Decadence in Sport.

Timaru Herald, Volume XIIC, Issue 14039, 23 October 1909, Page 3 (Supplement)

Decadence in Sport.

SUCCESS OF FOREIGN IUVALS. (Bv Sigma.) AN e are in for another wave of pessimism. This time it is not our Army or cur Navy or our commerce or our i'oor Law that is to be inundated, but our sport, the one remaining field in which we fancied ourselves moderately secure. It is really very distressing. For years past our schoolmasters and our publicists and .Air. Rudvard Kipling have been dinning it into us that we were sacrificing altogether too much to games. "Lost on a cricketliekl," wc were told, was to bo the ultimate epitaph on the British. Empire. The flannelcd tool at the wicket and the muddied oaf at the goal wore pointed at as national perils; and tin; ruin of England was confidently predicted unless wc thought more, worked more, and played less. And now it seems .we have been running these appalling risks and making this egregious sacrifice without a single compensation in return. AYc stand con%victed not only of playing too much, but of playing badly. AYc do not even excel in the games that are to bring us low. For look at the record. The Australians, witli 110 more than a fair to moderate team, have thrashed us at cricket. The Belgians, for the third time, have carried off the blue ribbon of the Thames. The Americans at Hurlinuham simply swamped our men at nolo. A South African won the hundred yards amateur championship, an American the two hundred and twenty, and a German the half-mile race. There were three Australians nlaying in the Oxford cricket team. The captain of the Cambridge eleven was a South African. And to crown our discomfiture, M. Bleriot, a Frenchman, has been the first to fly the Channel. Our decadence is incontestable.

So say the pessimist. l ;. But in this matter I confess myself anything but a pessimist. Almost all the jeremiads we arc listening to just now spring, as it seems to me, from a failure to realise, first, what is the real essence, of sport; and secondly, the conditions under which sport is carried on in England.

We won our old supremacy in games simplv because we were the first neopl" to cultivate them on a large scale. I do not suppose that wc were ever particularly pood at them, but wc were distinctly better than other nations. Thirty or forty years ago our position in pretty nearly all departments of snort, as compared with America and the Continent, was precisely what it is to-day in Rugby football as compared with "the French. The South Africans and the New Zealandcrs have proved that our Rugby <s not really first-class. But it is decidedly bettor than the French. They arc only just beginning it, and we have played it for 'generations. Therefore we beat them, and for some veal's to come shall probably continue to beat them. So it used to be" in almost every other form, of snort. We had been at it longer and harder than our rivals. They'began by being our pupils, and our superiority over them was relatively very great. Wc, let us say, were second-raters and they were tenthraters, and there were no first-raters. Consequently wc; had thins's p'reHv much our own way. But such a condition could n<it last for ever. Our rivals improved. They, began to specialise. They began to pros us hard. They have to-day very largely outstripped their old masters. But why? How is it that our ini-r provement has not kept pace with theirs? Well, there are several reasoiis. An examination of the Americans' victor*- at polo will explain some of tliern. I suppose there are a hundred Englishmen playing polo regularly to every American. And yet the Meadowbrouk quartet have utterly routed the best, or nearly the best, team that wc could put in the field. They have done it first of all, by devoting themselves almost exclusively to this single pastime summer after summer; secondly, by spending on it an amount of time and money and determination that our men have neither the means nor the leisure nor the inclination to give up to any game; thirdly, by playing in winter only such games, like tennis and racquets, as would help their polo 1 n the summer; fourthly, by buying up the best ponies to be got anywhere; and fifthly, by putting themselves under a professional trainer and shaping their whole lives for the time being to this single end. In this way they evolved a standard of play not only higher than any we have ever reached bv our. easy-going methods, but higher than wc shall ever be able to reach unless those methods are completely transformed. Our men are as good as ever. But their rivals, having set out to win. having also the canacity for taking infinite pains, and being willing to subordinate everything to the sole jiurpose of victory—everything, I mean, except sportsmanship—an- better. It was the same with Jay Gould and the tennis championship. He made; up his mind to win it; lie had a private tennis court built for him; lie practically lived in it for years; he employed the finest professional player; and naturally enough he defeated the English champion to whom tennis, while an absorbing pastime, was not the whole of life. And yet I do not doubt that tennis is far more widely played here than in the States, and that the first dozen English players would easily have vanquished the first dozen American plavers. To all international contests our.comnctitors from abroad bring an extra keenness, a stronger desire to win, a sounder and more scientific habit of insurance against all risks, and far more readiness to submit to the necessary discipline and take the 'proper amount of trouble than our own men. I remember noting an instance of this when Harvard and Yale met Ovford and Cambridge a few years ago. Tjicre was a slight drizzle falling during the high jump, and both the American first and second stripes brought with them on to the field thick warm rugs. When they had done their turn they wrapped, themselves roiinrl in the rugs, and thus «taved ofi' the smallest change of circulation. But the Englishmen bad no rug. After making their jump they lav full length on the damp grass until their turn came round again. It is all a matter of training, application, and minute and rigorous attention to detail. We have as rood material to work on as any people in the world, but we do not make the most of it. We rarely turn the potentially first rate man . into the actually first rate man. We are the last to invent any of 1 he hundred and one little devices that mean the difference between failure or success. The new seat in the saddle, the new start in the sprints, the now swerve in the high jump,'the new service at lawn tenuis, are all American inventions; and it is only reluctantly tliat we condescend to experiment with them. Does all this point to a national shortcoming? In a sense I suppose it does. I suppose it may be taken as one more sign of our preference for "muddling through," of our disdain, if not our incapacity, for prevision, preparation and the steady adjustment of means to ends. If anyone were to get up and say that we fail because we deserve to fail, because we are as deliberately casual as our rivals are deliberately careful, because, while desiring the prize, we are simply not willing to go to all the trouble to win it that keener competition has imposed upon'the'contestant's,

it would, 1 take it, l)c difficult to disprove liim. Hut in another, and to my mind, a more important sense, I am rather glad that we are not universally successful in these international contests. Our reluctance to go to the lengths of our foreign rivals in preparing for a struggle is due in part, in very large part, to a healthy perception that after all "the game's the thing," and that too great an anxiety to win is apt to turn a game into a business. So long as sport continues to hold its unique place in our national life, so long as its devotees are numbered by hundreds in England instead of bv tons as in other' countries, so long as old and young, men and hoys, meet and play together on innumerable fields, so long as we retain the same spirit and wholesome traditions of the tiling, 1 for one shall consider all talk of our "decadence" absurd, and shall not care a fig how many championships may chance to leave our shores. —London "Daily Chronicle."