The Christchurch Star PUBLISHED BY New Zealand Newspapers Ltd. THURSDAY, JANUARY 3, 1935. HOMAGE TO SPORT.

Star (Christchurch), Volume LXVI, Issue 20503, 3 January 1935, Page 6

The Christchurch Star PUBLISHED BY New Zealand Newspapers Ltd. THURSDAY, JANUARY 3, 1935. HOMAGE TO SPORT.

TT IS OFTEN SAID that the newspapers make too much of sport. Certainly, a rough analysis of the personnel of a cricket team lends to support the contention. Here we find eleven young men who occupy no outstanding place in the work-a-day world, but are invested with a rare importance and glamour in the e\ es of sports followers as soon as they become the champions of provincial sporting supremacy. This is as it should be. These men have been thrown up as the perfect exponents of a useful activity that prevents a multitude of work-a-day Jacks from becoming dull boys. They represent primarily that degree of physical perfection without which no man can ascend the ladder of sporting fame. They are skilled to a very fine degree in those qualities of quick decision, fine perception and rapid execution that increase a man’s value in any walk of life. They have attained this degree of perfection under a healthy stimulus, first of all, the pursuit of outdoor sport for its health-giving benefits, and after that for the satisfaction of the ideal. There are, of course, some material rewards for perfection in any sport. It is something to go on tour for one’s province or one’s country, and in a purely sporting sense it is something to have the stage set for the enjoyment of one’s ideal game under the perfect conditions that become part of commercialised sport. In that last particular, perhaps, lies the strongest incentive for aiming at perfection in cricket. Between slack cricket and keen cricket there is a great gulf fixed. The ideal of British sportsmanship lias always been to set the game beyond the prize, but this is only partially true, because a game is not worth playing unless it is played in the keenest competitive spirit, and there must be a prize to spur the players on to produce their best. That prize is the goodwill of the masses of sports lovers, and to-day that goodwill goes out in the very fullest measure to Mr Page and the other Canterbury cricketers, who by fine team-work have brought Canterbury this year within sight of provincial supremacy. ANTARCTIC TREASURE. 13 YRD’S GEOLOGIST thinks that -*-* there are vast mineral resources in the Antarctic mountain peaks, but he declines to predict the possible extent of valuable minerals, and mentions only galena, in which he believes may be associated lead, zinc and copper. Galena which, by the W'av, usually contains sufficient silver to pay for its extraction, has a very wide distribution over the earth’s surface; and lead, which it yields principally, is produced in the United States, Mexico, Canada, Australia, Spain, Burma and Rhodesia. There is a popular belief, based on hope rather than experience, that the Antarctic may have illimitable wealth for whoever stakes out the most effective claim, but the cost of production would be appallingly great for anything up to radium, and there is no evidence that that precious commodity exists in the Polar cap. CHANGES IN RUSSIA. npHE BANISHMENT of Zinovieff arid Kamenev to the Arctic leaves few at Stalin’s side of the men who staged the Soviet revolution of 1917. Most of those that remain occupy inferior positions in the State and none of Stalin’s counsellors belonged to Lenin’s general staff. Stalin’s right-hand man, a former shoemaker who was only twenty-four when Lenin struck seventeen years ago, occupies the position of Senator-Governor of Moscow, which Kamenev formerly held. Zinovieff had a similar powerful position in Leningrad. Certainly Lenin had marked Kaganovich for his ability and used him in Turkestan and the Ukraine, but lie belongs to the new generation of the leaders whose objective lias changed slightly from Lenin’s ideal of international Communism to Soviet patriotism, and from communal living and sharing to a greater tendency to look after the interests of the individual within the Soviet system.