MENTAL EMPTINESS.

Waikato Times, Volume 108, Issue 18166, 3 November 1930, Page 13

MENTAL EMPTINESS.

TOO MUCH SPORT. FAMOUS NOVELIST’S VIEWS. There has rarely, say the gossips, been such a season for sport as this. What with tests and Wimbledon and golf championships, foreign crews for Henley, and sweepstakes of magnitude undreamed of by our forefathers, the whole nation seems to have had its eyes of its interests on the playing fields since this mockery of a summer began, says a famous novelist interviewed by the Daily Mail, London. We may be going economically to the devil, but the people obviously are enjoying both bread and circuses. Ask any young man, or, for that matter, any young woman, what is our paramount interest to-day, and the answer possibly is “Bradman” or “Bobby Jones.” For these there is neither India nor a Budget. A profound Indifference as to our national balancesheet prevails.

“That’s All Right.”

The man in the mound stand cares not a soudo for the East or the /West. He reminds me of the youth who, being told at the beginning of the Great War that the Germans might come to Manchester, replied: “Well, that’s all right; they won’t stop the football. Many years ago Rudyard Kipling got much Ignorant abuse for writing of “muddied oafs" and “flannelled fools.” What that great writer meant, I take it, was to suggest that young men are much better occupied in playing games than iin watching them.

We can all assent to this, while admitting that Saturday .football and Saturday cricket are good things for the millions both of the north and of the south who find little recreation in bleak lives and certainly deserve what they can get. But the question of “too' much sport” goes much deeper than this. What, we may ask, is the physical condition of young men likely to become if their idea of exercise is associated with a bench on a cricket field or an iron railing on which to lean when two teams are playing for “the Cup?” Is this not a sure road to that G 3 ■category which the gospellers of health deplore? Are these “spectators” really sportsmen themselves —or just idlers w r ho pay the hired gladiator cheerfully and care, not a straw whether he comes from Blackpool or Shoreditch.? Quite Modern. Let it be admitted that all this frenzy of playing is quite a modern thing in our story. The Plantagenets legislated against the young man who would not go out and shoot arrows and forbade him sternly to kick a ball with his feet. Laws of a similar character were passed even in Elizabeth’s days, and many an apprentice went to prison in Stuart times for making a wicket of the wat-ch or kicking an alderman when he meant to kick a football. Later on 'we played games more ■sedately; and, save upon the racecourse, no sporting meeting drew more than a handful of spectators. Today a mob of 45,000 will applaud ■somebody it has never seen-before because he hits another man on the solar plexus and £20,000 depends on the blow. Two “continents may he shaken to the marrow by such a contest. The fall of St. Paul’s Cathedral or the renunciation by Mr Snowden of Cobdenism would cause no such interest nor provoke such sorrow or hilarity. We take nothing seriously to-day and the apotheosis of sport is, perhaps, a direct result of our mental emptiness. As a player of games all my life, I deplore the idle sensationalism which fires the enthusiasm of so many brainless youths to-day; and I think it a poor omen that the Arena stands for so much in the lives of ■so many and the Forum for so little.

It is obvious that a great national effort must be made sooner or later to re-win that economic place we held formerly among the nations—and neither upon the cricket field, the links, nor at Wimbledon do I discover such a preparation for that momentous encounter which alone will promise us victory. Nor should it be forgotten that if we are the vanquished in such a battle, neither bread nor circuses will be forthcoming for the “sportsmen” who are so wholly indifferent to the realities about us.