CHEERING A SCIENCE

Evening Star, Issue 19788, 11 February 1928, Page 12

CHEERING A SCIENCE

INTRODUCED IN ENGLAND CIV ALL BLACKS. In tlie football pageant football is not the least factor. There are many spectators to whom this phase of the entertainment is more important than the game itself. They arc football devotees not so much for the sake of the game ns of fhc spectacle—the crowd, the excitement, and, most of all, I lie cheering.. Thus cheering has become an organised sport, says the New \ ork 'Times.' The training and practice exacted from the football squad is not required, it is true; but the sounds that arise from the stadium arc by no moans the spontaneous reaction of the crowd. The demonstrations of cheering arc- planned and practised in advance with a diligence that accounts for their unison and harmony. The cheer leader in every college is a person of some importance, and he occasionally rises to an eminence almost equal to that of the football stars themselves. The cheer leaders are known on the campus and also wherever football “fans" among the alumni foregather. Their skill, in a measure, -may be natural; hut, if so, it is a talent to be developed only through industrious application. The contortions through which the cheer leaders go, in their c.xhaustlcss scries of gymnastic fantasies, are not staged merely to amuse onlookers. They are a definite part of the technique of extracting a response from hundreds of individuals.

Nowhere has the practice of cheering taken sudi a place as in America. Jt has no real analogy at English schools and universities. English crowds, it is said, became familiar with it only about twenty years ago when the New Zealand Rugby football team introduced the cries of .the Ma oris into their matches there. The word cheer in the sense of a shout of encouragement or applause is really of recent coinage. The meaning does not apply in Johnson, and Defoe speaks of it as a sailor’s word. Modern cheering manners might trace their lineage from the days of the Roman Empire. Gibbons says of the Emperor’s extraordinary processions through the streets of Byzantium: “The task of applause was not abandoned to the rude and spontaneous voices of the crowd.” The two opposing factions of the Roman circus cheered in turn, each displaying its colors; but instead of cheering for different sides they merely tried to outdo each other in a single cause—the glory of the Roman Emperor.'

“The most convenient stations were occupied by the bands of the blue and green factions of tbe circus,’’ this historian continues. “From either side

they echoed in response melody the praises of the Emperor. Their poets and musicians directed the choir, and long life and victory were the burden of every son.”