PROFESSIONAL FOOTBALL.

Rangitikei Advocate and Manawatu Argus, Volume XXXIII, Issue 9097, 17 March 1908, Page 2

PROFESSIONAL FOOTBALL.

No more vigorous attack upon the latest debasement of the sport has been delivered anywhere in the Antipodes than that by the retiring President (Dr. Kent Hughes) of the Essendon (Melbourne) Football Club. He emphatically declared, that he would sooner see a son of his dead than becoming a professional footballer. “For ten years of his life a professional footballer was doing almost nothing. He was practically a loafer, and benefited neither himself nor the game, as the history of the league would prove. One of the best chaps that ever breathed —a professional footballer —had died iu the Melbourne Hospital the other day. after naving loafed away the last twenty years of his life. ” It was a cruel wrong, he further contended, to ask a young man to become a loafer iu the heyday of his career by paying him £8 a week to do nothing “Young fellows went fast enough to the devil as it was. How many professional cricketers in England had ended their days in the workhouse? In connection with Australian cricket, too, instances could be pointed out where the money earned by professionals had been of little use to them. To ask a man to become a professional footballer was asking him to pat a rope round his neck.”