HONOR AMONG "SPORTS."

Taranaki Daily News, Volume LIV, Issue 136, 30 November 1911, Page 4

HONOR AMONG "SPORTS."

Aii Australian judge the other day made some harsh remarks iji regard to sport in Australia, suggesting that it had woefully degraded and saying that there was little howor and chivalry a/bout it. Like everything else, sport has progressed'. It is highly organised; it is a business, and sports management bodies regard sport as a serious financial matter. Few meetings are more deadly than a meeting of aggressive: sporting iiiiii who wrangle over the price of "seats" and the probable gates, athletes', wages (or expenses), and so. on. Sport for the joy of conquest and mere physical well-being still exists, but the element that made the old-time athletes strive for a name, and not the rewiml, is dying out in these days of Gate! gate! gate! liorse-racing would die to-morrow if horses raced for a riband. Few people want to see horses run unless they carry money, and most people don't need to see them run at ail as long as the financial part is all right. So with many other sports. Quite naturally, the eveT-present financial aspect of sport in general kills chivalry and hoiior in many contests. Australia is not, alone in its gradual decline from sport, for clean sport's sake alone, and at the moment there is in the Old Country a widespread antagonism to the innumerable men who are more correctly termed "showmen" than athletes. So many athletes nowadays specialise in a lirancli of sport that they have no time or inclination for anything else. The man who thus specialises i-> revered in a greater degree than a great statesman, artist or writer. It is misplaced worship to bow down to a human machine that trains a single physical faculty as a magnet for gold. One imagines a man willing to specialise as a runner, jumper, boxer, footballer, cricketer.'tennis player, swimmer, and so on for the love of conquest, but for him to l>e smitten with the "get-rich-quick" microbe is a catastrophe, and the one reason why "chivalry and honor" in sport is becoming rarer. It is necessary for organisations nowadays in every llritish country to offer large prizes to attract alleged "sports," and the great "sport" has his price just the same as

the specialist in vaudeville, the smart comedian or tho lending actor. Outside great public school sports—say the Oxford ami Cambridge boat race, or inter'varsity football and cricket matchessport within the Empire is poisoned with cash. There is one cheering feature about it all. Xo modern sporting specialist <kmips that he is out after the dollars. He frankly states the price for a win and his price for defeat. If people like national sport reduced to the level of a financial gamble—well and good. We have no sympathy with the spoil-sport party in this country which has lately been* attacking the people's amusements, and if these objectors would "strip off" and show us how to beat existing records without worrying about prize-money or gambling on the results, they would preach a powerful sermon. It is just impossible—and just as ateurd—to try to check the people's normal pleasures as it is to try to hold the Pacific back with wire netting, but it may be possible to create a sentiment in regard to sport that eliminates the innumerable parasites who live on- the game, "of, rather, the games. Most likely in abolishing the cash aspect a large number of'sports would be abolished too, and from the ashes of defunct games there might arise a' chivalrous regard for the "other fellow" and a disregard for the cash . that was the outstanding feature of the games in ancient Sreece.