Football

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXXIV, Issue 4, 25 January 1906, Page 1

Football

Some of the American universities have (so the cables say) taken steps to suppress football within their boundaries until the game has been reformed/ The prohibition has come none too soon ; for the pastime, as played in the United States, is an infuriate riot in which— desp/ite protective armor suggestive of Crecy or Poictiers— as much damage is often done to life and limb as in some of the set engagements of the South African war. The American university authorities have many precedents for their action. Six centuries ago the boisterous violence of the sport led to its temporary suppression by Edward 11. That was in the year of grace 1314. Edward 111. forbade the pastime in 1349, and Henry IV. in 1401. In the last-mentioned

century, the Parliament of James I. of Scotland, forbade football— which seems to have been then a favorite pastime in the Land o' Cakes—' in order that the common people mlight g\ve the whole of their leisure time to the acquisition of a just eye and a steady hand in the use of the long-bow.' James IV. of Scotland and, Henry VIII. of England also tried their hands at the suppression of football. But the game survived them all— although in a crude and more or less* sickly and surreptitious way. Queen Elizabeth's statesmen took a hand in the game of abolition, but without conspicuous success. So did some of her successors in the period between the Restoration and the Revolution. At that time headlong crowds used to pursue the flying ball through the filthy thoroughfares of London, often sending it smashing into linendrapers' shops, or into the Stygian abominatUons of the Fleet Ditch, where (as Jonathan Swift, an eye-witness, sang) ' Sweepings from butchers' stalls, dung, guts, and blood, Drown' d puppies, stinking sprats, all drenched in mud, Dead cats, and turnip-tops came tumbling down the flood.' The kill- joy spirit of Puritanism was at the root of some of the attempts to kill off football. But in England, at least, it died at last, chiefly of jts own violence. It was revived, and still survives, on the lines of reform. It America it is more barbarous than the Spanish bull-fight. And the sooner it is mended or ended, the better for the interests of clean and civilised pastimes.