Communication

[We invite all men in the University to submit communications on subjects of timely interest.]

To the Editors of the CRIMSON:

Wednesday night in the Brookline tank there was a swimming meet. It was a handicap meet: Harvard met Yale. Now if by some extraordinary chance any one of the invisible legislators of Harvard athletic rules, whom all men concede to be the most gifted handicappers in the world, were present at this aquatie duel, he would have seen in all its broadcast evil and unfairness the severity of his own law. As it is, he may read about it in the papers to dismiss it with a tush!

Here are facts. The Harvard swimming team has no tank to practise in, and no material but those men who will sacrifice a whole season of football or baseball for 2 or 3 swimming events, where time by the most approved stop-watches never exceeds four minutes, yet is by common consent of the legislators pronounced an extravagant mis-appropriation of time, energy, and gray matter. Lest such wholesale absorption of athletics be increased they have made the two-season rule.

Those men who did represent Harvard Wednesday night made a characteristic eleventh hour discovery that Yale, playing under a code of her own, was using freshmen on her 'varsity team. Harvard had but the melancholy resource of calling up by long distance telephone those members of the Athletic Committee known, who could in reply only endorse Harvard's previous understanding. "We play by our own rules," said Yale; "see how much better they are than yours." And so they are. The games went on and Harvard lost, where playing under Yale's rules she would have won.

This is my point--the vast and varied absurdities of the two-season rule, as now maintained. When this law was first made, it was tagged with the statement that it was reasonable because it would affect so few. As a matter of fact it affected a great many. Probation itself became blunted and worm-eaten by this idiotic rule. Does a man who has made a successful record in the fall in both sports and studies find himself better off than his neighbor who has competed to the detriment of his courses? Not a whit. Doesn't it seem reasonable that a man who can keep off probation the year round, taking part in two sports, could as easily compete in three? Because sure as water rises to its own level man takes his normal exercise, and the gratifying result of this rule is only to divert a certain amount of this exercise into channels which in no way assist the University. It's a pity, a great pity, that so many Harvard defeats are shelved with the athletic rules of its own making. It would seem as if the powers that be didn't care.  1908