"VICTORY OR DEATH!"

A good deal of fun has been poked at the so-called English attitude of "sport for sport's sake". It has been ridiculed as producing only mediocre, half-hearted athletics and the various "moral victory" explanations of defeat. But whatever its faults, real or imagined, it does point out by contrast some of the defeats in our American adaptation of the Spartan creed: "Gome back with your shield, or on it!"

There is just as much misdirected emphasis in a system which sets up Victory and Defeat as the opposite poles of glory and despair, between which there is no middle course, as there is in a system which purports to ignore the stimulus of victory entirely. It is obviously ridiculous that a margin of six feet in a crew race or a goal after a touchdown in a football game should be enough to send one team home heart-broken, "all in", disgraced,--at least in their own minds,--while the members of the other team mount pedestals to become objects for little short of idolatry. Yet just such a code of sport ethics is set up for us by the impassable gulf we create between winner and loser. With such a point-of-view appreciation of the game for its own sake is lost in accepting the finality of the score.

The value of the appreciation of sport for its own sake could nowhere be better seen than in Saturday's game at Worcester. The University was defeated, 2-1, but it is no "philosophy of defeat", nor does it detract in any way from Holy Cross's ability, to say that anyone who judged the result entirely by the score was getting less than no idea of the game. Fifteen innings of baseball, everywhere spoken of as one of the finest ever seen on a college diamond, featured by brilliant playing on both sides, is an achievement regardless of the score. There is no disgrace in such a defeat, any more than there is a "moral victory" in it; the whole standard of measurement by victory or defeat has nothing to do with the point. Fifteen innings of such baseball, like the football game with Penn State last fall, can do more than anything else to defeat the spirit of "anything to win" which tends to undermine American athletics.