THE SPORTIVE COLUMN

At this dubious period of the year, the sporting writer is inclined to go out and shoot himself to make news. Hockey and winter track are memories; baseball is yet to be born; athletic interest has reached its lowest ebb. The sporting pages of the daily papers must be read with extreme suspicion at such a time, for all sense of proportion and propriety has been discarded.

The headlines announce every morning that Yale swimmers have gained another large wet victory in some foreign tank. Dempsey is reported to have challenged almost everybody from Thomas Edison to Andrew Gump. Mrs. Dempsey states that she is still very happy and still unbattered. West Somerville boys, working out in Southern training camps, are said to be displacing Cobb and Ruth. The Boston baseball management says definitely for the first time that both teams will unquestionably win pennants. James James Carbunkle is heralded as the new basketball captain of Siwash, having served faithfully on the team some eight or ten years. It seems that Harvard is not going to build Finnish or Turkish baths on Soldiers Field. E. Plato Ward, an American, is accredited with having won the annual Parisian cross country race, through the Bois and back to Zellies.

These Spring fancies which the sport writers tender their public are quite without malice or forethought. There is a simple naivete about them which should be commended and not condemned. The sport writer has become temporarily a columnist, a writer of fiction.