TO HIM THAT HATH

In the spectacle of a college graduate launching against the professional champion of the wrestling world the flying tackle which he learned on a college football field, cheered on by a packed house of hardened followers of professional sport, the theory that no holder of a sheepskin diploma is a popular success in the professional sports arena seems to come a cropper.

The roll to top-notch college athletes who have brought their reputations to professional sport, particularly to boxing and baseball, is large, and the list of failures among these "college guys" almost as extensive. Almost universally, these failures have been hastened by unpopularity, and generally the attitude of the customers which, after all, makes or break a professional sportsman, has been ascribed to prejudice against the college man as such.

There seems to be something about education in an athlete that irks a dyed-in-the-wool fan. Gene Tunney found this out, and it is this jealousy, perhaps, of men who have acquired the stamp of education conferred by a college degree that has brought many a heavyweight champion of the Intercollegiate Boxing Association to grief in the "racket" of professional boxing.

But the difference between the "idol of fandom" and the man who is hissed out of a ring is entirely a matter of personality. Writers have called it "color", that intangible quality that makes a Cobb or a Ruth or a Dempsey. If a man possesses it, college education will iron it out of him. The Bachelor or Arts who hears a symphony of boos when he steps into a ring would hear the anvil chorus if he had never gone to college. It is a gift, no more and no less. And to him that hath shall be given.