PROFESSIONAL SPORTS

The decision recently announced by executives of the various major league baseball clubs to shorten the schedule in future years is but the most recent of the many indications that have accumulated to mark a decline in certain fields of professional sport. New York sport pages and individual columnists alike reflect the trend of the times with a tendency toward an Increasing emphasis upon amateur sports, upon tennis and golf and polo, that must be of some significance to the public at large, but of even more consequence to the collegiate world in which the best of amateur sport in certain fields is to be found.

If certain almost obvious axioms in the study of American competitive sport are to be accepted, collegiate circles will not be the last to foresee the possibility of a future invasion of professionalism upon fields that have thus far been represented mainly by the amateur. It was not such a far cry to the professional conquest of hockey, while the present invasion of football, although not yet a conquest by any means, is an established fact. Professionalism steps in where angels fear to tread as is evidenced by recent attempts to commercialize even the most commonplace dance marathon, let alone the attempted subsidization of better accepted sports such as tennis.

Under such circumstances the college can do little at present but assume an attitude of watchful waiting, and a strict policy that will insure that at least those principles that have thus far placed the freshness and energy of collegiate sport in the good favor of the sporting public may be preserved.