THE SICK MAN OF SPORT

It has just about been settled that football was starting to decline. The Golden Decade of exploitation was over, the public was beginning to tire of the spectacle, and the depression was forcing others to lose an interest. Several universities had made efforts to de-emphasize the sport and several others had taken drastic stops to lessen professionalism. Several years ago Iowa had been forced out of the Western Conference, Navy had broken with Army because of the latter's unfair eligibility stand, and Columbia had given loud publicity to its efforts to lesson the pressure on football by starting an athletic endowment fund. Sports writers had stopped this year to play up men as All-American prospects, two defeats had taken the spotlight off that gridiron monster, Notre Dame, and it seemed that things were actually progressing toward sanity Only a continual list of charity games and unemployment round-robins had served to distort the picture.

But it could not remain this way long. Now at the end of the present season come the stories. New York University has been indulging in a "high pressure' game, Columbia's swift rise in the football world is investigated and professional tactics are found to be the reason, the University of Southern California jails one of its players because he was suspected of divulging plays, and Navy comes out for open proselyting of secondary school athletes. Get players "who average fifteen pounds heavier than the present run of material" says the Annapolis athletic director.

Too many forces have converging to put football in its present position. Retrenchment is difficult and hardly probable. The American tendency for hero-worship, the principle of state education, the distortion of the idea of a university among the masses, the chauvinism of alumni, the expansion of the sport pages in newspapers and the special proclivity of the press for football stories--these and other causes have distorted the value of football and made it less a game than ever before.

It will be a long time before any of these forces can be diminished. No one college can reform the whole country, all it can do is to make sincere efforts to correct all its own faults and accept the national situation as a fact. In this respect Harvard is certainly among the leaders. As long as the sport as a whole remains on its present large scale the evils of the game will always exist. As soon as one sore is healed another will break out. American football will always be ailing but no doctor can do any good since the patient has no real desire to be cured.