May the Better Man Win

Back in the so-called good old days sports were merely amiable contests among a group of gentlemen seeking healthful exercise, and witnessed by perhaps a handful or two of casually interested passers-by. But our high-speed civilization has made even recreation a big business. Professional sports endeavors have reached up into the million-dollar levels, and salaries and gate receipts have hitched onto a fast-ascending skyrocket. What once passed for friendly "amateur" sport can no longer escape the commercial aroma of its play-for-play brethren, whose breeding grounds must still exist upon the college and school level. Rather than set themselves up in some ivory academic tower, colleges have let the lure of lucre seep down among them, and have usually welcomed with open arms such money-making orgies as the fast-multiplying bowl games on New Year's Day.

Purists may deplore this trend toward fashioning sport into a form of business venture, and colleges may set themselves up a high-sounding set of ethical principles which they expect promptly to ignore, but a truly realistic glance at the situation can only result in accepting the situation that exists. No college whose endowment stems chiefly from its football team can be expected to cut off its source of life; no tennis tournament entrepreneur is going to eliminate his well-padded list of expense accounts. The thin line that divides "amateur" from "professional" is becoming ever thinner, and no amount of high-flown oratory is going to stop it from doing so. Since any kind of a backward step is very unlikely, about all we can hope for is that professionalism may not go much further forward.

A more likely object of close scrutiny might rather be sports that openly accept the label of professional. Recent headlines have shown the dangers which are so tempting to their employees, with sordid tales of attempted bribery in the ranks of professional football and boxing following close upon each other's heels. A gambling industry of such size and resources as the one with which we seem to be saddled makes many more such attempts at insuring some desired victory inevitable, and some of them are quite likely to succeed without being detected.

The ultimate solution, of course, will be to stamp out the gambling racket itself, but such a task is not one to be accomplished over night, and more immediate preventive measures are urgent. On the other hand, if gamblers were given a completely free rein they would soon succeed in putting themselves out of business by their unchecked bribery, which might quickly reduce all professional sports to the level of professional wrestling, upon which, for some reason, few bets are taken.

Baseball, after passing through its only great scandal in 1919, appointed the late Kennesaw Mountain Landis as its all-powerful "czar," and for two decades his iron hand kept baseball's escutcheon spotless. Now would seem an appropriate time for all professional sports to choose together a joint ruling committee with similar vast regulatory powers, and thus aid in keeping the final outcome of all sporting events in doubt for all the spectators.