Publisher's Synopsis
This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1909 edition. Excerpt: ... while striving to keep within the letter. Professional sport is all right in its way. I am glad to say that among my friends I number professional boxers and wrestlers, oarsmen, and baseball men, whose regard I value, and whom in turn I regard as thoroughly good citizens. But the college undergraduate who, in furtive fashion, becomes a semi-professional is an unmitigated curse, and that not alone to university life and to the cause of amateur sport; for the college graduate ought in after years to take the lead in putting the business morality of this country on a proper plane, and he can not do it if in his own college career his code of conduct has been warped and twisted. Moreover, the spirit which puts so excessive a value upon his work as to produce this semi-professional is itself unhealthy. I wish to see Harvard win a reasonable proportion of the contests in which it enters, and I should be heartily ashamed of every Harvard athlete who did not spend every ounce there was in him in the effort to win, provided only he does it in honorable and manly fashion. But I think our effort should be to minimize rather than to increase that kind of love of athletics which manifests itself, not in joining in the athletic sports, but in crowding by tens of thousands to see other people indulge in them. It is a far better thing for our colleges to have the average student interested in some form of athletics than to have them all gather in a mass to see other people do their athletics for them. So much for the undergraduates. Now for the alumni, the men who are at work out in the great world. Of course the man's first duty is to himself and to those immediately dependent upon him. Unless he can pull his own weight he must be content to remain a...
