ATHLETICS

embracing all games or displays of physical strength and skill, outdoor or indoor. Such contests or exercises may either be for pastime or for muscular growth and take the various known forms of field and track games or indoor gymnastics. In the United States, whose population has largely inherited all the love of sport engendered by their northern European forbears, the pursuit of athletic games has become one of the most vital manifestations of the national spirit, which aspires to triumph in every field it enters. In running and walking, cro country endurance tests and marathons, hurdles, high and broad jumping, vaulting, hammer and weight throwing, and putting the shot, in golf, in gymnastic displays by the use of Indian clubs, dumbbells, parallel and horizontal bars, weight-lifting, rope climbing, and other pastimes, American athletes have achieved a high excellence, and several are conspicuous as world champions. The early Greeks fathered the development of athletics. Their influence on the human love of achievement in different physical tests has been so enduring down the ages that the modern international Olympic games reflect certain features of those practised by them in the heyday of their power. Then, as now, there were profe ional athletes, trained from boyhood like acrobats, and early broken in toe endure a discipline of Spartan vigor, systematic exercises, abstemious habits of living and a cultivation of a strong personality manifested by self-mastery, initiative and courage. In later days of the ancients; the athlete appears here and there to have become a huge ma of fiesh and muscle, to judge from mosaics and statues of Greek and Roman pugtlists which have come down to us. in ancient Rome, incidentally, profe ional athletes formed incorporated organizations. The World War caused a curtailment of athletic activities, especially in the postponement of the International Olympic games. The first of these contests held in the post-war period took place in the Pershing Stadium in France in the summer of 1919, when United States competitors achieved front rank in the track and field events the games comprised, scoring 92 points. Francs following second with 12 points. This triumph of American athletes signalized a similar supremacy in other fields of sport, notably in lawn tennis, golf and sculling. |The post-war period, in fact, found the United States especially eminent in the world of athletes, perhaps in part because the war's drala of man-power in other countries had) depleted their athletic centers of outstanding contestants. However that may be, one has only to glance at the American performances for 1922 as related in athletic records to perceive that they could not be readily matched by the best com petit ers other countries could produce in normal times. In the year named amateur and profe ional sports throughout the country and internationally continued to grow in interest, both from the spectators’ and competitors’ viewpoint. Every section of the country displayed a development in all forms of games and a heightened enthusiasm therein. National golf and tennis championships drew great crowds, while football games, especially those of intersectional interest, filled large stadiums with fervent onlookers. Lawn tennis competitions with Australian players for the famous Davis Cup resulted in its retention by the United States, due to the extraordinary mastery of the game displayed by ton, the two leading American defenders. In golf American experts took part in British championship events, while British players competed in the United States. One American golfer, Walter Hagen, specially left his mark on the game by carrying off the British open championship. The American Golf Championship for 1922 was won by G. Sarazen. Another victory of equal note in wresting a similar championship from a British holder was the sculling achievement of Walter M. Hoover, who, at the Henley Regatta, defeated his competitor, J. Beres ford, and thus became the world’s amateur champion sculler. In the feudal ages athletic tendencies, influenced by the Normans and the heritage of physical prowe they derived from the Vikings, took the form of tournaments and jousts among the nobles and primitive sports with clubs and bucklers among the yeomen on the village green. Such pursuits have their periods, for early athletics, in the changing eras of Europe, was subject to ups and downs, now decaying, then reviving. A decline in sports followed the waning of the age of chivalry, when muscular’ feats and the cultivation of physical strength became rarer. In England Henry VII. revived sports by establishing competitions with prizes, and in due time proficiency in the games of the period became a nece ary accomplishment of a man of fashion until the revolution period. Then the influence of puritanism and of the di olute Stuart regime alike tended to: kill the old athletic spirit except in the country villages. Until the early part of the nineteenth century, (devotion to athletic sports lay in the twilight. Naturally the moral and physical condition of English youth suffered by this almost extinction of manly games. The renai ance of English athleticism set in among all cla es of sports about 1850, aided in no small degree by the cult of ‘muscular Christianity,’ as eloquently espoused by Charles Kingsley and like social reformers. The universities, military colleges and the great: public schools became the centers of a revival in outdoor sports that produced a series of periodic contests for championships which have been continued down to the present, and also brought into being the governing power in British rte the Amateur Athletic As so cia i on. In the United States athletics began to emerge into popular favor in the seventies of the last century. A little later the need of regulating organizations caused the formation of a national a ociation of amateur athletes which was the forerunner of the Amateur Athletic Union, the chief controlling authority at present. As in England, the most active sport centers were the colleges, universities, and specially formed clubs. Contests between them grew in such numbers and frequency, and spread such a network of competing events — over the country that the need of grading and cla ification became imperative — if intercollegiate and other games were ~ to be conducted on satisfactory lines. — Accordingly the Intercollegiate A ociation of Amateur Athletes in America supervises intercollegiate athletics, em- — bracing track and field games, while the Amateur Athlete Union controls con- ~ tests in basketball, billiards, boxing, fencing, gymnastics, handball, hurdle,: racing, jumping, la cro e, pole vaulting, putting the shot, throwing the discus, hammer and weights, running, swim- { ming, tugs of war, wal and wrestling. The Amateur Athletic Union exercises — the power of determining the eligibility — of competitors in any athletic meeting, game or entertainment given or sanctioned by its executives. The Union — stands guard against the intrusion of profe ionalism into the game contests it controls. It disqualifies any would-be contestant who has ‘received or competed for compensation or reward in any form, for the display, exercise, or for rendering personal service of any ~ kind to any athletic organization, or — for becoming or continuing a member © of any athletic organization.’ The Union a'so makes ineligible any person who ~ resorts to practices as a contest entrant ~ that bring his bona fides in question. No one can compete who has knowingly entered any contests open to profe ionals, or has challenged any profe ion a’ for a prize or token. Another fundamental rule of the Union in the conduct of the sport events it sanctions is that no one can compete unle he is a registered athlete and a member of the organization for which he enters. The colleges project as the main pivots of athletic activities. In their playing fields the ardor of their student bodies reaches fever pitch and their teamwork produces displays that draw throngs | of spectators. College athletics, in other words, are profitable in other respects than turning out physically fit young men. Princeton, for instance, in 1922 had gate receipts for the various athletic events in which her teams participated amounting to $168,284, to which football contributed $150,345. She spent $104,000 on her sports, and the earnings for the total, regardle of source, were about 65 per cent. Princeton is not exceptional among colleges in deriving substantial profits from her pastimes. if other universities have not done so well, many of them have fared even better. Probably the money paid to see athletic spectacles at a number of our educational institutions would support schools of considerable size. The mere volume of college gate receipts is remarkable when it is remembered that fifty ing ago revenue from college -athletics scarcely existed. Much can be said for self supporting athletics, especially if the funds secured in exce of outlay are applied to the building of fields and tracks and baseball diamonds that bring you sands of additional young men out into the sunshine to develop their bodies. College presidents, alumni and student bodies recog- ‘mize the increasing importance of the monetary phases of sport exhibitions as a ociated with the need of greater development of facilities for physical efficiency. American women are advancing in athletics, especially as tennis and swimmers, but have yet to come to the front internationally. The most outstanding woman player in lawn _ tennis, Mrs. Franklin I. allory, did so in British tournaments, but failed to win the world’s championship from the present holder, Mlle. Suzanne Lenglen. A contingent of young American women took part in the first_ international women’s games held in Paris in 1922 i p and putting shot In the result, however, their Be re areantog G0'as auaiant ' all round points, 0 as 31 credited to the American girls. 35’ N., 72° 11’ W.); large boot, shoe, are Meet factories. Pop. 1920, Has or, daughter oF ¥gyptian Getty Ra; approximates with Gr. godde Aphrodite. peninsula, Turkey in Europe; extends into Aigean, connected with mainland by narrow strip of land; canal was made h ere by Xerxes, c. 470 B.C.; ends in conical peak, Mt. A. (5778 ft.); remarkable for religious establishments; monastic republic since 1060; now has 21 monasteries and about 6000 monks; plundered after fall of Constantinople, 1204; revived under Palzologi; pays tribute to Turkey; MSS., frescoes, mosaics.