Of these various group activities, the running-games belong properly
to the pre-gang stage of the boy’s existence. The normal instincts
of the little boy incline him to the individualistic games, of which
tag and hide and seek are the type, in which the player acts for
himself against the one who is “it.” The transition to the coöperative
“group games” of the gang age not infrequently takes place by way of
running-games of the prisoner’s base and relievo type, in which, though
the game is still fundamentally individualistic, there is nevertheless
some sort of loosely organized side.
Running being a deep-seated impulse of all young life, the formless
running-games of childhood tend to hold over into the gang age.
Thirty-one of my sixty-six gangs, or practically half of them, reported
that they still clung to their pre-adolescent sports. Tag, hide and
seek, and relievo are the favorites, being represented in twenty-one,
fourteen, and twelve gangs respectively. Hoist the sail, chase, leap
frog, and run-sheep-run, appear in five gangs or more. Some twenty
other games, a few of them apparently local inventions, are mentioned
at least once. Oddly enough, some of the oldest stand-bys of childhood,
such as puss in the corner, blind man’s buff, and follow the leader,
appear in but two gangs at most, while tops, marbles, and kites figure
not at all. Only two gangs--more’s the pity--play hare and hounds;
partly, let us hope, because of the limitations imposed by the city
streets rather than altogether because of deficient wind and stamina in
the city-bred boy.
Of the group games--of games, that is, which presuppose an
organized side, a leader, rules, apparatus, and some sort of
playing-field--baseball, as might be expected, comes easily first.
Fifty-one gangs play baseball, of the fifty-three which devote
themselves to group games. Football comes next, with thirty-six. Hockey
and basketball make a bad third and fourth, with nine each. Cricket
appears in six gangs. If, then, we lump together the cricket-playing
and baseball-playing gangs, as we may fairly do since they are both
bat-and-ball games of essentially the same type and really alternates
of one another, we arrive at the significant fact that all normal
boys, at the age when they have the native impulse to form gangs, have
also the native impulse to hit a quick-moving object with a club. The
precise significance of this conjunction, and the part which it ought
to play in the boy’s education, will appear later.
Of swimming, also, and the minor sports of boyhood, of smoking and
drinking and playing cards, I shall have more to say in another place.
For the present we are concerned only with such activities as arise
from the great fundamental instincts of the gang age.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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