The third element of sportsmanship is the grace of a good loser.
Artists to-day are better losers than were the "foot-in-the-grave
young men." Among them one now finds less and less childish petulance,
outspoken jealousy of others' success, and apology for their own
failure. Some of this has been shamed out of them by discovering that
the good sportsman never apologizes or explains away his defeat. And
they are importing these manly tactics into the game of art. It has
not taken them long to see how ridiculous an athlete makes himself who
hides behind the excuse of sickness or lack of training. They are
impressed by the way in which the non-apologetic spirit is invading
the less athletic games, even down to such a sedentary affair as
chess. This remarkable rule, for example, was proposed in the recent
chess match between Lasker and Capablanca:
Illness shall not interfere with the playing of any game, on
the ground that it is the business of the players so to
train themselves that their bodies shall be in perfect
condition; and it is their duty, which by this rule is
enforced, to study their health and live accordingly.
The fourth factor of sportsmanship is the grace of a good winner. It
would seem as though the artist were learning not only to keep from
gloating over his vanquished rival, but also to be generous and
minimize his own victory. In Gilbert's day the failure did all the
apologizing. To-day less apologizing is done by the failure and more
by the success. The master in art is learning modesty, and from whom
but the master in sport? There are in the arts to-day fewer
megalomaniacs and persons afflicted with delusions of grandeur than
there were among the "_Je-ne-sais-quoi_ young men." Sport has made
them more normal spiritually, while making them more normal
physically. It has kept them younger. Old age has been attacked and
driven back all along the line. One reason why we no longer have so
many grand old men is that we no longer have so many old men. Instead
we have numbers of octogenarian sportsmen like the late Dr. S. Weir
Mitchell, who have not yet been caught by the arch-reactionary
fossil-collector, Senility. This is a fair omen for the future of
progress. "If only the leaders of the world's thought and emotion,"
writes Bourne in "Youth," "can, by caring for the physical basis, keep
themselves young, why, the world will go far to catching up with
itself and becoming contemporaneous."
Gameness is the final factor of good sportsmanship. In the matter of
gameness, I grant that sport has little to teach the successful
artist. For it takes courage, dogged persistence, resiliency--in
short, the never-say-die spirit to succeed in any of the arts. It
takes the Browning spirit of those who
"fall to rise, are baffled to fight better, sleep to wake."
It takes the typical Anglo-Saxon gameness of Johnny Armstrong of the
old ballad:
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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