But those members of respectable society who advocate athletic games
commonly justify their attitude on this head to themselves and to their
neighbors on the ground that these games serve as an invaluable means of
development. They not only improve the contestant's physique, but it
is commonly added that they also foster a manly spirit, both in the
participants and in the spectators. Football is the particular game
which will probably first occur to any one in this community when the
question of the serviceability of athletic games is raised, as this form
of athletic contest is at present uppermost in the mind of those who
plead for or against games as a means of physical or moral salvation.
This typical athletic sport may, therefore, serve to illustrate the
bearing of athletics upon the development of the contestant's character
and physique. It has been said, not inaptly, that the relation of
football to physical culture is much the same as that of the bull-fight
to agriculture. Serviceability for these lusory institutions requires
sedulous training or breeding. The material used, whether brute or
human, is subjected to careful selection and discipline, in order to
secure and accentuate certain aptitudes and propensities which are
characteristic of the ferine state, and which tend to obsolescence under
domestication. This does not mean that the result in either case is
an all around and consistent rehabilitation of the ferine or barbarian
habit of mind and body. The result is rather a one-sided return to
barbarism or to the feroe natura--a rehabilitation and accentuation
of those ferine traits which make for damage and desolation, without
a corresponding development of the traits which would serve the
individual's self-preservation and fullness of life in a ferine
environment. The culture bestowed in football gives a product of exotic
ferocity and cunning. It is a rehabilitation of the early barbarian
temperament, together with a suppression of those details of
temperament, which, as seen from the standpoint of the social and
economic exigencies, are the redeeming features of the savage character.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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