I Believe and other essays

In the early part of last February, I spent part of an afternoon in an up-stairs room at the National Sporting Club. An Oxford friend, one of the most promising amateur feather-weights of the day, was having a practice spar with a professional. After the bout, we went down-stairs to the bar – always the bar! – and I talked to the boxer. He told me the same story, the story I already knew: Drink, drink, drink. It permeates pugilism, it makes it a sport which is looked upon with suspicion by many people – simply because of its associations, simply because of the blight of alcohol which surrounds it and seems inseparable from it.

England is a nation of sportsmen still. We take sport as seriously, we pursue it as keenly as ever did the Greeks themselves. But we are allowing this danger and reproach of drink to be mingled with some of our national pastimes. There is no doubt whatever about it, and, as I see it, the reason is this.

We are forgetting to idealize sport, to realize what it means no less than what it is.

I feel sure that if we can once get back to that attitude, the drink trouble will cease automatically. No man can be a thorough sportsman without a latent sense of the inherent fineness and dignity of sport. We want an organized campaign to wake up that latent sense!

Historical analogies may be out of fashion in some departments of life with which I am not here concerned. In sporting matters they are, and ought to be, very valuable in helping to keep the ideal of sport at a high level.

For example, among the finest sportsmen of all time, the ancient Greeks, who were the finest athletes? History tells us they were the Hellenes. They were mostly townsmen living in a country of dense cultivation and beholden to the gymnasium and the palæstra for their recreation, the noblest outcome of which was the Olympian meeting.

The greatest historian of Greek life and thought points out that the Hellenes “were always abstemious,” and they were the leading athletes of the world.

The Macedonian ideal was quite different. The Macedonians despised bodily training in the way of abstinence, and drank to excess. They were hunters and open-air people, they reproduced the life of the savage or natural man with artificial improvements, but when they came into the palæstra they were nowhere at all. A century ago in England many a rollicking county squire would spend a day in the saddle and a night under the table, but he could not have run a mile in five minutes to save his life.

Alexander the Great himself despised the abstemiousness of the Greek athletes, and though he thought in continents, he drank in oceans, and died in a drinking bout. He was a mighty hunter and fighter, but he was not a true sportsman, because he despised the control and self-denial which a man must practise if he would earn that dignity and title.

These last paragraphs may savour a little of the don, and possibly suggest an emanation from the shrunk skull of the pedant. I hope not, but believe me, they are proper to my purpose. After the brief summary I have given of the actual position, it is helpful to survey the whole question from a wider point of view than that of the immediate present.

Let us consider the sporting history of a time much nearer our own, the Elizabethan age. Every one was a sportsman then, because every one was practised in the use of the national arms and was a potential soldier – as the hidalgoes of the Armada found in 1588. But nevertheless, nobody was a teetotaller. “Temperance drinks” were not invented, because most people knew how to be sportsmen and temperate as well.

Shakespeare took ale for breakfast. Drake, Raleigh and Sir Humphrey Gilbert put to sea with barrels of beer for the sailors – “for ale went to sea in those days,” yet every peasant of the country-side was still expert with crossbow and English yew. In that high age drink had not become a fungus at the root of a goodly tree.

A great many sportsmen to-day drink far more than the ordinary person who knows nothing of them but their achievements in this or that game would suppose.

The quantity of alcohol consumed by some sportsmen who are eminent in their respective sports would often both astonish and alarm the layman. There is a very simple pathological reason which explains the fact. Oxygen is needed for the destruction of alcohol, as for the destruction of most poisons. Hence it follows that the athlete can get rid of his quota of alcohol without immediate deteriorating results. Last year I was at Oxford during eights’ week, the time of strict training. The stroke of a college boat, by no means an abstemious man at ordinary times, had been compelled to forego his usual potations. But there came what is known as a “port night,” an evening when the crew were allowed to drink a certain quantity of port. The stroke exceeded this quantity, went back to his rooms, became thoroughly intoxicated and had to be helped to bed. Next day his boat made a bump. A strong man – an athlete – can and very often does drink far more than an ordinary man without any apparent loss of power at the time.

Because there is no apparent deterioration the subject imagines that none is taking place, and the ordinary non-athletic person will find it difficult to realize that when I say that many fine sportsmen drink too much, I am speaking literal truth.

How often do we not observe that a sportsman has a brilliant and public career for a time and then suddenly disappears from the first rank – “drops out,” and is no more heard of? His sporting life is brilliant but it is short.

Yet there is no natural reason why the athlete’s athletic life should be a short one. Muscles and tissues do not easily wear out from continuous and careful action. Any doctor will admit as much. Indeed, an alert and healthy brain with correct muscular co-ordination and with due action of the reflexes is built up, stimulated, and sustained by hard and interesting physical exercise.

Nevertheless, in too many cases the athlete unconsciously shortens his sporting career by the too free use of alcohol. He of all people can least afford to overstep the bounds of strict moderation, yet the comradeship of sport, its jolly social side brings with it great temptations, and temptations which are daily increasing.

We can get a very clear idea of the toxic influence of the least alcoholic excess upon the sportsman by observing the psychology of the really confirmed inebriate.

In a chronic inebriate, loss of spontaneity is the most marked characteristic. Such an one has to think of his walking – a thing he never had to do in his temperate days. He feels safer walking with a stick, he develops an agoraphobia, or dread of open spaces. There is a distinct falling off in the accuracy of the purposive movements.

No one knows more about the effects of alcohol upon the brain than Sir Victor Horsley; auspice Horsley, I have recently made some study of this question myself. Now the athlete, the true sportsman, depends as much upon the condition of his brain for success as upon the condition of his body.

That is the finest thing about sport, and in many quarters it is the least understood thing about it.

Now if we pursue the analogy of the confirmed inebriate we are able to detect exactly the same symptoms, though in an infinitely less degree, in the player of games who consciously or unconsciously drinks more than is good for him.

At a critical moment in a game (let us say) the cerebellum or little brain fails for a single instant to transmit its message via the nerve telegraphs of the body to the motor muscles. The catch is missed, the pass is made half-a-second too late; the little extra dose of alcohol has disorganized the accurate execution of muscular action – and perhaps a match is lost, a sportsman’s career definitely injured.

Even in small quantities – provided always these quantities are in excess of the reasonable individual need – alcohol has a definite and harmful effect upon the actual performance of a voluntary movement.

In an essay of this length one is compelled to take a broad summarizing view of such a question as it deals with. There has been no space to enter into dozens of aspects of the bad effect that drink is having upon the sport of the day. But I have said enough to show how great the evil is, and I am absolutely convinced that hundreds of sportsmen will agree with me that the poison is active, the danger imminent.

It is an article of my creed that sport in its best sense means not only the salvation of the individual but the consolidation of the country. All sedentary and spoony sins, effeminacy, softness, and every sort of degeneration cannot form a part of the sportsman’s temperament. Neither you nor I have ever known a good sportsman who is mentally “wrong.” When eggs are oysters and tea is Chablis we may meet with such a phenomenon, and not till then.

What a preposterous and malignant thing it is, therefore, that a cloud is forming over one of the noblest of modern forces! Every genuine sportsman must get hot and angry in the presence of such a filthy and disturbing parasite as this is. Leagues, societies, confraternities, are all very well in their way. To accomplish, to carry out a material purpose, they are the best possible machinery. But I am not so sure that they are always as valuable when the point is a moral, or rather an ethical one. Be this as it may, and it is a difficult question to settle, I am sure, at least, that a hundred thousand pamphlets, offices – and a glib secretary – in Victoria Street, even a piece of coloured ribbon as a visible badge of enthusiasm, are not nearly as powerful as a quiet and individual discountenance of what is base and dangerous. A cynical daylight always follows too theatrical enthusiasm.

Sportsmen are not theatrical, and their influence can be exerted without pledges of war and a little book of rules. The reprobate purlieus of sport can be cleansed by any one who is awake to the lurking, growing evil on the one hand, and the high mission, the “commission” is a better word, he holds as a “sportsman” upon the other.

But certainly something must be done. It is too much that we should allow whisky, which is two-thirds amyl-alcohol; beer, which is full of pectins and colouring matter; brandy, which is German potato spirit – all the allied filths – to sap and weaken a national heritage, and the chief preservative of manhood which remains in this neurotic age.

I put a line from Juvenal at the head of this article. Florio translates it —

“A wise man will use moderation,
Even in things of commendation.”

“Sapiens” should have been translated “sportsman,” for it is a synonym in this case.

I do not know whether one should say that drink or betting is the greatest menace to modern sport. The latter, at any rate, permeates it in an alarming degree.

Mealy generalities are of no use, and it is a mere derision to pretend that nearly every branch of sport is not imperilled and besmirched by betting.

Dumb protest is always going on, but sportsmen themselves hear very little of it. Papers devoted to sporting matters do not speak out, and the campaign against betting made by the layman only reaches the sportsman’s ears with a muffled sound – like a drum beaten under a blanket.

Moreover, if the general public desires anything it always declares solemnly that it is true, the only truth. If it does not, it bawls out that it does not exist and has never existed. The Christian Scientists, for instance, are beginning to say this of Death itself, and the non-sporting majority, who want to make money without earning it, most certainly desire the continuance of betting.

I am quite confident, therefore, that the second half of this essay will be assailed quite as widely as the first part was, when it appeared in a magazine. In the first part the facts are very carefully authenticated, as they are in this one. Yet the obvious retort was hunted out with all the enthusiasm of a short-sighted bloodhound, and in some quarters one was spoken of as a sensation-monger, who probably made a good thing out of his wares!

That, of course, is very easy to say, but it is not argument. It is nevertheless welcome, because the vigour of the attack always shows the strength of the position.

In connection with the Betting Question, the mind at once turns to horse-racing. There is much to be said in this regard, and I intend to treat of this branch of sport later on in my statement. But I propose to begin with other instances of the evil. Evil it undoubtedly is. The massive harmony which the body and mind sound in correlation under the influences of true sport, is made discordant by it.

Like the youth of a nation, sportsmen are, in a sense, the trustees of posterity, and we must unite not only to recognize the fact but to crush the evil.

No sportsman ever takes a puritanical view of betting. It is the sort of person who thinks vaccination immoral, and whose conversation is like a glass of still lemonade, who thinks that a wager is a sin. This is a fault. I believe that I am voicing the point of view of the sportsman – which is simply the conviction of the sensible man – when I say that there is absolutely no harm in an ordinary wager. You put what you can afford to lose upon the result of a horse-race or a football match. If you win you are rather pleased and you have hurt no one. If you lose you are not hurt in any way, and you have done no more than make a mistake in prescience.

It is necessary to define the difference between a bet which is harmless, and systematic betting which is eventually an attempt to obtain the emoluments of industry without the effort of toil, an attempt which – and here is the very essence of the matter – leads to an abominable dishonesty and the most scandalous abuse.

And now, by graduated steps, let us proceed to a definite presentment of the evil as it exists on the day when you read what I am saying. You will please observe that one begins upon the small organ and in the minor chord. The swell and the crescendo will start later on, until we have full pedal music and thunder of the big pipes!

It has always been the boast of Oxford and Cambridge men that the Boat-race was in its very nature an event which was utterly removed from the gambling evil. One had a wager on one crew or the other, perhaps – most people did not – but the great rowing match was at least pure of offence in this regard. No public harm was ever done. I do not for a moment say that the Boat-race is provocative of general gambling, or is injured by it, as so many other sports are injured. But the fact that I am going to relate is symptomatic. It shows how the gambling spirit is growing and radiating until, in one instance at any rate, the Boat-race itself became the incentive to dishonesty.

Upon a dull day on the Stock Exchange, a group of the younger members began to make wagers about this event. The race was known to be a near thing. The next day the wagers were continued until quite a little “market” was established. The prices fluctuated according as the reports of the training of the crews came to hand. The whole thing was but half serious, though in a day or two large sums of money became involved.

One member of this coterie, a man who was known to be a sportsman, and one whose word had influence, deliberately circulated a false report as to the time in which Oxford had rowed a course, queered the market, and made a considerable sum.

In regarding the gambling question the attention of the ordinary man is generally focussed upon the race-course and upon the bookmaker, as he squirms his careful way through life. People either forget or don’t realize that most of the minor sports are being utterly spoilt and ruined by betting.

Cycle-racing is still a sport which is keenly pursued, though perhaps it has declined somewhat in popularity of late years. In many of the suburban districts round London there are fine cycle tracks, built with all the last improvements which the track-architects of America have discovered. In the Midlands and North of England there are magnificent tracks in nearly all the principal towns.