WITH THE EDITORWITH THE EDITOR
WITH THE EDITOR
AUGUST is the high-tide month of outdoor life. At this season, young folks, in preparation for the new school term, are hurried off to draw their last breath of vacation at the country, the seashore, or mountains, and the older people, wherever it is possible, leave their work and join the children on the court and field. Athletics supplant business and study.
The habit of taking physical exercise can be traced as far back as the time of Homer. With the old Greeks, systematic gymnastics was a part of the young person’s education. Further than that, it even became a matter of legislation, and to this fact can be attributed the splendid physiques which are portrayed in the old Greek statues.
At Athens, the government erected public gymnasiums. In connection with them were medical attendants whose duty it was to prescribe the special kind of exercise needed by each pupil. To show still further the regard for athletics at that time, it might be said that both Plato and Aristotle believed that public gymnasiums were essential to a perfect nation.
Athletics now are regarded in a different light. Very few of us go through the tedious systematic drill necessary to a perfect physical condition. By many, indeed, the exercise of the entire year is crowded into the short space of a fortnight, and then it is taken only as recreation.
A better form of the practice is found in what we might term team athletics, but even here we lack the wise purpose of the ancients. The object in this case is to develop a squad of athletes, generally those already well gifted by nature, to compete with and defeat another such team of picked men. As a consequence, in the great effort to produce a winning crew or eleven, the especial needs of the individual are forgotten.
So, notwithstanding the fact that every one is welcomed as a candidate for these teams, the final result is to turn out, perhaps, a score of exceptionally well drilled men, while hundreds of others, who, in reality, most need the exercise thus afforded, are content to fill the grand stands and cheer their men to victory.
Undoubtedly, team athletics does much good. It stimulates a greater interest and brings more men into the field than any other influence; but it still falls short of the ideal purpose of athletics—to get everyone, gymnasts or invalids, to develop their bodies with the same systematic care with which they train their minds.
Physical exercise must not be considered merely as a form of recreation or a detail in the making of an athletic team, but rather in the light of a training which, in the future, will have a very telling effect upon our lives. Even if we can never hope to lower a track record or win a place upon the gridiron, we should not wholly surrender the field to those who already excel: but see that a corner of it, at least, is left for those who are not born athletes—those who, in fact, are most in need of exercise.