Football Is a Funny Game!
Walsh, James J.
November 10, 1926 THE COMMONWEAL 11 FOOTBALL IS A FUNNY GAME! By JAMES J. WALSH FOOTBALL has become such a serious sport that the title of this article seems questionable. A foreign...
...The defeat was too poignant for words...
...Poor thing...
...As they removed their football togs for others, they gathered around one of the players whose shoulder had been dislocated during the game, to sympathize with him, and as they tried to tell him brokenly the outstanding points of how the game was lost, the tears rolled down their cheeks...
...Thousands will sit in a football stadium in the wet and rain, risking pneumonia and all sorts of serious ills, to watch a so-called football game, which is really more of a modification of water polo than football...
...But there is much more of this sentimental tale for the benefit of the public which feels there is nothing in the world quite so important as winning a football game...
...Tears running down my cheeks, shaken by emotion, I could not speak, let alone cheer...
...The insane are nearly always people who take themselves too seriously...
...Whenever you can laugh quietly at yourself, you are sane...
...Just now, in the matter of football, the academic classes of this country are taking themselves too seriously...
...On that unique occasion, Charlie Mapes of Columbia was especially overcome...
...Poor fellow, one must pity him...
...There is ever so much more of it in our generation than we had any idea of until the war opened our eyes...
...She was all gold...
...Is it any wonder that neurologists associate football and hysteria when even the sport-writers see it so clearly...
...The team of one of the major universities had been beaten when everyone had expected it would win...
...That is why crowds at football or baseball games get so excited that they sometimes do things almost impossible to understand among civilized people...
...A foreign university professor visiting the United States not long ago on academic purposes, declared that he found the accounts written about football in this country, and evidently read widely and with satisfaction, the funniest literature it has ever been his good fortune to encounter...
...But the foreign professor was glad to find that at least some of our college instructors objected to this point of view, and he read a quotatkm from Professor Grandgent of Harvard which quite met with his approval: "As if a college could derive glory from anything but the fulfilment of its proper mission—the cultivation of the individual minds entrusted to it...
...It is only that I feel deeply that if we are missing any fun in football, it is too bad...
...I am willing that children should make mad pies...
...She gave one quick, half-frightened glance...
...Mapes added, "I believe she almost realized all I felt...
...It takes football to bring out the truth of that...
...My best girl was with me...
...Columbia had beaten Yale...
...This was the game of the year, the game for which they had trained particularly and felt that nothing was too much to do—and now it was over and their work for six months had been all in vain...
...Why has life so few such moments ?" Of course, they married and lived happily ever after...
...It is super-suggestibility—that is, over-readiness to take suggestions because of lack of control of the nervous system...
...This sad scene with the dressing-room fairly swimming in tears proved too much for the visitor from abroad...
...The worst of it is that the hysteria spreads to the crowd and affects a great many people...
...Anyone who thinks that the old Greeks wept more readily than we do should consult the football annals and see how copiously our young football giants weep...
...It is not the so-called strenuous existence in America that makes us neurotic, as much as it is taking our sport too seriously...
...Only the very strongest words are quite strong enough to tell the tale of football events when an enthusiastic sport-writer is behind the pen...
...How could she do anything else with this big strong man, whom she admired so much, just melting away in tears...
...Shell-shock" was nearly all hysteria...
...And then Grantland Rice adds, "There you have the soul and spirit of football...
...But now it is evident that Horace's dictum remains as true as ever—"You can push out human nature with a fork, but it will come back again...
...it is their nature, but when they begin to declare that they are making mod pies, not for fheir own delectation, but for the embellishment of their city, it is time that they were sent on errands for their mothers...
...I wonder if any Greek warrior ever excelled him as Mapes himself told the story: "I shall never forget it...
...Intensity of this kind, especially over trifling affairs in which the interest has to be worked up artificially, tends to make people, especially young people, hysterical...
...with only a few seconds left, a forward pass sailing through the air brought on the miracle...
...Now I would not, for a moment, have it thought that I am poking fun at football...
...That would be dreadful, for football makes the melancholy fall of the year which might otherwise prove so depressing, quite bearable...
...We now have a single-word definition for hysteria...
...There has been a reversion to old ways under the primitive urge of football...
...In contrast to the noisy clamor just outside, there was the most absolute silence in the dressing-room...
...When I talked to him about it, I tried to insist that this was an extremely exceptional case, but he assured me that he had read other reports like it, and he added that if I cared to look through the literature of football I could find any number of descriptions of corresponding scenes of heartrending sadness in manly youth over the loss of a football game...
...Professor Grandgent added: "The altruistic tone assumed by devotees of college amusements is peculiarly irritating...
...The foreign professor would like to see them laugh a little at themselves over each increasingly funny football season...
...College papers sometimes hint that scholarship for it» own sake, especially as pursued by the "greasy grind," is essentially narrow and selfish...
...Under the circumstances, tragedy and humor draw close till but a line divides them...
...Mapes continued, "I feel now the timid little pressure on my arm as she tried to help me gain control of myself...
...Of course, the writer's expression is only an exaggeration for humorous purposes, but the reason it is 12 THE COMMONWEAL November 10, 1926 a joke is because of the soupqon of truth that is behind it...
...Some of the sport-writers recognize that fact...
...He had turned up a very touching story by Grantland Rice, recalling in similarly lachrymose terms the famous occasion on which Columbia beat Yale...
...The professor found this slang frequent and piquant in American university matters...
...That man is a risible animal, is as good a definition as that he is a rational animal...
...Of course, what you really have, is plain hysteria— always an amazing and amusing phase of poor human nature...
...And when that season was over, every Ohio State follower had to seek a nerve specialist for repair...
...Indeed, some of us think it better, because it is easier to make the distinction...
...The nervous excitement involved, superadded to youthful impulsiveness, lessens self-control to a marked degree...
...Young collegians used to think that we moderns had changed all that...
...As evidence he produced an article in which a well-known football writer described the scene in the dressing-room of a defeated team just after a big game...
...Who said that tears and joy are so close in the human heart...
...The preliminary dope had failed to register...
...I suppose she feared that there might be nothing left to go home with...
...That is what makes for the multiplication of accidents in motoring to and from games...
...The professor had been nosing into the literature of football just to get the point of view of the young men themselves...
...Here is an instance from Grantland Rice: "Three season ago, Ohio State won two or three of her "big ten" championship games in the last minute of play...
...Life held nothing more worth while...
...One very serious college editor insisted that the really generous student is the one who works, not for the cultivation of his own mind, but for the glory of his alma mater...
...Even strong-hearted warriors publicly melted into tears and did not seem to think it necessary to repress their feelings...
...He said that when he studied Greek, he and his college friends used to be very much amused over the way the old Greeks so easily wept and were not ashamed to display their grief...
Vol. 5 • November 1926 • No. 1
