Page:Points of View (1924).pdf/32

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noticed with a good deal of pleasure the amount of money that little country towns everywhere are putting into golf links and country clubs. Occasionally, also, I look at the sporting pages of the newspapers and read of the enormous expenditure that the American people are putting into baseball. Then I walk out and look at our crowded tennis courts, and at our athletic field, and at our two million dollar stadium; and I think of the great stadiums that have been erected in the last ten or fifteen years all the way across the country from the Yale Bowl to Leland Stanford University. I don't think of any more significant architectural phenomenon since the cathedral building of the Middle Ages. For these objects any amount of money is to be had, because people believe in them. Money flows into them as a great act of faith. Our young people everywhere believe in the athletic life and in our out of door sports and athletic games; and in what is compatible with them, and they tend to disbelieve in what is incompatible with them.

Now, I must ask you to consider for a moment what is compatible with an athletic game—with, for example, a good game of tennis. In order to play tennis with satisfaction to yourself and your opponents, you must bring into the game health, high spirits, endurance, energy, quickness, force, accuracy, honesty, generosity and perfect obedience to rules—to rules which are arbitrary, elaborate, but inflexible conventions. You must have all these virtues to play well at any athletic game; and to play