Page:The Sunday Eight O'Clock (1916).pdf/78

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perhaps, but it is a sport the training for which is most severe. A football coach is not always careful to be polite and kind; he must drive the men to their utmost capacity, and his words are often brutally goading. The men come in at night after their three or four hours of practice with discouraged hearts, and bruised muscles, and wrenched tendons, and fractured bones, and tired sore bodies to take up the real work of college. The glory and the hero worship they get out of it are not often commensurate with the sacrifices which they must make.

And we? We criticize the plays and the players, we are irritated because the score does not rise to the heights we had hoped, or we cheer passively if something pleases us. Few of us justly estimate the work that the fellows do or give them the credit they deserve.

Granting all the adverse criticisms which may be urged against the game, and they