Harry Perry Robinson

American Sport Twenty-five Years Ago—The Power of Golf—A Look Ahead—Britain, Mother of Sports—Buffalo in New York—And Pheasants on Clapham Common—Shooting Foxes and the "Sport" of Wild-fowling—The Amateur in American Sport—At Henley—And at Large—Teutonic Poppycock.

In "An Error in the Fourth Dimension," Kipling tells how one Wilton Sargent, an American, came to live in England and earnestly laboured to make himself more English than the English. He learned diligently to do many things most un-American:—"Last mystery of all he learned to golf—well; and when an American knows the innermost meaning of 'Don't press, slow back and keep your eye on the ball,' he is, for practical purposes, de-nationalised." Some six years after that was written an American golfer became Amateur Champion of Great Britain. Yes; I know that Mr. Travis was not born in the United States, but qua golfer he is American pure and simple. Which shows the danger of too hasty generalisation, even on the part of a genius. And it shows more. When he wrote those words Kipling was fully justified by the facts as they stood. It is the fault of the character of the American people, which frustrates prophecy.

Twenty-five years ago there was no amateur sport in America—none. Men, it is true, went off and shot ("hunted" as Americans call it) and fished and yachted for a few days, or weeks, in summer or autumn, in a rather rough-and-ready sort of way. Also, when at college they played baseball and football and, perhaps, they rowed. After leaving college there was probably not one young American in a hundred who entered a boat or played a game of either football or baseball on an average of once in a year. The people as a whole had no open-air games. Baseball was chiefly professional. Cricket had a certain foothold in Philadelphia and on Staten Island, but it was an exotic sport, as it remains to-day, failing entirely to enlist the sympathies of the multitude. Polo was not played. Lawn tennis had been introduced, but had made little headway. In all America there were, I think, three racquet courts, which were used chiefly by visiting Englishmen, and not one tennis court. Lacrosse was quite unknown, and as for the "winter sports" of snow-shoeing, ski-ing, ice-boating, curling, and tobogganing, they were practised only here and there by a few (except for the "coasting" of children) as rather a curious fad.

It was a strange experience for an Englishman in those days, fond of his games, to go from his clubs and the society of his fellows at home, to mix in the same class of society in America. As in the circles that he had left behind him, so there, the conversation was still largely on sporting topics, but while in England men talked of the games in which they played themselves and of the feats and experiences of their friends, in the leading young men's clubs of New York—the Union, the Knickerbocker, and the Calumet—the talk was solely of professional sport: of the paid baseball nines, of prize fighters (Sullivan was then just rising to his glory), and professional scullers (those were the days of Hanlan), and the like. No man talked of his own doings or of those of his friends, for he and his friends did nothing, except perhaps to spar for an hour or so once or twice a week, or go through perfunctory gymnastics for their figures' sakes.

Until a dozen years ago the situation had not materially changed. Lawn tennis had made some headway, but the thing that wrought the revolution was the coming of golf. It may be doubted if ever in history has any single sport, pastime, or pursuit so modified the habits, and even the character, of a people in an equal space of time as golf has modified those of the people of the United States.

Enough has already been written of the enthusiasm with which the Americans took up the game itself, of the social prestige which it at once obtained, of the colossal sums of money that have been lavished on the making of courses, of the sumptuousness of the club-houses that have sprung up all over the land. That golf is in itself a fascinating game, is sufficiently proved in England, where it has drawn so many thousands of devotees away from cricket, football, lawn tennis, and other sports. But can we imagine what the result might have been if there had been in Great Britain no cricket, or football, or other sports, so that all the game-loving enthusiasm of the nation had been free to turn itself loose into that one channel? And this is just what did happen in America. Golf had a clear field and a strenuous sport-loving nation, devoid of open-air games, at its mercy.

The result was not merely that people took to playing golf and that young men neglected their offices and millionaires stretched unwonted muscles in scrambling over bunkers. Golf taught the American people to play games. It took them out from their great office-buildings and from their five-o'clock cocktails at the club, into the open air; and they found that the open air was good. So around nearly every golf club other sports grew up. Polo grounds were laid out by the side of the links, croquet lawns appeared on one side of the club-house and lawn-tennis nets arose on the other, while traps for the clay-pigeon shooters were placed safely off in a corner.

Golf came precisely at the moment when the people were ready for it. Just as America, having in a measure completed the exploitation of her own continent and developed a manufacturing power beyond the resources of consumption in her people, was commercially ripe for the invasion of the markets of the world; just as she came, in her overflowing wealth and power, to a recognition of her greatness as a nation, and was politically ripe for an Imperial policy of colonial expansion; just as, tired of the loose code of ethics of the scrambling days, when the country was still one half wilderness and none had time to care for the public conscience, she was morally ripe for the wonderful revival which has set in in the ethics of politics and commerce and of which Mr. Roosevelt has been and is the chief apostle: so, by the individual richness of her citizens, giving larger leisure in which to cultivate other pleasures than those which their offices or homes could afford, she was ripe for the coming of the day of open-air games. And having turned to them, she threw herself into their pursuit with the ardour and singleness of purpose which are characteristic of the people and which, as applied to games, seem to English eyes to savour almost of professionalism. As a matter of fact they are only the manifestations of an essential trait of the American character.

The result was that almost at the same time as an American player was winning the British Amateur Golf Championship, an American polo team was putting All England on her mettle at Hurlingham, and it was not with any wider margin than was necessary for comfort that Great Britain retained the honours in lawn tennis, which she has since lost to one of her own colonies.

It is curious that this awakening of the amateur sporting spirit in the United States should have come just at the time when many excellent judges were bewailing the growing popularity of professional sport in England. Any day now, one may hear complaints that the British youth is giving up playing games himself for the purpose of watching professional wrestlers or football games or county cricket matches. My personal opinion is that there is no need to worry. The growing interest in exhibition games reacts in producing a larger number of youths who strive to become players. Not only in spite of, but largely because of, the greater spectacular attraction of both football and cricket than in years gone by, there is an immensely larger number of players of both—and of all other—games than there ever was before. It is little more than a score of years since Association football, at least, was practically the monopoly of a few public schools and of the members of the two Universities—of "gentlemen" in fact. Any loss which the nation can have suffered from the tendency to sit on benches and applaud professional players must have been made up a thousand times over in the benefit to the national physique from the spreading of the game into wide classes which formerly regarded it, much as they might fox-hunting, as a pastime reserved only for their "betters."

It is none the less interesting and instructive that in this field as in so many others the directly opposite tendencies should be at work in the two countries: that just when America is beginning to learn the delight of being a game-loving nation and amateur sport is thriving, not yet to the detriment of, but in proportions at least which stand fair comparison with, professional, the cry should be raised in England that Englishmen are forgetting to play games themselves in their eagerness to watch others do them better. Here, as in other things, the gap between the habits of the two peoples is narrowing rapidly. They have not yet met; for in England the time and attention given to games and sports by amateurs is still incomparably greater than on the other side. But that the advancing lines will meet—and even cross—seems probable. And when they have crossed, what then? Will America ever oust Great Britain from the position which she holds as the Mother of Sports and the athletic centre of the world?

Some things, it appears, one can predict with certainty. America has already taken to herself a disagreeable number of the records in track athletics; and she will take more. On the links the performance of Mr. Travis, isolated as yet, is only a warning of many similar experiences in the future. In a few years it will be very hard for any visiting golf team of less than All England or All Scotland strength to win many matches against American clubs on their home courses; and the United States will be able to send a team over here that will be beaten only by All England—or perhaps will not be beaten by All Britain. At polo the Americans will go on hammering away till they produce a team that can stand unconquered at Hurlingham. It will be very long before they can turn out a dozen teams to match the best English dozen; but by mere force of concentration and by the practice of that quality which, as has already been said, looks so like professionalism to English eyes, one team to rival the English best they will send over. In lawn tennis it cannot be long before a pair of Americans will do what an Australian pair did in 1907, just as the United States already holds the Ladies' Championship; and England is going to have some difficulty in recovering her honours at court tennis. In rifle shooting America must be expected to beat England oftener than England beats America; but the edge will be taken off any humiliation that there might be by the fact that Britain will have Colonial teams as good as either.

And when all this has happened, will England's position be shaken? Not one whit! Not though the America's cup never crosses the Atlantic and though sooner or later an American college crew succeeds—as surely, for their pluck, they deserve to succeed—in imitating the Belgians and carrying off the Grand at Henley. There remain games and sports enough which the United States will never take up seriously, at which if she did she would be debarred by climatic conditions or other causes from ever threatening British supremacy.

The glory of England lies in the fact that she "takes on" the best of all the nations of the world at their own games. It is not the United States only, but all her Colonies and every country of Europe that turn to Great Britain as to their best antagonist in whatever sport they find themselves proficient. Just now England's brow is somewhat bare of laurels, but year in and year out Britain will continue to win the majority of contests in her meetings with all the world; and if she lose at times, is it not better to have rivals good enough to make her extend herself? And is it not sufficient for her pride that she, one people, should win—if it be only—half of all the world's honours?

Meanwhile Englishmen can afford to rejoice ungrudgingly at the new spirit which has been born in the United States. Each year the number of "events" in which an international contest is possible increases. The time may not be far away when there will be almost as long a list of Anglo-American annual contests as there is now between Oxford and Cambridge. But it will be a very long time before the United States can displace Great Britain from the pre-eminence which she holds—and the wonderful character of which, I think, few Englishmen appreciate. Before that time comes such other sweeping changes will probably have come over the map of the world and the relations of the peoples that Britain's displacement will have lost all significance.

And Englishmen can always remember that, whatever triumphs the Americans may win in the domain of sport, they win them by virtue of the English blood that is in them.

It is, of course, inevitable that in many particulars the American and English ideas of sport should be widely different. There is an old, old story in America of the Englishman who arrived in New York and, on the day after his arrival, got out his rifle and proceeded to make enquiries of the hotel people as to the best direction in which to start out to find buffalo—the nearest buffalo at the time being, perhaps, two thousand miles away. It is a story which has contributed not a little to contempt of the Britisher in many an innocent American mind. It happens that in my own experience I have known precisely that same blunder made by an American in England.

I had met an American friend, with whom I have shot in America, at his hotel on the evening of his arrival in London one day in November. In the course of conversation I mentioned that the shooting season was in full swing.

"Good," he said. "Let me hire a gun somewhere to-morrow and let's go out, if you've nothing to do, and have some shooting."

Nothing, he opined, would be simpler, or more agreeable, than to drive out—or possibly take a train—to some wild spot in the vicinity of London—Clapham Common perhaps—and spend a day among the pheasants. It was precisely the Englishman and his buffalo—the prehistoric instinct of the race ("What a beautiful day! Let us go and kill something!") blossoming amid unfamiliar conditions. My American friend wanted to kill an English pheasant. He had heard much of them as the best of game-birds. He had eaten them, much refrigerated, in New York and found them good. And he knew nothing of preserving and of a land that is all parcelled out into parks and gardens and spinneys. Why not then go out and enjoy ourselves? Before he left England he had some pheasant shooting, and it is rarely that a man on his first day at those conspicuous but evasive fowl renders as good an account of himself as did he. Similarly every American with a sound sporting instinct must hope that that traditional Englishman ultimately got his buffalo.

Many times in the United States in the old days have I done exactly what that American then wished to do in London. Finding myself compelled to spend a night at some crude and unfamiliar Western town, I have made enquiries at the hotel as to the shooting—duck or prairie chicken—in the neighbourhood. Hiring a gun of the local gunsmith and buying a hundred cartridges, one then secured a trap with a driver, who probably brought his own gun and shot also (probably better than oneself), but who certainly knew the ground. The best ground might be three or five or ten miles out—open prairie where chicken were plentiful, or a string of prairie lakes or "sloughs" (pronounced "sloo") with duck-passes between. That evening one came home, hungry and happy as a hunter ought to be, with perhaps half a dozen brace of spike-tailed grouse (the common "chicken" of the Northwestern States) or ten or a dozen duck—mallard, widgeon, pintail, two kinds of teal, with, it might be, a couple of red-heads or canvas-backs,—or, not improbably, a magnificent Canada goose as the spoils.

With the settlement of the country, the multiplication of shooters, and the increase in the number of "gun-clubs," which have now included most of the easily accessible duck-grounds in the country in their private preserves, the possibilities of those delightful days are growing fewer, but even now there are many parts of the West where the stranger can still do as I have done many times.

Though the people had so few outdoor games, the great majority of Americans, except the less well-to-do of the city-dwellers of the Eastern States, have been accustomed to handle gun and rod from their childhood. The gun may at first have been a rusty old muzzle-loader, and the rod a "pole" cut from the bank of the stream with a live grasshopper for bait; and there are few better weapons to teach a boy to be a keen sportsman. The birds that he shot were game—duck or geese, turkeys, quail, grouse, or snipe—and the fish that he caught were mostly game fish—trout and bass. It is true that the American generally shoots foxes; so does the Englishman when he goes to the Colonies where there are no hounds and too many foxes, with game birds which he wishes kept for his own shooting, and domestic chickens which he destines for his own table. On the other hand the American does not mount a miniature cannon in a punt and shoot waterfowl by wholesale when sitting on the water. It is only the gunner for the market, the man who makes his living by it, who does that, and the laws do their best to stop even him. The American sportsman who cannot get his duck fairly on the wing with a 12- or 16-bore prefers not to get them at all. "But," objects the English wildfowl shooter, "suppose the birds are not get-at-able in any other way?" "So much," the American would retort, "the better for the birds. They have earned their lives; get them like a sportsman or let them go."

The time may not be far away—and many Englishmen will be glad when it comes—when to kill waterfowl at rest with a duck gun will no longer be considered a "sport" that a gentleman can engage in in England. Perhaps fox-hunting will become so popular in the United States that foxes will be generally preserved. The sportsmen of each country will then think better of those of the other. Meanwhile it would be pleasanter if each would believe that such little seemingly unsportsmanlike peculiarities that the other may have developed are only the accidents of his environment, and that under the same circumstances there is not a pin to choose between their sportsmanship.

Reference has more than once been made to the quality which looks to English eyes so much like semi-professionalism in American sport. It is a delicate subject, in handling which susceptibilities on one side or the other may easily be hurt.

The intense earnestness and concentration of the American on his one sport—for most Americans are specialists in one only—does not commend itself to English amateurs. The exclusiveness, which seems to be suspicious of foul play, and the stringent training system of certain American crews at Henley have been out of harmony with all the traditions of the great Regatta and have caused much ill feeling, some of which has occasionally come to the surface. Some of the proceedings of American polo teams have not coincided with what is ordinarily considered, in England, the behaviour of gentlemen in matters of amateur sport. On the other hand, Americans universally believe that Lord Dunraven acted in a most unsportsmanlike manner in the unfortunate cup scandal; and in one case they are—or were at the time—convinced that one of their crews was unfairly treated at Henley. Honours therefore on the surface are fairly easy; and, while every Englishman knows that both the American charges quoted are absurd, every American is no less of the opinion that the English grounds of complaint are altogether unreasonable.

We must remember that after all a good many of the best English golfers and lawn-tennis players do nothing else in life but golf or play lawn-tennis. And this tendency to specialise is undoubtedly increasing. Meanwhile it will never be rooted out of the American character and in departments of sport where it, and it alone, will bring pre-eminence, Englishmen will either have to do as Americans do or, sooner or later, consent to be defeated. There is nothing in the practice at which the Englishman can fairly cavil. Americans have still much the fewer sports; and it is the national habit to take up one and concentrate on it with all one's might.[420:1]

A more difficult aspect of the situation has to do with the question of the definition of "gentleman-amateur"; the fact being, of course, that the same definition has not the same significance in the two countries. The radical difficulty lies in the fact that the word "gentleman" in its English sense of a man of gentle birth has no application to America. Let this not be understood as a statement that there are any fewer gentlemen in America or that the word is not used. But its usage is not re-inforced, its limits are not defined, as in England, by any line of cleavage in the social system. A large number of the gentlemen of America are farmers' sons; more than half are the sons of men who commenced life in very humble positions, and nearly all are the sons of men who are engaged in trade or in business, the majority of them being destined to go into trade or business (and to begin at the beginning) themselves. In England, of course, the process of the obliteration of the old line is going on with great rapidity. In America, on the other hand, there is a tendency towards the drawing of a somewhat corresponding line. But the fact remains that at present there exists this fundamental distinction and the consequence is that Englishmen continue to find among American "amateurs" and in teams of American "gentlemen," individuals who would not be accepted into the same categories in England.

But what Englishmen should endeavour to understand is that the man who on the surface seems to belong to a class which in England would be objectionable in the company of gentlemen probably has none of those characteristics which would make him objectionable were he English. He has far more of the characteristics of a gentleman than of the other qualities. The qualities which go to make a "gentleman," even in the English sense, are many and complex; but the assumption is that they are all present in the man who bears the public school and university stamp. The Englishman is accustomed to accept the presence or absence of one or a few of those qualities in an individual as evidence of the presence or absence of them all. In judging other Englishmen, the rule works satisfactorily. But in America, with its different social system, the qualities are not tied up in the same bundles, so that the same inference fails. The same, or a similar, peculiarity of voice or speech or manner or dress or birth does not denote—much less does it connote—the same or similar things in representatives of the two peoples. Particular Englishmen have learned this often enough in individual cases. How often has it not happened that an Englishman, meeting an American first as a stranger, not even being informed that he is an American, has, judging from some one external characteristic, turned from him as being an Undesirable, only to be introduced to him later, or meet him under other conditions, and find in him one of the best fellows that he ever met? The thing is happening every day. Very often, with a little more knowledge or a little clearer understanding, Englishmen would know that their judgment of some American amateur athlete is shockingly unjust. To bar him out would be incomparably more unjust to him than his inclusion is unjust to any antagonist.

This of course does not touch the fact—which is a fact—that in America what answers to the gentleman-amateur in England is drawn from a much larger proportion of the people. This does not however mean, when rightly viewed, what Englishmen generally think it means, that Americans go down into other—and presumably not legitimate—classes for their recruits. It only means that a very much larger proportion of the people belong to one class. There is no point at which an arbitrary line can be drawn. This is in truth only another way of saying what has been said already more than once, that the American people is really more homogeneous than the English, or rather is homogeneous over a larger part of its area, so that the type-American represents a greater proportion of the people of the United States than the type-Briton represents of the people of the British Isles.

This is obviously in the realm of sport so much to America's advantage. It is not a condition against which the Englishman has any right to protest, any more than he has to move amendments to the Constitution of the United States. When better comprehended, Englishmen will accept it without either resentment or regret. The United States has a larger population than Great Britain: so much the better for the United States. Also a larger proportion of that population must be admitted into the category of gentleman-amateur in sport; so much the more the better for them.

But, curiously enough, this condition has its inherent drawback, which not impossibly more than compensates for its advantages. The fact that young Americans grow up so much of a class involves the essential fact that the enormous majority of them are educated at the Public Schools, that is at the Board Schools or Government Schools or whatever they would be called if their precise counterpart existed in England. The United States has not (the fact has been touched on before) any group of institutions comparable to the great schools of England. A few excellent schools there are which bear some resemblance to the English models, but they are not numerous enough to go any way towards leavening the nation. It is to the Public Schools that, in the mass, the English gentleman-amateur owes his training, not only in sports but in many other things besides: especially in those things which stamp on him the mark by which he is recognised as belonging to his right class through life. The American, as has been said, is not so stamped; but in missing that stamp—or in failing to receive it—he necessarily missed also all that discipline and training in games which the Public School gave to the Englishman. The very same cause as gives America an advantage in the numbers from which she can draw her amateur athletes, also forbids that these recruits should have had the same advantages of early training as fall to the Englishman.

The thing is about as broad as it is long. It is not difficult to imagine that the great schools might never have come into existence in England, so that a larger proportion of the population than is now the case would be educated at some intermediate institutions, at the Grammar Schools let us say, when the English gentleman-amateur athletes—the polo, golf, and tennis teams and the crews that row at Henley—would be drawn from a larger circle of the population, and the individuals would not bear as close a superficial resemblance, one to the other, as they do to-day. They would in fact be more like the members of American athletic teams as Englishmen know them. The question is whether England would gain or lose in athletic efficiency. When Englishmen find something to cavil at in an individual American amateur or in an American amateur team or crew, would it not be better to stop and consider whether the disadvantages which compel America to be represented by such an individual or team or crew, do not outweigh the advantages which enable her to use him or them? If the United States were to develop the same educational machinery as exists in England, which would stamp practically all their gentlemen-amateurs with the same hall-mark, as they are so stamped in England, and would at the same time give them the English public-school boy's training in games, would not England, as a mere matter of athletic rivalry, be worse off instead of better?

For the purpose of pointing the moral of the essential likeness of the American and English characters, as contrasted with those of other peoples, reference has already been made to Professor MÜnsterberg and his book. It is an excellent book; but what English writer would think it necessary to inform English readers that "the American student recreates himself on the athletic field rather than in the ale-house"? We know something of the life of a German student; but it is only when a German himself says a thing like that that he illuminates in a flash the abyss which yawns between the moral qualities of the youth of his country and the young American or young Englishman.

Again the same author speaks on the subject of the Anglo-Saxon love of fair play (the sporting instinct, I have called it) as follows:

"The demand for 'fair play' dominates the whole American people, and shapes public opinion in all matters whether large or small. And with this finally goes the belief in the self-respect and integrity of one's neighbour. The American cannot understand how Europeans" (Continental Europeans, if you please, Mr. MÜnsterberg!) "so often reinforce their statements with explicit mention of their honour which is at stake, as if the hearer was likely to feel a doubt of it; and even American children are often apt to wonder at young people abroad who quarrel at play and at once suspect one another of some unfairness. The American system does not wait for years of discretion to come before exerting its influence; it makes itself felt in the nursery, where already the word of one child is never doubted by his playmates."

There is an excellent American slang word, which is "poppycock." The Century Dictionary speaks disrespectfully of it as a "United States vulgarism," but personally I consider it a first-class word. The Century Dictionary defines it as meaning, "Trivial talk; nonsense; stuff and rubbish," which is about as near as a dictionary can get to the elusive meaning of any slang word. English readers will understand the exact shade of meaning of the word when I say that the paragraph above quoted is most excellent and precise poppycock. Every American who read that paragraph when the book was published must have chuckled inwardly, just as every Englishman would chuckle. But the point which I wish to emphasise is that it is not at all poppycock from the author's point of view. I doubt not that his countrymen have been most edified by that excellent dictum, and the trouble is that one could never make a typical German understand wherein it is wrong. No, Mr. MÜnsterberg, it is not that the sentence is untrue—far be it from me to suggest such a thing. It is merely absurd; and you, sir, will never, never, never comprehend why it is so.

It is in the presence of such a remark, seriously made by so excellently capable a foreigner, that the Englishman and American ought to be able to shake hands and realise how much of a kin they are and how far removed from some other peoples.

I have dwelt on this subject of the games of the two peoples at what may seem to many an unnecessary length, because I do not think its importance can well be exaggerated. It is not only desirable, but it is necessary, for a thorough mutual liking between them that there should be no friction in matters of sport. No incident has, I believe, occurred of late years which did so much harm to the relations between the peoples as did the Dunraven episode in connection with the America's cup races. I should be inclined to say that it did more harm (I am not blaming Lord Dunraven) than the Venezuelan incident.

On the other hand, it is doubtful whether the more recent attempts to recover the cup, and the spirit in which they have been conducted, have not contributed as much as, say, the attitude of England in the Spanish War to the increased liking for Great Britain which has made itself manifest in the United States of recent years. Few Englishmen, probably, understand how much is made of such matters in the American press. The love of sport is in the blood of both peoples and neither can altogether like the other until it believes it to have the same generous sporting instincts and the same clean methods as itself. As a matter of fact, they do—as in so many other traits—stand out conspicuously alike from among all other peoples, but neither will give the other full credit for this, till each learns to see below such slight surface appearances as at present provoke occasional ill-will in one party or the other. Fuller understanding will come with time and with it entire cordiality.

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