6 came quite apparent to every- The consequence has been that "athletes" are growing less and less important in athletic clubs, and the "old timers" sit together and hold indignation meetings over the course of the clubs which they have fathered. I was present at a meeting of the members of a certain athletic club, called to consider the advisability of the club's ceasing to be represented by a football The Hall, New York Athletic Club. team. This particular club has grown forcibly declare that he deplored the tendency stimuÎated by the membership that recent years has brought into the club, which was to divert the resources of the club to other than athletic purposes; and that he felt called upon to remind the club, in the words of Hereward the Wake to old Gilbert of Ghent, that these new-comers, like 66 were enthe Jews of old, tering into goodly houses which they had builded not, farms which they had tilled not, wells which they had digged not, and orchards which they had planted not." But however the athletic clubs may have fallen away from the original intention of their founders, however deplorable some of the phases of their present condition may be to those enthusiasts who regard their associations as having only one reason for existence the making of physical and moral manhood and however regrettable may be the ascendancy of the café over the gymnasium, that tendency or consequence has been a very natural one. The formative period of the athletic clubs is ended, and they have become settled institutions supplying gratification to continuing needs, and only responding occasionally to an enthusiasm for athletics, according to the composition of their membership. Further, they reflect the present attitude of the community toward athletics. It needs no demonstration to make clear the fact that athletics have been pushed to excess, and that there is now a reaction. Among the colleges there appears to be no diminution of the athletic fury, but among the athletic clubs proper, competitive athletics are being softened into a pursuit of exercise, open-air life, and good fellowship. The interest in competitive sports is quite as great as formerly, but no longer includes personal competition, but is rather confined to a side line interest in them. The country club feature is the most pronounced evidence of this change. The high-board-fence athletic field has been supplanted by the country house, designed not for its athletic facilities, but for the pleasures of a country life. And indeed the country club feature, when it has been introduced, is a further cause in itself for modifying the excess of athletics. For any ra tional man would prefer to the monotonous pounding of a cinder track in city air and surroundings, the transporting of his thoughts and his body to the ameliorating surrounding of the country; and the indulgence there in open-air sports, not as a labor or with any purpose save the uncontrollable one of naturally using his body, with only such rivalry as demands no arduous training yet gives a zest to the game, and can be On one knoll of the Island sits the club-house, facing the outlet into the Sound, which focusing between Glen Island and the heavily wooded eastern shore of Hunters Island, holds a view of the farther water and the distant shore of Long Island as if one were looking through the lens of a camera. It is the delight of a summer's evening to dine upon the club-house piazzas and catch the drifting picture of distant yachts and coasters and snowy Sound steamers. The Yacht Club-house. measured by long glasses afterward. Travers Island is the best known of these country athletic fields. It is one of the rocky, wooded, dromedary-backed formations that are characteristic of the north shore of the Long Island Sound. It was originally an island by the courtesy of the high tide, but a roadway has joined it hard and fast to the shore as a peninsula. It is shoreward of picturesque Glen Island, and between it and Glen Island, and stretching farther away under the shore of Hunters Island, is a straight-away course of nearly two miles of as good rowing water as a sweep could dip. 8 Somewhat farther toward the mainland is a larger knoll, left in its natural state and covered with trees, save where some tennis courts are laid out. Beyond the trees are the boat house and the yachting quarters. Between the two knolls lies a level bit of turf as smooth and soft and rich as if it were a cloak of Lincoln green thrown upon the earth, and about it runs the dark border of a cinder track. From the club-house and from the grassy slopes reaching down to the track, a view of the field is given as if one were looking down upon the arena of a natural coliseum; and as one glances at the surrounding hills that give a sense of seclusion to the place and help to concentrate the view upon the field itself, one could scarcely keep from thinking, that if the athletic sports of Greece were to be revived, if the somewh t grandiloquent French project to re-establish the ancient athletic games with The New York A. C. at Travers Island. the world as a new Greece should succeed, no more harmonious Olympia could be found. But unfortunately, the palmy days of track athletics have gone by. The last annual championships of the Amateur Athletic Union were held on these very grounds, and although they were given under the auspices of the most powerful of all the athletic clubs, and although they represented the competition of the whole of the United States, they were attended by only a very meagre audience. The fact is that the American appetite for competition is no longer satisfied with the comparatively mild contests of the track events. And then again, the athletic clubs themselves have helped to destroy the interest in the ordinary field sports. For many years they made the giving of athletic games the whole purpose of their existence, and finding them popular, they multiplied them to replenish their treasuries. They pursued the idea that the winning of prizes by men wearing their club colors meant prosperity. They invented a system of athletic memberships, that signified anything that they desired it to mean, from free initiations, remitted dues, gratuitous board and lodging, to a business situation or cold cash, and they offered valuable prizes that could quite readily be converted into money. They raised their trainers from the position of rubbers and servants of the club to the position of athletic managers, and imposed upon them the duty of having a sufficient number of speedy legs to run and jump and a sufficient number of muscular backs to throw weights for their clubs, irrespective of any social requirements of the owners of those backs or legs. The consequences most inevitable The Club-house. were that the athletes of the clubs became hired performers, and they were often kept like a pack of hounds and taken around by the athletic manager to run in one game after another; that the athletic managers, who were mostly The Club-house. illiterate and purely of the professional class, absorbed in themselves practically all of the competitive athletics of the clubs and forced their personalities on the clubs that engaged them; that the Amateur Athletic Union was compelled to make an annual round up of all its members, to brand a goodly number of the ostensible amateurs as professionals; and finally, that the tone of track athletics became so cheap and so common that the better portion of the club membership held aloof from it. But whatever may be the pres status of track athletics, if you haven't had too much of them, they are vastly interesting. It is fine to see a quartette of hurdlers "set" for the finals, and to watch them break over the low hurdles like the fast curling wave of a fresh-water lake, that tosses itself rapidly along and rushes up the beach as it breaks. It is fine to watch the flat sprinters dart into high movement at the crack of the pistol and fly like leaves before a furious wind, holding together like a living thing, until a dark, swarthy, sunburned figure, that has caught your eye from the freedom of his movement, glides out ahead of the rest, every bit Tennis Courts. of him running, not a false motion anywhere, and you feel that you have seen one of the perfections of physical attributes. And it is fine to follow the full, strong stride of the half-mile and mile runners, whose legs rise like pistons and whose prototypes must surely have suggested to the ancients the idea of the winged feet of Mercury, so lightly do they touch the ground. Perhaps the most exciting of all the track events are the bicycle races, for it is astonishing to behold the speed of those meagre skeletons of steel that seem almost like the bones of the wind. Indeed, at the present time ordinary athletic games will not draw a crowd large enough to pay expenses unless bicycling is made an important part of them. It is interesting in connection with this to pick up the newspaper account of the very first games given by the New York Athletic Club, in 1868, at the Empire City Rink, the first games given by any athletic club in this country, for it calls to mind how marvellous has been the development of the wheel since that time. The reporters in those days possessed none of the easy familiarity with sporting matters which the craft possesses to-day, and the particular scribe who wrote this story set down with considerable naïveté what quite filled his eyes. The Crescent A. C. of Brooklyn. |