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Indoor Training for Outdoor Sport
 There were those of us who believed that with these innovations brought from outof-doors, indoor athletics would take its place on a par with athletics on the cinder track and sodded field. But we soon began to see limitations. The first appeared when the star sprinters were urged to turn out and train for the dash and the relay teams. They held back. They were looking forward to the time of outdoor work, when there would be medals and ’Varsity letters at stake, and they did not propose to stiffen themselves running on a hard floor, or to take chances on staleness from too early training.As a result, the relay teams were largely made up of new men, or of men who had done some little work of an inferior quality before. Now this was discouraging to our hopes of seeing indoor work rise to a par with the spring games, but, after all, it gave themeet character. It brought into contest students who would hardly aspire to competition in the more pretentious games.
It brought out new material. It furnished a good time—a series of contests close enough to be exciting, and not so close nor so important as to be attended with the keen anxiety which destroys so much of the play when great things are at stake. Then, too, it taught athletic lessons and created new interest by distributing honors. It made new athletic champions, indoor champions, and in this land of universal eminence, where every man is a colonel or a champion, or a member of the aristocracy of brains, such a means of distinction is not without its place in the general economy. These, limitations and these benefits, it seems to me, pretty nearly define the place of indoor contests.
Indoor athletics by no means culminate in the annual indoor meet as track athletics culminate in the spring field day of early summer. Its great importance is in the development of men for work outdoors. In this direction the limitations of the gymnasium are growing fewer each year. This is a day of gymnasium building, and the colleges give their baseball men, prospective crew members, and various candidates for track and field, early training indoors. The training in baseball and rowing is necessarily unsatisfactory, for, of course, men cannot become expert oarsmen’ from pulling at machines in a basement room; and, of course, they cannot become star ball players within the nets that protect windows and apparatus.
But the manager can weed out an immense amount of the worthless material from crew candidates pulling at the machines or the skeleton oars, and can give those that remain rudimentary lessons in form. The success of the fencing league mentioned above attests to the suitability of that sport to a place in our colleges, and a high place, too. But while fencing is on the rise just now, its popularity with Americans has always been a matter of doubt. It is a variable quantity, rising this year and falling next, and the student body will not turn out and enthuse over contests with the foils as they will over almost any other contest. Analyzed, this seems due to the fact that it does not appeal to the student’s personal interest. The average student loves best the thing which he has had a part in. Therefore, he is always at the baseball field unless hindered by financial limitations, and always at the side of the gridiron, for he has had some experience in these games and knows them. He likes very well to look on at a fencing bout, thinks it all very pretty and somewhat exciting; but he does not catch the fine points, and so does not enthuse.
American sport that baseball and Rugby have, so that all men fence or have fenced more or less, the foils will draw men to the gym as they are now drawn to the field. To my mind, it is a thing to be regretted that boxing is in such disfavor with college authorities. The average crowd likes to look on at a good bout, and, besides, it is excellent fun. What may appear to the spectator as a painful contest is more than likely to be a most pleasant experience. We have a way of wasting our pity upon those who do not need it, pitying on the strength of mere external appearances. I believe any one who has gone through a clean, square college bout will bear me out in the saying that the excitement of contest far more than offsets the pain, what little there is, of the blows. And any one who has been through both will testify that the worst sufferings of a three-round bout in the college ring were as delight to torment alongside the strainings of the last quarter in a mile run. For my own part, some of the most pleasant college recollections go back to the boxing-room, and, strange to say, cluster no more about victories than about the defeats. Perhaps this was because the latter had in them more of hard fighting. Wrestling holds its place on the college program, and has some few advantages over boxing. Chief among these is the fact that, when a wrestling bout is ended and a man is down, there is no possibility of doubt as to the righteousness of the decision. With boxing there is room for doubt when the fight is close and the decision is based on points.
Wrestling brings out much of the same determination, selfcontrol, and self-confidence, and is pretty nearly as useful as a means of self-defense on the possible occasions when a man may need it. It has one drawback, which is that two green wrestlers, going on the mats together, may make stupid, or even laughable, contests through their fear to take the aggressive. One such I remember in the interscholastic meet. The contestants were young and had an exaggerated idea of the danger of tricks, and each seemed to see traps in every attitude of his opponent. The result was a series of so-called bouts in which the wrestlers merely eyed each other, or, perhaps, took now and then a half-hearted hold to let go again for fear of some trap set by a wily opponent. An equally disgusting bout I saw one time in a university indoor meet. One man threw himself flat on the mats and lay still. His opponents was not expecting such utter nonresistance and found the task of turning him over, saw-log fashion, a matter of two rounds, during which the audience alternately roared with laughter and hissed in disgust. Such farces can, of course, be avoided by the selection of a referee who will promptly order to their dressingrooms men who do not show a disposition to take hold and contest. That basket-ball is hardly likely ever to be a game over which the student body will become wildly enthusiastic is, I think, evident to any one who has watched the play. That it is a fine game for getting physical work out of the student in the form of play, of making his hours in the gymnasium pleasant rather than burdensome, there can be no doubt; but it is not the rugged sort of contest which the American youth likes. Still it affords good sport of a playful nature, and the games of the intercollegiate association have awakened a very decided interest of the minor sort.
The tendency in the colleges to-day is to make the indoor meet largely a matter of gymnastics. In this, fancy club swinging, work on the trapeze, the horizontal bar, parallel bars, and similiar apparatus are the more attractive features. But these events do not and will not satisfy the longing for contest. It is contest that we like to see, contest in which men are arrayed on opposite sides. When one man steps out and goes through a gymnastic feat and another and another follows, it is very pretty to look at; but it is not contest, and we feel that something of strength and masculinity has been left out of it. But these various hindrances to the development of indoor athletics have, as hinted before, their use, for they give us a series of contests where nerves are not strained to the utmost; contests that we can think about lightly and look forward to as pleasant recreation rather than desperate battle. This is perhaps the place which the indoor athletic contest is to occupy, and perhaps it is the place where it is needed most.
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