On the Football Defeat.

To the Editors of the Crimson:

If I may use a little of your space, I should like to make a suggestion. We are too much given to coddling our defeated athletes. This is because we are used to defeat, and take it as a matter of course. But it will never win a football match. We should make a decided difference between a victory and a defeat and in our attitude towards the players who contributed to each. There is altogether too much nonsense in the annual consolation that "they did the best they could," "they played a sandy, up-hill game," "they played like gentlemen, anyway." Why, many enthusiasts actually go home quite contented with this assurance. Does this mean that gentlemanly playing can never win a game? How about Pennsylvania?

I wish the undergraduates could know the feeling toward Harvard which exists down town among men who didn't go to college. Her name coupled with athletics is a laughing-stock. What is worse, owing to the present prominence of athletics, the name of Harvard as a university, from constant association with defeat, is loosing its reputation among a number of men, who, not graduates themselves, have sons who will soon be old enough for college.

What I propose is a more hard-hearted policy toward the players themselves. I have had some small athletic experience, and know that if they have the right stuff in them, it will do them good. We want the spirit which characterized the coaching after the Yale game two years ago, which resulted in the overwhelming defeat of Pennsylvania. We want more of the kind that followed the Princeton game this year. It may hurt the feelings of eleven men to be cursed out after a defeat, but not as much as it aggravates eleven hundred men constantly to hear the name of their Alma Mater held up to ridicule and contempt.

Will a man play harder if he knows that after a losing game there are friends eager to crowd around and wipe away his tears, or if he knows that, defeated, he will be given the cold shoulder? I know this sounds hard, but success is worth the price. We want, not the spirit that accepts defeat with resignation, but the spirit that will not tolerate it.

Year after year Harvard has gone to Springfield confident of success. The papers have sounded a note of triumph and the freshmen have put up all their money; and year by year-with one glorious exception-we have come back beaten. But we have not been utterly cast down. Oh no,- "If A. hadn't fumbled the ball on the five yard line, or if B. hadn't slipped just as he had a clear field, or if C. had only got by that Eli fullback, we'd have had 'em on the run. As it is they deserve lots of credit for the game they put up." Did they play against twenty men then, or some tremendous odds? No, they played against eleven men lighter than themselves.

No one now in College has seen a winning eleven, or a winning crew, or a winning nine. This year has begun badly, but let the College make it end better. Regard defeat not as a disagreeable necessity, but as a disgrace that can be borne no longer. Let the whole University back the crew, the nine, and the Mott Haven team with all their might and ninety-one's victories can be repeated.

NINETY-FOUR.

BOSTON, November 24.