FOOTBALL AT HARVARD

Saturday afternoon, with the Harvard football team poised for a try at the hieing point, a crescendo of "block that kick" swept over one side of the stadium. The only element of surprise in this tradition of footballmania was that the vocal effort came from men, themselves undergraduates at Harvard. Add to this the fact that the small colorful team from William and Mary was cheered consistently throughout the game by the University spectators, that on one occasion the referee was roundly hissed when he called a penalty against the Southerners at a rather crucial point, and the display offers something alien to the traditional partisanship attendant to America's fall sport. The attitude taken by the cheering section, however, was not treason to make the most of rather, it was a gesture of appreciation for a smaller team which had presented a gallant battle against difficult odds.

As the H. A. A. News in its editorial page pointed out, the Harvard-Dartmouth game a week before was well attended despite the inclement weather. The crowd was in no sense of the word a spectacle that day; the 52,000 who spent three hours in the rain must have been actuated only by the desire to witness a good football game. Saturday, scores of undergraduates spent the afternoon elsewhere, mainly because of the pre-game supposition that William and Mary would afford little opposition.

These concrete instances may be indicative of the fact that Harvard as a whole has begun to look on football purely as a game. It is, perhaps, an extension to the spectator of the new tendency to accept the English ideal of playing the game for the game's sake: that it is better to lose a cleanly played good match than to win a poorly contested one. Such symptoms of saneness in the Harvard attitude toward football sufficiently dispel the bugaboo of overemphasis. Perhaps super-patriotism has become passe and the ultramodern plays or watches his football with pleasure as the guiding principle.