For the Glory of the Game

Football, like all other business enterprises, is feeling the effects of the times. Gate receipts, as might be expected, are not as large as they were a year or two ago. People are choosing their games with more discrimination, and "sell-out" crowds are exceptional rather than the rule.

More than that, the rumblings of rebellion against the sanctity of the game are being heard here and there throughout the country with perhaps increasing strength. Princeton alumni are dismayed by the sad record of this year's team, but the undergraduates display a bewildering indifference regarding its fate. Columbia's eleven has brightened the New York horizon by winning a few games, but the editor of the student daily has mitigated the resultant joy by charging the team with professionalism. The worst blow of all, however, has come from that foremost glorifier of the gridiron, the movies. In a current film, "Touchdown," the central figure is an ambitious young coach who cripples a player for life in order to win a game, and then, for the conventional happy ending in an unconventional form, loses his most important game to win his lady love.

Now comes bitter iconoclasm in the form of "Maguire, Builder of Men," a satirical study by John R. Tunis in the December Harper's. Mr. Tunis has long been a heretic among the orthodoxy of sports writers, but it is doubtful if his pen has ever been sharper. In his current piece, it is not what he says but what he implies that bites. His subject is Maguire, an imaginary person, typical of the successful and famous football coach. Everything that he says about "Doc" Maguire is most flattering, and yet--

Maguire's attitude towards "the greatest of American games" is best summed up in a characteristic epigram: "One defeat a season is good for the coach's soul. Two defeats are bad for his contract." Money, of course, means nothing to the builder of men.

"Believe it or not," as Mr. Tunis explains, "Doc gets only $6000 a year from the college, exactly the sum a full professor receives. This is frequently mentioned by the college authorities when some one outside twits them about the Doc." But it is not generally known that he also gets a percentage of the football profits, and "last season they were slightly above half a million."

Mr. Tunis's portrait will undoubtedly meet a cold reception in many places. It is possibly unfair to individuals whom readers will identify with Maguire. --Boston Herald.