NEWSPAPER FOOTBALL 265 



mishaps should not be charged up to the game. No advocate of the 

 game of football should fear the truth so far as the dangers of the game 

 are concerned, yet every believer in it has a right to resent the unfair 

 playing upon popular fears and emotions by a public press that is either 

 culpably careless in the gathering of news, or worse. 



Football is not a gentle game, and the boy who is entirely satisfied 

 with tiddle-dy-winks, as well as his father, who in his day had been 

 satisfied with similar games, may deem it over-strenuous. But no 

 youth of bone and muscle who hears even the faintest ' Call of the 

 Wild' echoing down from a thousand generations of fighting ances- 

 tors — and they must have been fighters or they would never have been 

 ancestors — comes to his own without somewhere and somehow a chance 

 at the physical try out with worthy adversaries. With the days of 

 almost universal war superseded by days of as universal peace and the 

 knight-errant and the tournament things of the past, if we emasculate 

 football and attempt to eliminate entirely the danger element, we shall 

 close the last safety valve to virile expression and may well expect an 

 explosion. Newspaper football is excessively dangerous, but is, after 

 all, football of the college gridiron? In a statistical study which I 

 have made covering ten years of play (1892-1902) in sixty- four lead- 

 ing colleges and universities, where 22,766 men played upon 1,374 

 different teams, but three men were fatally injured, eight permanently 

 injured and but three men in each hundred sufficiently injured to lose 

 time from their class work. And Harvard was within the list studied, 

 in spite of what might be inferred from reports for the past season. 

 President Hadley was right when he said a few days ago that football 

 was not only not an excessively dangerous game as played at our 

 colleges, but the least dangerous of the more important sports. But he 

 was not speaking of newspaper football. 



