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issue with athletics in the colleges themselves. The disease starts from
without - among the men whose interest is etait But also conflicting
purposes arise in the mind of youth regarding school and college. (Many
coaches hold up to the boy the glory of conquest on the athletic field as
the most important activity of college life rather than the all important
thing of acquiring durable satisfactions in the classroome

The intelligent athlete will not sell his academic birthright
for a mess of pottage (the pay-off). This athlete will protect his forth-
right freedom the same as the American voter protects his ballote But
naturally the boy desires to compete in games of combat and contact. The
game of football as a morale builder and as a builder of men perhaps has
no equale Above the door of the gymnasium at the United States Military
Academy at West Point, N.Y., are these words of Major Koehler, cut in
stone;

"Upon the fields of friendly strife are sown the seeds

that upon other fields in other years are borne the

fruits of victory."

Football would never die, but would continue to thrive, were
it not for the football followers of Brutus who have stabbed the sport to
near deathe These pseudo-friends of football are the gamblers, the sub-
sidizers, the proselytors, and the "pollyannas" who state that "football
at the present is enjoying sound health and is becoming more of an amateur
sport all the time".

I stated last winter that subsidized football and basketball
had but ten years to lives I revised this estimate downward somewhat this
fall, depending on the part that we play in this second World War which
we are now ine Replying to my long-time friend, Major John L. Griffith,

Commissioner of the Big Ten, may I say that I base my deductions on the