Those who appreciate the true valves of athletic training shovld also recog-
nize its limitations, and should be satisfied with a fitting role for athletics in the
post-war world. Sports are needed to make the people strong, but compulsory military
training is needed to make the country strong.

«et et Fe

BASKETBALL'S BIG PROBLEM

There is a lot of emphatic talking being done on the subject of the basketball
gambling evil, but it is accompanied by a disappointingly inadequate amount of clear
thinking. Cures which have been glibly offered don't even attack the basic problem;
thus they fail to provide any actual solution and -- worse -- they obscure the real
problem and so make its eventual solution all the more difficult.

A common mistake is to neglect differentiation between betting at games and
betting on games -- two activities alike in interest but very unlike in significance.

Betting at games is a distinctly minor evil. It is annoying to college athlet-
ic authorities just as it is to spectators, and it certainly creates an unwholesome
atmosphere for amateur competition. It is a nuisance rather than an ill. Alert
policing will readily eliminate it, for without much trouble or effort known gamblers
can be barred from the scene of a contest and any persons openly wagering can be
ejected from the premises, wherever situated. Betting at games is dollar-—and-—dime
stuff, of comparatively little harm and of less importance.

Betting on games is something else again. In this category falls the profes-
sionally directed big money gambling which constitutes a serious menace to collegiate
basketball. It involves bookmakers operating miles away from the place of competi-
tion, or hundreds of miles away from it, and hence far removed from any direct control
on the part of the game management. These bookmakers and the interests which they
represent are in big business; they have no concern for the sport itself, and feel no
hesitancy in attempting to corrupt basketball and its participants for their own gain.

"Remove basketball from the big arenas", says one person after another, "and
you will remove the gambling evil from basketball." -How can this overly simplified
measure be accepted as the answer to an extremely complex question? The locale of a
game has little or no bearing on its serviceability as a medium for betting. A
bookie doesn't have to be on hand at a contest in order to perform his function as
betting agent; as a matter of fact, attendance at one game would seriously hamper him
in his business of providing gambling facilities for many games. He can -- and does
-- quote prices and make book on contests taking place simultaneously at big metronol-
itan arenas, at large campus fieldhouses, at small college gymnasiums, and at tiny
YMCA courts. To a fan a basketball game is a basketball game wherever it is played,
but to a professional gambler it is e business opportunity pure and simple (though
neither pure nor simple) -- and that goes for Boston, or Minneapolis, or New York City,
or Ann Arbor, or Philadelphia, or Atlanta, or Lawrence, Kansas, or Ong's Hat, N. J.

Let's not decide to play ovr college basketball games behind locked doors in
the upstairs back room, and then relax into the comfortable conviction that the gam-
bling problem has been solved and ovr job done. That procedure would be highly satis-
factory to the gambling interests, for as long as the scores of the games are printed