I Believe and other essays

Upon a dull day on the Stock Exchange, a group of the younger members began to make wagers about this event. The race was known to be a near thing. The next day the wagers were continued until quite a little “market” was established. The prices fluctuated according as the reports of the training of the crews came to hand. The whole thing was but half serious, though in a day or two large sums of money became involved.

One member of this coterie, a man who was known to be a sportsman, and one whose word had influence, deliberately circulated a false report as to the time in which Oxford had rowed a course, queered the market, and made a considerable sum.

In regarding the gambling question the attention of the ordinary man is generally focussed upon the race-course and upon the bookmaker, as he squirms his careful way through life. People either forget or don’t realize that most of the minor sports are being utterly spoilt and ruined by betting.

Cycle-racing is still a sport which is keenly pursued, though perhaps it has declined somewhat in popularity of late years. In many of the suburban districts round London there are fine cycle tracks, built with all the last improvements which the track-architects of America have discovered. In the Midlands and North of England there are magnificent tracks in nearly all the principal towns.

Cycle-racing is popular, draws enormous crowds, and draws the small bookmaker also. It is a known fact that at any big cycle-race meetings bets are made with all the briskness and regularity possible.

Large sums do not change hands. Half-crowns, sovereigns and half-sovereigns represent the actual ready-money transactions, though in sporting public-houses, for days before a big local event, much greater amounts are wagered.

It is no use for any one to pretend that this is not so – I have innumerable facts. One instance, which may be interesting to set down here, was related to me by a friend who is a builder of scientific miniature rifle ranges. At one time he resided in Manchester, and frequently visited the great pleasure-gardens known as Belle Vue in that city. My informant used himself to make a book on the cycle track in this popular place of amusement.

“I used to make quite a lot of money,” he told me. “It was great fun.”

“But how did you do it?” I asked him. “Describe” …

“Oh, it was quite easy. You waited till the one or two policemen who were strolling about were not near; they were never too anxious to bother one in any case. Then I used to jump up on the railing and say ‘I’ll take money!’ I used to get a lot of punters round in a minute by shouting the odds.”

How many readers will call out, “Much ado about nothing.” “What harm,” they will ask, “can the small wagers of a crowd at a Manchester cycle-race possibly do to Sport?”

I reply that these wagers do the very gravest harm, not perhaps to the wagerers, but to real Sport itself. The fact of so many hundreds of people having a financial interest in the success of this or that rider at once puts the rider – a sportsman – in a position of danger and temptation. The low class of person who has his being in the side-scenes, the tortuous coulisses of Sport, is always at hand to make a disgraceful bargain with the athlete. Men who are accustomed to regard life as no more than a game of cunning come with gold in their soiled hands. And if the sportsman succumbs, then not only is a bar sinister charged on his personal escutcheon, but the whole tone of Sport is lowered. Every single instance of this kind fosters a base and ignoble view of Sport, and it does matter very much indeed that Tom loses half-a-crown, Dick makes five shillings, and Harry comes out “even on the afternoon.”

If fools must gamble, why are they not allowed to do it apart from such a fine and splendid thing as Sport? I would far rather see a nasty little Casino established in every town, where fools might lose what they can’t afford in the hope of winning what they won’t work for, than see them tempting athletes and spoiling the game.

Of two evils choose the least – a make-shift maxim, but sound in its way!

Very few dwellers in the South and West of England are aware of the extraordinary interest taken in the Midlands and the North in pigeon-flying. This is a good and fascinating pastime. It certainly interests me, and there is something very stimulating to the imagination in it. The careful breeding of strong-pinioned birds, the training of them, the vast distances they cover under changing skies and down the long invisible slants of the wind – it has an appeal, has it not? Certainly it requires real knowledge and care.

I don’t suppose that there is any minor sport so utterly spoilt and degraded by gambling as this sport is.

They tell a good story in the North which epitomizes the whole thing. It is a reprobate yarn, but it is funny… An old pitman lay a-dying. He had been a worthy fellow, a very well-known breeder and flyer of pigeons, and his only fault had been that he wagered what, to him, were reckless sums upon the results of pigeon-flying matches.

He lay dying, and the Vicar of the parish sat by his bedside and tried to ease the fear of passing from one life to another by telling the man of what might well await him in the next world.

…“Did thee say as I should be a gradely angel, parson?” the old fellow said.

“You’ve lived a straight life, John.”

“Angels ‘as wings, don’t they?”

“The poets and painters have always imagined so, John.”

“Well, I’m goin’ first, and I’m reet sorry to say good-bye to thee, Vicar. But I make no doubt thee’ll be up there soon theeself. Now I’ll tell thee what I’ll do when thee arrives. I’ll fly thee for a quid!”

That makes one laugh – it makes me laugh at least – but it is merely one of those pleasant jests which divert the mind from the contemplation of an evil. Clergymen in the Midlands and the North have told me the saddest stories of humble homes ruined, broken and bankrupt, because of the gambling on pigeon-races. The moral fibre of many a collier and millhand is often destroyed by betting on this sport. Women and children suffer in consequence, rates are raised in the local commonwealth, and once more “sport” – that misunderstood word – is soiled and besmirched in the public mind. And those of us who are capable of taking a broad and comprehensive view of affairs must allow that the sport-hating Puritan has at least got some reason for his distorted point of view.

He can say, and with perfect justice, that betting has killed professional sculling.

He can point out, and no one can deny it, that even the quiet, but highly-skilled game of bowls is permeated with the gambling spirit, that owing to the large sums put up as prizes and wagered upon results, the temptation to players in a public contest is enormous.

“What is this sport you vaunt so loudly?” the Puritan said. “Surely it is a thing which is essentially bad and wrong, because of the evils it excites. When the American press accuses English oarsmen of ‘doping’ an American eight’s crew owing to heavy betting on the part of the other crew, when American athletes refuse to dress in the same room as a competing team of English athletes – is it not obvious that sport cannot be the worthy and fine thing you say it is?”

I have voiced the shrill cry of prejudice and exaggeration. But truth must always be the basis upon which exaggeration is built. No one, to my theory, can successfully exaggerate a lie. The result is redundant, and so, unconvincing, while the attempt itself is like trying to add four pounds of butter to four o’clock.

In the space of an article such as this, I must not unduly prolong the dismal story of how the minor sports are being injured by gambling.

Yet the whippet-racing of Lancashire, Yorkshire, and Northumberland has degenerated, and the sport must be given a bad name – though it is the owners and not the dogs who ought to be hung!

Pigeon-shooting – if that is indeed a sport, which I personally beg leave to doubt – has become no trial of skill and readiness, but an occasion upon which, when the betting is in favour of a right-hand shot, a needle is sometimes put into the left eye of the bird so that it may swerve to the right upon its release from the trap and increase the difficulty of the aim.

I am informed that birds are frequently blinded in this abominable way at local English meetings, and also in Germany – in the interests of gambling. In this matter, however, it is only right to say that the Hon. E. S. Butler – one of the crack pigeon-shots of the day – tells me that the conditions at Monte Carlo are absolutely fair, though the betting is most heavy.

There is hardly any “gambling” in English golf. Private matches sometimes provoke a heavy wager between the players, but that is not gambling. In Scotland, however, where most towns have links which are open to everybody for a fee of threepence, there is an immense amount of gambling among the poorer classes. Now it is certainly far better that the Scotch mechanic should spend his Saturday afternoon playing at a fine game than in watching other people play it, as his English brother does at a football match. But it is an enormous pity that such facilities as the poorer folk enjoy for sport should be abused and spoilt. A well-known Scotch clergyman, a favourite preacher of the late Queen’s, tells me that the gambling at golf makes a constant watchfulness necessary on the part of players. “Many of them will cheat if they can,” he said; “and you’ll know how easy it is to cheat at golf? It’s just the money aspect of the question. It’s small wonder that a man will move his ball an inch from under a bunker, if it’s necessary and the other fellow isn’t looking, when perhaps a third of his week’s wages depends upon the lie.”

Again I would punctuate my instance with the moral it affords. Here also sport suffers. If I did not believe in the inherent nobility of sport, if I was not absolutely convinced of its supremely important place in the life of both soul and body, I should not be writing this. But as one goes on with this dismal catalogue – no very pleasant task, one gets into a fever of indignation. “Duo quum patiuntur idem, non est idem,” of course. No two men experience identical effects from identical causes. But true sportsmen will at least share something of my feeling. And it’s no use to set out alone to kick the world’s shins. The world has several million shins to your one. We must combine– we who love sport and realize what it means.

The Hermes of Praxiteles is a perfect type of all that is physically fit and fine – and so spiritually also – in man.

Take that statue and regard it for a moment as a concrete manifestation of all that is meant by the word “sport.”

And then, suppose that the Hermes of Praxiteles were your own possession, that you had it in your own house. Would you allow a crew of people who cared nothing for great art to cover it with mud?

…Now to gambling as it affects the major sports.

Cricket is fortunately untouched, save very occasionally in League cricket. It is pleasant to think of our national game as unsmirched.

But football, which we may well call our other national game, is most deeply and gravely involved.

Of the two games, rugby is cleanest in this regard. In the Northern Union District there is more gambling than elsewhere, but, take it all in all, rugby does not greatly suffer.

But what can one say of Association football?

…There are many quite well-known instances of goal-keepers being bribed. They are, indeed, so well known that people who are interested in the game, and know anything of its polity and ways need hardly be reminded of them.

The buying and selling of players – for it is just that – and their transference from club to club, is responsible for much of the evil, as I see it. But in Association especially, not only does sport suffer from the occasional dishonesty of the players, but the game itself provides a constant incentive to the spectators to forget the beauty of its raison d’être and to regard it merely as an opportunity for speculation.

Is running untainted? Not a bit of it!

Professional running is in an even worse condition than when Wilkie Collins wrote his remarkable novel about it – though professional running no longer holds its old position or keeps its old importance. But the Sheffield handicaps, and the Scotch professional contests at Edinburgh, still exist as prominent features in the sporting life of our time. And as prominent scandals also.

Amateur running is far more widely entangled with betting than most people are aware.

Some time ago, on the County Ground at Bristol, there were six men in a heat for a 120 yards race. Five of these were friends and the sixth was almost a stranger, but one whose record, by comparison, would certainly have secured him the race in the opinion of experts.

This last gentleman was taken aside before the race and offered ten pounds “To let Bill win.”

Please remember that I am neither inventing nor exaggerating, that I have chapter and verse, that I have gone into the whole question most carefully, that I relate fact.

From the ancient times when gladiators fought with the brutal spiked cestus, until the present day, boxing has always been a fine sport. Among the Romans it was certainly brutally misused, and in our own time of the Prince Regent it was not free from the charge of brutality. To-day, in the humane progress of ideas, the ring cannot be assailed in this regard. We have refined this splendid sport until it stands purged of all imputations of savagery.

Of savagery, yes; of the far meaner vice of gambling, no! Who can say for certainty that any fight, in Bristol, Liverpool, Cumberland, at the N.S.C., “Wonderland,” or even at the Belsize, is absolutely a square fight? Who knows whether the blind old heathen goddess of chance has not been harnessed by the money-mongers and is waiting with malevolent intention at the ropes?

No one can say with certainty, outside the Army, Public Schools, and the ’Varsity contests.

The rascality of the ring would fill a number of a magazine. Boxing is no longer a national sport, which goes on everywhere and, as a matter of course, under the full sunlight. It has sunk into a local amusement or a located disgrace. And it has sunk simply and solely because of gambling.

Wrestling, that worthy and ancient English sport, has almost ceased to exist. I have had a cottage in Cornwall for some years and it is my privilege to know many of the champions of the past in this chief old home of the game.

I know what it was once, how splendid and stimulating to the life of the community. And what is wrestling to-day? It is a sporadic contest, between great players indeed, but one which is utterly spoilt and discredited, when looked upon from the true sportsman’s point of view. In the most cynical and open way many of the sporting newspapers discuss the probability of this or that bout being a “square” one or not. With the indifference with which one would discuss the chances of an egg proving to be fresh or stale, some journalists determine the pros and cons of honour and dishonour.

I have a friend who is a theatrical agent and entrepreneur. Among his various activities, he is the manager for the champion wrestler of the world. “You never know,” he said to me at dinner, “you never really know the truth about the bona fides of many wrestling bouts until the contest is over. Of course men like ’ – ’ and ’ – ’ are absolutely square. They are the haute noblesse of the game. They’ve got to be. But you may take it from me that dozens and dozens of contests are faked in the interests of the betting ring.”

After extreme youth is over, life mercifully dulls the hunger for perfection in all of us. There never was a time in the history of horse-racing when people did not bet. Nor does one expect the impossible. But while racing was never more popular and more strongly organized than it is to-day, it was never so provocative of evil, so manqué from the true sportsman’s point of view. The men of carrion passions, and the army of muddy knaves who live by the exploitation and bespatterment of the noblest of sports, are legion.

The smaller fry who make existence possible for the knaves – the ordinary men who bet regularly on races – are millions. There is no need to insist upon the fact, it is as dismal and obvious as a lump of clay. The whole atmosphere of the turf is like the degradation of the air in a close bedroom with the windows shut.

It is not my province or intention here to go very deeply into illustrative detail in the matter of the turf. It is better to be luminous than voluminous. But there are one or two points which may be new and instructive for the non-gambling sportsman.

Here is a recent quotation from a well-known English “sporting” paper – one of those, by the way, which conveys “humour” direct from the pit to the front page.

It is about some English jockeys in America —

“Our jockeys are having a hard time, in a way, inasmuch as they are being kept under the closest surveillance by Pinkerton detectives. They are practically caged off from the public, are escorted to the scales and paddock, are not allowed to speak to any one except an employer, and then only when mounting, and their valets must wear a distinctive uniform, with numbers on their sleeves. This is reform with a vengeance, and by no means agreeable to some of our young swells, who are also shadowed after the races.”

“By sports like these are all their cares beguiled!”

Was Goldsmith a prophet?

It is not always easy to remember that the professed aim of the Jockey Club is “the furtherance of the breeding and preservation of the English thoroughbred horse.”

Yet to-day the officers of foreign armies buy Australian walers. They won’t purchase English stallions. I belong to the “Cercle Privée civil et militaire” of Bruges, a great military centre. Every day the General commanding the district and his staff are in the Club. They tell me that English horses are no longer looked upon as they were upon the Continent.

Does not this “give one furiously to think,” as my friend the General said here the other morning? Doping in the interests of the gambling market seems to be beginning to tell!

The gambling industry is organized with consummate skill and great business capacity.

Gambling by post is almost incredibly upon the increase. In Middleburg and Flushing there are twelve huge betting firms. One person employs ninety people in his office, and has his own printing establishment, which is always glutted with work.

Often £1000 is received by one firm in a single day – nearly all in small bets, and all from England. The post-offices of Dutch towns of the size of Middleburg or Flushing normally keep in stock stamps which will supply the needs of a population of 20,000 persons. Now, these two towns are compelled to keep enough to supply a population of 200,000 – all for the “furtherance of the breeding and preservation,” etc., etc.

Here is another significant fact which may possibly elucidate the recent and somewhat cryptic utterance, “The battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton just as certainly as the battle of Spion Kop was lost upon the playing fields of Sandhurst.”

The fact is this …

In the issue of The War Office Times, May 25, 1905, occurs a flagrant puff of a bookmaker, who without the humour of a less eminent confrère who described himself as a “brass finisher” in the census returns, calls himself a “high-class turf-accountant.”

“We strongly advise any of our readers who require a high-class Turf-accountant to send for Mr. – ’s book of rules, bound in leather, which will be sent post free to applicants. We have convinced ourselves that this is a thoroughly genuine business, and, as such, we have no hesitation in recommending it to our readers.”

I have the book “bound in leather,” and a good many others also, which I acquired for the purposes of this article.

And precious and elaborate productions they are! The ingenuity of red morocco and gilding, of alluring propositions and the suggestion of a bludgeon-sturdy honesty deserve the highest praise. I was especially delighted with the telegraphic code of one hero, which used the names of fish to symbolize the amount of “investments.” “Salmon,” for example, means “put me ten pounds on.”

All the denizens of ocean are used save one…

With commendable modesty, or possibly a fellow feeling, this worthy has omitted “shark.”

One has said enough to outline – I hope vividly and strongly – how Sport is being spoilt by gambling.

Sport, thank goodness, is not yet retrograde owing to this curse. But it may be. Let us all remember that progress is merely the power of seeing new beauties. The more Sport progresses unhindered by gambling, the sooner will it take its high place in life and fulfil its noble destiny.

And every sportsman can do something to help that progress.

The fiery Erasmus writes this of Sir Thomas More, who was a thorough sportsman, to his German friend, Ulrich von Hutten: —

“Gambling of all kinds, balls, dice and such like he detests. None of that sort are to be found about him. In short, he is the best type of sportsman.”

“Nobilitas sola est atque unica virtus.”

Note. —Since this essay was written, three short articles appeared in the sporting columns of the Daily Mail which are a striking corroboration of my contentions. All the articles appeared within a few days of each other, and I print parts of them as an appendix.

FOOTBALL AND ALCOHOL

HOW PLAYERS MAY LENGTHEN THEIR CAREERS

By William McGregor.

I dealt a few days ago with the question of what constituted a sensible diet for footballers, and hinted that the so-called special training which teams undergo on the eve of a great encounter was often prejudicial rather than beneficial.

Now, a well-known medical man, who fills the position of official doctor to one of our leading football clubs, met me on the evening of the day that the article appeared and said (excuse the apparent egotism, but it is necessary for the purpose of the article), “That was a really good article of yours in the London Daily Mail. You put the matter precisely as I should put it, as a medical man. You might follow it up with an article pointing out that there are two abuses which footballers suffer from, viz. errors in regard to eating, and errors in regard to drinking. If you can put in a strong plea for either the abolition of alcohol, or the sparing use of alcohol by footballers, you will be doing the game a good service, and you will be doing the players a good service.”

I then remembered a little incident which occurred at the Aston Villa ground early in the season. The occasion was a match played during that tropical weather, weather which was utterly unfit for football. Violent exercise such as football imposed a very severe strain upon the men that day.

As soon as the interval was over, a medical man came up to me, and in quite excited accents said, “I say, Mr. McGregor, do you know that they have been giving the visiting team spirits during the interval? I have never heard of such a foolish proceeding. Why, alcohol is the worst possible thing for footballers to have at any time, but more especially on a day like this. You could not have anything more heating than spirits.”

Speaking from a general rather than a professional or technical experience, I agreed with him. I asked him, as a medical man, what he would have given the men under such peculiar circumstances. His answer was, “At any rate, I should not have given them alcohol. I do not know that I should have given them anything. The best thing would have been for them to have rinsed their mouths out with cold water.”

CHAMPAGNE OR LEMONS?

In a match which took place in the Midlands last season, the home team gave a particularly poor display in the second half, and one of the directors said to me, “They have been behaving foolishly to our men. The trainer gave them champagne during the interval, and I do not think that is a good drink for them to have. The momentary feeling of exhilaration following a glass of champagne soon wears off.”