Page:Discipline and the Derelict (1921).pdf/171

 with strength and animal spirits; it gives him pleasure to win, and if through his winning Alma Mater gets an incidental mention he is not annoyed. Few athletes consider the time they put in in practice or the punishment they receive in a game as a sacrifice; the joy of contest and of victory more than outweighs all the sacrifice and pain endured. If there is doubt of this in any one's mind let him watch the successful athlete as he looks over the sporting sheet of the Sunday paper following a successful game or meet and reads his own eulogy and sees his own photograph; there is very little thought of Alma Mater in his mind at such a time.

Because he is so well known, there is no one else in college whose daily life is so much under observation, whose habits and ideals and accomplishments are so much discussed and whose dicta count so much in setting the standards for the college community What the athlete thinks and does determines what is right; what he says settles a matter for all time. He can quell a riot or stop an objectionable undergraduate practice with a word, if he will. He is often so harassed by the severe exactions of his athletic training and by the necessity, under this training, of keeping up his college work, that he has little time for leadership in any active way, and though he stands out in a notable manner as an example which the students in general are likely and willing to follow, he usually makes a poor chairman of a committee, an indifferent president of an organization, and a not very active member of anything that requires aggressive leadership. He takes the popularity, and the prominence, and the adulation, but he side-steps the