The colleges, meanwhile, somewhat conservative as they had been at first in taking up the new sport, had long been pursuing it with undergraduate enthusiasm, and the records, poor enough at first, had begun to approach within striking distance of the figures of what one might call modern times. Running was taken up in the Eastern colleges in the early seventies, and the Intercollegiate Athletic Association was organized in 1876; but it was not until well along in the eighties and nineties that anything like the present widespread interest was aroused. It is difficult to realize, in these days of athleticism, how primitive, athletically speaking, the time was. It must be remembered that when running was taken up by the undergraduates the people at large had not yet "discovered the country"; the bicycle, which effected a sort of social revolution to the generation which used it, was not yet invented; and the value of exercise and outdoor sport, together with all our modern erudition in the way of anthropometric charts and pulley-weight pedagogy, were alike unknown. President Eliot, in speaking of the average college freshman of those days, describes him as a person of "undeveloped muscle, a bad carriage, and an impaired digestion, without skill in out-of-door games, and unable to ride, row, swim, or shoot." Some of the descriptions of the Hemenway gymnasium—an antique and inadequate enough building in the opinion of the contemporary undergraduate—written when that building was new, give one some idea of the naïveté of those days. "Look upward!" says one of these enthusiasts, referring to the main floor of the room in which the Harvard undergraduates are wont to huddle, juggling dumb-bells and toying with chest weights; "what a vast network of iron frames and crossing bars and rods, all seeming at first to be hopelessly entangled with each other until they form almost a ceiling by themselves! Here hang stout cotton ropes and there hemp ones, . . . sloping ladders, some down here by you, some away up there in the roof! . . . Huge mats a foot thick lie spread on the polished floor beneath, ready for you to fall; . . . that broad board sloping sharply upward is a springboard made purposely for high or long-distance jumping when first you take a sharp run, then spring from the board with all your might and main; . . . over there is a glorious stationary springboard ten feet long; . . . pull these weights past your sides and you have the prince of chest expanders," etc., etc. O prince of chest expanders! O vast roof and rope tangles! O glorious great stationary springboard, ten feet long! Times have changed, indeed, and in these matters we are become sadly sophisticated.
Even the undergraduates of those days must have been different if we are to accept the words of a writer in the Outing of some twenty years or so ago. Speaking of the slowly growing interest in athletics and of Dr. Sargent, whom the contemporary Harvard undergraduate, if we mistake not, irreverently dubs Dr. Sourgent and takes none too seriously, he says, "His tolerant and well-balanced mind and personal popularity well fit him for working among college men, who often require a little coaxing and stimulus to draw them from their studies." The same observer mentions a hare-and-hound run which was tried at Cambridge in 1882 as "that Rugby sport," quaintly notes that Walter Soren "leaped nine feet six inches with the pole," and on viewing the young men at work on Jarvis Field in their parti-colored athletic clothes he is gravely reminded of the "picturesque crimson doctors' gowns of Oxford, England."
The beginning was made toward a new order of things when the first races were held at Saratoga, in July, 1874, as a sort of side exhibit to the regatta of that year. Something of an idea of the desultory character of the running of that day may be gathered from the fact that the contestants in those Saratoga races were quite as likely as not to have rowed in the varsity boat the day before. Of course, for a runner to subject his legs to the heavy leg drive of sliding-seat rowing is about as fatal to speed as it would be to attach to them a ball and chain. The crude races at Saratoga in the summer of 1874 aroused a great deal of interest, however, and in commenting on them the Harvard Advocate expressed a sentiment that was shared in other colleges when it said editorially: "A new door has been opened for men who really mean to be what they ought physically, and it is pleasant to see already signs of a brisk rivalry in this direction. The legs—long neglected members—are now to be put to their best, and at last we have the various foot contests so well known in the British universities." There were five events at the first meet in 1874—the mile, the one-hundred-yard dash, the three-mile run, the one-hundred-twenty-yard hurdles, and the seven-mile walk. This latter preposterous and distressing contest was much thought of in those days, and the audiences of the late seventies and early eighties took a more vigorous interest in such events than, curiously enough, they did in the sprints and hurdles. The results of this first meet were as follows: One-mile run, won by Copeland of Cornell; time, 4 minutes 58 seconds; second, Van Derometer of Princeton; third, Reed of Columbia. Copeland was 14 seconds ahead of his nearest rival. One-hundred-yard dash, won by Nevin of Yale; time, 10-1/2 seconds; second, Potter of Cornell. Three-mile run, won by Downs of Princeton; second, Goodwin of Columbia. One-hundred-twenty-yard hurdles, won by Maxwell of Yale; time, 20-1/2 seconds; second, Marquand of Princeton; third, Rives of Harvard. Seven-mile walk, won by Eustis of Wesleyan; time, 71 minutes; second, Hubbell of Williams; third, Price of Columbia.
In the following year, 1875, a committee of Saratoga citizens arranged the games, which consisted of ten events, and were more ambitious and successful in every way than those of the previous year. Pennsylvania made her first appearance at the intercollegiates in these games in the person of H. L. Geyelin, '77, and it was here that the red-and-blue colors of Pennsylvania were first worn in an intercollegiate contest. Amherst also entered the running in 1875, and her team carried back three prizes: Barber, '77, taking first in the mile run in 4 minutes 44-3/4 seconds, and second place in the half-mile, while Morrell, '77, won the three-mile run in 17 minutes 7-1/4 seconds. Of the points, Harvard, Yale, and Amherst each won two firsts, and one first went to Williams, to Union, to Wesleyan, and to Cornell. Mr. James Gordon Bennett added to the interest of these early games by donating handsome cups, and in 1875 the Saratoga citizens' committee also put up valuable cups for prizes. By this time the interest in the new sport was so lively and so general in the colleges that the formation of an intercollegiate association for the purpose of holding track contests began to be seriously considered. Mr. George Walton Green of Harvard, now dead, Mr. Creighton Webb of Yale, Mr. Clarence W. Francis of Columbia, and Mr. H. Laussat Geyelin of Pennsylvania were among those who were most actively interested in the matter, and who finally issued a call to the colleges for a meeting to organize the association. The first meeting was held at the Fifth Avenue Hotel, in New York City; the association was presently formed and the first regular intercollegiate championships were held at Glen Mitchell, at Saratoga, during Regatta week in 1876. Princeton won four firsts—the half-mile run, done in the now ridiculously slow time of 2 minutes 16-1/2 seconds, the three-mile walk, the shot put, and throwing the baseball. Williams won two firsts—the one-hundred-yard dash, done in 11 seconds, and the quarter-mile, done in 56 seconds. The other four events were divided among four colleges: Dartmouth taking the mile in 4 minutes 58-1/2 seconds, Yale the high hurdles in 18-1/4 seconds, Columbia the high jump with 5 feet 4 inches, and Pennsylvania the broad jump with a leap of 18 feet 3-1/2 inches.
Harvard and Yale, who were each destined to capture one of the two "Mott Haven" cups that have since been awarded "to the college winning the intercollegiate games the greatest number of times in fourteen years," were quite snowed under during the first few years of the intercollegiate games by Princeton, Columbia, Pennsylvania, and the smaller colleges of New England. Harvard did not win a first place at the regular intercollegiates until 1879, and at Yale the apathy to track athletics was so effective that no one was entered after the games in 1876 until 1880. By that time, however, track athletics had begun to be pursued with such enthusiasm at Cambridge that it was not until six years later that Yale developed a team that could meet her natural rival on even terms.
The Harvard track men of those days had one advantage over their brethren in New Haven in that their field was near at hand. Jarvis Field, where the early running was done, is only a stone's throw from the dormitories in the Harvard Yard, and the men could leave their lectures at ten o'clock, for example, take their runs, bathe, dress again, and be back in their seats for another recitation within the hour. The Yale field, on the other hand, was on the outskirts of New Haven. It was not practicable to attempt going there until the late afternoon when lectures were over, and even that meant using up about all that was left of daylight before dinner time. As a result only those men who were very keen for the sport or particularly good at it went in for running. This difference in conditions at the two universities may have accounted, partially, for the difference in the way track athletics developed at Harvard and at Yale during the eighties. The Harvard teams were all comparatively large; that is to say, a great number of men of average ability trained for them, and as a result all-round teams were put into the field. At Yale, on the other hand, track athletics were a desert waste punctuated by a few oases-like star performers. The more normal and pleasurable conditions at Cambridge resulted as normal and healthy conditions in any sport always will result,—in sending into the field teams of superior merit,—and it was not until the early nineties, when Yale adopted the Harvard theory of developing a large number of moderately good men, that the track teams came up to the standard set by her nines and crews. One of the pleasantest features of the smaller colleges is the nearness and neighborliness, generally, of the athletic to the studious and social side of undergraduate life. Men may sit in their window-seats and look up from their books to see the eleven practising signals at the farther end of the campus, or have their meditations enlivened by what has been called the sweetest of all sounds,—the crack of a willow bat against a baseball. This delightful neighborliness is generally crowded out sooner or later in the larger universities; but in the Harvard of the eighties it was at least partially preserved, and it was not only pleasant, but it resulted, doubtless, in bringing out many men who might never have tried their hands or legs at track sport, or known how good they really were. In 1891, for instance, Finlay broke the record at Mott Haven in the hammer throw. Finlay took up the hammer-throwing merely because one day, as he was crossing Holmes Field on his way to practise with the eleven on Jarvis Field, he happened to pick up a hammer, and hurl it some eighty feet at the first throw. Many another weight-thrower or runner happened into the sport in a similar way, and it is almost a tradition of the track that the men who make the records generally have never worn a spiked shoe before they came to college.
The Harvard Athletic Association was organized in the autumn of 1874, after the first intercollegiate races at Saratoga; four years later the Hemenway Gymnasium, the best gymnasium in the country at that time, was built, and in 1883 a quarter-mile track was laid on Holmes Field. There was no better track in the country, and the men who used to run on it firmly believed that there was none so good, and with this track and an adequate gymnasium and field-house almost adjoining the Yard, there was every reason why track athletics should be pursued with enthusiasm. That this was the case, the teams of those days are proof enough, and it was in the eighties—in the days of Evart Wendell, Walter Soren, Goodwin, Easton, Baker, Rogers, and Wells—that for seven years straight the Mott Haven championship was won by Harvard.
In all the Eastern colleges at that time a laissez faire system of athletics existed, and the methods of training, particularly at Harvard and Yale, were curious and unlovely. Not only were professional trainers employed, but each athlete chose his own—often a professional sprinter or walker who had no connection with the college. There was great rivalry among these trainers. Each one was desirous of the advertising which would come from having put a winner into the field, and the result was that the weaker candidates were neglected, while disputes and jealousies arose over the handling of the favored men, which were anything but in keeping with the spirit of a gentleman's sport. The beginning of better things came in 1882, when a faculty committee, consisting of Professor Charles Eliot Norton, Professor J. W. White, and Dr. Sargent, was appointed at Harvard, and on their recommendation Mr. J. G. Lathrop was engaged as a general trainer and supervisor of track athletics. Mr. Lathrop was made "assistant in the department of physical culture"; the track-team trainer was made amenable to the faculty, and his status as an instructor was, and has continued to be, the same as though he taught trigonometry or Greek. Further than this, the committee prohibited professionals from appearing on the field, made the regulation that "no college club or athletic association shall play or compete in any athletic sport with professionals," and compelled all students to pass a physical examination satisfactory to the director of the gymnasium before they were permitted to compete in any athletic sport. These reforms of 1882 mark, in a way, the beginning of the new and modern epoch of track athletics, and with them the oldest of our universities set her seal on a sane and gentlemanly ideal of sport.
At Yale, meanwhile, as we have already suggested, the interest in track athletics was for many years perfunctory. There had been several excellent individual athletes, such, for example, as Nevin, '76, Maxwell, '75, and Trumbell, '76, and there had been cross-country running of a desultory sort from a time as far back as 1869. In that year teams from the junior and sophomore classes ran a four-mile race through the snow in 34 minutes and 54 seconds, and in 1870 there was a three-mile race with dollars for prizes; but the new sport did not get the grip on the Yale undergraduates that it did on other New England colleges. "Foot races," observes the editor of one of the Yale magazines of those days, "are, after all, very old-fashioned affairs, and are nowhere in comparison with the exhilarating game of baseball." In spite of the success of Maxwell, Trumbell, and Nevin—the latter, with typical Yale pluck and ingenuity, won the hundred in 1874 by catching the tape with his hand when he was a yard away from it—Yale sent no men to the intercollegiate during the three years immediately following the formation of the Intercollegiate Athletic Association, and up to the year 1886 Harvard continued to win the Mott Haven cup each year, with Columbia second and Yale a poor third. Among the individuals who did what was done in those years for the honor of the Blue, Brooks, '85, was of the most famous. T. DeWitt Cuyler was another of these individual stars. Mr. Cuyler was sent down to run the mile in the spring of 1880. Mr. Evart Wendell was running the sprints for Harvard, and he and Mr. Cuyler were friends. Just before the games were called, the rubber who was accustomed to prepare the Harvard sprinter for action went over to the Yale quarters, presented Mr. Wendell's compliments, and begged to be allowed to apply his skill upon the limbs of Mr. Cuyler. The offer was graciously accepted and Mr. Cuyler's rubber forthwith sought the Harvard quarters and begged to present a similar courtesy to Mr. Wendell. It was an agreeable outcome of this exchange of amenities that Mr. Wendell won the hundred-yard dash that day and that Mr. Cuyler not only won the mile run, but broke the record and set up the figures of 4 minutes 37-3/5 seconds, which were not bettered for seven years. H. S. Brooks, Jr., appeared in 1882. He was a big man—six feet and over in height, and he weighed nearly one hundred eighty pounds—but he won both the hundred and the two-twenty at the intercollegiate that year and the next, and in 1884 he beat the Harvard champion, Wendell Baker, by a hair's breadth in the hundred. Brooks ran against club amateurs also, and he was one of the few men who had the honor to beat the phenomenal "Lon" Meyers. The race was a scratch two-twenty run in 1882 at the New York Athletic Club games. Of men such as these Yale had reason enough to be proud, but it was not until 1886 that the "Mott Haven Team," as a team, became of sufficient importance to make the contest for the cup between the traditional rivals really close. Harvard won in that year—the hundred-yard dash alone determining the result—but in the following year Yale, with Coxe, '87, the big centre-rush, as captain and weight-thrower, and such men as Sherrill, the sprinter, Ludington in the hurdles, Shearman in the jumps, and Harmer, the freshman miler, at last won. There were nineteen colleges represented at Mott Haven that year. Yale scored six firsts and four seconds. It was a well-earned victory, and from that time on the track team at Yale took the place which it now holds beside the nine, the eleven, and the crew.
Similar development had been going on in the smaller New England colleges. At Amherst, where a department of physical education had been established as early as 1860 and the interest in outdoor games had always been keen, the new sport was taken up with especial enthusiasm. It came in just at the time that the interest in rowing—obviously an impracticable sport at waterless Amherst—was dying out, and the success of the men whom Amherst sent down to Saratoga in 1875 set the ball rolling. A regular track meet was held in the following autumn, and ever since then these class games have been a regular feature of the fall term. So has the barrel of cider which was given that year to the victorious class, and which every victorious class since then has lugged off to an innocuous bacchanal in the gymnasium. Williams, Amherst's traditional rival, was somewhat slower in getting her track athletics well under way, but there was much interest in the sport there as well as at the other small New England colleges; and finally, on November 23, 1886, delegates from Amherst, Williams, Brown, Bowdoin, Dartmouth, Trinity, and Tufts met at the Quincy House in Boston, and unanimously agreed that a New England intercollegiate athletic association should be formed. Another meeting was held later in the winter, a constitution, in the main the same as that of the Intercollegiate Athletic Association, was adopted, and the first outdoor meet was held the following spring. The general feeling among the New England colleges at this time is pretty adequately expressed in the following editorial, which was printed in the Amherst Student, December 4, 1886:—
"The need of taking this step has been felt for years, and the reason why it has been put off so long we fail to conceive. Competition with Yale, Harvard, and the larger colleges, inasmuch as no rivalry in this branch of athletics exists between ourselves and them, is unavailing. With poor chances for success at Mott Haven, the proper spirit and enthusiasm needed for creditable representation could not be awakened in the college, and the result has been in the past that the intercollegiate contests neither promoted athletic industry in the college nor added to its reputation. To achieve success in anything, rivalry in some form must be present to actuate the participants to put forth their best endeavors in its behalf. We now belong to an association in which we have an even chance for gaining a position which will make Amherst prominent in athletic circles. Several of the colleges represented are, without doubt, equal to Amherst in athletic ability, and it will be sure to follow—that to the one which works the hardest will be awarded the honors."
The colleges and schools of "up-state" New York naturally took their athletic inspiration from that haven of husky youth, Cornell. As early as 1873 Cornell had her athletic association, and at the first intercollegiates she won a first in the mile and a second in the hundred. Cope won the mile in 4 minutes 58 seconds, and Potter finished second to Nevin of Yale in the hundred in iof seconds. The first field day was held at Cornell in 1873; and in 1878 winter indoor meets were started at Ithaca. The smaller colleges and schools in the central part of the state gradually fell into line, and in 1885 the New York State Intercollegiate Athletic Association was organized. It included Cornell, Union, Syracuse, Hobart, Rochester, Hamilton, and Madison, and, like the New England Association, made possible a joint meet, in which the minor colleges might compete with a keener sense of sentimental rivalry and with a fairer chance of doing themselves justice than they could at the big annual meet at Mott Haven.
What was true of New England and New York was true of the Middle West and the Pacific Slope, although in the smaller colleges of the Middle West the new sport was slow in striking fire. And, for the matter of that, many of these little colleges gave scant attention to any sort of sport in those days, and what tentative interest the undergraduates themselves happened to take was likely to be frowned upon by the faculty. Most of these small colleges were either coeducational or strongly sectarian, or both. In the first there was likely to be a feeling that there was something incompatible between athletics and a decorous gentlemanliness, and in the latter sport was looked at askance as flippant and of the flesh fleshy. Those who had these institutions in charge were generally men who had come from good old New England stock, or who had been brought up in the stern school of the pioneer, and it was naturally very difficult for them to look upon mere games as anything but a waste of time. A letter which President Buckham of the University of Vermont wrote, in 1875, in reply to a newspaper query, "Why was Vermont not represented at Saratoga?" illustrates forcibly the point of view of many wise and good men of that day toward the growing cult of athleticism—of many men of to-day, for that matter, who were brought up in the old school and whose opinion of outdoor sport, and what comes of it, is more a matter of personal prejudice than of knowledge at first hand and personal experience. Thus speaks President Buckham, and the "earnest of the north wind" of old New England is felt in every word:—
"You ask why the University of Vermont was not represented at Saratoga. It certainly was not for lack of facilities for training, for we have, as you suggest, a beautiful lake on one side of us and a beautiful river on another side. Neither was it for lack of manliness in our men. The university was 'represented' in almost every great battle of the Rebellion, from Bull Run to Petersburg, having sent to the field a larger number in proportion to its total roll than any other New England college. But the fact is, that neither the character of our community nor the traditions of the college are such as to encourage sporting habits. A large proportion of its students, large enough to determine the prevailing tone of the institution, are sons of farmers—plain, industrious fellows, who are working their way through college, and who, at the time of the regatta, are swinging the scythe in the hay-fields or handling the compass and chain on the railroad. Besides, though they are poor, they are proud, and would regard it as beneath the dignity of a free-born Vermonter to expose their muscle in public, like gladiators in the amphitheatre, for Mrs. Morrisey and other high-born dames to bet on. If you will get up a contest in some honest and useful work, and will insure us against the intrusion of gamblers and blacklegs, we will engage to be 'represented.' Meanwhile, we must answer your petition as to why we were not represented at Saratoga, by pleading that we are too busy, too poor, and too proud." Sentiments such as these would have found an echo, we venture to say, in many of the smaller colleges of the Middle West during the seventies and eighties; but the new order of things had come to stay, and as the larger state universities grew in importance and popularity, and such institutions as Michigan and Wisconsin began to take on more of the frivolities and social complexities of the East, athletics—and track athletics along with football and baseball—began to play an aggressive role in college life. The Middle West was about twenty years behind the East in beginning intercollegiate track contests, but desultory "field days" had been held at the larger colleges all through the seventies and eighties. At Ann Arbor, long before intercollegiate contests were started, open games and interclass games were held; and during the eighties, crack athletes from the Detroit Athletic Club used to come out and run the undergraduates off their feet. The races of those days were run on the clay track at the Ann Arbor fair grounds. It was not until 1890 that the University of Michigan had an athletic field of her own; and it was several years later before she had a really good cinder path. Michigan was the first Western college to enter the Intercollegiate Association, and in 1885 Bonine, the Michigan sprinter, won the hundred at Mott Haven. Dean Worcester, later to become a member of the Philippine Commission and Secretary of the Interior for the Philippine Government, had done fast time in the mile walk on the old dirt track at Ann Arbor, and he was sent down East with Bonine. He was disqualified by the judge of walking, however. Considerable heartburning was aroused at Michigan, and it was not until 1895 that Ann Arbor cared to send any more men down to Mott Haven. Bonine's success acted, however, as a decided stimulus to track athletics, and the Ann Arbor open field days became more and more interesting and important. It was at one of these field days that Harry Jewett, who won the national amateur championship in the hundred in ten flat in 1892, came up from Notre Dame as a raw schoolboy and first showed what was in him. Ducharme, the Detroit Athletic Club hurdler, was another club athlete who ran in the Ann Arbor open games.
In 1893 the Universities of Michigan, Minnesota, and Wisconsin and Northwestern University, which had formed a league for football the preceding year, held an intercollegiate track meet at Chicago. There had been more interest taken in track athletics at the University of Illinois and in the Iowa, Indiana, and Ohio colleges than at either Wisconsin, Minnesota, or Northwestern, but because of the size and subsequent athletic importance of the universities which sent teams to Chicago in 1893, their meet may be said to mark the beginning of Middle Western intercollegiate athletics. Michigan won the games. The league was dissolved the following winter, but the next season, in June, 1894, a sort of invitation meet was held at Chicago, which was a much greater success than the first one. The Universities of Michigan, Wisconsin, Iowa, Minnesota, and Illinois, Chicago and Northwestern Universities, and Oberlin and Iowa Colleges all took part. Illinois won handily, and the Iowa colleges came next. The meeting held at Chicago following the games resulted in the formation of the Western Intercollegiate Association, which included the colleges that had sent teams to the meet and several small institutions.
This vigorous growth of track athletics was not, however, paralleled by healthy development of the amateur spirit. The decadence of the athletic clubs had already set in, and whatever influence they exerted on college athletics was bad. Unscrupulous trainers and managers violated continually the laws of sportsmanship, and all of these harmful influences were exerted on a public which had, as yet, no intelligent understanding of the special code of ethics which applies to sport. After Michigan's victory at the games of 1893 it was learned that the enterprising manager of that team had used five "ringers" to make sure of success. Such flagrant offences are comparatively easy to deal with, and the man was expelled by the Michigan faculty just on the eve of getting his diploma; but it was a harder task, as it has always been, to prevent the offering to promising athletes of sugar-coated inducements, or to pound into the heads of untutored, husky, easy-going youths a serious appreciation of the meaning of the word "amateur." Where the status of individuals was in question, there was bound to be continual bickering and backbiting between the rival colleges that made up the new Western association. At the meet in 1895, for example, Wisconsin protested at the last moment two of the best men on the Michigan team. One of these men had been one of the "ringers" on the team of 1893. But his case had been put before the association the preceding winter, it was shown that he had acted unwittingly, and he had been reinstated; the other, a former Princeton man, had accepted a few dollars for expenses for coaching a team in Alabama, an infraction of amateur ethics which was also made without any intelligent understanding of the nature of the offence. Michigan was willing that this latter man should be disqualified, but she was displeased at the method which Wisconsin had taken to bring about such a result,—it was asserted that Wisconsin had "doctored" up the board of directors of the league against Michigan, and fixed things for the expulsion of two of the Michigan men regardless of all prescribed rules of procedure,—and as a result she retired from the association, and arranged the following spring for dual meets with the University of Chicago. We have no desire to enlarge upon such unseemly squabbles as this, but it is necessary to mention at least one to make plain the situation in Middle Western athletics at that time,—a situation which resulted eventually in the dissolution of the association and the formation of the Intercollegiate Conference Athletic Association. This was organized by faculty representatives of eight of the leading Middle Western colleges. Other colleges were excluded in order to bring the entry list within reasonable bounds, and to make more certain the enforcement of eligibility rules, and track athletics were at last set upon what seemed to be a permanently healthy basis.
During the years in which Middle Western track athletics were enduring these growing pains, a number of star performers appeared from time to time, who carried their successes to the East and even across the water. From Iowa, where there had been a great deal of interest and activity in track athletics, came, in 1895, John Crum to win the hundred at Mott Haven in ten flat. Crum was credited on several occasions with better than even time. In 1897 Rush of Grinnell was credited with 9-4/5 seconds in the hundred at the Iowa intercollegiates, and with 21-4/5 in the two-twenty. Maybury of Wisconsin, the next sensational Western sprinter, won the amateur championship two-twenty in 1898, and he was credited repeatedly with having beaten even time in the West. Maybury, however, not only ran for money at Minnesota picnics, when he was too young to know better, but he competed, unfortunately, as a professional after he had made his best record in the West and when he knew just what he was doing. Maybury's professionalism, together with that of Cochem, another Wisconsin athlete, was unflinchingly exposed by the authorities at Madison—a course of procedure which was one of the most effective things that was done toward checking undergraduate professionalism in the Middle West. Kranzlein was another phenomenon who came up out of the West during the latter nineties—to be acquired, as soon as his prowess had been demonstrated at Chicago, by the University of Pennsylvania. Of late years the track athletes of the Middle West have more than come into their own. At the conference meet in 1903, Blair of Chicago won the hundred in 9-4/5 seconds, and Hahn of Michigan captured the two-twenty in 21-3/5 seconds. In the spring of 1904 the Michigan team fairly swept the field at the Philadelphia relay games—Hahn beating Schick of Harvard, the fastest man in the East, the relay racers beating the fastest Eastern distance men, Schule of Michigan taking the high hurdles, while the shot-put was disposed of by Rose of Michigan with his world's record. And since the formation of the Conference Association the amateur status of Middle Western college track athletes has been as carefully preserved as that of runners in the older colleges of the East. In the Far West college track athletics were not retarded by any Puritanical scruples, but during the early days there was too little chance for competition particularly to encourage their development. College athletics began to make themselves felt in California during the latter eighties, however, and in 1893 the first meet was held between Stanford and Berkeley, or, as it is more commonly known in the East, the University of California. Berkeley won by the score of 91 to 35, and also won the succeeding two years. In 1896 the score was a tie, but, generally speaking, the track athletes of the state university have thus far been more successful than those of Stanford. It was in 1895 that Berkeley felt herself strong enough to send an attacking party on a tour of conquest down East. Games were held in various places along the way, the team's record was a good one, and at Mott Haven California won two seconds and one third. That was the year that Crum of Ohio vanquished the Eastern sprinters and won both the short distances. Had it not been for those two unusual hurdlers, Bremer of Harvard and Chase of Dartmouth, two firsts instead of two seconds would have gone to California. As it was, "Father Bill" Curtis, after watching the Berkeley hurdlers run, remarked that he would never again question a record that came from the Pacific coast.
Many excellent track men have been developed at the two big California colleges of late years. Among Stanford's men was E. E. Morgan, who first came into prominence at Portland, and who won scores of races at all sorts of games along the coast. Morgan was coast champion at one time, a 16-2/5-second man in the high hurdles, and a tolerable performer at the low hurdles, high jump, and several other events. Plaw of Berkeley has held the collegiate record in the hammer-throw. Dole has done very unusual pole-vaulting, and were it not for the almost prohibitive distance between the coast and the games of the East, Berkeley and Stanford would doubtless develop teams that could compete on even terms with the college teams entered at Mott Haven. The annual meet between the two California rivals is, at present, the principal purely college track-athletic event on the coast, and the coast championships in which club and college athletes both compete take the place, in a way, of the Eastern intercollegiates. The time is probably not far distant, however, when the state universities will unite with Stanford and Berkeley and an association will be formed providing for games in which all may be represented.
There is no space here to narrate in detail the growth of that great network of intercollegiate and interscholastic associations which now cover the country. In addition to the original "intercollegiate" association, there are a dozen or more state intercollegiate associations, and a score or more dual-meet agreements between the larger colleges. There are intercollegiates now in Texas and in North Dakota as interesting and important to those concerned as are the dual meets of their alma maters to the undergraduates of Harvard and Yale or Stanford and Berkeley. The secondary schools and high schools are now organized on no less comprehensive lines, and there is scarcely any part of the country where schoolboys and collegians cannot find rivals to run with and tracks on which to run. The time has long gone by when a victory at Mott Haven makes a man a college champion except in name. The sentimental satisfaction of such victories must always be very great to the men who win them, but that no longer necessarily implies that the performances are of any higher standard than would have been required to win at home.
In looking over the growth of track sports in America three phases are apparent. In the first place, there was the vague general interest which, manifesting itself in running as in other sports, marked the beginning of that healthier appreciation of the out-of-doors which has been so typical of the last generation. Then came the starting of the athletic clubs, their amazing growth and popularity during the seventies and eighties, their final slipping into professionalism, and their decline. Lastly, the colleges, beginning with desultory cross-country runs and gradually getting together at Saratoga and Mott Haven, and later in the South, the Middle West, and in California, so developed and cleansed and strengthened the sport that when the time arrived for the clubs to drop out there were undergraduates and schoolboys from Maine to California ready to jump into the running.
The good that has come from track athletics can hardly, I believe, be exaggerated. Other sports may be more exciting to the spectator, and more fun for the man who is in the game; almost any man, I dare say, would rather stroke a winning crew or make a winning touchdown than win by a few inches a hundred-yard race. But no other college sport can be indulged in by so many men; no other sport opens such possibilities to the average man and the duffer. And it is the average man and the duffer who need looking after and need encouragement. The man who can make an eleven or a crew doesn't need any physical training. He is either already a "born" athlete or of a temperament that will get vigorous play and exercise whether or no. The track teams of our colleges and schools have not only drawn into athletics and healthy sport thousands of men who might otherwise have grown up with flaccid limbs and undeveloped lungs, but they have had their social influence as well, and to many a man who might otherwise have remained a hopeless outsider they have given the chance for which every undergraduate rightfully yearns—to do something and be somebody and in some way serve his college.
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