I Believe and other essays

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.