Up Squash! Down Baseball!

Before proceeding further, I ought to explain that in my survey I limited myself to what I considered to be the 20 most commonly played college sports. No sport that does not have an official or semiofficial status on a majority of eastern college campuses is included. Though there are distinct social gradations between such extracollegiate sports as lawn bowls, court tennis, sky-diving, roller skating, mountaineering, cricket, cycling, chess, pigsticking, yachting, fox hunting, beagling, bowling and falconry, I have omitted any discussion of these because I considered them too special, too apt to cloud the general picture.

It is also important to remember that positions on the Up and Down scale keep changing. One reason for this is that Up guys and Down guys do not make Up sports and Down sports. It is more commonly the sport that makes the man, though it can work both ways. For instance, a sport that is played only by Up guys is apt to be an Up sport, but notice that I am careful to say "apt to be." Some sports played only by Down guys can also be Up sports. Some sports will always be Up sports, no matter who plays them. Their positions are secured by time and tradition, e.g., tennis. There is another factor, too, that affects the rank of certain sports: girls. If I may refine my metaphor a bit, then, the two escalators are like department store escalators on Saturday afternoon when they are crowded with unruly children. Some of the children are charging up the down escalator. Others try to race down the up one. The effect is chaotic, and so it is with college sports. Though some sports have shown great stability in recent years, others have fluctuated wildly.

Perhaps it is easier to understand what makes a sport Up when you understand what makes a sport Down: A sport can be Down for any one of three reasons:

1) Any sport that is Up as a high school sport is Down as a college sport, e.g., basketball.

2) Any sport that is elaborate, that requires paraphernalia, special equipment or money, is a Down sport. (Polo, the most Up of adult sports from Newport to Pebble Beach, enjoys a lowly position at colleges for this reason. "Polo is strictly for social climbers," observes a Williams man. Social climbing is a Down sport.)

3) Finally, any sport is a Down sport if it is inordinately popular with a large section of the American public, the kind of sport that attracts a following of beer-drinking, hot-dog-munching fans, that consumes quantities of newspaper space and television time. Baseball, the "national pastime," is in the cellar spot on most campuses for this reason.

An Up sport is a clean sport, a gentlemanly sport but, more than anything else, it must be a casual sport. It must not take itself too seriously. (Sports car racing, if that were a college sport, would be a Down sport.) Generally speaking, any sport at which the onlookers are called spectators is an Up sport, and any sport at which the onlookers show their approval by clapping, rather than cheering, is an Up sport. Enthusiasm, excess zeal—called "gung ho"—is out of fashion these days. Sports where the contest is called a match rather than a game or meet are likely to be Up sports. Sports where it isn't the score or who wins or loses but how you play the game that counts are Up sports. Any sport that attracts a small but fiercely loyal band of devotees or aficionados who can converse in that sport's private language and which has built up around it, like atonal music, not only its own vocabulary but its own aura of mystery, is an Up sport. Jai alai, if it were a college sport, would be an Up sport. The high position of fencing on the Up list is explained by this. Finally, any sport that was an Up sport as a prep school sport (not to be confused with a high school sport) is likely to be an Up sport as a college sport, too, e.g., hockey and soccer. This is because the line that divides eastern prep schools and eastern colleges is in so many places so fine, so thin.

Learning to negotiate one's way among the Ups and Downs requires some fancy footwork. It is almost a game in itself. As in a sport, knowing the rules is not enough. The student who wishes to be on top of the situation can only get there with practice. To give you an idea of how important it is to know the ropes, I would like to cite now a couple of case histories. To make things easier and, at the same time, to preserve the anonymity of the men involved, I shall call these the cases of Arthur A. and Bradley B.

Arthur A. came to College X as a freshman in the fall of 1958. "I considered myself a typical, all-round American college boy," Arthur says, "in A-l physical condition except for the glasses which I only need to wear while reading. At high school I was a pretty good athlete. I was too light for football, but I was fast, so when I got to college I decided to go out for cross-country." At first, Arthur reports, all seemed well. Then, as weeks passed, he began to notice what he describes as "a kind of gradual numbness" on the part of his friends and fellow students "every time the word cross-country came into the conversation. I'd mention what we did at practice that day, and they'd all start clearing their throats. I didn't know what was wrong."

One night, describing the latest freshman cross-country meet to a Saturday night date from a neighboring girls' school, Arthur observed another curious thing. After a few moments of seemingly intense interest his date suddenly yawned; then her eyes began to wander aimlessly about the room. Arthur stopped talking, feeling hurt, and after a while she said, "Yes, go on." But, though he did go on, he felt sure that he was not really holding her interest. "I could tell I was boring her," he says. "I thought to myself that this was the wrong girl for me. Little did I realize at the time that the real trouble was that cross-country was the wrong sport."