Is the Super Bowl Un-American? Too Bad We Can't Ask TR

What would TR think of the Super Bowl? He'd hardly be expected to say it de-lighted him! As a father he tried to discourage his sons from playing college football. As a public commentator he denounced professional sports, as he did in this essay published in the North American Review in 1890, a decade before he was elected to national office.

In America the difference between amateurs and professionals is in one way almost the reverse of what it is in England, and accords better with the way of life of our democratic community. In England the average professional is a man who works for his living and the amateur is one who does not; whereas with us the amateur usually is and always ought to be, a man who like other American citizens, works hard at some regular calling--it matters not what, as long as it is respectable, while the professional is very apt to be a gentleman of more or less elegant leisure, aside from his special pursuit.

The mere statement of the difference is enough to show that the amateur and not the professional, is the desirable citizen, the man who should be encouraged. Our object is to get as many of our people as possible to take part in manly, healthy, vigorous pastimes, which will benefit the whole nation; it is not to produce a limited class of athletes who shall make it the business of their lives to do battle with one another for the popular amusement. Most masterful nations have shown a strong taste for manly sports. In the old days, when we ourselves were still a people of backwoodsmen, at every merrymaking there were sure to be trials and skill and strength, at running, wrestling and rifle-shooting, among the young men. We should encourage by every method the spirit which makes such trials
popular; it is a very excellent revival of old-time American ways. But the existence of a caste of gladiators in the midst of a population which does not itself participate in any manly sports is usually, as it was at Rome, a symptom of national decadence.

The Romans who, when the stern and simple strength of Rome was departing, flocked to the gladiatorial shows, were influenced only by a ferocious craving for bloody excitement; not by any sympathy with men of stout heart and tough sinew. So it is, to a lesser extent to-day. In base-ball alone, the professional teams, from a number of causes, have preserved a fairly close connection with non-professional players, and have done good work in popularizing a most admirable and characteristic American game; but even here the outlook is now less favorable, and, aside from this one pastime, professionalism is the curse of many an athletic sport, and the chief obstacle to its healthy development. Professional rowing is under a dark cloud of suspicion because of the crooked practices which have disgraced it. Horse-racing is certainly not in an ideal condition. A prize fight is simply brutal and degrading. The people who attend it, and make hero of the prize-fighter, are,--excepting boys who go for fun and don't know any better--to a very great extent, men who hover on the border-line of criminality; and those who are not are speedily brutalized, and
are never rendered more manly. They form as ignoble a body as do the kindred frequenters of rat-pit and cock-pit. The prize-fighter and his fellow professional athletes of the same ilk are, together with their patrons in every rank of life, the very worst foes with whom the cause of general athletic development has to contend.