The Birmingham age-herald., 1922-03-12
MONEY QUESTION EASILY SLIPS M ALL ATHLETICS
 WALTER CAMP
Camp Discusses Connection of Betting With College
 Sports
CAMP
By WALTER CANT

Special Correspondent of The Age Herald
 Copyright, 1921, by The Age eHerald.)
 New York, March 11.--It takes very straight thinking and some kind of spirit which can hardly be defined to preserve the word amateur" It is indeed a difficult thing to keep the money question out of amateur athletics and it always has been made a menace. This brings up the age old discussion of betting and it's con neetion with sports.
 The first Oxford Cambridge games were held for money prizes. It is also true that in the early days of the building Of colleges in this country, the favorite method of rais ing funds was through lotteries. In that way some of the college build ings now standing were financed. In the early 1700s Princeton was sup ported by lotteries, the last of which was held in 1763 and netted 5000 pounds. Certain of the old houses in the old brick row at Yale were built by means of a lottery. Even up to a comparatively recent time, the choice of rooms at Yale was a lottery or the most pronounced type.
 Gambling on Small Scale
 Probably the majority of boys in college are quite familiar with seeing. their fathers play golf and bridge for stakes and perhaps do the same thing themselves. The toss of a coin to settle Ruth's salary proba bly did not shock any large proportion of our college baseball players. The first Harvard boat races at Worcester were practically financed by the railroads in expectation of traffic receipts and college teams do not feel any particular harm in a junket at the expense of some one else.
 In the earliest days of baseball. even before the Knickerbocker base ball club was organized, 1t was GUS tomary for teams to play for the ball or the bat used. The writer has be- fore him now letter from Ajax Cartwright, one of the originators of the great American game, written in lS65, in which he boasts of his team s victories, saying he had in his pos session "the original ball with which we used to play on Murray hill"
 But his dearly beloved baseball fell into the hands of gamblers and was only resurrected with difficulty.
 The betting on college games un- doubtedly has been much exagger- ated. Betting is usually ready money proposition and the average collegian has no large sums. The writer has traced down stories of thousands having been wagered, only to find the thousands reduced to hundreds and usually to tens.
 There is an old saying, "who plays for more than he can lose with pleasure, stakes his heart" As a rule college betting is of a character that comes within this spirit and that is all that can be said for it. Where It IS possible to eradicate the evil it something for social economists to puzzle over.
 An ingenious suggestion was made few years ago by C. Franklin Brown, that the amateur be abolished | altogether and that distinction be- tween amateur and professional be omitted. He held that amateur and professional classes were instituted ir England to protect the leisure class against those who were their superiors in sport. It would be diff ficult for him, nevertheless, to con vince people here that these rules emanated, at least, with us, from a dire dread of defeat at the hands of paid men.
 The great growth of college ath- letics has been under the operation of as strict rules as can be enforced to preserve the amateur spirit and keep money out. To most of us it seems that any letting down of the bars would be most dangerous and might undermine all the admira ble work that has been done