Rowing and Track Athletics (extract)

274 Track Athletics athletic to the studious and social side of under– graduate 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 delight– ful neighborliness is generally crowded out sooner or later in the larger universities; but in the Har– vard of the eighties it was at least partially pre– served, 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 hap– pened 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 gener– ally have never worn a spiked shoe before they came to college. The Harvard Athletic Association was organ– ized in the autumn of 1874, after the first inter– collegiate races at Saratoga ; four years later the