ORGANIZATION OF THE CLUBS Track sports, like other athletics, have tended of late years to become so nearly synonymous with college track sports, that the work of non collegiate athletic clubs in the introduction and furthering of the games of field and cinder path has been obscured and almost forgotten, and, to the present generation of undergraduates, almost unknown. The growth and the clarifying of the amateur spirit, coming as it did side by side with the degeneration of so many athletic clubs into mere circus aggregations for professionals, to gether with that polite glamour which our so called " return to the country " has cast on all branches of sport, have made the non-collegiate follower of athletics a less important and interest ing figure in the public eye.
When, however, Mott Haven was yet a name unknown, and a cinder path — without which no cross-roads boarding-school is complete nowadays — could not have been found behind a campus in the country, and when an undergraduate who could run a quarter mile in a minute flat would have been regarded as a Mercury by his class mates, little crowds of young fellows working in the cities, who had no time to spare, and no motive except love of exercise and sport, were getting to gether in the clubs which succeeded so tremen dously for many years, and whose members made so many of the records now down on the books. It was the plain, ungilded crowd—young fellows who had to work all day behind a counter or a desk, and train at night — who brought track ath letics into this country and put the sport on its feet. Of these clubs, the New York Athletic Club was in many ways the pioneer. It was the New York club which built the first cinder path, and brought the first spiked shoes into the country, which held the first real track meet, and which acted as the pattern and the stimulus for similar organizations in various parts of the country.
The New York Athletic Club was organized in 1868. William B. Curtis, — " Father Bill " Curtis, —now dead and gone, and his friends and fel low-athletes, were behind the movement. It was " Father Bill " who, with John C. Babcock, drafted the circular which was sent out to give the ath letic public an idea of what was proposed. There had been desultory running going on for years, of course, the formation of athletic clubs in Eng land had been watched with interest over here, and there was a considerable body of what one might nowadays call sportsmen of the old school who were glad to hear of such a scheme. In a letter to the writer telling something of these early days, that veteran of the track, Mr. H. E. Buer meyer, gives a few words of personal history, which would apply equally well, doubtless, to many an other man of the same tastes and the same gen eration. " I have been interested in sports ever since I was fifteen years old," he says, " having rowed in a boat race in 1854, and I can recollect reading about foot races in Bell's Life and the New York Clipper more than fifty years ago. I
had several sporty English acquaintances, who were much interested in wrestling, pugilism, pe destrianism, etc., and that's the way I got interested in those things as a boy, and have kept it up more or less ever since." The reply to the circular was prompt and enthusiastic. The club was organized. J. Edward Russell was elected president, three hundred members were soon enrolled, headquar ters were secured in what is now Clarendon Hall, East Thirteenth Street, and on November 8, i868, the club's first games were held at what was then the Empire Rink, at Third Avenue and Sixty-third Street. It was at these games that spiked shoes were first worn in competition by an American amateur. Mr. Buermeyer, who was treasurer of the new club and present at the games, gives the following history of these shoes, which were worn by " Father Bill " Curtis himself : " Curtis learned from Davis, a professional champion sprinter of that time, that there was an Irish shoemaker in New York who had imported some spikes from England, and who had made shoes for a few of the professionals. Curtis got Davis to make him a pair, and he wore them at the games. The only difference between these shoes and the kind they wear nowadays was in the weight ; the old style were heavier and much stronger." These games were crude enough, ac cording to our present-day standards — the sprint was started with the tap of a drum — but they stirred up a lot of interest, and the membership of the club rapidly increased. In the following spring an outdoor track was found, and outdoor games were held, but it was not until 1871 that the club acquired land at Mott Haven, and there built the first cinder path in America. At the spring games that year there were five events— the one-hundred-yard dash, the half, one-mile, and three-mile runs, and the three-mile walk — and the fact that the half was done in 2.23 and the mile in 5.25 gives an indication of the crude develop ment of running at that time. The performances may have been poor, but there was plenty of spirit behind them, and the energy that had put the club on its feet made it for many years a leader and pioneer. It was the New York Athletic Club which held the first winter indoor games, in 1878, in what is now Madison Square Garden, and it was under the same auspices that, in 1877 and in 1883 respectively, the first steeplechase and the first cross-country race were held. Not only was this club the pioneer of such organizations, but it was destined to increase in wealth and impor tance for many years, and to survive with at least a measure of its acquired prestige when many of its later rivals had succumbed to a decline in interest in club athletics or the blight of profes sionalism.