Read Online Year of the Dunk by Asher Price - Free Book Online

included this exchange: “Agesilaus, King of Sparta, when asked what things boys should learn, replied, ‘Those which they will practice when they become men.’ ” The practice, of course, whether in Sparta or in 1864 Maine, was for battle. “To develop my body became an obsession with me,” Sargent later wrote.
    He took up dumbbells, Indian clubs, and boxing, and systemized his gymnastics, all the while undertaking heavy-lifting farm work, rising at 6 a.m. in the winter and 4 a.m. in the summer to complete his hay-baling, lumbering, and wood-chopping chores. He began hosting gymnastics and tumbling demonstrations at his family barn, and soon he was drawing followers. As a pastime, Sargent would lie on the barnyard floor and wrestle against two or three boys at the same time who were charged with keeping him down. The local newspaper, the
Republican Journal
, described him asa “young Hercules.” Despite the press, the boys largely trained in secret, to insulate themselves from a frosty Maine sensibility that predictably turned against the gym work.
I came acrossa public prejudice which I was later to know well and battle hard. Some parents forbade their boys to take part in any kind of gymnastics which they regarded as “monkey shines” and “gymkinks.” The gymnasium was regarded in the same light as were billiard saloons and bowling alleys. Whether this ill feeling was a survival of a Puritanical spirit that tended to stamp out all manifestations of life and joyousness, or whether its cause lay inthe custom of the German turners of performing in cheap recreation halls and saloons, I cannot say.
    Eventually,Sargent fled to the circus, literally, to become a trapeze artist and tumbler. The Goldie Brothers circus was wearying, of course—among other things, atiresome senior clown always stole Sargent’s buckwheat pancakes—and in less than a year he made his way back to Belfast, weighing whether he might go into law, the ministry, or medicine. A friend, returned from Bowdoin in the summer of 1869, told him about a possible vacancy in the directorship of the school’s gymnasium.
    Sargent was 20 years old, a former circus runaway with little money and no college degree. But he had shown himself to be a keen, serious student of the body in a period without any such discipline. Bowdoin took him on, and that fall, in his inaugural address, the president of the college, a Mr. Harris, told his charges:
Other things being equal,the healthy man is the happiest and makes others the happier. He is the more pleasant husband and father, the more generous friend, the cheerer and helper of the sad, in every position and relation, the wholesome man. He radiates joy. Health, as the perpetual spring of animation and energy, is the first requisite of success. It must never be out of sight in the administration of a college.
    The speech evidently made an impression on Sargent. As the gym janitor, instructor, and director, he gained the respect of the students—at one point challenging a series of them toboxing matches, which he invariably won—and remade the modest gym, importing the latest weightlifting mechanisms from Germany.After a half-dozen years at Bowdoin, however, he went to Yale for a medical degree before moving on to New York, to open his own gym, at 24th and Broadway.
    But even as he began training New Yorkers, he longed to return to the academy, to press upon young men his particular form of physical education, which conflated physical health and hygiene with moral rectitude. The teacher of physical education, a term promoted by Sargent, aims “tomake the weak strong, the crooked straight, the timid courageous,” he would write in one academic journal. “His aim is not only to keep them well and prevent disease, but to lift them to a higher plane of living, morally and intellectually, as well as physically.” Such a teacher should combine technical ability and scientific know-how with “a great deal of the