Gamesmanship - The Gamesman Versus The Pure Player

The Gamesman Versus The Pure Player

Potter's double-edged ironies did not spare the gamesman himself (he slyly named one prominent protagonist 'Bzo, U., holder (1947) Yugo-Slav Gamesmanship Championship', for example). Potter acknowledged repeatedly that 'the way of the gamesman is hard, his training strict, his progress slow, his disappointments many', and recognised that as a result 'the assiduous student of gamesmanship has little time for the minutiae of the game itself - little opportunity for learning how to play the shots, for instance'. Yet one of his "correspondents" owlishly admits, 'there is no doubt that a knowledge of the game itself sometimes helps the gamesman'.

Hence 'perhaps the most difficult type for the gamesman to play is the man who indulges in pure play. He gets down to it, he gets on with it, he plays each shot according to its merits, and his own powers, without a trace of exhibitionism, and no by-play whatever'. The book gloomily concludes, 'we amateurs have to fight against the growing menace of young people who insist on playing their various games for the fun of the thing...indulging rather too freely, if the truth were known, in pure play'.