The Globe - South Bethlehem
Monday, November 10, 1913 - editorial
ATHLETICS

An apostle of the faith of athletics is to address the Harrisburg Board of Trade upon the value of a winning baseball team to a town and the lecturer is to be no less personage than the manager of the victorious Philadelphia Athletic team. Just what this team did for the City of Brotherly Love in a single season was much in the way of advertising. It kept the nation even unto the smallest hamlet on the qui vive almost each day of the outdoor season for news as to result of contest on the diamond; placed and kept the name of the great city in the minds of millions and during the world's series aroused the civilized sphere to Penn's City being prominently on the map; kept the entire globe awake to receive results on battle and by the conclusion of this stamped indelibly, wherever news is read, that the metropolis of Pennsylvania is a city of no little importance. The advertisement that this third largest city in the Union received was such that could not have been gained in any other way for so long a period, reaching so many millions of people and at such nominal cost. Just what this indomitable leader of the Mackmen may tell in Harrisburg may be applicable to the Bethlehems and needs to be told them probably with more emphasis than to the residents of the capital city, for the Bethlehems alive to many other opportunities for advancement have been very short on baseball. The Amateur League of the Bethlehems is hardly a memory and the other baseball teams, several of them excellent organizations, have had a precarious time of it, even last season. The Bethlehems possess a champion soccer team, the success of which in the largest degree was apart from marked cooperation of the public with it. This organization has scored repeated victory at home and abroad, offering a class of entertainment that is on par with the best in the country and like the baseball league that was deserves support and cooperation, more and otherwise if for no other reason than that of home pride. These soccer giants have held aloft Bethlehem's banner, where it never before was unfurled and kept it in the eyes of the public in field and journal, at home and abroad, in way similar to that which the Mackmen displayed Philadelphia's standard. All of the colleges and universities long ago accepted conversion to the athletic faith and still adhere to it because of the advertisement that it affords, and that on the first page too, space that money could not buy for mention in formal advertising shape. "Throwing down" the home athletic team is neither patriotic nor economical, but an exhibit of lack of regard for place of residence.


Bethlehem Steel Soccer Club