Daily Inspiration Quote by Heywood Broun

Broun’s line is a neat little ambush: it takes the feel-good civic religion around sports and flips it into a test with a microscope. The popular promise is alchemy - put kids in uniforms, stir in discipline, and out comes virtue. Broun, a journalist with a reporter’s allergy to comforting myths, insists sports are less a factory than a spotlight. Under pressure, with an audience watching and stakes (however petty) suddenly real, people default to who they already are.

The intent is corrective, even faintly prosecutorial. “Build” suggests intention, coaching, systems, institutions taking credit. “Reveal” assigns responsibility back to the individual. That shift matters: it denies schools, leagues, and booster culture an easy narrative where winning equals moral instruction. Broun is also puncturing the way America launders aggression through the language of character. If a game licenses cruelty, vanity, cheating, or scapegoating, that isn’t “competitiveness” being forged; it’s conduct being exposed.

Context sharpens the cynicism. Broun wrote in a period when mass spectator sports and college athletics were becoming big business and big politics, wrapped in ideals of manliness, nationalism, and social order. The subtext is that sport’s real value is diagnostic: it shows who respects rules when breaking them is tempting, who treats opponents as humans, who collapses into excuses when the call goes against them. It’s a warning disguised as a proverb: stop outsourcing ethics to the scoreboard.