G. B. SHAW AS SPORTS COMMENTATOR

New Zealand Listener, Volume 3, Issue 63, 6 September 1940, Page 18

G. B. SHAW AS SPORTS COMMENTATOR

During the last few months "The Listener" sports page has been interested in the social problem of modern sport, with its few participants and many onlookers. A backward-looking reader was reminded by our articles of an article by George Bernard Shaw which appeared in "The Nation," on December 13, 1919. Here is Mr. Shaw in the role of sports commentator. His article explains for itself our reasons for reproducing it:

THE BECKETT-CARPENTIER FIGHT

by

G. Bernard

Shaw

(wrote Mr. Shaw), and are at. all curious about it, imagine four thousand people packed by night into a@ roofed enclosure with a gallery around it. I had better not call it a building, because that word has architectural associations; and this enclosure has none. It is fearfully ugly, and calls itself a Stadium, probably to provide modern poets with a rhyme for radium. The four thousand people are all smoking as hard as they can; and the atmosphere, which will be described in the morrow’s papers as electric, is in fact murky, stifling, and fumesome. In the midst is a scaffold, or place of execution, twenty-four feet square, fenced by ropes and glared down upon so intolerably by arc lights that some of the spectators wear improvised brown paper hat brims to shield their eyes, On the scaffold is a mild man, apparently a churchwarden, but really a referee, patiently watching two hardworking Britons earning a precarious livelihood by boxing for the amusement of ‘8 you were not at The Great Fight

the four thousand. They are tired, and have not the smallest animosity to give a bitter sweet to their exertions; but they are most earnest and industrious, and one feels, in spite of the sportive alacrity which they keep up like a ballet-dancer’s smile, and their attempts to give a little extra value when the arc-lights are increased to cinematograph the last round or two, that they are thinking of their little ones at home. One of them presently gets a tooth, real or artificial, loosened. His second extracts it with his fingers; his opponent apologetically shakes hands; and: they return to the common round, the nightly toil. It seems indelicate to stare at them; and I proceed to study the audience. More Expensive Than Opera Like all sporting audiences, it consists mostly of persons who manifestly cannot afford the price of admission. My seat has cost me more than ten times what I have paid to hear "Parsifal" at Bayreuth or Beethoven’s "Ninth Symphony"

at a very special performance at the Grand Opera in Paris. Certainly there are people here who can spare ten guineas or twenty-five easily enough: honourables and right honourables, explorers, sporting stockbrokers, eminent professional men, plutocrats of all sorts, men with an artistic interest in the display like Robert Loraine, Granville-Barker, Maurice Baring, Arnold Bennett and myself. But the prevalent impression is the usual one of a majority of men who have sacrificed a month’s wages to be present and hope to retrieve it by bets on the result. Here and there is a lady. Not any particular sort of lady*or no lady: just an ordinary lady. The one who happens to be sitting by me is one next whom I might find myself in the stalls of any theatre or in church. The girl at the end of the next row would be perfectly in place in any West-End drawing-room My lady neighbour watches the weary breadwinners on the scaffold and tries to feel excited when they seek rest in leaning their heads affectionately on one another’s shoulders, and giving one another perfunctory thumps on the ribs ("Kidney punches"), and on the nape of the neck ("rabbit punches") to persuade the audience that they are "mixing it" terribly. This is modern in-fighting, which seems to me simply despicable. But I fancy she is trying to stifle a suspicion that she had better have stayed at home and spent the price of her ticket on a new hat. As for me, nothing would have induced me to stay-in the place four minutes had I not been waiting for the not very far off undivine event towards which the sporting section of creation had moved. : The Atmosphere Clears _ Everything comes to an end at last, even the minor items in a boxing programme. The boxers retired, presumably to their ain firesides; and the scaffold was occupied by one unknown to me, for I belong to an older generation. This philanthropist earned my heartfelt gratitude by adjuring the audience, if it loved the champions, to refrain from smoking; after which the atmosphere cleared until it was no thicker than an average fog. Suddenly a figure from the past-from my past-was announced and appeared. It was Jack Angle, no longer a trim, cleanshaven, young amateur athlete, but a pére noble in white moustaches, exactly like Colonel Damas in "The Lady of Lyons." I found myself saying involuntarily, "Thank Heaven! Here at last is somebody who knows something about boxing." I looked round for his contemporaries, Chinnery, Douglas, Michell, Frost-Smith and the rest; but if they are alive and were present I could not identify them. He instructed us politely but authoritatively how to behave ourselves. Enter the Gladiators Then the cheering began, rather localised, because from most of the seats little could be seen except the platform. Even

the Prince of Wales had had some difficulty in procuring silence for his brief speech when he entered; and several people believed for some time that it had been made by Carpentier, As it happened, I was near the gangway by which the champions came in, and therefore saw at once that the cheering was for Mr. Joseph Beckett, who was approaching in an unpretentious dressing-gown. Mr. Beckett, though the descriptive reporters insisted on making him play Orson to his opponent’s Valentine, is by no means ill-looking. His features are not Grecian; but he can be described exactly as a very sensible-looking man; and I may say at once that he behaved all through, and has behaved since, more sensibly than most men would in a very trying situation. I liked Mr. Beckett very well, and did not change my .opinion later, as some of his backers did. He mounted the scaffold and went to his corner. A burst of louder cheering made me look around again to the gangway; and this time I was startled by a most amazing apparition: nothing less then Charles XII, "The Madman of the North," striding along the gangway in a Japanese silk dressing-gown as gallantly as if he had not been killed exactly 201 years before. I have seldom received so vivid an impression; and I knew at once that this could hardly be Charles; he must be either Carpentier or the devil, Genius could not be more unmistakable. Being in that line myself, I was under no illusion as to genius being invincible. I knew that Mr. Beckett might turn out to be Peter the Great, and that Charles might be going to his Poltava; but genius is genius all the same, in victory or defeat. The effect of the audience on the two men was very noticeable. Beckett, too sensible to be nervous, put up with the crowd of people staring at him as a discomfort that was all in the day’s work. Carpentier rose at the crowd, and would have had it forty thousand instead of four if he could. He was at home with it; he dominated it; he picked out his friends and kissed hands to them in his debonair way quite naturally, without swank or mock modesty, as one born to move assemblies. "Stripling and Colossus" The descriptive reporters began to scribble their tale of a frail French stripling and a massive British colossus. But the physical omens were all against the Briton. Beckett, who was trained, if anything, a little too fine, has a compact figure, a boxlike chest, stout, stumpy arms useful only for punching, and a thickish neck too short to take his head far out of harm’s way. Carpentier, long and lithe, has a terrible pair of arms, very long, with the forearms heavy just where the weight should be. He has a long chest, a long reach, a long head. Nobody who knew the ABC of boxing could doubt for a moment that unless Beckett could wear him down and outstay him, and stand a good deal during the process, he could not win at the physical odds against him except by a lucky knock-out. A Complete Greek Athlete When the men stood up, another curious asset of Carpentier’s raised the exe (continued on next page)

(continued from previous page) traordinary question whether he had not been taught to box by a lady. Some years ago, Mrs. Diana Watts, a lady who believed that she had discovered the secret of ancient Greek gymnastics, reproduced with her own person the pose and action of the Discobolus and the archer in the Heracles pediment in the British Museum, both of which had been up to that time considered physically impossible. Her book on the subject, with its interesting photographs, is still extant. Her method was to move and balance the body on the ball of the foot without using the heel, and to combine this with a certain technique of the diaphragm. Now the moment "Time" was called, and Carpentier on his feet in the ring, it was apparent he had this technique. He was like a man on springs; and the springs were not in his heels but in the balls of his feet. His diaphragm tenue was perfect. Whether his lady instructor was Mrs. Diana Watts or Dame Nature, she had turned out a complete Greek athlete. This really very remarkable and gymnastically important phenomenon has been overlooked, partly because it has not been understood, but partly also because the change in Carpentier’s face when he sets to work is so startling that the spectators can see nothing else. The unmistakable Greek line digs a trench across his forehead at once; his colour changes to a stony grey; he looks ten thousand years old; his eyes see through stone walls; and his expression of intensely concentrated will frightens everyone in the hall except his opponent, who is far too busy to attend to such curiosities, It Was No Fight There was no fight. There was only a superb exhibition spar, with Beckett as what used to be called a chopping-block. For a few moments he wisely stuck close to his man; but Mr. Angle gave the order (I did not hear of it but was told of it) to break away; and Beckett then let the Frenchman get clear and faced him for outfighting. From that moment he was lost. Carpentier simply did the classic thing; the long shot with the left; the lead-off and get-away. The measurement of distance-and such distance!-was exact to an inch, the speed dazzling, the impact like the kick of a thoroughbred horse. Beckett, except for one amazed lionlike shake of the head, took it like a stone wall; but he was helpless; he had no time to move a finger before Carpentier was back out of his reach, He was utterly outspeeded. Three times Carpentier did this, each hit more brilliant, if possible, than the last. Beckett was for a moment dazed by the astonishing success of the attack; and in that moment Carpentier sent in a splendidly clean and finished right to the jaw. It is not often that perfect luck attends perfect style in this world; but Carpentier seemed able to command even luck. The blow found that mysterious spot that is in all our jaws. and that is so seldom found by the fist. There was no mistaking the droop with which Beckett went prone to the boards, In an old-fashioned fight he would have been carried by his seconds to his corner and brought up to the scratch in half a minute, quite well able to go on. Under the modern rules he had to lie unhelped; and at the end of ten seconds Carpentier was declared the winner.

"The Usual Orgy" Carpentier had made the spar so_intensely interesting that the seventy-four seconds it had occupied seemed like ten; and I could hardly believe that four had elapsed between the moment when Beckett dropped to the boards and the jubilant spring into the air with which Carpentier announced that the decision had been given in his favour. He was as unaffected in his delight as he had been in his nervousness before "Time" was called, when he had asked his bottle-

holder for a mouthful of water and thereby confessed to a dry mouth. The usual orgy followed. Pugilists are a sentimental, feminine species, much given to kissing and crying. Carpentier was hoisted up to be chaired, dragged down to be kissed, hung out by the heels from the scaffold to be fondled by a lady, and in every possible way given reason to envyBeckett. Beckett’s seconds, by the way, so far forgot themselves as to leave their man lying uncared for on the floor after he was counted out until Carpentier, in-

dignant at their neglect, rushed across the ring and carried Beckett to his corner. I suggest to the masters of the ceremonies at these contests, whoever they may be, that this had better not occur again, It is true that the decision was so sudden and sensational that a little distraction was excusable; but if Carpentier, who had the best reason to be carried away by his feelings, could remember, those whose duty it was could very well have done so if they had been properly instructed in their duties. (To be Concluded)