Heroes of the Roped Ring

Radio Record, Volume IV, Issue 37, 27 March 1931, Page 1

Heroes of the Roped Ring

What listener has not thrilled to the tense "He's down!" of the commentator describing a boxing match over the radio? Even those previously uninterested in the glove game find them. selves hanging on every word and wondering what will happen next. In the following article Walter T. Rault reviews some of the great figures in the history of the roped ring-from the time oj _John Broughton, first champion of England, to Primo Carnera of to-day, the giant Italian, whose claim for the heavyweight title of the world seems likely to be fulfilled within the next twelve months. Three of the World’s Foremost Fighters | Left-Jack Dempsey, one-time heavyweight champion of the world and idol of America. His recent plucky attempt to "come back" showed that though he has lost much of the fwe and dash that made him champion, he ‘is still\a(fighter to be reckoned ‘with.

iy HAT no person is to . hit his adversary when he is down, or seize him by the ham, the breeches, (or any part below the waist: a man on his knees to be reckoned down." | . . So ran the seventh and last of the Rules to be Observed in all Battles on the Stage (the wooden platform that preceded the canvas ring), as agreed by several gentlemen at Broughton’s Amphitheatre, Tottenham Court Road, London, on August 16, 1743. And that was, roughly speaking, how it all began. We can see them now, those several gentlemen of George II’s reign, in their laced coats and sprigged waistcoats and their jewelled fobs, gathered gravely round the table in that little building in Hanway Street to settle the first recorded rules of the Ring. | They took it seri- ‘ ously, for both money and credit in their fashionable world hung often upon the result of a mill ov those railed-in boards. They were no flash Tob who patronised Jack Broughton, champion of island and the most reputable of promoters and M.C.’s. Yet they would have been astonished if they had known into what a battery of flood-lights the candle that they were lighting should one day, grow. How could they even dream of the vast stadium by the Great Lakes, the crowds of paleface ‘scalpers’ busy where then Red Indians hunted scalps, and 100,000 Americans gathering to watch a main battle fought for more money than anyone in England in Broughton’s time had ever seen? From Broughton’s amphitheatre to the Albert Hall; what -a pageant of pugilism stretches be- ; GREAT fighiters and ; tremendous fights; brilliant and bulldog pluck; not a little crookedness, fights on the cross, fiascoes, bad decisions, fouls; but still the game pulls itself cars of the trough and rises regularly to the

heights again. From Bendigo in the eighteenforties, with his habit of going down without receiving a blow, to Sharkey in the nineteenthirties, with his predilection for hitting below the belt, there have been unworthy figures in the long procession, but history shows us that there are champions in plenty still to come. Broughton himself leads them all, the first acknowledged champion of the pure art of fists alone. Close on his heels his conqueror, Jack Slack, the butcher, who won the title in 1750, and with it the winning end of the purse computed to amount to £600. After him comes Tom Johnson, the cornporter, five feet nine and fourteen stone, and hard as one would expect a man to be, who could fight with the bare fists against a man three stone heavier than himself for sixty rounds. Though one must remember, in reading of the old bare-knuckle fights, that under Prize Ring rules a round ended when a man went down, and after every round was half a minute’s rest; so that a round could last any time from a minute or so, which was the average, up to an occasional quarter of an hour; and.a knock-out blow was one that put a man out for more than half a minute in the hands of his seconds, instead of ten seconds alone on the floor of the ring. | some ways the old fights were fiercer, in some ways less exacting, than one might think if one imagined them fought under the modern rules. Far back in the history of the Ring comes Daniel Mendoza, the first Jewish pugilist, champion of England, and the first of the long line of fighting jews-who had held championships all over the world. He was born in Aldgate, and there have been few periods in boxing history since when Aldgate has not had its representative in the first flight. Mendoza was the victim of one of the most curious incidents in ring history-the famous occasion when Gentleman Jackson seized him (Continued on page 9.),

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"up by his long hair and rained upper- » euts on him until he went below. : They eall it the Dempsey haircut now, but never since Mendoza fought Jackson in 1795 has any boxer gone into _ the ring with hair long enough to get a hold on. The custom has ‘outlived the age of bare hands, so that to-day we see boxers who look like film stars sacrificing their marcelled locks-as if they are_ afraid they may be seized by their opponents’ padded gloves. Gentleman Jackson is, of course, one of the most famous of all champions. Living in the great days of the Regeney, when. dukes and princes clustered round the ropes’and talked the jargon of the fancy, he had half the nobility at his gymnasium in Bond Street, and Byron was vain of his acquaintance. He stands:in boxing history as the epitome of the golden ‘of Corinth; of curly-brimmed casier Ty of gigs and eurricles and phaetons missed round the twenty-four foot ring, of sporting amateurs and titled backers in. the corners where the huge muscled ‘pugilists in tights and silken stockings rested for brief half-minutes on their seconds’ knees. . They were a great crowd, those fighters of the Regency: Jackson and Mendoza, Tom Cribb, the man of iron, and Jem Belcher, the gallant and vain, who would not yield -his championship even when he lost an eye;: Tom Spring of Hereford, John Gully-Gene Tunney’s prototype, who like him left the ring after three championship battles and took up respectability-the only pugilist to become an M.P.; the Game Chicken, and Molineux the Black, the fighting Moor, precursor of those col- . oured fighters who have made so much ring history until ‘they produced Jack Johnson, heavyweight champion of the world, The prize ring reached its zenith in their days, and after them declined until, at the end of the century, came {as they say in Hollywood) the gloves. Perhaps they emerged, some of the veterans of the Regency, from their little pubs in Soho and around Holborn and Leicester Square, for the last great knuckle battle, when in 1857 Tom Sayers, the champion of Hngland, fought John Heenan of America, the Benicia Boy. No fight of: the century has left such records as: this, It -was the first of the great international contests, and the papers were as full of it as they were of the sorry affair at Miami not so long ago.. Thackeray wrote copiously of it;.for weeks there was controversy about the result. It "was a great fight, certainly, with that between the antagonists that always makes for excitement, for Sayers, though heavyweight champion,’ stood five feet eight inches and weighed ‘only around eleven stone, while the American was a real heavyweight of six foot two. But Sayers, like Fitzsimmons after him, made nothing of a handicap of some three stone. The Tipton Slasher had ;had that advyantage, and after Sayers had done with him his fighting career was at an end. So Heenan frightened Sayers no more than he frightened: his: backers who, after a morning spent in dodging the police, met in a meadow near Farnborough to see the sroatesy fight ever fought with bare’ hands, And yet, two ‘hours. and. twenty minutes later, with the crowd’ wild with excitement and the police struggling desperately through. it to the ring, the end came in a way. as. unsatisfactory as.any of the fiascoes. to which we are accustomed now. © Sayers’s right arm was broken, Heenan’s: eyes’ were closed #0 that he had to grope hig

way toward his man, yet both fought fiercely on. Then Heenan got, the Dnglishman’s head under his arm and forced it down on the ropes till Sayers went black in the face, -That.was too much even for a rugged age.. The -ropes were cut, the police broke in, and the fighters disappeared in the crowd. ' The result was a draw, though Heenan‘s admirers claimed the .championship for him. As so often, the aftermath of counter-claims was unsavoury. But nothing could alter the eonviction of those who had seen the battle that Sayers had given the most supreme display of British pluck and skill that even the old prize ring had ever seen, As the century went on the brutality of P.R. fighting increased as the skiil and the pluck diminished. There were fights like the one between Billy: Hdwards and Arthur Chambers, in Detroit:in 1872, where a world’s chamPionship changed hands through the foul trick of a second who bit his own man on the chest between rounds and eharged his opponent with it next time they met in the middle of the ring. After Jem Mace the great procession of pugilists tails away, and in their wake comes a seedy cortege of ruffians, saloon-keepers and hangers-on. Bur the art of the raw ’uns passed on one legacy to the new art of glove fighting, with its more civilised conditions and rules. John L. Sullivan, the Boston Strong Boy, first world’s heavyweight Ghampion with the gloves, began his career under the sterner code. A great figure, John L., with his flowing moustache and mighty muscles, and the hot temper that so often got him into trouble in his later days, when Gentleman Jem Corbett, the most elegant boxer that ever held the title, had deposed him in: twentyone gruelling rounds at New Orleans in 1892. Then John L, toured America with his road show of "Uncle Tom’s

Cabin," where he played Simon Legree until one night on the stage Uncle Tom asked for a rise and the old champion socked him in the jaw: and bust up the show, He went on the stump as a temperance orator, and then had to apologise to the saloon-keepers whose bars he had smashed up in his unregenerate days. He was a picturesque champion, more so than ever Pompadour Jem Corbett, who succeeded him, even though he was a boxer who made connoisseurs catch their breath with joy. And Sullivan was avenged by another fighter with no grace about him: Bob Fitzsimmons, the Cornishman, who nevér weighed twelvé stone, whose arms were like wire ropes, whose flat feet and thin legs and bald, freckled head made a grotesque spectacle in the ring, but who whipped the biggest and _ the strongest men in the world. It was not until James J. Jefferies arose, as big as a bear and as fast as a cat, years younger and stones heavier, that Fitz had to let the heavyweight championship go back to the heavyweights again, ' Jeffries was unbeaten when he retired, and, as usually happens when a champion retires, a slump set in. Tommy Burns, who succeeded him, was about as worthy a world’s champion as Sharkey, or Schmelling, or whoever it is, is now. And then, on the turn of the tide, came Jack Johnson, the giant negro, one of the greatest figures in the whole story. Fifteen stone, immensely strong, and harder to hit than any big man of his time, he taunted the white race with its inability to find a man to beat him. His fight with Burns at Sydney in 1908 was a nightmare. Outfought, outboxed, outmatched even at the mouth-fighting in which he had always excelled Burns was offered up as a victim to Johnmson’s pride of race. Bverybody hated the big nigger, and nobody could stop him in the ring.

They brought Jefferies out. of retire. ment, but ‘they ‘never come. back," Johnson continued his arrogant career until, in 1915, finding his title had eeased to be profitable to’ him, he took a count from Jess Willard, the Man Mountain, who was a fighter just about good enough to beat Phil Scott, . WORD great names come crowding in upon us as we recall the history of fighting with the gloves; great names and _ picturesque careers. There are the great British boxersJimmy Wilde the Welsh Wizard, so gmall that he fought above his weight in the flyweight class, who looked as though a punch would kill him, and who handed out trouncings to opponents of every size and every degree of skill, A veal fighting phenomenon, whose punches came from all angles at incredible speeds, and always full of steam. Jim Driscoll, the Peerless Prince, the most perfect boxer of them all, a great-hearted fighter who never had-an enemy, whose final defeat when, with iliness gnawing his vitals, he went down to a lucky punch from a man years younger, is the most glorious achievement in the annals of the N.S.C. He was a great man as well as a great fighter, and when he died all Cardiff walked behind his coffin, boxers and jockeys and publicans, side by side with the nuns and orphans to whom he had been a friend. There is Alf Mansfield, who fought Wilde himself, hugging the dreadful secret that he had lost the sight of one eye. ‘There are the great negroes -Peter Jackson, another chivalrous battler, who never got a chance at the world’s title; Sam Langford and Joe Jeannette, and that ageless mystery the Dixie Kid, who drifted from nowhere across the fistic world, beat all the best men at anywhere round his weight, and vanished again nobody, knows where. . HERE was the meteoric career of Georges Carpentier, the pit-boy from Lens, who fought his way weight by weight through the French titles, and then, before he was twenty, weighing some twelve stone, electrified Burope by knocking out Bombardier Wells, the champion of England, at Ghent in 1913. Poor Beautiful Billy, the destined stepping-stone in the Frenchman’s path! The same year came the return fight in London, the first of those lightning knockouts which Carpentier taught us to expect. Then, dropping a curtain across Carpentier’s career, came the war. The end of the war found another British champion, Joe Beckett, just waiting to put him back on the map. Beckett went the same way as Wells, and he stood not on the order of his going. The last rung of the Frenchman’s ladder led him into the arena at Jersey City, where Jack Dempsey met him and sent him back to his own class. For he was a class out with Dempsey in weight alone, and there is an old ring proverb about that. And yet he so nearly ‘pulled it off; he did all he could hope to do, and landed on Dempsey’s craggy jaw that "poisonous right" that had never failed him yet. It failed him now;-the Manassa Mauler staggered and came back, and Oarpentier’s right hand had not stood the blow. ° After the event it was easy to say the men were badly matched, but Carpentier had cast a spell over Europe, ‘and even after his beating he remained (Concluded on page 84.),

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an idol. He had the "Indian Sign’ on Beckett, and no-other rivals. He had a shock wlien he met: one Gershon Medneloff, better known as Ted Kid Lewis-another great fighting machine of similar build to Fitzsimmons, and wit, his habit.of giving weight away -# yt. the poisonous right saved him. then. one day, in a fight that nobody took seriously, a wild battering from an unknown Senegalese called Siki brought..the bright story of Georges Carpentier to a sudden end. Battling Siki!. Has any stranger character passed across the modern stage?. Born in Senegal, a coal-black savage; made into a fighting man by a manager: who saw in him the ideal "intelligent ape’; conqueror of Carpentier and-idol of Paris-an irrespousible savage with Western civilisation at his feét. His lion-cubs in Montmartre restaurants; his fantastie fight with McTigue in Dublin at the height of the troubles, when land-mines lay under the ring, and a touch of a button would: have blown half the champions of Hurope out-of their seats; his lurid career in America, until that dawn when he was found lying on his face in an alleyway in Hell’s Kitchen, with a _ knife in his back-has any stranger story come true in our time? \HEY crowd . across the stage, the fighting. men, shadowed ‘by the memory of their great fights. Frank Moran the fighting dentist, huge and good-natured; Teddy Baldock the Pride of Poplar, the Mumtaz Mahal of the ring; Mickey Walker the pocket Dempsey, king of the middleweights; Johnny Basham the scientist, of the three famous. fights with Kid Lewis; Tunney the snob; Tiger Flowers the negro champion, black panther in the ring and deacon out of it;. Villa, the conqueror of Wilde, and the other great little men-La Barba, Gennaro, lionhéarted little Elky Clark, of Glasgow, whose tragedy saddened us all; the nbountainous form of Luis. Firpo, the Wild Bull of the Pampas: the novice from the Argentine who knocked Jack Dempsey clean out of the ring. And last came two who promise to redeem boxing from another of the slumps into which it has sunk; Primo Carnera, the Ambling Alp, badly as he has been managed, seems likely to give the world a real heavyweight title-holders again, and Kid Berg

latest of the series of great HastEnders, who has revived boxing in Bngland and in America by his brilliance and fire. Fiascoes cannot kill boxing; Cucovsky-Sharkey and Suf-fling-Scott can do their worst to it. And when the big fights are merely big fiascoes, there are still the smaller ones, and for the cost of a programme at a million-dollar set-up, you can go into the little halls and see keen, clever, ‘boxing that would. have amazed and delighted. old Jack Broughton and his patrons at the amphitheatre in the Tottenham Oourt Road-wWalter ‘TT. Rault, in "Radio Times." ‘