Life — August 9, 1928 — page 14: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

SPORTSME “There Were Giants in Those Days” Ir’s high time that certain elderly fight fans quit telling us fairy stories about the terrifying giants and ogres who roamed the canvas in the “fe fi fo fum” era of forty or fifty years ago, grinding e the bones of their opponents to make their daily bread. They were wonderfully ferocious fellows, to be sure, and if they were half as mutually destructive as we have been led to believe, it’s a positive marvel that they didn’t kill cach other off like so many Kilkenny cats. It. recalls Prince Hal's description of Percy, “the Hotspur of the North; he that kills me some six or seven dozen of Scots at a breakfast, washes his hands and says to his wife, ‘Fie upon this quict life! I want work.’ ” (There we go, quot- ing Shakespeare again—which is another demonstration of the Tunney influence on current pugilistic literature.) Thus runs the tale of the oldtimers about John L. Sullivan, Peter Jackson, Joe Walcott, Sam Langford, et al. We are told that one of those ancient heroes—any one of them, probably—could have knocked out Gene Tunney with one hand and with the other have hit Tom Heeney hard enough to cripple his three brothers in this country and his forty-seven cousins in New Zealand. It is all the more marvelous because most of those famous and ferocious fight- ers of the ancient era trained on wines, liquors and cigars, delicacies that are not allowed at the training tables of our pam- pered weaklings of the present day. Pos- sibly this may be a partial explanation of the dreadful state of pugilism at present Reapy To SHoor Mance: How are you getting along with your automobile lessons? Mince: Wonderfully! Today I learned how to aim the thing. which is so mourned by oldtime fight fans. Hand out the cigars and pass around the liquor. Give our modern lads a chance to equal the great feats of their rugged forbears. Open a case of champagne and let the boys get down to serious training. There are probably a hundred fighters now for every fighter in those “good old days.” The financial rewards for success are astounding. With so much to strive for and with so many more striving for it, one would think that the fighters would im. prove just as the players at all other sports ave improved; but hark to the oldtime fight fan: “T aint so!” Well, that settles it. In the modern era we have had Bobby Jones in golf, Bill Tilden in tennis, Babe Ruth in baseball, Devereux Milburn and Tommy Hitch. cock in polo, and Nurmi, Wykoff, Pad- dock, Hahn, Seraphin Martin and Sabin Carr in track and field, but we have no John L. Sullivan or Peter Jackson or Joe Walcott or John C. Heenan in the ring. They were the great fighters and our modern leather-push- ers are poor, sickly specimens by com- parison, How do you prove it? Why, you just keep saying it so often and so loud that nobody dares dispute you. If a couple of the ancient heroes went a hun- dred rounds to a drawn battle, it was because they had such tremendous courage and endurance that neither could knock the other out. If two modern fighters go ten rounds, it’s because neither one can punch hard enough to knock a boy off a bicycle. If Sullivan laid his man flat, it was because he had a devastating punch. If a modern fighter scores a knockout, it is solely due to the fact that his opponent has a glass jaw or congenital sleeping sickness. It's a great line of argument and by the same method of reasoning it would be casy to prove that the discovery of elec- tricity was a horrible mistake and the in- vention of the steam engine a fatal event in the history of the human race. John Kieran. SUCCESSFUL FAILURES Boss: So you want me to hire you as general efficiency man and business ad- viser. I suppose you have references from your former employers Appticant: I am sorry, sir, but the last three places I worked are no longer in business. comicbooks.com aft