12 Sports Aces, May 1943 — page 63: what you’re looking at

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

00 ree Oe nee Bs 1 Be ene Oe Oe Gorn OH OH GHB OOH never like any punch which lands on the back anyway. Lew switched his tactics and. pushed Cartelli away in the clinches, trying to put him on the spot for a knockout, And in this the fans encouraged him. It was Lew who went on to win. He did not land the knockout, for he did not have experience enough to know how to plan it against a ringwise orthodox type of boxer. But if Lew keeps on listening to the’ fans, he will puneh his way right into their hearts and he will learn enough ring craft to make the big time. For the customers are tired of watching one standard type fighter after another. Men who follow the safe and sane rules and Jook as much alike as if they had come off a factory production line, and who do exactly the same things to each other in exactly the same way night after night. Lew can go on to be a never-for- gotten man like Jack Dillon, Harry Greb and Jack Dempsey, te mention a few. ... r BASKETBALL the fans help the — p layers a lot, too. When Aberdeen Proving Grounds faced Fort Dix in the Garden, it was clear te every fan in the place that Aberdeen was losing because the men took one step too many before setting go of: the apple, Soon the rafters rang with the ery, “Shoot!” Every time that last available _ second arrived, the sheut roared out from three thousand throats. And although it did not turn Aberdeen into a world-beat- ing aggregation, the combined pressure of all those voices did cure that fault for that one night and make things much tougher for Fort Dix. Aberdeen may not have learned any lasting lesson. It is so easy to pose be- fore shooting, to get into that set posi- tion from which the chances of sinking the pill are so great. But the opportunity for an opponent-to prevent the basket is also as great. A team which once forms this habit seldom breaks it; the first game against a soft opponent will com- pletely overcome any cure whieh expe- rience against a hard opponent may have applied. But almost any team can add ten THE CROWD ROARS 61 points per game to its average score by listening to the fans. . In basketball the referee is helped a lot by 4 certain type of spectator. This _bimbo seems to go to the game for no ether purpose than to call fouls from the grandstand. “Look at dat walkin’!” he will yell. “Pickin’ off! Pickin’ offf’ he screams. Basketball has so many rules that if the referee enforced all of them to the letter a high school team with a good foul shooter would be able to beat Long Is- land University. The ref. has to close his eyes to a lot that he sees and try to be fair to both sides. And the fan with his yelling either warns the player so he stops the fouling or makes the fouls so apparent that nobody can kick when the official begins to whistle that player down. There has to be an exception to this help by the fans and hockey is the sport in which to find it. Hockey is one game in which the ac- tion is so fast that before the fan can get out his yell the play has gone down to the other end of the rink and has come back. The fans yell of course. But no two agree upon what to yell. They cannot hold their voices, but their rooting becomes a single high pitched scream which starts with every face-off, explodes with every body check, and sounds like a pack of hounds at the kill when the.puck goes into the netting, In baseball the voice of the fan is the score keeper of the factors which never get into the official records, Is a pitcher tiring? The fans know it long before any manager. Is a player taking too long a lead from first base? The roar of the crowd tells the pitcher that if he makes a real hard try on his cutoff threw, he may get him, and the ball comes over there like a cannon sheot.. Is an outfielder laying in the wrong spot? The denivens of the bleachers soon will put him right. Old John McGraw used te tell his fel- low managers, “Always listen when the crowd tells you that a player is slipping, for they will see it long before veu do.” . Babe Ruth and. Lou Gehrig both hit their hardest when the fams yelled the comichbook (E(9)