CANNOT TAKE PUNISHMENT

Evening Post, Volume CXXV, Issue 112, 14 May 1938, Page 22

CANNOT TAKE PUNISHMENT

MODERN DAY BOXERS ARE SOFT DO NOT COMPARE WITH OLD TIMERS "With few exceptions, present-day fighters are a bunch of sissies, who can't take the punishment that endeared old-time warriors to fight fans," says an American writer. "In the parlance of the ring, they can dish it out, but they can't take it. And they can't take it because they have the skin you'd love to touch—with a good right hand." , • r

"In the old days, a referee rarely found it necessary to stop a bout to save a man from punishment, but nowadays fights are stopped so often as to be commonplace. It isn't that the referees are more humane today; it's simply because the modern fighter is soft compared to the old timer. Many of our leading fighters today are what is known to the trade as "bleeders." Their skin cuts like a babe's. One .punch and a gash is opened oyer the eye, the lips split, or the nose cut. Some of our "toughest" and gamest heavyweights look as if their faces had been run through a meat chopper after a battle with an ordinary puncher. Even Tommy Farr, the British battler, who prides himself on his toughness, cuts easily. j However, it's worth noting that nol heavweight champion was a softy, i From John L. Sullivan to Joe Louis not one of them was a "bleeder." Possibly that is one good reason they were champions. They were tough enough to battle their way to the top without having their brains scrambled. Even Primo Camera, who was some-

thing of a joke as a fighter, was by no means easy to cut up. - Abe Attell, featherweight fchampion of the world for eight years, and admittedly one of the cleverest boxers who ever drew on a glove, advances

Now, Abe knows what he is talking about when he says the headguard is responsible more than anything else for the number of boxers who are nowwalking on their heels, which is a quaint way the trade has of describing a punch-drunk battler. \ "A young fellow who probably has a pants presser for a manager goes into a gymnasium to train for a fight and first thing he does is put on a headguard like a football player," Abe says. 1 "Next he shoves a big rubber mouthpiece in his face. Then the pants presser rubs vaseline all over his face. "What's the result? He doesn't bother to learn to slip punches with his head or block them with his hands, because he knows the headguard will protect him. "GETS BRAINS KNOCKED OUT." "But when he gets into an actual fight, he hasn't got the headguard and he gets his brains knocked out" Attell is, if anything, even more in- | censed about the mouthpiece than h« is about the headguard, because he insists it is awkward, unnatural, and CUtf off the fighter's breathing, 1 I The ring veterans save their bum!

withering comment for the vawlin* jar* ' "If your wife wants to get her lace soft and pretty she uses vaseline or cold cream, doesn't she?" they ask. "Well, the fighters do the' nme\ thing nowadays. No wonder most,of them look, as if they had been Tun through a meat grinder." "Attell himself and Jack Dempsey and others of the old school certainly did not use vaseline. No, indeed. They washed their facej in brine to toughen the skin, and so well did they suceeed that even today they both have skins like a rhinoceros.