BOXING

Gisborne Times, Volume LXXXII, Issue 12538, 27 April 1935, Page 6

BOXING

A FAMOUS EIGHT. FOR WORLD’S CHAMPIONSHIP. Fistic battles of fame will endure, Until the time comes when the last surviving witness of the Jack John-son-Tommy Burns fight at the Sydney Stadium on Boxing Day, 1908, answers the final roll-call, episodes associated with Australia’s lone world’s championship boxing contest will be related. So, recently, I heard two men discussing the fight which Johnson won,, the only (coloured man to hold the heavyweight title off tho Queensberry realm (writes Claiide Corbett, in the Sydney "Sun”). That fight is going on to be 27 years old, but its stirring incidents, belore, during, and after the battle, are still vividly recollected by men who saw it more clearly than any other sporting event which has passed this, way. One of the two men to whom I listened told us how, with powerful binoculars, he watched from a precarious perch on the back row of the "bleachers,” every movement of the fighters in the ring. He could see, he declared, Johnson wincing under the right hand body blows of Burns, taking away that golden smile of the big negro; gold because of the wealth of that metal he had set in his teeth. That man who thought he saw Johnson drawing away from Burns’s body blows was right. I could have told him that Johnson had a rib broken during the fight, and that Burnp knew it! Burns was outclassed, certainly, but even to this day I’ll vouch that he will declare he would have won had not Superintendent of Police .lames Mitchell, late Inspector-General, compelled referee Hugh D. Mclntosh to stop the fight and declare Johnson the winner. Johnson never admitted that he had a broken rib, hut Rndie Unholz. who was one of the big fellow’s seconds, told me tiie day following the fight that he had accompanied Johnson to tho Manly Hospital, where the rib had been strapped upUnholz had no reason’ to concoct the story, and it has often been a subject for the conjecture whether, in the remaining tew rounds, Burns would have been able to land a punch of sufficient weight to make Johnson curl up. I do not think be would have, as Johnson was so much his master, and had piled up such a mass of points that, nothing hut a complete knock-out would have retained the title for tho white race. Another remarkable aftermath o* that fight, which writing this has recalled to me, was the manner in which Burns recovered. In the ring he was a, gory and sorry spectacle, with swollen and bleeding lace. \Ahen it was all over and Burns Bay. that faithful henchman of his, Pat O’Keefe, tho fighting Irish middleweight, prepared a hath consisting entirely of arnica tor him. For hours Burns’s face was bathed by his brother-in-law, Larry Keating, O’Keefe and others. So effective were the ministrations that next day Burns appeared jn Sydney streets with only slight face discolouration and marks. Anybody, not, knowing Burns, would not have believed he was the man who had received such -a battering 24 hours earlier. That only shows that Burns was not so . hardly hurt as Superintendent Mitchell and everybody else believed he was. Burns objected to the fight being stopped, but when the action was taken it seemed the only thing which could have been done. It appeared that Burns Lad reached the limits of endurance.