GOOD OR BAD?

Hawke's Bay Tribune, Volume XXII, Issue 193, 30 July 1932, Page 2 (Supplement)

GOOD OR BAD?

THE HARVEY-JOHNSON FIGHT WHAT IS DEMANDED BY THE AVERAGE MAN. TILT AT THE BOXING CRITICS. It is Thursday morning and I have just finished reading every available report of the much-heralded HarveyJohnson fight at the Albert Hall. I admit to being completely befogged. More, I am asking myself if 1 know anything at all about boxing and lighting as an entertainment (writes a contributor to “Boxing”). If the boxing critics are right I have witnessed one of the most classic en-

counters of the age; seen two marvellous fighters, the equal of which 1 may never see again on this mundane sphere; been highly privileged to paytwo guineas for a seat and observe us fine an exhibition of the public art as has been served up to the British public for many years! Even my “guide, philosopher, and triend” in these matters, Mr Ben Bennison, pens a eulogy in one of the London evening papers in which he nails Leu Harvey as a world-beater, praises him to the skies, and urges him to go over and clean up every fighter of his class in the United States! Another critic, writing in the leading morning paper (penny) showers metaphorical kisses on Harvey and elevates him almost into the class of Dempsey or Frankie Klaus or Kid Lewis at his best. They are all the same, these wonderful critics; “father,’ whoever he is, says “tain,” and they all turn together.

One in My Favour. But stay, there is one minor critic, and what he says marches so well with my own opinion that I read his report again and again just to make sure that my eyes are seeing right. “Ludicrous” is the word he employs to describe the main aspects of the fight! And to my mind no other word hits off so well the fight as I saw it from the ringside. I was one of a party of a dozen or more gentlemen and without a single exception they were thoroughly and wholeheartedly disappointed with the efforts of.both then. What did we pay our money to see?

I shall tell you—and it will be in honest English without all the frills and the fineries and the furbelows of the ordinary sporting writer. We saw two men who spent three-quarters of the time in the ring hugging, mauling, and patting each other, lie saw them advance, at the start of every round, lunge clumsily (yes—clumsily) and clinch for long and weary intervals. We saw a poor gentleman in evening dress—anxious and willing to do his duty as a referee to the best of his ability—called upon to exert far more physical! energy than the fighters themselves in his hopeless endeavours to keep them reasonably apart so that they could get on with the business of fighting as against wrestling! Wo heard this gentleman shout “Break!” so often during every single round that an organ accompaniment would have made his performance a pretty good recitative piece of music. We saw a negro who shaped like a scientific and determined boxer, but who denied every fulfilment of the promise he seemed to offer, at one moment or another, during the whole of the fifteen rounds. We saw. a mag-nificently-shaped, highly alert, young Englishman who, not once during the entire evening, did anything at all in the manner of a real champion.

Champions don’t hold, they don’t miss with three out of four punches, and they never hit with both feet off the ground or out of position! Harvey did all these things—and did them repeatedly. The best way to visualise what happened at the Albert Hal! on Wednesday, if you were not there, is to imagine three fighters in the ring all the time—the two protagonists and tho referee, with the referee doing most of the work! At the finish there was no real enthusiasm and the two words 1 heard on every hand on leaving were “Very poor!” varied with such comments as “Terrible!” or “They won’t catch me again for a long, long time!”

A Layman’s View. Mark you, I do not claim to be an expert. 1 only know that I like boxing and fighting as a sport and that I am one of thousands who have recently been brought back to the game after being disgusted with it for years. But unless we arc going to get some real fighting, some genuine colour introduced into much-boomed matches between promlnen! men, an occasional flash of fighting genius, our British promoters are in for another thin time of it. The people with money to spend will simply not roll up in their thousands to see such exhibitions as Harvey and Johnson staged last night. Tn spite of all that the critics say this morning I repeat that it was drab, dull, without one genuine thrill from start to finish. And to write about Len Harvey going over ugaiu to America and cleaning up

there—why, the mere suggestion is fantastic. And Harvey himself knows it, believe me! An Editorial footnote reads as follows: Needless to say, I do not at all agree with our contributor’s view of the fight. It was a keen, tense, battle between two men who were prepared to give nothing away to each other All the same his points of view hold much food for thought, not only on the part of fighters themselves, but the promoters of fight-programmes everywhere. Perhaps some of my readers have points of view on the subject I