FIGHTS OF THE PAST.

Wairarapa Daily Times, 10 December 1925, Page 2

FIGHTS OF THE PAST.

SOME FAMOUS MATCHES. THE WORLD’S CHAMPIONSHIP. FITZSIMMONS AND CORBETT. My memories of great lights for the heavyweight championship of the world begin with the tight between Fitzsimmons and Corbett at Carson City, Nevada, nearly :>0 years ago, writes a boxing historian, when the .lank Cornishman gave “Pampadonr Jim,” then at the height of his fame, and undoubtedly one of the cleverest, gamest and most stylish boxers who ever trod alum, a thrashing second only in its relentlessness and its severity to that administered to him by .1. .1. Jeffries, the Ohio boilermaker, at San Francisco, three years later. Writing of that battle years afterwards, Corbett, said: “.I. should have played safe with Fitzsimmons and kept away from him until I. knew he was beaten, us I did when I fought John L. Sullivan. A fighter is foolish to take chances in a big battle when he knows he can beat his opponent by playing safe.’ ’ Almost a, generation afterwards, when ''Fitzsimmons was an old man, I saw him. brought, out to be butchered by Bill Lang, a. fifth-rater. O Boxing, what tilings are done in thy name! Fitzsinv.net s —the man who was never defeated by the greatest middleweights and light-heavyweights of the Co Idea Age of the ring—forced at the end of a glorious career to put a few more coppers into a boxing promoter’s cashbox! Corbett’s' great fight with Jeffries at Coney Island went to 2:1 rounds. Corbett, although heavily outweighted, and nearly ten years older than the boilermaker, then at the peak of his strength and his ferocious hitting power, was easily ahead on points, but there was no respite from the terril.de rain of power-weighted blows that Jeffries ceaselessly directed on his body. Jeffries retired, unbeaten, four years afterwards. Tho tragedy of his attempted ‘ • come-back ’ ’ against Jack Johnson at Reno in 1 DIO was as disastrous, and almost as pitiable, as Fitzsimmons’ defeat at. Sydney a year previously.

One would have tli on‘••lit that Jeffries would have profited I>y tliat lesson, and avoided the smirching of one of tlie greatest ring career in boxing history. Jeffries and Fitzsimmons were 'both dreadful examples of the truth of the saying, ‘‘Youth will he served.'' A third example is fresh in the memory of many. “Who does not recall the exhibition Joe Beckett made of Tommy Burns in London four years ago? Burns, cx-heavyweight champion of the world, a chopping block for Carpentier’s old friend! Perhaps the most . extraordinary thing about the famous light at Sydney in BIOS between Burns and Johnson was that, when the men went into the ring (it was .11 o'clock in the morning) the betting was 4- to 1 on Burns. The light hadn’t gone half a round before it was 4 to 1 on Johnson; at the end of the lir.st round you couldn’t name the odds on the negro. For weeks before the light there had been a lot of bad blood between the men, and, once, nearly a stand-up fight with bare knuckles in the promoter’s office. Very foolish and ill-advised was Burns to talk openly of Johnson’s “yellow streak’’ and to taunt the giant black lighter, and heap every kind of insult on him, both in public and private. The result was that when Johnson got the French-Canndian into the ring he simply cut him to pieces, giving as good as he got and more when it came to swopping compliments (as well as punches) as the fight went on. The police stopped the contest in the fourteenth round; they should have stopped it in the fourth. CAEPEXTiBE v. DEMPSEY. By far the most interesting heavyweight battle of recent years was that at jersey City between Carpentier and 'Dempsey, under the management or Tex nicicard, Napoleon of lignt promoters, on July 2nd, 192]. In actual cusn from Rickard, Dempsey received 1 £715,000 and Carpentier £311,000 —figures which left every other record stone-cold. Dempsey made far more than the money Rickard p.ud him out of that light. His total earnings, it is now well known, exceded £IOO,OO0 —a sum which exceeded the aggregate of all the stakes ever received by Jeffries in his long and! unbeaten record. When I say “unbeaten,’’ I refer, of course, to the days when lie fought Goddard and Peter Jackson, Sharkey and Fitzsimmons, Corbett and Rulilin. Wlmt Jack' Johnson did to him when lie was an old “has been’’ at Reno in 1910 cannot be combed seriously as a light. Except for one elemental moment in the Dempsey-Carpentier light—the second round —when Carpentier put across one of those lightning rights, staggering the champion and knocking him half-way across the ring, Carpentier never had a-chance. He took absolutely murderous body punishment, and in the end collapsed a smashed and beaten man. It would probably be true to soy that the seven greatest heavyweight boxers in ring history have been John u HulHvan, Jim Jeffries, Jack Dempsey, Jake K lira in, Jim- Corbett, Bob Fitzsimmons, and Peter Jackson, with the last two as the greatest of them all.