BOXING.

New Zealand Illustrated Sporting & Dramatic Review, Issue 1346, 10 February 1916, Page 4

BOXING.

COURAGE AND TEMPERAMENT.

INFLUENCE A BOXER’S CAREER

BOXING AKIN TO WARFARE,

The following article, which recently appeared in London “Sporting Life,’ is well worth reading by boxers and all who are interested in the fistic art: —

“Courage,” said a friend of mine, who is rather inclined to lay down the law, “is either born in a man or it isn’t. If it is there at the start it will be there always; if it isn’t there at the start it never will be.”

A sweeping enough dictum, and, like most generalisations, capable, perhaps, ot a little modification. Men who have a natural shrinking from pain or bodily hurt have before this won the V.C., because by sheer moral force they have made themselves do things which, had they followed the line of least resistance, would never have been attempted, much less accomplished.

Now, boxing is in many respects akin to open warfare; there is present the actual contact with an opponent, and there is the realisation that one must lose and the other must win. And right away through the long history of boxing there have been some men who have almost welcomed punishment, glorifying in the giving and taking of a punch, and there have been others who, while not in the least cowards, have never been at all happy when they were taking a hiding.

So recently as Thursday I saw two boxers, who were just natural fighting men, at the West London Stadium. They were soldiers, and for six rounds they slammed each other, with quarter neither asked for nor given. The fine points and subtleties of the game were not for them; each was out to punch the other fellow hard and often; and that was just what they did. When it was all over, with honours even, a squeamish individual might have been pardoned if he had felt sorry for the two battered gladiators, but he would have been absolutely wasting his sympathy. COURAGE THAT COUNTS.

The pair had enjoyed themselves hugely, as a matter of fact, simply because they liked a “mill” for its own sake. I imagine that some of those present fell to making comparisons between these two fine fellows and some of our stars, who prefer tapping to punching. And yet there would be an element of unfairness in such comparisons. A man cannot really alter his own temperament. The most he can do is to develop and strengthen his weak points; what he cannot do is to put something there that never was there at all. Some may contend that boxing is so much a science that sheer courage is not an all-important factor, and in theory they might make out some sort of a case.

But in practice pluck still counts, as it did when men fought for hours at a time before the Corinthians of the Regency, and were rewarded with a few sovereigns. A boxer has got to be superlatively clever to escape a drubbing always, and when his skill proves insufficient for the time being it is no bad thing for him to have a reserve of bulldog, hanging-on courage to fall back upon. Science and skill are, of course, all-important in boxing, but the sport is not, and never will be, a drawing-room entertainment; it must always call for the masculine virtues of pluck and endurance. If the game ever became so “refined” that those qualities ceased to matter a great deal, then boxing would indeed have fallen from its high estate.

A handful of the faddists would he pleased, for boxing would have become quite “nice,” according to their own peculiar notions of what niceness i s —b U t it would be boxing no longer. By all means keep any suggestion of brutality out of the game; do not put too great a premium on sheer strength at the expense of cleverness, but leave something that is virile and manly in the great game.

A MATTER OF TEMPERAMENT. Certain it is that the man who has an almost contemptuous indifference to pain has still a marked advantage in the ring. For the effects of what we call punishment are twofold. There is the actual bodily hurt of a punch. To a well-trained man this does not mean so much, of course, as to the unfit and unseasoned, but to the sen-

sitive and highly-strung man there is the psychological effect as well, and that often plays tne deuce with him. He receives a pretty hard punch, say, on the point, and though the physical effects are but monetary, he has been punched. And from that point onwards he is perpetually anticipating more punches and dreading them.

“That means he is simply a coward,” you say. Not necessarily. What it does mean is that temperamentally he is not fitted for the boxing game. I suppose we can all recollect a perfect example of this. The records have it that Carpentier knocked out Wells in the first round at the N.S.C. on December 8, 1913. Technically he did knock the Bombardier out, but the punches that accomplishea the process would have been taken with a grin by the two soldiers I saw at the Stadium on Thursday. The true fact should read like this: “Bombardier Wells beat Bombard.er Wells, December 8, 1913.” That is just one instance, and a striking one, of the effects of too much imagination in the boxing ring.

It is by no means easy to tell if a boxer has the sheer fighting spirit or not. There are prominent men in the game to-day whom the general public regard as' dead game, but those who are intimately associated with them know that there is always a danger which nine people out of ten never suspect, and the danger lies in the lack of that very gameness with which public opinion has endowed the boxer. THE LOVE OF A FIGHT.

A year ago our “humanitarian” friends would have held up their hands in shocked alarm if one had written in praise of “the fighting instinct” in connection with boxing. In fact, they did do so, and wrote of “the foul scene” at Olympia when, just a year ago, Carpentier and Gunboat Smith met. Well, times have changed since then. The gentry who talked in this strain have run to safety, thankful, no doubt, that the sons of England have still that selfsame love of a ‘fight. I wonder if, when the war is over, they will slink back and again engage in vilifying better men than themselves, whose great sin is that they have red blood running through their veins. Cannot vou imagine them saying: “Oh, don’t Let us humiliate the Germans; that would be so brutal; they are really nice fellows, properly understood.”

Word from America conveys the information that Jeff Smith, the wellknown American middleweight boxer, who fought several contests in Australia not long ago, took part in a match at Boston on December 7. His last previous battle in America took place over three years ago. This time he had George Chip for an opponent, and once more Smith was concerned iii| an unsatisfactory ending. Doc Almy, of the Boston “Post,” writes: “At the time of the foul, Chip had Smith bleeding from the mouth and the nose and in distress, and a knockout seemed to be close at hand. Smith evidently felt this way about it himself, for several about the ring claim to have heard him say, ‘Let up, will you; I’m all in.’ The request had no effect on Chip, and in his eagerness to end the fray he whipped in left and right to the body. Smith went down. There was a yell of ‘Foul! Foul!’ from his corner, and the referee, Powers (Young Donahue, the retired boxer), ruled against Chip. In my opinion the blow was low, but at that Chip had the battle practically won at the time.” Jack Malaney, of the “Boston Journal,” has his say: “At the time the punch landed it would have taken a very charitable person to say that Smith was having the better of the milling. In the seventh round particularly Smith was away Leh.nd, It is a fact that Smith appeared to be in distress as the finsh of the seventh round drew near. Right at the start of the session Chip landed hard on him several times, and the blows seemed to reach spots vulnerable. Smith’s nose was tapped hard, and the gore flowed freely. About all that Smith did was to try and protect himself and clinch. The foul committed after such a round came at a bad time, for it surely made it appear that Smith was taking advantage of a technicality.” The Boston “Herald” remarks: “Jeff Smith won a cheap victory over George Chip, of Pittsburg, at the opening of the Armory A.C. last night. Smith got the verdict on an alleged foul. The blow was a left hook. Smith said it caught him low. The punch, which was not seen by many of the ringsiders, was nevertheless allowed by the referee. Up to the time the thing ended Chip had decidedly the better o,f the boxing. The foreign title holder”—this term probably because of the manne in which Smith was, most unwarrantably, boosted in Australia as champion middleweight of the world —“was out-boxed and outhit from the time of starting up to the finish of the contest, and, had the fight gone the limit, Chip would have won the verdict. Chip forced the boxing, slugged and punched every

second of the time he was in the ring, while the best Smith was able to do was to hold and stall his way through each round. Once in a while the New Jersey man (Smith) made a flash, and then he showed he was a clever boxer.” The Boston “Globe” viewed the affair in pretty much the same way as the other authorities did. It also says: “That Smith was a beaten man in the sixth round was very evident. The referee heard him ask Chip to let up, and at once warned Smith to go on.”

Carpentier is of the opinion that the war is a lot nearer to an end than most people imagine. He compares the Germans to a boxer who piles up a big lead on points in the first 10 rounds only to be knocked out by one stiff punch in the eleventh. It is not impossible that the young Frenchman had in mind the present Allied offensive when he prophesied that the Allies still packed a kick in one paw. The part aviation is playing in the war is tremendous, he says, writing to the Milwaukee “Leader.” “ My American friends cannot imagine the grandeur, the magnificence, of seeing a field of 50 soaring birds sail out into the sunlight bound for some camp of the Bodies. No one can. I used to think a ring battle was the most grandly spectacular thing imaginable. But, pooh! it is nothing beside feeling yourself soaring in the clou is after a real enemy—not one whom you have knocked out and you can help to his feet and shake hands. There is no handshaking in this ring! To my many American friends, au revoir, and wish with me that I may clinch my match with my adversary—and get the decision.”