Bruisers and Boxers

An Englishman, Trevor C. Wignall, has written the story* of boxing from the days when fight training consisted of "three doses of salts, three sweats, three vomits, for three weeks, with food three-parts dressed," to the elaborate training camps of today. Strangely enough, the book is written with the sanity, the interest and the respectability of diction that is supposed to belong to literature.

This is what Mr. Wignall has to say of the institution of which he writes the life history: "there have been few epoch-making changes in the two hundred odd years that have passed since pugilism first became a recognized trade. I do not call it a sport. . . . Professional boxers are tradesmen. They whirl their fists to purchase expensive cars or else to buy coffee-stall suppers."

With this disillusioned preface, he sets out on the recital of the great fights and fighters from James Figg, master of "the Foil, Backsword, Cudgel, and Fist" to the redoubtable Dempsey. There were, in the days when the knockout to the point of the chin was still unknown, such colorful fighters as Buckhorse, "singularly unsightly," Jack Slack (the Bristol butcher), Mendoza the Jew (founder of scientific boxing, the first boxer to go on the stage), Mr. Jackson (the first "gentleman" fighter), the Belchers, the Game Chicken, and Daniel Donnelly (an Irishman) of whom it was written:

He died at last from forty-seven Tumblers of punch he drank one even: (O'er-thrown by punch, unharmed by

fist.

He died unbeaten pugilist. Such a buffer as Donnelly Ireland never again will see.

The roster of great names and memorable fights is Bendigo, Sayers and Heenan (coadjustors in the "most memorable fight"), James Mace, John L. Sullivan, Corbett, Bob Fitzsimmons, Jeffries, William Richmond; Peter Jackson, Thomas Molineaux, Jack Johnson--the great Negroes; Carpentier, Beckett, Dempsey . . .

*The story of Boxing--Trevor C. Wignall--Brentano ($6.00).