Fighting Frenchman

After many a summer, a foreign fighter reached the U.S. without bringing along a glass chin and a pair of collapsible knees. In smoke-hazy Madison Square Garden, hairy-chested Marcel Cerdan, middleweight champion of Europe, danced out from his corner last week and swung like a Normandy windmill. George Abrams, one of the top four U.S. middleweights, looked surprised and swung back. For the next ten rounds they fought it out. Then they waited vacant-eyed and with blood trickling down their faces while the ballots were collected. The winner, to no one's surprise but Abrams', was Frenchman Marcel Cerdan.

In his first U.S. fight, Cerdan proved to be what is known in the trade as a "club fighter," always boring in, fists flying. The crowd loved it, especially when one of his haymakers made Abrams' knees buckle. Cerdan's favorite target: George Abrams' stomach.

Polite, 159-lb. Marcel Cerdan, already 30, never wears himself out training. In wartime Europe, where there was no time for the elaborate kind of training that U.S. fighters indulge in, Marcel's manager would hold up his hands, palms held outward, and let Marcel punch at them. Marcel trained like that when the Germans in occupied France ordered him to fight Jose Ferrer,* the Spanish champion, in 1942. He knocked out the Spaniard in 82 seconds, shortly afterward turned up in North Africa and joined the Free French navy. Among Marcel Cerdan's 96 victories (against two defeats, no knockouts), was an easy triumph in the Inter-Allied boxing championships in Italy two years ago.

Paris fight fans, who gather at a tawdry nightclub called the Club des Cinq, heard the news at 5 a.m. Georges Carpentier, a not so galvanizing Gaul who once suffered deeply at the hands of Jack Dempsey, slapped the nightclub manager so vigorously on the back that the manager passed out and had to be revived with his own champagne.

With his cut of the gate ($20,000) and six stitches over his left eye, Marcel Cerdan headed back to spend Christmas with his family in Casablanca. He will return next year, for a probable chance at the middleweight title, and some more Yankee dollars.

* Not to be confused with U.S. Actor Jose Ferrer (Cyrano de Bergerac), no kin.

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