Berlenbach vs. McTigue

At midnight, in the middle of a baseball lot on the outskirts of Manhattan, stood a squat man in a blue suit. He lifted up his face toward the dark cave of a stadium risen out of a cigaret smoke, peopled with 40,000 ghouls. Enormous lights concentrated their white, sterile fire upon his stubby head. On each side of him, in the opposite corners of a roped square, sat a boxer. On his right was a young German, whose heavy, amazed face protruded from the folds of a bathrobe that concealed a torso bulging with incredible dorsal muscles, a pair of clumsy thighs. On his left sat an old Irishman, tired and sly, with a streak of blood like a scarlet worm running down his chin from the corner of his mouth. The ghouls waited. This man in the blue suit stood before them to announce a decision. He did so, when he felt that the drama of his pause had reached its climax, by sharply raising one of his hands. Instantly, from the smoky caves, came a great hooting.

Those who hooted had seen this Irishman, Mike McTigue, light-heavyweight champion of the world, retreat all evening before Paul ("Punch 'em") Berlenbach of Astoria, L. I., who followed him with the angry obstinacy of an animal whose insignificant brain was fogged by the fumes of his very adequate blood. They had seen the Irishman's left hand flicker in the face of the assaulting one; they had seen him, in the sixth round, swing his right hand twice to Berlenbach's jaw, at which the latter sank to his knees, his cloudy face even cloudier. A bell had rung then, and Burly Berlenbach got to his corner and the smelling salts. But, after that, McTigue seemed very tired. His debonair red trunks were soggy and dark with sweat. Still he retreated, always faster than Berlenbach, ducking, rocking, pulling away. His right hand, broken long ago, was little use to him. At the end of the bout, it was the young German whose legs sagged, the old Irishman who seemed fresh; and, though he knew, as he sat staring at the squat announcer in the blue suit, that he haa been bested, he knew also that he had been the cleverer of the two, that he had put up a gallant defense. He did not think that they would take his title away on so slight a margin. Neither did the 40,000 smoke-veiled phantoms. That is why they booed when the squat man raised his right hand, gave the title to Berlenbach.

The hooters, the booers, who walked to the exits across the transformed baseball diamond, consoled themselves with the reflection that they had seen, that evening, at least one light-heavyweight who knew how to box. Neither Berlenbach nor McTigue was this one, but an adolescent named Jimmy Slattery,* who knocked out Jack ("Bulldog") Burke, Dempsey's best sparring partner, in a round and a half of the third preliminary. He was so fast that he never lifted his hands from his sides to parry, struck with his wrists slack and whippy until the moment of impact. The beauty of his bright, merciless speed made grizzled gentlemen at the ringside mutter of Kid McCoy, of Jim Corbett. They heard that this Slattery was still growing. "Three years from date . . . ," they said.

* Twenty years old.