Revival

Since prizefighting has been enjoying a private and acute depression of its own, strenuous means of ballyhoo were required for the meeting of World's Champion Max Siegfried Adolf Otto Schmeling, German printer, and William Lawrence ("Young") Stribling of Georgia. Stribling, an able if eccentric aviator, borrowed a plane from Cleveland airport and flew it 90 miles from his training camp at Geauga Lake Park, Ohio to Schmeling's training camp at Conneaut Lake Park, Pa. Here he flew low, shouted: "Yeah, Maxie!" and flew away again. Other exciting training camp incidents were few. Reporters assigned to the Stribling camp were compelled to interview the numerous members of the fighter's family (mother, father, brother).

Nonetheless, since a big fight is always a social event of sorts, trains, planes, and autos were crowded going into Cleveland last week. A yacht brought Wisconsin's dapper young Senator La Follette; a plane brought Edsel Ford; trains brought Chicago's Mayor Cermak, onetime Heavyweight Champions James J.Corbett (1892-97), James J. Jeffries (1899-1905), James Joseph Tunney (1926-28). Bobby Jones, who had been at Toledo to watch the Open golf championship (see p. 24), came over for the weekend. But trains and autos failed to bring the expected big crowds of noncelebrities.

There were approximately 35,000 people in the huge dark horseshoe of Cleveland's new Municipal Stadium when the fighters, almost unnoticed, got into the ring. In the first rounds, Stribling seemed to have deserted his customary and tedious method of embracing an opponent and pushing him around the ring. He tried to hit Schmeling with left jabs and hard rights to the face. He succeeded frequently. Schmeling kept coming in, grinned ostentatiously whenever hit, swung his short hard right at Stribling's head and body.

After the fifth round, Stribling had apparently made up his mind that the best he could do was to keep from being knocked out. He began to lead punches that served no purpose beyond enabling him to get close to Schmeling and hold his arms. In the tenth round, he hit Stribling with short lefts and rights to the face, heard his manager, who had taken the cigar out of his mouth, shouting, "Go on Max, you've got him!" Stribling was still on his feet when the round ended.

When the fighters touched hands at the beginning of the fifteenth, Stribling's face was smeared with blood, his mouth was cut and swollen, his left eye had begun to draw together bruised and dark like the halves of a musselshell. He tried to clinch immediately but after two minutes of fighting Schmeling landed the right he had been trying for all through the fight. Stribling fell on his face, got up when the referee had counted nine. He tried to clinch again. When the referee saw that Stribling, leaning in, was supported almost entirely by the punches Schmeling was pouring into his face, he stepped between the fighters and raised Schmeling's hand, ending the fight by a technical knockout 14 seconds before it would have ended otherwise.

Radio descriptions by gruesome Graham McNamee, breathless Floyd Gibbons and a tough-tongued fight expert named Sam Taub, made the fight sound more exciting than it was. Schmeling, pleased at vindicating his right to the championship, and at being paid 40% ($106,138.36) of the gate receipts said: "I am a very happy boy!" He planned a quick trip home, perhaps another fight in September. Madison Square Garden Corp. acquired a deficit of $23,000, but expected to recoup on the stimulus to prizefighting provided by the first good, big fight in two years.

In Reno, Nev., a crowd of 18,000 attended Reno's first big fight since Jack Johnson beat Jim Jeffries on July 4, 1910. The fighters were Paulino Uzcudun, golden-toothed wine-bibbing Pyrenean lumberjack, and Max Baer, reckless young Californian who once killed an opponent with punches. The U. S. rules were relaxed, to permit almost any kind of fighting. After 19 rounds of ordinary gut-thumping and jaw-bashing, unconventional kidney-pounding and neck-hacking, cruel and unusual heeling, gouging, wrestling, butting and arm-twisting, Jack Demp- sey, the promoter and referee, said the fight was even, the next round would decide it. After the 20th round, he raised the arm of Paulino Uzcudun, who could scarcely have raised it by himself.

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