Fisticuffs & Colonels

"I'm telling you and I'm telling him just what I'm going to do. I'm going to wrap it all up in one package and let him have it in the first round. . . ."--Max Baer, in Speculator, N. Y. where a grandstand at his training camp last week collapsed, injuring 60 people.

"I figure I can hit him while he's cranking up his right. I think I'll knock him out, cold. I figure I can knock anybody out cold. . . ."--Joe Louis, in Pompton Lakes, N. J.

Statements like these last week, two weeks before Max Baer and Joe Louis come to blows in New York, were a fair sample of the ballyhoo which has for the last month preceded the most exciting prizefight since Dempsey met Tunney in 1927. Whether newspapers publicize prizefights because the public likes fights or whether the public likes fights because the newspapers publicize them is one of the many riddles of pugilism. No riddle is the fact that while newspaper readers were last week absorbing the details of Negro Louis' romance with a dusky Chicago stenographer named Marva Trotter, whom he said he planned to marry the day after the fight, ticket sales approached $500,000. Two weeks before the customary time for this stage of their activities, reporters last week began canvassing celebrities for their opinions.

Said onetime Champion Jack Dempsey: "I've got to like Baer. No one knows whether Louis can take it. . . ."

Said onetime Champion Jim Jeffries: "Baer is terrible. If Louis is half as good as they say, he's due to win. . . ."

Odds last week were 7-to-5 on Louis.

Meanwhile last week another fight which will be fought the same day as the Baer v. Louis engagement with equal significance to prizefight enthusiasts was receiving no ballyhoo at all. This was the fight between Colonel John S. Hammond, board chairman and principal stockholder of Madison Square Garden Corp., and Colonel John Reed Kilpatrick, president and lesser stockholder, for control of the No. 1 sports-promoting organization in the U. S.

In 1927 Madison Square Garden made $1,000,000, mostly from boxing. Last year it made $180,000, mostly from hockey. This year a new organization called the Twentieth Century Sporting Club, by promoting the Louis v. Baer fight and the Louis v. Carnera and Louis v. Levinsky fights which preceded it, has far outdistanced the Garden as a matchmaking organization. That this sad state of affairs is due to the way the Garden has been managed by President Kilpatrick is the contention of Board Chairman Hammond who hopes to oust him at next week's stockholders' meeting.

A West Point graduate who first met the Garden's late famed Tex Rickard in the Argentine, persuaded him to install hockey at Madison Square Garden in 1925, John S. Hammond was ousted from the Garden's vice-presidency in 1932, bought control in 1934, had himself made board chairman. His principal interest remains hockey, not prizefights. A one-time All-America Yale footballer who enlisted in the Army in 1916, got the Croix de Guerre and the Distinguished Service Medal during the War, John Reed Kilpatrick was put in as president of the Garden in 1933, has been bucking Colonel Hammond ever since the latter became board chairman. Last year Madison Square Garden did not run at a loss as it did the year before. That it has nonetheless lost most of its prestige in pugilism is due largely to the efforts of Rickard's onetime right-hand man, Ticket Speculator Mike Jacobs, who this year set up, with Hearst newspaper backing, his Twentieth Century Sporting Club, which has no indoor arena. Its big outdoor fights are staged in Manhattan baseball parks, in which Madison Square Garden held the boxing franchise until it built its own outdoor Bowl in Long Island City three years ago.

That Twentieth Century is currently kingpin among prizefight promoters is not based solely upon this summer's fights. Promoter Jacobs may have a contract with onetime Champion Max Schmeling to fight the winner of Baer v. Louis next year. To match this the Garden has only Champion James J. Braddock, generally considered sure to lose his title in his next fight. That the Garden will have to find better ways than it has heretofore of dealing with Twentieth Century--either by competing efficiently or conceding defeat and renting out its boxing concession --was clear last week.

Which course it will take, and how, will depend upon whether Colonel Hammond has enough proxies to oust Colonel Kilpatrick at next week's meeting.

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