Uncle Tom's Nephew

First U.S. prizefighter to compete for the world's heavyweight championship was a Negro named Tom Molineaux. A Virginia slave whose master freed him for knocking out the bully of a neighboring plantation, Molineaux went to England in 1810, fought famed Tom Cribb, gave him a severe thrashing for 30 rounds. In the 31st round, Molineaux fractured his skull against a ring post, lost the fight. Cribb beat him again before a crowd of 40,000 in 1811. The black fisticuffer was found dead in an Irish army barracks in 1818.

Last week the business of avenging the sad affair of Tom Molineaux fell to his great-great-grandnephew, John Henry Lewis, a coffee-colored 21-year-old from Phoenix, Ariz., who is currently light-heavyweight champion of the world. Lewis' opponent in Manhattan's Madison Square Garden was the first Englishman in the past decade deemed worthy of a chance to win such an important title, a tubby-looking, determined young Lancashireman named Jock McAvoy, billed as middleweight and light-heavyweight champion of the British Empire.

In his second U. S. fight three months ago McAvoy distinguished himself by knocking out Middleweight Champion Babe Risko in the first round. Eager to duplicate that achievement, he pounced out of his corner last week when the bell rang for the first round, planted two solid lefts on Lewis' face. Stung but not stunned, Lewis retaliated with a hard right. In the rounds that followed, McAvoy continued to charge his bigger, heavier adversary. Lewis settled down to the strategy of a skillful animal trainer subduing the ferocity of an angry lion cub by poking it in the face with the legs of a chair. When McAvoy led for the face, Lewis jarred him with a left jab. When he fought from a crouch, Lewis used an uppercut or chopped at his ears with a hacking right. After 15 rounds of this, the judges unanimously awarded Lewis the decision.

Great-Great-Granduncle Tom Molineaux, a brother of John Henry Lewis' great-great-grandfather, was by no means the only fighter in his descendants' lineage. John Henry Lewis inherited his profession more directly from a grandfather, who was a heavyweight, his father, who was a featherweight. Two brothers are also prizefighters. Practicing his profession, Lewis' father migrated from Ohio to Los Angeles, trekked back to Phoenix, Ariz., where he opened a gymnasium and taught boxing. John Henry Lewis was ready to enter his father's business at 16. He did so without the preface, customary for such young fisticuffers, of fighting as an amateur. Instead, he took all the professional fights he could find, in the course of which he gradually worked his way up to the top of his class by the time he had acquired his full growth -- 6 ft. & 172 Ib. James J. Braddock, now heavyweight champion of the world, beat him once, lost to him once, considers him the best man he ever fought. Jack Dempsey, who refereed one of his bouts two years ago, called him the best young fighter in the U. S. That was before Dempsey had seen another young Negro fighter, Heavyweight Joe Louis.

The resemblance between Louis and Lewis goes further than their names, which they pronounce alike. Both were born in May 1914. Both have well-to-do Negro managers, a rarity for Negro boxers. Lewis' is Gus Greenlee, whose other interests include the Pittsburgh Crawfords, a Negro professional baseball team. Both are trained by bald Jack Blackburn, famed 30 years ago as a lightweight fighter and currently as a Svengali of Negro pugilists.

Unlike surly, monosyllabic Joe Louis, John Henry Lewis is an affable, talkative young black who spends his spare time shooting pool or picking out popular tunes on a piano, prefers Y.M.C.A.'s to hotels, and, as a souvenir of an adolescence spent in the roughest company in the toughest mining towns of the Southwest, has apparently acquired no more vicious taste than a fondness for vanilla milkshakes. After last week's fight, his first in defense of the title he won from Bob Olin last autumn, Lewis refreshed himself at a soda fountain, retired to his training camp to consider offers for fights in Paris, London, Sydney.

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