Sport: A Matter of Opinion

Prize fighting is popular because, watching it, civilized people are vicariously purged of their primitive inclinations. Another need that it satisfies becomes evident, not only in the prefight betting, but in the event the outcome is disputable. Onlookers can then enter actual combat, with their opinions. In the Stone Age, a fight was simply a fight, with no nonphysical exchanges before or after. Today a fight stimulates the popular art of debate. Psychologically speaking, the meeting of the country's two second-best physical fighters last week in the Yankee Stadium, Manhattan, was one of the most successful affairs of its kind ever conducted by society.

Of the principals, one was a 194½-pound man, aged 32, of Irish descent—Jack Dempsey. Thick-lipped, splay-nosed, laconic, he was to demonstrate whether or not he could again transform himself into a smashing feline whirlwind in the boxing ring as he could from 1919 to 1926 when he was world's champion heavyweight.

The other was a 196-pounder of Lithuanian descent, Jack Sharkey,* aged 25. Heavily good-looking, bright-eyed, garrulous, he was to prove himself formidable enough to deserve a chance at overpowering the man that whipped Dempsey last autumn, World's Champion Gene Tunney.

Each of these big men boasted he would batter the other unconscious and each—though Sharkey had been coached to check his "killer" instinct and weary Dempsey by skillful boxing—reverted quickly and satisfactorily to the brute soon after the first gong sounded.

They drove their fists into each other savagely, scarcely bothering to protect themselves. Eighty thousand people, swarming around them in the night, bellowed with joy. They drove each other back and forth around their brightly lighted enclosure, grunting, snuffling for breath, dripping sweat and blood. Several million people, listening to an excited radio announcer at the ringside, rocked with excitement. It was, said the announcer, a furious fight, fast and even.

Sharkey, the talkative, was known to be tender of stomach. Dempsey, crouched and persistent, concentrated his hammering on Sharkey's ribs and navel. Sharkey's jabs and swings rained on Dempsey's grimly contorted face, opening wet cuts under both eyes, abrading the truculent jaw.

Some thought Sharkey hit oftenest. Others said Dempsey hit hardest and forced the fight. Sharkey seemed the livelier, Dempsey the stronger, when, in the seventh round, something happened about which cigar stores and drawing-rooms, blind pigs and boudoirs, will never need to stop wrangling.

The man nearest the two fighters at the time, Referee Jack O'Sullivan, described it later:

"There is no question about the punch on the left leg with a right —a punch on Sharkey's left leg by Dempsey's right. It was a sweeping blow which glanced off the leg and it was followed by Dempsey's left to the solar plexus, which was the decisive blow as I saw it. When Sharkey got the solar plexus punch he grunted. Before the solar plexus blow was delivered and after the right landed on Sharkey's left leg, I was stepping in toward the men, saying: 'Watch your punches, Jack.' Then, realizing there were two Jacks, I said: 'I mean you, Dempsey.' Then Dempsey hit the solar plexus blow. Sharkey dropped his right hand and Dempsey hit, him a left on the jaw."

Sharkey fell on his anguished face.