Sport: Clown into Champion

The heavyweight champion of the work can, by rights, beat anyone who will fight him without weapons. There were last week possibly half a dozen men in the world capable of beating Champion Primo Carnera but it seemed unlikely that Max Adelbert Baer was among them. An exuberant young pugilist who enjoys night life more than fighting, Baer had trained so nonchalantly that a member of the New York State Boxing Commission threatened to have the fight cancelled because the challenger was in such pooi physical condition. Even after a committee of physicians had examined Baer's 210-lb. hulk, pronounced it hale, it seemed improbable that he would be a match for a champion who weighed 50 Ib. more, and stood 4 in. taller than he. Camera had trained with characteristic solemnity. Six weeks of roadwork, six daily rounds of boxing and a Spartan diet made his muscles swell with awesome health when he clambered into his corner of the ring at the Madison Square Garden bowl in Long Island City. When the bell rang for the first round, he lumbered earnestly out of his corner and pushed his left fist inquisitively into Baer's grinning face.

To the crowd of 60.000 Baer's reaction was amazing. With a blow of his right hand, which he swings as if it still held the meat axe with which he used to butcher heifers, he knocked Carnera down.

He knocked Carnera down twice more before the round ended. In the second, he knocked him down three times, made the champion so groggy that when he fell he dragged Baer down with him. In the next seven rounds, Carnera pulled himself together sufficiently to keep his feet on the ground and his guard up. Baer took to walking in with his hands down, laughing at friends in ringside seats, chatting in the clinches. In the tenth round, Baer stopped his clowning and started to floor the champion some more. When Carnera had twice hoisted his monstrous frame to its shaky feet Referee Donovan saw that he was dazed and stepped between the men. Before he could stop the fight, the round was over.