The Wilmington morning star., 1947-10-07
AS Pegler Sees 1t
BY WEsTBROOK PEGLER
Copyright, 1947, By King Features
Syndicate, Inc.)

NEW YORK, Oct. 6.-At the end of the
first big war there was so little territory
eft in the United States in which prize
fighting and racing were permitted that
one could say that these old, disorderly
pleasures had been reduced to little pock-
cts of resistance. Prizefighting had been
illegal even in Chicago, which always has
been a tough town. ever since 1908 or
thereabouts. I am not a buck ingenue,
myself. AS a scrawny little sprout in Ex-
c%elsior, Mimi, I had goggled at the
scratchy, Pickering movies of the Corbett-
Fitzsimmons fight taken in Carson City,
New, in 1897. incidentally, this fight had
been chivvied all over the wild and woolly
west of that day because the hardy from
tiersmen regarded it as an obscene, pro-
ceeding, and a retreat toward the twill ght
of the dawn of civilization.
1t finally landed in Carson City when
the governor of Nevada gave it refuge for
the sake Of the money it would attract,
but with something of the air of the minis
ter who buried the actor from the Little
Church Around the Corner. George Siler,
the referee, whose name appeared over
L1G STORY OIL the llSIC Ill LIE 1IllCdSO lI1U-
une, said with a note of haunting pride,
that many persons of wealth and distinc-
ton were seen at the ringside. Reading
this piece about the time of the second
of the Tunney-Dempsey spectacles in Chi
cago, in 1927, l was impressed by the ex-
~cellence of Mr.. Siler's journalism and nice
ly surprised, too, because l had never re-
garded him as a mar implicated in oeautl-
full letters. But Jack Curley. a versatile
1,1rf1,or orl n blvd m told mo tho
actually, he had written this article and
others by Mr.. Siler and much more about
tat quaint event in the desert frontier
which is simply lost now because nobody
ever took the trouble to put it down. The
ringside seats were $50, a spectacular
price and never to be equalled, I believe,
until Jess Willard won or by other process
acquired the heavyweight championship
from Jack Johnson in Havana in 1915.
Mr.. Curley promoted that offense against
our continental culture.
These were old films of Corbett-Fitzsim-
mons which toured the little circuit of fire
trap town halls and they were very adj
vanced entertainment. The programs 9TH
er wise were magic-lantern shows. My &C
.quaintance with the fight picture came
about the winters of 1902 and 1903. The
Emulsion was taking off by then and the
gladiators under the desert sun looked as
though they were fighting in a p~aradoxical
blizzard. BY the time we moved to Chica-
60 in 1904, l had been seriously corrupted
by this experience and, even at the age of
ten, shifted the air in vain for the tang
of the resin box and the reek of rub stuff.
There was a sallow elevator boy IN the
oscillating cage at the old Chicago Amerl-
can on Madison street who called himself
Chicken Duffy. He came from the Irish
country back of the yards and used to
fight in private" as the phrase went on
the sport pages, which meant in the palm
rooms behind saloons and in a barn near
Aurora where the sheriff appears to have
been not exactly priggish. Tad Dorgan,
the sport page cartoonjst, came barn
storna;ng to Chicago once and covered a
fight in this barn around 1904 and drew
pictures of an amazing bantamWeight
named Young 1zzo. who knocked out a
lightweight. He predicted that Young 1zzo
would have a fine future but I never heard
of him again.
My details will be faulted because most
of such memoirs are matters of unverified
recollection but I believe the police had
stopped prizefighting in Chicago because
CT some mockery enacted by Joe Cans for
the enhancement of Terry McGovern in a
hall or Wabash avenue called Tattersalls.
Cans quit and a city which walked up to
its eyes in sin, with two reservations frank
~ anu dlIIiOSC legally SVOIC u "a lo11Iy
and with gambling houses right up stairs
along Madison and Clark streets, was so
indignant that the in~corrigible sport was
forbidden-forever.
Chicago actually was a frontier town,
although we would nave resented any such
opinion, the more so from a New Yorker.
We had an elevated railway which was a
marvel to thousands of rubes from the
plains and the Masonic temple was q
4o,;a, LioL with a booyv ropfa1 cCrAap
across the lobby to protect the innocent
from suicides.
Racing had been forbidden long ago. l
am not sure 1 ever learned why. 1t was
just a historic memory as bear batting
might nave been recalled vaguely by a
few cackling old liars in England about
then.
New York tolerated prizefi ghting under
a statute called the Frawley law, permit
ting 10 rounds but forbidding decisions so
that the displays could truly be viewed
as sparring matches for the physical bene-
fit of the ~culprits and the cultural profit
of the esthetes around the arena. The de
c~isions'' were given by the sport writers
and a majority of the newspaper opinions
prevailed in the settlement of bets except
when there was a particular agreement to
abide by the decision Of one, three or five
individual journalists. There. was low and
doubtless erroneous gossip that gamblers
sometimes coiled their Shiny tentacles
around the cornerstone of free journalism
in this connection but I wouldn't believe
that.
New Jersey forbade fighting and racing.
Philadelphia tolerated six round, no-deci-
sion fights. We had eight FOUNDERS and
decisions in St. Louis but the decisions
we're given by Harry Sharpe, the referee,
who worked for the Post Dispatch and re-
served his verdicts for his own column
the next day. 1 delighted to disagree with
him savagely because he had a nasty ad-
vantage of us on the other papers. He was
an old fighter, himself, who had gone sixty
or an ro11nds AGAINST some other historic