[Most of the journal excerpts published on this blog to date deal with descriptions of Army life, musings about society and politics, and the occasional introspective journey. My father’s journals, however, are also filled with critiques of books he read and movies he saw, along with dozens of other wide-ranging topics. The following excerpt is an example — a wry description of the June 19, 1946 World Heavyweight Champion bout between Joe Lewis and Billy Conn, held in Yankee stadium and experienced by my father via radio. The detailed — and amusing — recount of the match speaks well of both the broadcast’s quality and my father’s reporting and writing skill. Perhaps he should have gone into sports writing rather than political journalism. Mike Jacobs, mentioned in the first paragraph, was the Don King of his day, a boxing promoter who exerted near total control over the sport.]
June 20, 1946 (Fort Lawton, WA)
The records set in Yankee stadium last night were not exactly those predicted in the pre-fight ballyhoo. Possibly there was as much interest in the “three-million dollar gate” as there was in the projected controversy between Joe Lewis and Billy Conn. But the gate was a flop, slightly less than two million dollars when the turnstiles stopped clicking. Though this was the second-highest haul in history, it will draw only sneers from Americans, who have no sympathy with second-best performances. Not a few cynical ladies and gents, who have recently been advised in national magazines of the stranglehold which Mike Jacobs holds on prizefighting, will no doubt derive a perverted pleasure from this financial fiasco. The sportswriters, in a sudden burst of honesty, have come as close as possible to biting the hand that feeds them. They have been hard put to find enough adjectives to describe the avariciousness of kindly old “uncle” Mike. A lot of folks get a hell of a kick out of the disappointment of greed, except when they are involved as principal parties in the drama. Of course there’s no possibility that Mike lost money on his show, but certainly his prestige was deflated just a little.
First congratulations should go to Louis, who has always been a great and fair fighter, and who suffered no loss of reputation last night. Second congratulations should go to the thousands of people who could have got into the stadium for a price, and stayed outside instead. And Billy Conn should get some kind of consolation prize for covering more space in eight rounds than any previous challenger or champion, even after deducting from the total distance the six feet which he covered in the final ten seconds.
Billy put up his best fight in the newspaper article which appeared under his name a couple days before he met Louis in the ring. He was full of Irish cockiness as he claimed right out that Louis was as good as a dead pigeon. Louis, of course, mentioned that Conn might be mistaken in this opinion, but not many people took Joe seriously. The idea was fast gaining ground that the champion was practically in his dotage. Conn himself seemed to be making a lot of this notion; he knew he couldn’t whip Louis by trading punches, but apparently he expected the Negro to drop from the sheer exhaustion of the chase. This strategy might have succeeded on a quarter mile track, with no time between rounds. But in the ring Billy kept running into the ropes and couldn’t dodge quite all of the punches that Joe threw at him.
As heavyweight brawls go, this one was a very genteel affair. Billy and Joe obviously remained good friends throughout. A couple of times Billy slipped on a corner and fell to the canvas. Joe simply stepped back and waited for him to regain his feet, being content to score his putout unassisted. Billy kept grinning every time Joe managed to get close enough to jolt him. Possibly he wanted to reassure his backers who expected him to keep out of range until Louis was staggering with weariness. “A mere tactical error,” he seemed to be saying. Then in the eighth round it was a mere tactical error which laid him flat on his back, and for once poor Billy couldn’t manage a grin.
I heard the fight in Seattle at the Servicemen’s’ Center. Approximately a hundred fellows were bunched around the big radio in the second-floor ballroom. Most of them were sailors, since the Fort Lawton authorities, apparently fearing a race riot, had imposed a fifteen percent quota of passes. That sounded to me like a typical example of brass-hat reasoning. The only riotous phenomenon which came to my attention was the laughter the fellows bestowed on the announcer’s description of Conn’s frantic race against time. The fellows got just as many laughs and were far more comfortable than the suckers who paid a hundred bucks for the privilege of shivering in a ringside seat at Yankee Stadium under the assumption that they were going to see a fight.
Paul Davis Journals Blog 