Never Sleep Three in a Bed by Max Braithwaite

Author:Max Braithwaite [Braithwaite, Max]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-55199-648-6
Publisher: McClelland & Stewart
Published: 1988-10-31T16:00:00+00:00

And here I must digress a bit, to talk about how fascinated Prince Albert kids were with world sporting events.

It is often assumed that because there were no radios or televisions in 1921, we didn’t know what was going on in the world. This is totally wrong. There was still the telegraph, which could bring us blow-by-blow, or pitch-by-pitch accounts of heavyweight championship fights or world series ball games.

It is the boxing that I remember best. Every kid in Prince Albert knew all about Jack Dempsey and hated his guts. This, of course, was all due to the great publicity campaign developed by his handlers. By making Dempsey the most hated fighter in history they assured a big gate for his fights against Sir Galahad-type challengers. They did everything possible to discredit the champ. His war record was doubtful. He was a killer, an inhuman monster in the ring. Why he even looked like a killer, with his three day growth of beard (he retained it to prevent bleeding, but we didn’t know that), his surly attitude with the press, and the unfair way that he bashed his opponents about.

Well, Dempsey signed to fight Georges Carpentier of France, and I’m sure no sporting event since the days of the Roman gladiators received more publicity. Every day the sports pages were full of it. Carpentier had everything that a Galahad should have. He was handsome, lithe, graceful, modest, clean-living, loving to his mother–and brothers, too, for all we knew. He was smaller than Dempsey, but fast. So fast–I can remember the exact quote–that he could “catch a wild hare”. And he was reputed to have a right-hand punch that could flatten a bull.

We all loved Georges and hated Jack. During the entire spring of 1921 we talked of little else. We staged impromptu boxing matches on the street in which the hero, Georges, always clobbered the rat, Jack. Nobody wanted to play the villain role, of course, and so we had to take turns. Many a kid was content to go home with a bloody nose or thick ear because once again the ogre had been bested.

We followed ail the press reports. By the night of the fight, on July 2, we knew that close to a hundred thousand fight fans, many of them women, would crowd into Boyles thirty-acre field in Jersey City, and pay well over a million and a half dollars to watch the “Manassa Mauler” finally get his come-uppance. There was no doubt that Carpentier would win. Why, didn’t he represent right and goodness and virtue, and didn’t those things always triumph in 1921?

On the night of the fight, half of Prince Albert filled the street in front of the Herald office. From an upstairs window a strong-voiced reporter, using a megaphone, relayed the blow-by-blow account to us as it came in over the wire. It was a festive occasion–men in straw hats, women in long dresses, kids in bare feet. The popcorn vendor, who usually sold

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.