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By Root 580 0

Their first fight, at Shepperton-Range, near London, on May 17, 1814, moved Egan to rapture. Writing of the third round of their battle, he exclaimed, “Such a complete determined milling round is not to be met with in the Annals of Pugilism, and there was more execution done in it than in many fights of an hour’s length. It was enough to finish any two men. By a correct stop-watch, it continued FOUR MINUTES AND A HALF AND TWELVE SECONDS!” (A round by the rules of those days lasted until one man or the other went down, and half a minute separated the rounds. A round now lasts three minutes.) In the eighth round, “Painter was quite done up, and Oliver finished the contest in prime style.” As evidence of their sincerity, the historian noted, “they were both punished in the extreme, and Painter was quite blind, and his nose beat flat upon his face. Oliver’s body was terribly beaten, his head much disfigured, and one of his eyes nearly closed.”

At the end of six years—things went more slowly then—the men were rematched to fight in the village of North Walsham, twenty miles from Norwich, Painter’s home town. Egan says that the contest “excited an unusual degree of interest in the sporting circles; and numerous parties, for a week previous to the fight, left the Metropolis daily, to be in time to witness this combat.” After a mere fifty-five minutes of rather dull milling—“the punishment that both the combatants received,” Egan skeptically records, “was so truly light for such heavy men that they were up at an early hour the next morning to breakfast”—Painter floored Oliver with “a tremendous blow upon his temple.” Half a minute elapsed—he would have had a minute at the end of one of our rounds—and Oliver didn’t come to. He passed the time sitting on his second’s knee, the custom in an age when stools were not permitted within the ropes. But when Painter had been proclaimed the victor, Oliver “rose (as from a trance) from his second’s knee, and going up to Painter said, ‘I am ready to fight.’ ‘No,’ said Painter, ‘I have won the battle.’” And that was that.”It is true,” says Egan, concluding his account of this ambiguous ending,”that many ill-natured remarks have been made upon the termination of this battle; nay more, that it was positively a X between the combatants. It is the duty of an impartial writer to mention this circumstance; indeed, he could not pass it over. But it is equally his duty to observe that nothing like PROOF has been offered to substantiate it was a X … . At all events, no man possesses a higher character for a deserving well-behaved man in society, whether in Lancashire, London, or Norwich, than NED PAINTER.” By “a X,” Egan meant “a cross.” A “cross fight” was a bout in which one of the combatants had agreed to lose. A “double cross” was one in which the man who had agreed to lose didn’t.

To complete the discomfiture of the fight fans who had traveled all the way from London to see this mystery—and who had mostly bet on Oliver—it was followed by a great downpour of rain. “The hedges were now resorted to, and hundreds sought for shelter even under the slightest sprig or a bush; and those who scampered off to North Walsham had not a dry thread about them long before they reached it. The daffy and eau de vie [gin and brandy] were tossed off like milk, to put the toddlers (who were as exhausted as drowning rats) in spirits.” By “toddlers” Egan meant pedestrians. “In short, the road beggared all description—it was a fine finish to the fight—and the Bonifaces never had such liberal customers before, that they might very fairly exclaim, ‘It is an ill wind that blows nobody good.’”

The annals of the modern ring are not lacking in anecdotes about fights that ended prematurely. Most of them follow the same pattern. Arrived at the ringside, the man who has traveled great distances to get there lowers his head for some trivial reason. He looks up and the fight is over. Practically every ancient who ever told me that he was at the fight between Bob Fitzsimmons and Peter Maher, in 1896, across the Mexican border from