—and quite a nice one, too—was Glenna Collett, the National Women’s Amateur golf champion. Brown’s Iron Men had just gone undefeated through the football season of 1926, and the Providence Steamrollers won the professional-football championship in 1927. Gus Sonnenberg, the Steamrollers’ star tackle, was flattening visiting wrestlers every week in the Arcadia Ballroom by a tactic of almost miraculous simplicity—butting them in the belly. But the town had never produced a world’s boxing champion. It was not for lack of aspirants; the weekly amateur tournaments at the Arcadia dance hall drew crowded entry lists. Nor was it for lack of scheming—there were more old fighters around than you could shake a towel at, all saturated with good counsel and looking for a likely young ear to pour it into. There was a shining example of ringcraft to observe; a Providence boxer called Young Montreal—his real name was Maurice Billingkoff—who had boxed six world’s bantamweight champions and, according to local belief, beaten them all. He had beaten three even according to the record book, and had boxed no-decision bouts with two of the others; unfortunately, he had never been able to beat one of these fellows at the precise moment when the fellow was holding the championship. When I saw Young Montreal, he was past his prime but still a most elusive, exasperating man in the ring. He was bald and had red freckles and pipestem arms, and in his pugilistic old age I saw him make a fool of Bud Taylor, one of the hardest punchers who ever lived. I was on the city side then, but I could usually get a free ticket from the sports department. It has always seemed to me a historic injustice that Monty never held a title—something like Gustave Flaubert’s failure to receive an invitation from the Académie Française. While I was in Providence, a young featherweight named Ernie Mandell showed promise—he was a good, graceful boxer—but he got knocked out by a Filipino from Cleveland, and never did much after that. And in the twenty-six years that have passed since my departure from that tranquil town, it has produced perhaps a dozen fair fighters, but never one who went all the way to a title.
A few years ago a cellist and former journalistic confrere of mine who still lives in Providence told me there was a lightweight boxer up there who showed signs of real virtuosity. The boy’s name, he said, was George Araujo, and since the cellist himself had been an amateur boxer of some technical capacity when I first knew him, I made a mental note of it. From time to time after that, I saw wire-service stories about Araujo on the sports pages, their progressively increasing prominence reflecting his rise, and then I read that he was matched to fight the lightweight champion, Jimmy Carter, for the world’s title, at one hundred and thirty-five pounds, in Madison Square Garden on the night of June 12, 1953.
The lightweight class has been in a decline in recent years, for reasons as hard to explain as the non-appearance of bluefish in seasons when they are expected. My learned friend Whitey Bimstein has attributed the extinction of good “bantyweights”—hundred-and-eighteen-pound professionals—to the increase in the stature of the human race, but there are still great numbers of young men visible who stand, say five feet six or seven inches and can do a hundred and thirty-five, which is the lightweight limit. Because of the drop in the class’s prestige, the Carter—Araujo bout did not get the publicity buildup that a lightweight-championship fight would have got in the days of Benny Leonard, who drew nearly half a million dollars into the Yankee Stadium when he fought Lew Tendler there in 1923, or even in the late thirties, when there were lightweights around like Tony Canzoneri, Barney Ross, Henry Armstrong, and Lou Ambers. Instead of writing about the match for weeks in advance, as they did when the middleweights Randy Turpin and Ray Robinson were to fight here in 1951, and when Rocky Marciano was to fight Jersey Joe Walcott, the sports columnists waited until the last