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wide, swooping hooks. Possibly because Roberts was “pacing himself,” several of these nailed him. If he had been coming in as fast as before, he might have got inside them. (“I should of throwed short hooks,” Dennis said. “They would of been even better. But I must have didn’t do so bad, because they all applaused me.”) In the eighth, Roberts came right back at him, and when the judges and referee agreed to call the fight a draw, everybody was happy—“Hook ‘n’ stick” as well as “Stick ‘n’ hook.” The general satisfaction was shared by the two managers, each of whom must have thought several times during the battle that he had let his colleague outsmart him. Whitey, who identifies himself with his charges, said with some heat, the next time I met him in the Neutral, “I thought we win it,” but Jimmy August, who was there, too, said, “Ain’t that funny? I thought we win it.”

There was a corking club fight after that, in which the chunky young Brooklyn middleweight named Rinzy Nocero beat a red-haired Negro known as Castiron Tommy Dixon, by a decision that might as well have been a draw. But the workmanship was not of the same excellence. The windup fight, between the Yorkville fellow, Irwin Schulz, and a colored middleweight named Bobby Moore, from Newark, was the least exciting of the lot—Moore won it easily—but as the matchmaker, McKenna, said later, it wouldn’t have looked so bad if it had been on before the other two. The gate money, McKenna said, had just about covered the purse distributions and the expenses—the show had drawn a net of twenty-six hundred dollars, at two dollars and four dollars a seat—but the advertising in the M.B.A. journal had cleared a profit.

The next morning, I looked at the Mirror, the News, the Times, and the Herald Tribune, and all any of them said about the fight was that Earl Dennis, 1431/2, and Ernie Roberts, 1441/2, had fought a draw.

Debut of a Seasoned Artist

In a previous sequel to the works of Pierce Egan, the Philippe de Commines of the London prize ring, I felt impelled to chronicle the misadventure of Hurricane Jackson, an unfortunate pugilist with four uncoordinated limbs and three mutually antipathetic managers. I was therefore delighted to hear, after the public demolition of Mr. Jackson, that the next event of importance at air-cooled Madison Square Garden would be the at-long-last debut there of Archie Moore, by popular report the very antithesis of the Hurricane. Moore was an aging academician—thirty-seven, to be precise—of such celebrity that young fighters came from the very Antipodes to study at his feet, which is where they frequently landed. For several years I had been hearing about Moore, a virtuoso of anachronistic perfection in an age when boxers in general are hurried along like artificially ripened tomatoes, and with similarly unsatisfactory results. Moore’s art was said to be the product of a fortunate mixture of genius and moderate adversity. (In the growth of any artist, an essential element is a correct dosage of calamity. If the adversity is too adverse, he has to seek work at some useful trade; if it is not adverse enough, he gets a swelled head.) Moore’s adversity had taken the form of never getting a big match in New York, which is why I had not seen him. But eighteen years of provincial appearances had kept him in pocket money, and he had even picked up the light-heavyweight championship by defeating Joey Maxim in St. Louis in 1952. St. Louis is Moore’s native city, but it has never been suggested that chauvinism affected the decision. Members of the Moore cult thought Maxim hardly worthy of appearing on a Moore program. “It would be like Casadesus playing ‘Liebe-straume,’” one of them said to me when the match was first suggested. Since then, Moore has given finished interpretations of Maxim in return bouts in Ogden, Utah, and Miami, Florida.

The opponent announced for Moore’s Garden debut was Harold Johnson, of Philadelphia, rated by the National Boxing Association as the No. 2 light heavyweight of the country. Like Maxim, he was a slightly hackneyed