Louis Phal

On a clear winter midnight last week, a patrolman standing in the shadow of a doorway on West 42nd St., Manhattan, saw a figure proceeding irregularly toward him, now with a kittenish skip, now with a wobbling adaptation of a popular dance-step, now with a stride that sagged curiously sideways. The patrolman stepped out of shadow. The night-wanderer raised a hand in genial recognition.

"Hi, boy," he remarked. "I'm on my way home."

The patrolman grunted. "Keep on your way," he responded without warmth, "and don't forget that's where you're going."

The lurcher--revealed by a street light as a big blackamoor in a stiff shirt (badly smutted) and a dented plug-hat--beamed amiably and continued his uncertain gambol up the empty street.

Two hours later the patrolman's attention was arrested by a crimson puddle of blood that spread its darkening stain over the flagstones at No. 346 West 41st St. A hundred feet from the corner the Negro lay in the gutter with two bullet holes in his body. Patrolman Meehan glanced casually at the black, distorted face, and then stepped to the telephone to inform his captain that the person known to the police as Louis Phal, and to the public as Battling Siki, once light- heavyweight champion of the world, had been shot to death.

An octoroon from Memphis, Tenn., identified the body in the morgue. She, Mrs. Lillian Werner Phal, legally married to Siki in 1924, bound up her head in a wet towel and told reporters about her husband. She did not dwell upon his recent carousals--that he was arrested five months ago for attempting to kill a policeman with a knife; that the U. S. Government has for some time been trying anxiously to deport him, and the French Government as anxiously refusing to take him back. Instead, she spoke with affection of his domestic qualities:

". . . He used to do all the cooking and clean the house and help me with the washing. He scrubbed and wrung the clothes. Then we used to sit in front of the radio when there was a fight broadcast and hug each other when his man was winning. . +. Oh, he was a fine boy. He wouldn't hurt anyone. . . . Just mischievous. . . ."

And Manhattan Senegalese who went to gaze at their murdered idol remembered creditable things of Battling Siki. They remembered how during the War he was mustered into the French Army--an ebony-muscled bully-boy of 18, with a jungle smile and an arm like an ironwood tree. He was given a musket with a long knife on the end of it and told to do thus and so to all who wore a certain uniform. Siki grasped his instructions so capably that, although wounded with shrapnel and bay- onets, he won the Croix de Guerre, two palms, Medaille Militaire, seven citations for conspicuous bravery in action.

In order to get favor with white people, he found one had merely to fight. Accordingly, when the War was over, he started to earn his living in the prize-ring. His naive but effective antics made him a good drawing card, and before long he found himself standing under enormous arc lights in the Velodrome Buffalo in Paris while 50,-000 people shrieked and Georges Carpentier, "Gorgeous Orchid Man," world's light-heavyweight champion, twisted helplessly at his feet.

After that he was the idol of the boulevards. He had animal pets--two great hounds and a pure whita ass. He swaggered through tha streets with a monkey on each shoulder, throwing money right and left. The greatest night of his life was that on which he entered a famous cabaret leading a lion on a leash, with the consequence that strong men hurried for the exits, the daughters of U. S. millionaires stood on chairs and screamed, and the gendarmes were called out. . . .

Again, Irish policemen were called out in Dublin on St. Patrick s Day, 1923, when Siki met crafty Mike McTigue, and lost his title (TIME, Mar. 24, 1923).

The rest of his brief career was writ in firewater. He proclaimed that he was the only fighter alive who could train on brandy with champagne for a chaser, and leered with drunken merriment at Paul Berlenbach until that pug-ugly pounded him unconscious last win-ter--Siki's last important ring appearance. He fell to fighting ham-and-eggers for pick-up stakes. Soon no promoter would bill him at all, and he took to exercising his fists in the grubbier night clubs of that part of Manhattan known to detectives as Hell's Kitchen. The police believe that he was shot by a bootlegger to whom he owed $20.

In Paris, Georges Carpentier, told of Battling Siki's death, said:

"It seems a pity, that an athlete of such magnificent gifts should have met with this end. The time has passed when boxers can indulge in drinking and carousing and. be champions. I only hope poor Siki's fate will be a lesson to aspiring pugilists."