Fisticuffs

Last week there were two championship fights -- one won by the challenger, the other by the cham pion. Featherweight. In Hartford, Conn., a small ugly Jew, Louis ("Kid") Kaplan, champion, struck a small ugly Latin, Robert Garcia, chal lenger, in the ribs with his fist and knocked him down. The Italian got up. Kaplan administered a long left hook. The Italian fell down, got up. Kaplan applied an other left to the body. The Italian fell down. It was obvious that he could rise no more, but at that instant the loud and insistent ringing of a bell informed his sup porters that the round was over and that it behooved them to purvey their battered advocate to his cor ner. In the ninth round Kaplan knocked him down three times, and once more in the tenth. The referee, seeing that Garcia was al ready rising on one knee to go in search of further injury, stopped the bout. Lightweight. When Benjamin Leonard, nonpareil of lightweights, retired from the ring at the top of his hour, the successor to his crown proved ultimately to be Rocky Kansas, of Buffalo. This Kansas, whose real name was left behind in some alley of his white boyhood, is a scarred workman, 35 years old, who has devoted approximately two-thirds of his life to the trade of fistic war. He is not beau tiful. He is not agile. He is not even particularly strong, but long hours spent in the practice of his profession have given this virtue: he is hard to hurt. He absorbs, without feeling them, blows that would decimate an ordinary citizen. He was not afraid of little Samuel Mandell, a street-shiek of 22 with oiled hair and a nice smile, who confronted him in a rainy ball park in Chicago last week. Mandell kept popping left jabs into his face; even a very ordinary citizen could have hit harder than that, and Kansas smiled his rocky smile. Yet, after he had endured ten rounds of slapping and cuffing, waiting for a chance to land a real blow, the referee gave the bout, the championship, to Samuel Mandell.