Uzcudun v. Wills

A tall black perpendicular shadow moved out of the murk of a cloudy night last week in Brooklyn, into a glaring arena, a boxing ring. Soon it slid back into the murk, horizontally. It, the shadow, was the ghost of the reputation as a heavyweight fighter of Harry Wills, onetime Negro stevedore, now an affluent Negro bank depositor. The horizontal departure of Mr. Wills's shadow was effected by a grotesque human with thicket eyebrows, a blasted mouth and arms and legs like bent ingots--Paolino Uzcudun, woodchopper from the Basque country (southwest France). M. Uzcudun, not bothering to protect his already hopeless face from Mr. Wills's outlashing fists, waited until the fourth round to bash Mr. Wills over backwards against the ropes, down on the floor, down on the floor again. Then M. Uzcudun lay on the floor himself, flipped himself erect with a comic leer and said: "Paolino Uzcudun, champion du monde!" Champion du monde (of the world) he was anything but, having demonstrated very little except that Mr. Wills is a total anachronism. Josef Paul Cukoschay (Jack Sharkey), Boston sailor, demonstrated the same thing some months ago (TIME, Oct. 25). At that time, all that Mr. Sharkey won was the right to meet Mike McTigue (TIME, March 14); from whom he won the right to meet his fellow Bostonian, Edward James Maloney; from whom he won the right to meet onetime Champion Jack Dempsey; from whom, last week, he was getting ready to try to win the right to meet Gene Tunney, actual champion du monde.