Big v. Little

One of prize-fighting's many trite adages says that a good big man can beat a good little one. The fight between Jack Sharkey (Josef Paul Cuckoschay) and Michael Patrick ("Mickey") Walker in Boston last week seemed designed to be one more illustration of this adage. Sharkey, a 198-lb. heavyweight, was still considered a good fighter despite sloppy performances against Risko, Christner, Stribling, Scott and World's Heavyweight Champion Max Schmeling. The New York State Boxing Commission considered him good enough to call heavyweight champion of the U. S. Mickey Walker was welterweight, then middleweight champion before his manager Jack Kearns, onetime manager of Jack Dempsey, got him selected as an opponent for Sharkey. Kearns wanted to bet any part of $100,000 that Walker would win; but the odds, when the fighters went into the ring, were 3 to i, with Sharkey the favorite. Sharkey weighed 198 lb., Walker, a little heavier than had been expected, 169.

Openly contemptuous, Sharkey had trained carelessly for the fight but he was careful in the ring. In the first round or two, he sparred cautiously down at little Walker, who strained up at him like a bulldog on its hind-legs at the end of a leash. Sharkey aimed long lefts at Walker's eyes, opened a cut over the left eye in the fifth round.

Walker, his face intermittently sprayed with blood, fought in the way that has caused him to be called, pound for pound, the best fighter in the world. He bobbed, squirmed, charged, wove, ducked, slammed and smashed at Sharkey, trying to hit his face more than his body. He swung in under Sharkey's high guard with what Westbrook Pegler colorfully called "the simian roll of a vaudeville baboon on roller skates." In the seventh round, a right caught Sharkey on the chin. He went back against the ropes, the crowd roaring.

The crowd roared again in the eleventh, when Walker landed with an uppercut and put Sharkey on the ropes again. Sharkey, his face set into lines of exasperation and doubt, let a punch or two go low, rubbed Walker's bad eye with the heel of his glove, "fished" instead of hitting with his left hand which was hurt early in the fight. He rallied in the last rounds, won the 15th and stood shuffling his feet in his corner while the referee spoke to the judges. There was one vote for a draw, one each for Sharkey and Walker. The decision was a draw.

Pleased with what everyone present considered a moral victory, Walker immediately asked for a match with Schmeling. In his dressing room, he learned that his first wife, Mrs. Maude Walker had attached $27,800 of his $42,000 share of the receipts, filed papers accusing him of "almost diabolically inhuman" conduct. Sharkey, taciturn before a fight, always feels very free to talk as soon as he can get his gloves off. Not at all ashamed, he said: "Inactivity beat me. . . . I thought I won. . . . He's nobody's mug and much tougher than Schmeling. . . . I'll fight again in August, if my hand's all right." The New York State Boxing Commission reiterated its strange belief that Sharkey is heavyweight champion. Promoter Jimmy Johnston, delighted with a capacity house, carried forward his plans for a late summer bout between Sharkey & Camera.

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