Triple Champion

Last September any fight fan with 40-c- in his pocket could have seen a spindle-shanked little featherweight Negro named Henry Armstrong strutting his stuff in Manhattan's Madison Square Garden. Last week in that same arena, air-conditioned but nonetheless sweltering under floodlights on one of the hottest nights of the year, 20,000 fight fans gladly paid as much as $16.50 a seat to watch the same spindle-shanked little boxer perform.

For in the intervening eleven months, 25-year-old Henry Armstrong had snatched the featherweight (126 Ib.) championship away from Petey Sarron (by a knockout), then, jumping right over the lightweight class, had punched the welterweight (147 Ib.) crown off Barney Ross's head. The first pugilist to hold both the featherweight and the welterweight titles at the same time, ambitious Henry Armstrong last week went back to get Lou Ambers' lightweight (135 Ib.) crown.

A pugilistic freak is Henry Armstrong. A bantamweight from the waist down and a welterweight from the waist up, he has arms as fast as Glenn Cunningham's legs --and just as tireless. He can throw 1,200 punches in a 15-round fight (as he did against Barney Ross last May) and appear no more fatigued than if he had spent an evening at a Harlem shindig. He has fought on an average of twice a month in the past year, has knocked out 35 of his last 38 opponents. Most fight fans agreed that the little Iron Man would hammer Lightweight Champion Lou Ambers into submission in jig time.

A 3-to-1 underdog, Champion Ambers in the early rounds did nothing to raise his reputation. Under a tattoo of blinding punches he crumpled to the canvas at the end of the fifth round. Saved by the bell, he came out for the sixth only to be knocked down again. But at the count of 8, just as the Garden spectators and millions of radio listeners were mentally collecting their bets, Underdog Ambers clambered to his feet.

Somehow Ambers kept on his feet through that round, and the seventh--and the eighth and the ninth and the tenth. The crowd went crazy. By the 13th. when he plainly got the better of Armstrong, who by this time was swinging wildly and forfeiting rounds because of low blows, the Garden was yelling for a game fighter. After the 15th round, when Referee Billy Cavanagh held up Armstrong's arm in victory (a decision boisterously booed from the gallery), Henry Armstrong was so exhausted that he probably could not have pronounced his own title: World's Featherweight -Lightweight -Welterweight Champion.

In his dressing room, the world's first triple ring champion, who had just earned $20,766 in 45 minutes, cracked no smiles. Reason: he had a split lip.

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