Benny the Brain

It was the evening's tag-end bout in Manhattan's smoky St. Nicholas Arena, and the fans were paying less attention to the two indifferent welterweights than to the referee. He was Benny Leonard, onetime great lightweight, now a paunchy 51 but still an agile man in the ring. Dancing out of the fighters' way in the first round, he suddenly toppled to the canvas. Tripping over his own feet was something new for Benny Leonard; the fans laughed.

They stopped laughing when Benny lay still. Minutes later, in the dressing room, the ring doctor pronounced him dead of coronary thrombosis.

One of the most skillful boxers of all time, Benny Leonard (born Leiner) learned to fight in the streets of Manhattan's lower East Side. In his championship days he was so good on defense that he got through many a bout with his well-oiled hair still impeccably parted. He held the world's lightweight title from 1917 to 1925, when he retired undefeated because his mother told him to. Having lost most of his savings in the crash, he tried a comeback; it went the way of all boxers' comebacks and Jimmy McLarnin knocked him out.

Benny knew how to fight with his head. His most famed rival, Lew Tendler, claimed that Benny had talked him out of the title by whispering disconcerting things between punches. Benny's version: "He caught me over the eye with a left and I felt my knees going under me. I said, That was a good punch, Lew.' I said it in a friendly, matter-of-fact tone of voice and it put the fight on a different plane. Lew snarled, 'Never mind that stuff, come on and fight.' But I stuck out a restraining hand and said, 'No, Lew. That was really a good punch. It was all right.' Lew paused again, and by that time I had recovered my senses."

Before Benny's fight with Richie Mitchell, the referee explained the then-new rule that after scoring a knockdown, a boxer must go to a neutral corner. Benny suddenly registered perplexity. "Let me get,this straight," he said. "As I understand it, every time I knock him down I'm to go to a neutral corner." Mitchell looked nervous. Benny knocked him out in the sixth round.

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