End of a Champion

Since the last defense of his lightweight (1351bs.) title 17 months ago, Champion Ike Williams has been barnstorming in the welterweight (147 lbs.) division, where there is more moneymaking competition. Last week, forced to make a title defense, Williams picked out a likely pushover named Jimmy Carter (who had lost two of his three 1950 fights), then set about shedding some 15 lbs. of surplus weight. Ike, normally known as a smart operator, made two mistakes: 1) the extra weight that came with easy pickings and age (27) was not so surplus, and 2) Carter was no pushover.

When the fighters entered the Madison Square Garden ring, Williams, who was still earnestly shadow-boxing eight hours before the fight to sweat off the last three-quarters of a pound, looked string-muscled and drawn from the strain of making the weight. Carter, also 27 and a natural lightweight (133 lbs.), looked plump in comparison. And he did not seem to have read the jeering predictions of the sportwriters.

For the first four rounds Williams fought with the assurance of a champion, deftly blocking Carter's bullish charges, jabbing and stabbing with lefts, uppercutting swift rights. But for all Williams' style, the blows bounced off dogged Jimmy Carter like pingpong balls. The Ike Williams zip, which had stiffened nearly half of his 137 opponents, was gone.

In the fifth round, when a Carter right dumped Williams to the canvas, the championship was on its way, too. After a fagged and beaten Ike had hit the canvas for the fourth time in Round 14, the fight was stopped. Little Jimmy Carter, who had seemed doomed to the life of a ham-&-egger, went home to his third-floor Harlem walkup to tell his wife and two-year-old son how, in his first fight in the Garden, he had become lightweight champion of the world.

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