Word: featherweight
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Often battered, seldom beaten Henry Armstrong, 36, who eleven years ago held three world's championships (featherweight, lightweight, welterweight), and more recently has been managing fighters, announced in California that he intends to take a punch at the devil. He expects soon to be ordained a Baptist minister, tour the country preaching to sinners...
Success had had its bitter side for little Willie Pep. As fancy a featherweight as ever tied on gloves, he won so many fights (134 against one defeat) that home-town Hartford, Conn, took him for granted. Willie grew cocky and careless. Result: last October he was knocked out cold by Challenger Sandy Saddler. Willie lost his featherweight crown, but in defeat Hartford began to rally round him and he became a town hero on a comeback trail. The home folks bellowed for a return engagement...
Twenty-six-year-old Willie Pep, decided the judges, had won his return engagement, become the first featherweight in history to win back his crown undisputedly after losing it. Hartford folks who bet their shirts on him won a small fortune from the big-city slickers. Mumbled battered Willie, who had been worried lest somebody might have thought he gave up too quickly last October: "I had to prove the last one was no phony...
...picture's chief blunder is the miscasting of Patricia Neal, an able young Broadway actress whose throaty, stagy intensity in this featherweight role suggests a tigress in a cat show...
Other winners last week: CJ Sandy Saddler, 22, a willowy, broomstick-legged Negro, ended Willie Pep's six-year reign as featherweight boxing champion. Saddler, more of a puncher than a boxer, began by bloodying Pep's nose, put him on the floor twice before knocking him out in the fourth round at Madison Square Garden...