Word: loughran
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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When Jack Sharkey, jowled, beefy and 31, climbed into the ring of Philadelphia's Baker Bowl one night last week he became $25,000 richer. When Tommy Loughran, likewise 31, slack-bellied and scarred from 16 years of prizefighting, entered the opposite corner he knew he would collect not one cent for what was about to happen...
...Loughran's "end" was a percentage of the gate receipts in excess of Sharkey's guarantee; and less than 8,000 persons felt like paying to see a fight which could decide but one thing: which of two outworn heavyweights was due for immediate oblivion. Loughran, a quiet, well-liked fellow, had never been a powerful threat in the ring since he stepped up from the light-heavyweight class. Sharkey knocked him out four years ago. And now talkative, wealthy Sharkey, only three months ago the champion, had left his last claim to importance on the floor...
...nine rounds Loughran stepped away from Sharkey, repeatedly flicking his opponent's face with light jabs which did no damage. In the tenth Sharkey wearily floundered into a stiff right which caught him squarely on the chin. He dropped flat on his face-the first knockdown Loughran had scored in years. He was on his feet before the referee could start to count, attacked Loughran's body savagely for the remaining five rounds, but that one punch cost Sharkey the fight. Two judges disagreed; the referee cast the deciding vote for Loughran because of the knockdown...
...chief merit is an attentive, saturnine realism. The first paragraph of his piece before last week's most widely publicized prizefight: "Jack Sharkey, the prizefighter who took up failure as a vocation in life and made a brilliant success of it, is fighting his old friend Tommy Loughran in Philadelphia tonight. There is a contest in which it ought to be possible to stir up the widest disinterest...
...Well, it was sad, in a sad, sentimental sort of way, to peer up through the ropes of the scaffold and compare the Loughran and the Sharkey of that moment with, the boys as we knew them when Loughran used to be called the pretty one, He started fighting at the age of 15, which was 16 years ago, an uncommonly handsome, upstanding kid with the poise of a statue and nice teeth and hard, flat belly with the muscles laid over one another like the sections of an armadillo's shell...