Word: prizefight
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...voice had been heard by 100,000,000 spectators at New York prize fights, theatres, rodeos, ball games, carnivals, races, funerals. He scorned loudspeakers, earned $25 for ordinary and $100 for championship fights, invented a system of hand-wavings to show a fighter's exact weight, made a prizefight crowd of 40,000 stand in silence while he improvised a prayer the night Lindbergh was flying toward Paris. In 1933, when he awoke one night to find himself alone and paralyzed as a result of his first stroke of apoplexy, Announcer Humphreys achieved his masterpiece. He announced...
...myth of Joe Louis' invincibility started a year ago when, a raw but talented young fisticuffer eight months out of the amateur class, he defeated a worn trial horse named Natie Brown. Prizefight reporters, hero worshippers by nature and naturally gullible, promptly hailed Louis, as they had hailed dozens of other promising fighters, as a coming champion. Louis failed to belie his billing as promptly as his predecessors. Matched with Primo Camera, tottering but still formidable, he won by a knockout in the sixth round...
Accustomed to seeing their idols shattered, prizefight reporters concealed their amazement by enthusiasm. They likened Louis, a cool young blackamoor who did his work with a commendable economy of motion, to a cobra, a leopard, a panther. He received innumerable complimentary and alliterated nicknames, and a match with noisy and preposterous Max Baer. Baer, like Camera, was slow, overgrown and easy to hit. Louis dealt with him the same way, except that this time the knock-out arrived in the fourth round. Louis ceased to be an animal. He became a "superman...
...last winter it had long been unanimously conceded by all prizefight experts that Louis would win the heavyweight championship as soon as he fought the current holder, James J. Braddock-who had won it from Louis' predecessor as super-fighter, Max Baer. The desideratum was to heighten not the suspense but the dramatic finality of this achievement by delaying it as long as possible. In the hope that doing so would prove a profitable venture, 20th Century Sporting Club dug up Schmeling who, since losing the title to Jack Sharkey and being thrashed by a second-rater named Steve...
Among the things that prizefight reporters & public overlooked last week was the fact that the first-class heavyweights Louis had fought did not include one who was reasonably quick, intelligent and courageous. Consequently, Press & public were unaware that Joe Louis had not yet learned how to defend himself from a straight right-hand punch on the jaw. Max Schmeling revealed this shocking omission in the fourth round of the fight. Superman Louis flopped down on his haunches...