Schmeling v. Uzcudun

The poor babies of Manhattan and environs are richer by $130,000, that being their share of the sums paid by 40,000 fight patrons to see last week's Milk Fund bout between Heavyweights Max Schmeling and Paulino Uzcudun in the Yankee Stadium. Herr Schmeling and Senor Uzcudun are richer by $72,500 each, or 40% of the total proceeds. Herr Schmeling is richer by the title, "Champion of Europe," which awkward Senor Uzcudun previously held in a vague way. Fight patrons are richer only by the semi-satisfaction of a hope, the half-answer of a question.

The question was and is: who can be, who should be, acknowledged World's Champion to fill the niche whence James Joseph Tunney stepped into the Social Register? The hope was that Herr Schmeling, who is quite as genteel as Mr. Tunney but whose fighting face and style sharply recall tigerish onetime Champion Jack Dempsey, would prove himself eligible.

Elevated trains stopped to watch. An advertising airplane roared and blinked overhead. A smart police cordon idled around in the outfield like alert mannikins on a playing board of green baize. But in the bottom of the cone of white light at the centre of it all, Fighters Schmeling and Uzcudun did much more butting, grasping and shoving than sparring, smacking, socking.

Herr Schmeling was being cautious. His opponent's long left arm was flying over-head very frequently. Senor Uzcudun was clumsy. His nose is so flattened on his face that a punch on it makes him snort for breath like a prize hog. It seemed best to him to cross his big bony arms in front of his face to protect it from Schmeling's choppy thrusts, to bend over forward and try to butt Schmeling around to where he could be hit by a wild-swinging attack. After he found the range, Uzcudun thrashed often and heavily into Schmeling's ribs during their head-to-head clinches. But Schmeling stood it well and got the better of this horizontal infighting. His jolting up-jabs eventually got Uzcudun erect. Then Schmeling continued his face attack like a boxer wearing down but unable to subdue a brute. Eyes closed and bleeding, nose clogged, breath stertorous, Uzcudun, who had never been knocked out, was saved only by the bell in the 14th round. Schmeling says he might have finished him off in the next and final round, might have looked much more like a World's Champion, if he had not injured his right hand on the Basque's cromagnon cranium early in the fight.

The indisputable decision for Schmeling pleased nearly everyone except a lot of Uzcudun's wood-chopping countrymen who went down from their Pyrenean villages to Biarritz and bet their savings that he would win.

Later this summer, Herr Schmeling will probably fight out the world's title inheritance with Josef Paul Cukoschay (Jack Sharkey), the glossy, glib, unconvincing Bostonian than whom, for the moment, the U. S. can apparently produce no heavyweight less unsatisfactory.