Lemme Open Up

This was the way it had been when he was a kid in tough Utah mining towns, and punched out his right to play on the streets of Bingham and West Jordan. Last week's fight had hardly started before the broken-nosed, beetle-browed young brawler was sure he could win. After mixing it up in Madison Square Garden for six rounds with Middleweight Champion Sugar Ray Robinson, Challenger Gene Fullmer, 25, walked back to his corner and said, "I can knock him out, Marv. Lemme open up and knock him out."

Manager Marv Jenson saw the scrap with more cautious clarity. Across the ring he saw the lithe and light-foot memory of a great champion, the dark and dangerous shadow of a man who had once been the finest fist fighter of his generation. And Jenson worried lest Sugar Ray, at 36, reach back across the years for one of those wickedly coordinated punches that could end a fight in an instant. "Just keep going the way you have," he told his boy. "Be careful. Don't open up."

Clutch, Lean, Absorb. So Gene Fullmer folded his arms in front of him to ward off uppercuts, and waded in. Robby clutched, leaned and absorbed an awful banging around his ears and his midsection. Once or twice he shook loose and threw the swift combinations that had won him back his title for the third time after an unhappy retirement to nightclub hoofing. Fullmer blinked and kept coming.

The home-town crowd that had begun by rooting for Harlem's hero began to cheer the spectacle of a champ going down. "Hit him in his pink Cadillac," screamed a ringsider. Fullmer rained leather just about every place else. In the seventh he clubbed Robinson toward the canvas and then body-pushed him through the ropes. Sugar Ray was up at the count of six. For a brief flurry in the ninth, the champ looked like the destroyer of old. Still. Fullmer just kept coming.

The challenger's defense was better than his awkward, plodding style suggested; his offense was a barrage of punches from everywhere. In the 14th round his slashing gloves split open old scar tissue, and the champion's left eye leaked blood. "Rip 'at eye wide open, Gene, rip it open," pleaded an ex-Robinson rooter in the 19th row. Sugar Ray fought back with a tired, sometimes frenzied grace, but he was punched out. No one could quarrel with the judges' unanimous decision that Gene Fullmer was winner of at least eight of the 15 rounds and the new middleweight champion of the world.

Jensen's Gym. Afterward came the expected promise that Sugar Ray will try again in a return match with Fullmer. But only stubborn pride can suggest that he will ever do any better against the tireless young elder of the Mormon Church who, true to his faith, has never touched tobacco or whisky. Gene Fullmer was named for his parents' idol, gentleman Gene Tunney (whose real name is James Joseph), but he grew up to admire a different type of heavyweight, man-eater Jack Dempsey. At the age of eight he decided he wanted to become a prizefighter, fought his first bout at twelve.

Proud Lawrence ("Tuff") Fullmer taught his muscular son everything he had learned from a short and undistinguished career in the ring (two younger brothers are also learning). Then Tuff turned Gene over to Marv Jenson, a local mink rancher, who had developed the once-promising heavyweight Rex Layne. Young Gene was the kind of willing worker that Jenson had always wanted. Out of high school, he had a job as an apprentice welder, in the repair shop at Kennecott Copper's great open-pit mine, but he still had the energy to get up at five o'clock every morning and put in three to four miles of roadwork. He also worked out daily in Jenson's gym. After a year-long layoff to practice a different kind of fighting in Korea, Gene got his pro career under way in earnest. He came to New York last week, winner of 37 out of 40 fights, 20 by knockouts.

Just getting a crack at Sugar Ray was the toughest scrap of all. Jenson had to settle for 12 1/2% of the gate, or $20.915. Robinson pocketed $78,190 of the gate receipts, plus $60,000 of the TV and radio income, of which Fullmer got none.

For Fullmer, his wife Dolores and his five-month-old daughter Kaye, there will now be some bigger payoffs. The new champion is not an exciting fighter or remotely as great as the one he succeeded. But he promises to be a diligent one, and there ought to be some lively Donnybrooks in the middleweight division before Gene Fullmer runs into anyone tough and smart enough to dethrone him.

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