Pressagent's Delight

Roy Harris, a heavyweight (6 ft., 195 Ibs.) from Cut and Shoot, Texas, has fought 22 professional bouts and won them all, but he has never been seen either on TV or outside Texas. Last week, to stir the nation's interest in the new contender for the heavyweight crown (he is due to fight Champion Floyd Patterson in Los Angeles on Aug. 18), TelePrompTer Corp. offered a Texas junket to some of Yankeeland's top sportswriters. What the ringside pros saw left them happy, dazed, full of copy, and fat pigeons for TelePrompTer's pressagents.

Cut and Shoot proved to be a hamlet in the middle of a swampy, oil-rich wooded area known as the "Big Thicket." Its 194 inhabitants claim that "if you stand around long enough, you'll get cut; if you try to run, you'll get shot." The city-slicker writers found Roy a quiet, soft-spoken schoolteacher and ex-Army lieutenant living in a modern cottage on the Harris farm. Roy told them he was part Indian (Cherokee) and "I want to prove that I am a fighter and not a myth." They all dutifully wrote that down.

But it was life among Roy's relatives that staggered them. Less than 75 yds. from Roy's cottage stood the elder Harris' swamp-angel shack where, wrote the New York Post's Milton Gross (a Brooklyn type), "you'll see barefooted and barebacked kids whooping and hollering through the woods and kittens feeding off their mothers in the front room. You'll see cattle and hound dogs and the head of an alligator long since gone. Chickens and hogs and rusty tin cans and discarded tires. You'll see garbage strewn on the ground, flies abounding in the rooms, roaches on the wall and the windows and doors wide open for more to come in."

Poor-Rumped Relatives. Every Harris relative proved a flack's bonanza. There was Roy's father, "Big Henry'' Harris, a 237-lb., 47-year-old bear who has been called "the best fist, knee, knife and heel fighter in the territory." Big Henry raised his two sons, Roy and Tobe, as fighters, roamed saloons for daring comers, now tells Roy to whip Patterson "or I'll whup you."

There was Uncle Jack, who was once a character witness for a man accused of bootlegging. The court records in Montgomery County show that, asked how he made a living, Uncle Jack replied: "We are in the hawg business. We steal a few. We also makes a little whisky, dynamites fish, shoots any kind of game we pleases, runs rooster fights and pitfights, bulldogs and such. We gets by right-near the same as all these old poor-rumped people around here does." Asked how he knew the defendant stole hogs, the record's answer: "Because I sometimes hold 'em whilst he knocks 'em in the haid."

Killing for Defense. Minor characters of Cut and Shoot included Cousin Armadillo, who stays on the Harris farm because he likes it, is called "Armadillo" because he has killed (he claims) 6,632 of the little beasts and keeps their ears to prove it--and Uncle Bob, who killed a man. Explained Roy's brother Tobe: "This fellow decided to kill Uncle Bob. He and two pals caught Bob in a saloon. The fellow offered Bob a drink, and when Bob lifted it to his lips, he hit him in the head with an automobile wrench. Bob staggered, but he fought back and pulled the other fellow down on top of him for protection against the other two men. He reached into his pocket, pulled out his knife, then reached clear around the fellow's neck--and whoosh--cut his head off, so it was hanging only by a strip of skin." Uncle Bob went scot free when a jury found he had knifed in self-defense.

With all the barefooted kids, the moonshine, the crawling alligators, the cussin' and fightin' Harrises, Yankee sportswriters were a happy bunch, and Roy Harris began to sound as though he might be a fair country fighter--at least good enough to challenge the so-so Patterson. Happiest of all was TelePrompTer President Irving Kahn, who wants to sell 500,000 theater seats across the nation to cash in on his deal of an exclusive closed-circuit TV show of the Patterson-Harris fight, now seems in a fair way to do it.

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