A little later a story went about London of his conduct to his mistress, a woman of good breeding, which did him no good. He had bought her, it appeared, and one night he came home with his usual set of drunken prizefighters and cab-drivers; and when they were all drunk, he rang the bell and sent the maid up for Mrs. L… The maid came down and said her mistress was in bed. Baird said, 'If she doesn't come down, I will go up and fetch her down in her shift.' Whereupon the lady had to come down and witness some of the drunken orgy. Next morning she packed up and told Baird she was going to leave him. He went out and in half an hour came back and tried in his rough way to get her to stay. When she wouldn't stay, he took a ball of paper out of his pocket and threw it at her face. She told him what a cur he was to strike a woman; he cried, 'Look at it, you fool, before you talk.' When she picked it up, she found the ball of paper was made of fifty notes for a thousand pounds each.
The story was told to me by one who had heard Baird tell it. A little later, I believe, Baird died, still a young man, but a dreadful specimen of the evil great wealth can work on a common nature!
A little later I was to meet a much better specimen of the prize-fighter than Slavin, certainly the best character I ever saw in the ring. One day news came to the Sporting Club that Peter Jackson, the colored man, was coming over to London and was spoiling for a fight. I heard from the secretary that Slavin was very eager to meet Mm, and accordingly they soon met.
I soon got to know Peter Jackson personally and liked his quiet and modest ways. I asked him one day who would win.
'It is a tricky game,' he said, 'but I don't intend to let Slavin beat me, if I can help it. He is rather a brute. You know I taught him boxing in Australia: one day something or other I said offended him, and he struck me in the face, and we had a set-to. They parted us pretty quickly. But I am not afraid of Slavin and I don't like him, and frankly I don't think he has any chance of beating me.'
Charlie Mitchell sized up the fight clearly beforehand. 'Slavin,' he said, 'is a real fighter, and if he starts in at once to mix it, he may get the better of Jackson; but if he boxes with him for the first rounds, he is sure to be beaten;
Jackson is about the best boxer I have ever seen-a really fine performer, both in defense and in attack.'
The fight bore out Mitchell's prediction to the letter. Slavin boxed the first three or four rounds, and Jackson outboxed him from beginning to end.
About the fourth round, Slavin rushed in and struck Jackson heavily about the heart. The round was clearly Slavin's, but the bell saved Jackson.
When they came out again, Slavin tried the same rushing tactics, but Jackson avoided him and kept hitting him in the face and on the chin; and in this round Slavin palpably weakened. From that time on Jackson hit him almost as he wished, and the fight ended pretty quickly with Slavin's complete defeat.
Peter Jackson told me afterwards that the punch which he had got from Slavin over the heart was the heaviest he had ever had in his life.
The colored man, Peter Jackson, like Corbett, was very much of a gentleman: he told me he always hated to knock anyone out, and thought the referee should stop the fight when the complete superiority of one fighter was established. I have said nothing in these memoirs of mine about Corbett, but he was a splendid specimen, and I always believed that his defeat by Fitzsimmons, good as Fitzsimmons was, was due rather to a chance blow, which caught him on the spleen, than to any superiority. Still Fitzsimmons was a marvelous fighter; considering that he never weighed more than one hundred and sixty pounds, the most extraordinary fighter ever seen. It mustn't be forgotten, however, that he had a longer reach than most of the big ones, and blacksmith's fists at the end of enormous arms; he seemed to be built for the ring.
I should perhaps say one word here to explain certain defeats in the prizering that are not sufficiently understood. A young man-and prizefighters should be very young-after training hard for some time and getting into perfect condition, is very apt to discontinue all exercise when the fight is over, and so put on a great deal of fat very quickly. He has been keeping himself fit by the most strenuous exercise, which has developed his appetite as well as his muscles. When he stops training, his appetite continues and immediately fat accumulates, and it accumulates not only round the intestines and abdomen, but round all the muscles, and especially round the main muscle of all, the heart.
It is comparatively easy to take off abdominal fat, but it is extremely difficult and extremely painful to take off fat that has accumulated round the heart.
In fact, the moment a man begins seriously to train for this purpose, any prolonged exercise exhausts him and he feels very ill. The heart, lacking its accustomed support, sags, labors, and the man feels faint and sick. For a couple of months, at any rate, the athlete must go on exercising under a constant cloud of sickness and weakness that is apt to bring him to despair.
But if be continues, the fat will come off and in a certain tune, say six months, he will begin to feel fit and well and strong again, and increasingly fit and strong as time goes on; though in my opinion he will never be quite as good again as he was before the fat accumulated round the heart.
The case of Paget Tomlinson, the famous hurdler, occurs to me. A great natural runner, he had stopped exercising for a year or so, but was called out when Oxford and Cambridge had to meet Harvard and Yale; and though he was still, as he thought, very fit, the clock told him at the beginning of his training that he was nothing like so good as he had been a year or two before.
But he trained as a man of brain does train, with perfect method and desperate resolution. He brought himself down to pounds less than he had ever been at the varsity, and persevered through the feeling of disease and sickness, but still the clock would not be conciliated. He got to within half a second of his best tune, but could not improve it, and was beaten in the race some three yards by a younger man who had never been out of training.
Now, prize-fighting is a far severer test than a one-hundred-and-twenty yards' sprint over hurdles. How severe it is can be told in almost one sentence.
Sharkey and Jeffries had a memorable fight of one hour. In that hour it was found that Sharkey had lost thirteen pounds and Jeffries eleven pounds and a half. These men were both trained to the hour before they went into the ring, and the loss of weight alone shows how tremendous the exertion and strain must have been.
The best way for the fighter, of course, is never to go out of training, strictly to limit what he drinks with his meals, and prevent himself ever going up more than a pound or two; but if he has put on weight, the best way of taking it off is not to go into physical training at once, but to begin by cutting out all drinking with his meals. Half an hour before a meal and two hours afterwards, he should drink nothing. In a month he will be lighter than he ever was, probably even than he was in his first training, and then he can begin by careful exercise and very careful feeding to increase his strength once more and get himself perfectly fit.
Perhaps I should say here too that unfortunately boxing has won such vogue in the last two or three decades that the influence of money has corrupted and degraded the prize-ring. No one can be a champion and be honest; it is almost unthinkable. Big money wants to bet on a certainty: a man cannot be as sure of winning as of losing; hence he will be a better instrument for making money on if he consents to lose than if he wanted to win. The fact is patent, obvious, corroborated by experience everywhere.
Is baseball honest? Is horse-racing honest? Ask a real prize-fighter: 'Is prizefighting honest?' and he'll laugh in your face.
I have only written these recollections of prize-fighters to justify my opinion that the prize-fight is an evil, and boxing one of the lowest forms of athletics. I am very sorry that the French and Germans have taken it up as they have, but fortunately, in the last thirty years, the French have taken up every form of athletics with passionate enthusiasm. I remember thirty years ago seeing some regiments drilling near Toulon; someone had put up a rail about two feet six in height for the men to run and jump over. It was perfectly comic to see how most of the soldiers jumped with both feet together. At the request of the colonel, I went over and showed them how they should jump the rail, taking it in their stride. Thirty years later the ordinary French boy has learned how to jump and how to run, too, while at cycling he is probably as good as any.
The worst evil of boxing came through its increased popularity. As soon as it was taken up in America, the quick Irish-Americans found out that two blows were likely to be decisive; the first blow is an upward stroke catching the chin, which produces a shock on the vertebrae and often results in partial paralysis; the other is the blow on the spleen, which is spoken of as the blow in the pit of the stomach; but when the spleen is really hit, it turns the man sick and he has very little strength for the next ten or fifteen minutes, in spite of perfect training.
