Knuckles and Gloves. Bohun Lynch

Knuckles and Gloves - Bohun  Lynch


Скачать книгу
slit open the brow and bled profusely besides causing Mendoza to fall. Jackson was evidently doing the better as the betting changed in his favour.

      It was in the next, the fifth round, that our model of gentlemanly conduct sought his own advantage by means of one of the foulest tricks that have been handed down to us. There was a fierce exchange of blows during which the Jew’s head was lowered as he lunged forward with his right to the body. Jackson stepped aside to avoid the blow and caught Mendoza by his somewhat long hair, twisting his fingers in it, whilst with his free hand he upper-cut him again and again.

      Mendoza’s friends instantly appealed to the umpires, but, Egan tells us, “they deemed it perfectly consistent with the rules of fighting.” Mendoza fell and 2–1 was betted on Jackson.

      During the next three rounds the old champion was evidently growing weak, and fought only on the defensive. But Jackson beat down his guard and hit him severely. The ninth round was the last. Jackson walked in and planted several hard blows in quick succession on face and body. Mendoza struggled on for a little while and at last fell utterly exhausted. He knew that he stood no chance now. It was folly to go on. He gave in.

      It was one of the shortest main battles ever fought, lasting in all but ten minutes and a half; and for its time quite the hardest ever fought at all. Mendoza was badly cut up; the new champion was hardly hurt.

      This was not by any means the Jew’s last appearance in the Prize-Ring, for he fought Harry Lee for seventy minutes and beat him in fifty-three rounds eleven years later: and he actually fought Tom Owen in 1820, when he was fifty-seven years old. “Youth will be served,” we know, and Owen, who was at the time only just over fifty, beat him. Mendoza lived to a good old age, and in comfortable circumstances, dying in 1836.

      Seven years after the encounter recorded above a letter appeared in the Daily Oracle and Advertiser which purported to be a challenge from Mendoza to Jackson for a return match. As a fact, the letter was a practical joke; but a part of Jackson’s reply is worth quoting, as it is so characteristic of all we hear of the man.

      “… for some years,” he wrote, “I have entirely withdrawn from a public life, and am more and more convinced of the propriety of my conduct by the happiness which I enjoy in private among many friends of great respectability, with whom it is my pride to be received on terms of familiarity and friendship. …”

      Jackson never fought again, and one of the greatest reputations in the annals of the championship that have come to us is based upon a pugilist who only entered the ring thrice! One other champion was in precisely the same case, and that was John Gulley, whom we shall come to in due course.

      No doubt Jackson attracted to himself a good deal of attention apart from the eccentricity of his good behaviour. He was a man of prodigious strength and is said to have written his name whilst an 84 lb. weight was suspended from his little finger.

      After his retirement he took rooms at 13 Old Bond Street, a regular and fashionable house of call for the young bloods of the day. It became the correct thing to take a course of boxing lessons from John Jackson. Byron, who was a keen boxer despite his infirmity, used to go there to keep down the fat of which he ever lived in terror. In his diary for March 17th, 1814, he says: “I have been sparring with Jackson for exercise this morning, and mean to continue and renew my acquaintance with my mufflers. My chest, and arms, and wind are in very good plight, and I am not in flesh. I used to be a hard hitter and my arms are very long for my height.”—which was 5 ft 8¼ inches—“At any rate, exercise is good, and this the severest of all; fencing and broadsword never fatigued me half so much.”

      Byron regarded John Jackson as a friend whom he greatly admired. He wrote letters to him on several occasions.

      Jackson had innumerable pupils and was about the first real instructor of boxing for amateurs. He went to his grave in Brompton Cemetery old and honoured in 1845.

       JEM BELCHER

       Table of Contents

      If the love of Fair Play is not born in us, and has therefore to be taught, we do have ingrained in us a very real admiration for a good loser. Nothing, as we know only too well, succeeds like success—particularly material success. But somewhere or other deep down in us we have a kind of mistrust of what the world at large calls success: there may be a tinge of superstition in our feeling. At any rate we have a very warm corner in our hearts for the glorious failure: and not without good reason, for there are more failures than successes, and, having failed, it is easy enough to invent the glory.

      Jem Belcher is probably the most renowned prize-fighter that ever lived. He won several splendid victories, details of some of which have come down to us. But it is not his victories that have given fame to him so much as his glorious defeats: and these not so much on account of the champions who beat him, though they were very famous too, as on account of Belcher’s personality. This, compounded as it was of qualities and especially defects, unlovely in themselves, was of exactly the kind which endears itself to the English speaking world, and to that world not only.

      Jem Belcher was a roysterer, a drinker, a loose fish. He was also jealous and vindictive. But he was indomitably courageous and he was good-looking. He was a gracefully built man, and well-proportioned, but he made no great show of muscle. He stood 5 ft. 11 in., but never weighed more than 11 stone 10 lb.—only a little over the modern middle-weight limit.

      Jem Belcher was born at Bristol on April 15th, 1781, being on his mother’s side a grandson of Jack Slack, the champion of 1750. He went to work as a butcher’s boy, and whilst quite a lad, showed amazing precocity as a boxer. His first recorded fight, when he was but seventeen, was with Britton, whom he beat in March of 1798 in half an hour or so. Then he came to London, where he was kindly treated by Bill Warr, now an elderly man, who put on the gloves with him to see what he was made of. As a result of this trial, Warr backed Jem against Paddington Jones, whom he easily beat. In the following year he fought a drawn battle with Jack Bartholomew, when quite out of condition. In 1800 he was matched with Bartholomew again and fought him for three hundred guineas a side on Finchley Common. Belcher had already shown himself as a brilliantly scientific boxer, aggressive, “never to be denied,” as they say. But with Bartholomew, a much heavier and stronger man, he showed how well he could defend himself, “milling on the retreat” when necessary. In spite of this Bartholomew dashed at him at the beginning, and, forcing down his guard, knocked Jem down. So certain were Bartholomew’s backers that he had the fight in one hand, so to say, that they immediately sent off messengers to London announcing his victory. This was a little premature, for no sooner had those messengers left the ring-side than Belcher with lightning speed hit his opponent several times in succession without a return, and finished a brilliant round by throwing him a hard cross-buttock. The effects of this handicapped Bartholomew for the rest of the encounter. He had plenty of pluck, and all of it was needed. The moral courage required to stand up and take a beating from a much lighter man, or rather a boy, is very great. The rounds were short and very fierce, seventeen being fought in twenty minutes. And at the end of that time Jem sent home a tremendous body-blow which knocked Bartholomew down and out of time. He was unable to reach the scratch after the half-minute’s rest.

      After this Belcher thrashed Andrew Gamble in five rounds and nine minutes. His next battle, quite an important one in regarding the man’s record, was yet but a brawl at the ring-side of another fight. Just after the encounter between Isaac Bittoon and Tom Jones in July of 1801, Joe Berks, the Shropshire butcher (who figures in somewhat similar circumstances with Boy Jim in Sir A. Conan Doyle’s Rodney Stone), somewhat elated by wine, called out, “Where’s young Jem Belcher? Where’s your champion?” So Jem went up to him and asked him what he wanted. The reply was a quick blow which Belcher, ever on the alert, stopped. They thereupon settled down to a bye-battle which lasted for nineteen minutes and which Jem Belcher decisively won.

      However, it was manifest that Berks had been fighting under the handicap of considerable intoxication, and a set battle was finally arranged between


Скачать книгу