I picked up this quote from a boxing book I ran across in my closet.
"In 1915, when I was nineteen, I fought Johnny Sudenberg ten rounds in the wild mining town of Goldfield, Nevada. I was in there with a good fighter, one much better than I was, but I took the fight because I was dead broke and my manager of the moment, Jack Gilfeather, had been able to jimmy a $100 guarantee out of [the] promoter...
Sudenberg almost killed me. For two rounds it was a fight. For the next eight I was a helpless, blood-soaked punching bag. It was the worst beating of my life. I don't remember going down once, because I still don't remember the last three or four rounds.
Goldfield was a tough town. A stranger who got his brains knocked out in Goldfield was no rarity. Hardly worth bothering the doctor about. So they dumped me, unconscious, into a wheelbarrow and some good Samaritan pushed me through the hilly streets. He threw me on the bunk in my "home." I slept.
My "home" was a cave in the side of a hill. Goldfield had been a boom mining town and a room cost five dollars a week. In advance, for a skinny young hobo with holes in his shoes and a newspaper for a suitcase.
...I remember nothing at all until I woke up at three o' clock the next afternoon ?nearly twenty hours after I'd been wheelbarrowed "home." Everything hurt, of course. But I was young, and I was hungry. I stumbled over to the saloon where Gilfeather hung out, to collect my share of the purse.
In the saloon a few heroes laughed at my battered face. A few made jokes about how funny I looked being trundled through the streets in a wheelbarrow (which is the way I found out about that journey).
I asked where I could find Gilfeather.
A bartender said, "He left town last night, kid. He got drunk and Blew his wad shooting craps."
I had been almost killed for nothing. I was broke and starving. It was the lowest point of my entire life..."
Four years later, on July 4, 1919, Jack Dempsey ?yes, the dog-eared old book was Dempsey’s Autobiography—demolished the hulking giant, Jess Willard, to win the single most coveted prize in all of sports in that era: the Heavyweight Boxing Championship of the World.
Is there a moral there?
"In 1915, when I was nineteen, I fought Johnny Sudenberg ten rounds in the wild mining town of Goldfield, Nevada. I was in there with a good fighter, one much better than I was, but I took the fight because I was dead broke and my manager of the moment, Jack Gilfeather, had been able to jimmy a $100 guarantee out of [the] promoter...
Sudenberg almost killed me. For two rounds it was a fight. For the next eight I was a helpless, blood-soaked punching bag. It was the worst beating of my life. I don't remember going down once, because I still don't remember the last three or four rounds.
Goldfield was a tough town. A stranger who got his brains knocked out in Goldfield was no rarity. Hardly worth bothering the doctor about. So they dumped me, unconscious, into a wheelbarrow and some good Samaritan pushed me through the hilly streets. He threw me on the bunk in my "home." I slept.
My "home" was a cave in the side of a hill. Goldfield had been a boom mining town and a room cost five dollars a week. In advance, for a skinny young hobo with holes in his shoes and a newspaper for a suitcase.
...I remember nothing at all until I woke up at three o' clock the next afternoon ?nearly twenty hours after I'd been wheelbarrowed "home." Everything hurt, of course. But I was young, and I was hungry. I stumbled over to the saloon where Gilfeather hung out, to collect my share of the purse.
In the saloon a few heroes laughed at my battered face. A few made jokes about how funny I looked being trundled through the streets in a wheelbarrow (which is the way I found out about that journey).
I asked where I could find Gilfeather.
A bartender said, "He left town last night, kid. He got drunk and Blew his wad shooting craps."
I had been almost killed for nothing. I was broke and starving. It was the lowest point of my entire life..."
Four years later, on July 4, 1919, Jack Dempsey ?yes, the dog-eared old book was Dempsey’s Autobiography—demolished the hulking giant, Jess Willard, to win the single most coveted prize in all of sports in that era: the Heavyweight Boxing Championship of the World.
Is there a moral there?
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