Before the announcer can do his next stunt half a hundred hands--gloved and ungloved--are coming together in applause. The cue came when a trim built, muscular little fellow, whose condition is not too good, slips through the ropes. He smiles cordially at the crowd and nods his head jerkily in response to the reception.
“I take pleasure in introducing Patsy Haley,” begins the announcer, but he is stopped by the applause which breaks out again, and he fails to get in that saving clause about the “club member” business. As if Patsy needed any introduction to that crowd of sports, young or old, who have seen him fight when he was at his best. How can they ever forget the wonderful cleverness he used to show? Don’t you remember when he fought Terry McGovern before the Lenox Athletic Club in 1899? It was all Patsy up to the eighteenth round, and even the wonderful Terry couldn’t find him until then, when he landed the crashing punch that gave him the big end of the purse. Is it any wonder that they applaud him? He’s too wise for the best of them for three rounds even to-day, for he can stall and get away with as little effort as a kid makes when he goes up against a nursing bottle. He hits when and where he likes and how he likes, but he has no punch, as the youngster who is up against him soon finds out, and so he wades in to do a little execution with a wild, swinging right, but the glove never gets within three inches of Patsy’s smiling face. It is jab, jab, jab with the old-timer, and the crowd roars its approval, while the Kid’s seconds keep calling to him in stage whispers which can be heard all over the house, to--
“Mix it there, Kid, one punch will do him.”
Their advice is good, but the bewildered, dazed kid, not hurt a bit, but simply made dizzy by those lightning-like feints, followed by taps that push his head back and throw him off his balance, can’t make good. He rushes, swinging as he comes in, but he finds himself breasting the ropes, and he turns only to get a straight left square on the point of the nose.
It’s very discouraging work for a novice. You see, he’s evidently been figuring on going into the ring and putting this old-timer away and then getting his name and picture in the sporting papers. It’s a hundred to one that he’s been in training, and he’s had it all framed up with his trainer just how he was going to do the trick. It seemed very easy in that stable, or loft, or wherever it was that he had his punching bag and skipping rope, and he was told there was no harm in a dozen of Patsy’s punches rolled into one. He knows that now, but that merciless, pitiless jab is enough to worry anyone, and besides, his arms are beginning to ache with the effort of swinging and hitting nothing.