SPORT.
A ROLAND WITHOUT AN OLIVER.
THERE was a time when the fall of princes was held to be the only proper matter of tragedy. To-day they leave their
kingdoms by train, looking for all the world like rich tourists.
With the block and the traitor's gate princes have lost the art of falling beautifully in public. We may build up their tragedy out of newspaper stuff, but nowhere can we see it enacted. Our modern counterpart is the fall of champions. I am a Romantic, and when I went to the Albert Hall on the 15th I was prepared to write heroics if Ted (Kid) Lewis should fall. He fell, but he carried my heroics with him, because nothing in his life has become him less than his leaving of it.
It did not show him at his best either as a boxer or as a sportsman. He might fairly have been disqualified, but he can bear the law no malice for his death. He was unarguably beaten, and although his holding may have saved him from worse physical punishment, it was at the price of robbing his defeat of all splendour. When he who came hither middle-weight champion of Great Britain and Europe sulkily left the ring, few of us were so gentle as to think of him as, now, poor Kid Lewis.
Of course, I know that he himself would not, if he could, have indulged in the sentimentalities of a Buckingham.
The ci-devant holder of five titles can well leave such things
to the likes of me. Besides, he hopes to rise again. He has already expressed a wish for a third meeting with Todd and he deserves the chance, because of the sporting alacrity
with which he gave Todd his return, contrary to the usual way of champions with an invader. We have no desire to keep him down, but at present he is down, ship and flag.
But so • much more significant than the unpleasant twilight of Lewis was the full dawn of Roland Todd. Whether his noon will be the high noon of world-championship it is still difficult to prophesy. His marvellous defence is not alone sufficient, and even in his victory he did not show the old fighting spirit of his opponent. But he showed more of it than he has done before. This victory of Todd's was that of the boxer over the fighter ; of clean, open English methods over the crouching terrorism that comes from America.
Todd's boxing was a masterpiece of science, of serene confi- dence, of calculated generalship, of uncanny prescience. He does not look a fighter ; his personality does not dominate the ring ; but, truly, he can box magnificently, and never, like the unlucky Bombardier, forgets to do it. The " one-two, one-two," with the right to head and ribs that he adopted in the later rounds was a wonderful manoeuvre that completed the baffled distress of one of the most experienced and dashing fighters that England has ever produced. Todd, with his almost impregnable defence and with at least sufficient attack to have daunted Kid Lewis, can confidently hope to bring to England a world title. And what is most satisfactory to us, who regard the ring as more than a money-making concern, is that any victory which Todd may win will be a victory of pure boxing.
ANTHONY BERTRAM.
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