Evening Republican, Volume 14, Number 145, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 18 June 1910 — MANLY ART OF SELF-DEFENSE. [ARTICLE]

MANLY ART OF SELF-DEFENSE.

Game In America Rained by Men Who Cared Only for Money. England was one cif the first of the Mvilized countries to take up boxing as a serious matter, and the Briton with the ready fist in time of need has been the center of news and story for hundreds of years back. There were prize fights there of the brutal type, but the Englishman appreciated the good points of sparring from the first and went out of his way to perfect and elevate It to the plane of recognized athletics, Ed A. Goewey' says in Leslie’s Weekly. It soon lost Its title of “boxing” and was given that of “the manly art of self-defense,” because it was realized that a good boxer could take care of himself on most occasions without resort to the cowardly knife or the revolver. The British seamen were taught to box, and they carried the art to the four quarters of the globe. The trouble is that in this country boxing has been too often made a brutal sport, because, like most everything else here it was promoted, until recently, solely as a commercial proposition. Some great boxing contests were held that were between men perfectly trained and evenly matched, and when the battles were over and the cleverer men had won, none was much the worse for the struggle he had gone through. The bad feature was that men who would “promote” anything that promised financial returns gained the upper hold of the boxing game and held it for years. They took advantage of the fact that Americans love an athletic contest and they overfed us. They cared not whether the men who boxed were evenly matched or were in good physical condition. All they wanted was “the dollar,” and they so abused their privileges that boxing was stamped not only as brutal, but ofttimes as crooked. Then the public in all parts of the country rose up and put the boxing game almost out of commission. It was solely the fault of the money-mad promoters, the men who ruined racing, wrestling and every other professional sport in this country except baseball— and they’ll kill that, too, unless the fans are vigilant. —• —• —