You know of my interest in boxing since I often put on the gloves with Mike Donovan, Jack Cooper, and you. I had to abandon the sport after an eye injury, sustained in a sparring match with a young Captain of Artillery who cross-countered me on the eye, and blinded me. Fortunately it was the left eye but had it been the right, I never would have been able to go shooting—my hobby. When I was in the legislature and was working very hard with little chance to get outdoors, all the exercises I had were in boxing and wrestling. I was extremely fond of both and still am. Naturally through my enjoyment of boxing I grew to know a good many fighters and to most of those, I grew genuinely attached. I have as a result never been able to sympathize with the outcry against the sport. I have always regarded it and still do, as a fine, healthy, manly form of entertainment and have never thought of it as brutalizing. Of course matches can be conducted under conditions that will make them brutalizing, but this is just as true of football and other highly strenuous contact sports. Bob Fitzsimmons was a good friend of mine. I admired him as a pugilist. For a long time I enjoyed his friendship and that of John L. Sullivan. There never was a better prize fighter than the “Boston Strong Boy.” When he was in his prime, no finer fighter ever stepped into a ring. When I went to Africa to hunt wild game, Sullivan presented me with a gold mounted rabbit’s foot. I carried it through my African hunting trip and it certainly brought me plenty of luck. I believe that boxing should form a major part of the athletic recreation of our Army and Navy and should be included in the physical education program of every college. I congratulate Harvard on its acceptance of boxing as an inter-collegiate sport and you on your appointment as Harvard’s boxing coach.” THEODORE ROOSEVELT [Illustration: 5] I FIGHT TO BE A SOLDIER Back in 1914, when the Mexicans were raiding the Texas Border and it looked as if Uncle Sam would have to take a firm hand in subduing Pancho Villa and his gang of marauders, Major General Leonard Wood, commanding the Second Army Corps at Governors’ Island in New York Harbor, at the suggestion of several New York newspapermen, decided to drill members of the Fourth Estate in soldiering. The reporters who had organized a Newspapermen’s Military Corps, with the object of mastering the Manual of Arms, received permission from the State Armory Board to use the drill floor of the Seventy-First Regiment Armory, where twice a week they assembled for instruction.