“I don’t go to as many fights as I used to,” he said. “It’s the same old thing—fight after fight; fouls, holding, referees interfering with the boys and poor decisions. I’m fed up on it, Nat. The boys rush in headlong and then slap their way through the bouts, round after round. They either have their eyes shut or their hands open. “Remember the old Barnum saying, ‘There’s a sucker born every minute?’ The population is bigger now so that the sucker crop is much greater than in his day, but they’re still falling.” We discussed Johnson, Jeffries, Tom Sharkey, Ketchel and a few others among the old time greats and compared them with the fighters of this era. Tad challenged me to name eight topnotchers who came to the front since 1916. I started but he cut me short. “What’s the use?” he asked. “Even if you name fifteen, you won’t find four equal to those I’ve named. I like to talk about the stars of other days because they were the real masters. Their names will go on forever, just as those of the great actors, musicians, painters and writers—Dickens, Cruikshank, Leech, Shakespeare, Balzac, Dore, Kipling, O. Henry and Jack London. Birds like that will continue to be chatted about. They were the cream in their specialty as were Corbett, John L., Jeffries, Fitz, Ryan, Sharkey, Johnson, Choynski, Walcott, Gans, Dixon and Attell in theirs.” We had attended a show a few nights before in the Garden at which about 16,000 persons had crowded the arena, but the main event was marred by repeated holding and waltzing and Tad, turning to me, remarked: “Just because 16,000 fight fans saw that bout and only about 800 saw some of the ring classics of the past, some of the stirring contests we used to attend, doesn’t prove that the boxer of today is better than the fellows of twenty years ago. Where do they get off to compare these birds to men like George Kid Lavigne, Bat Nelson, Gans, Jack McAuliffe, Frank Erne, and many others of their brand I can name? A magazine writer today gets ten times what Dickens got fifty years ago, but that doesn’t mean anything so far as comparative ability goes. Half of the fans of today think that they’re seeing great fights, when as a matter of fact, they’re just being entertained by dubs.” Tad knew his fights and fighters. He had the facts. The day before the Berlenbach-Delaney fight, I sat with Tad and we discussed the coming battle. “Is a great left better than a great right hand?” he asked. I thought for a moment and then replied that I thought the best fighters in recent years were those who possessed good, powerful lefts. “Let’s see,” Tad answered. “Take a pencil and jot down these names.”