There are many, many others. In England, where I am as much at home as in my own country, I frequently reported international boxing matches and other events with Frank Butler, Tom Phillips, George Whiting, Peter Wilson, Maurice Smith, Harold Mayes, Lanson Wood, John Macadam, Ralph Hadley, Desmond Hackett, Reg Gutteridge, Joe Bromely, L. N. Bailey, Gerald Walter and Bill Mann. The Fourth Estate’s sports writers constitute a grand crew, doing a tremendous job in a vital department of American and British journalism. They are the men whose dynamic prose has brought pleasure to sports fans the world over. [Illustration: 27] A SUMMING UP On June 6, 1958, I completed my thirtieth round trip to Europe. During my five-weeks’ tour of the continent I appeared on a number of radio and television programs, and, as has been the case on other such occasions, I was asked to compare ranked fighters of this era with the stars of the past. Queries pertaining to the respective punching powers of Jack Dempsey, Joe Louis and Rocky Marciano; the cleverness of Ray Robinson; the cause of boxing’s decline; television’s effect on pugilism; the International Boxing Club’s difficulties with the government, and the investigations into boxing in various parts of the United States, seemed to be of particular interest to my interviewers. Watching the passing sports parade during my many years as a journalist, I have been most impressed by the changes that have taken place in boxing, changes which I enumerated in my overseas talks. There have been changes in style, and the brutality that predominated in pre-commission days has been eliminated. Boxing has spread throughout the world and there is no doubt that it enjoys a greater following today than ever before in its history. However, in most major sports the champions of today are as good, and in sports such as track and field, far superior, to those who ruled the roost when I covered sports as a cub reporter. This is definitely not so in boxing. All one need do is to watch some of the televised bouts that are dished out as main events to realize that fighting talent has gone into an amazing decline. It is difficult to grow ecstatic over what one observes nowadays as compared with the really first class matches of the past. There is at present a general lack of knowledge of the finer points of the game which can be attributed to the training and management of young fighters by incompetents. Prior to World War II the difficulty in ranking fighters lay in selecting ten from an outstanding field of possibly fifteen or more prominent performers. Today’s headache comes from trying to find a sufficient number of worthies in any division after the first three or four have been listed.