One of the greatest fighters of my time was the middleweight Stanley Ketchel. Talk to the veterans who followed the career of this fighting man during the height of his glory and they’ll tell you that Stanley Ketchel was the finest in his division. Unfortunately, I didn’t see him when he fought his memorable battles with Billy Papke and Joe Thomas, but I did cover most of his thrilling Eastern contests, and from what I saw in the two years in which he made the East his headquarters, I rate Ketchel the greatest middleweight of all time. Stanley was an unusual individual, wild and untamed one second, lovable the next; treacherous at times, and most amiable on other occasions. His frank, open eyes were soft, yet the moment he climbed through the ropes in pursuit of his prey, those eyes became the eyes of a killer. He always breathed through his nostrils and fought with his mouth tightly shut, a slight grin of contempt on his lips. Ketchel scorned the word retreat. Yet once his mission was over, and he either flattened his opponent or won the verdict, he was just one of the mob—a man full of fun and mischief. The memory of this spectacular ring gladiator has never faded. Those who saw him flash across the pugilistic firmament spoke of him with unwavering loyalty and admiration. The greatest praise that can be lavished upon a promising middleweight contender today by a sports critic is to rate him as another Stanley Ketchel. Few among the thousands of fistic heroes I’ve seen were more colorful than Ketchel. A demon of the roped square, he made his opponents think that all the furies in Hades had been turned loose on them. He got his punches away from all angles. If he missed an opponent with one hand, he would nail him with the other. He was as game as a bulldog and as tough as a bronco. His most prominent traits, I would say, were his generosity outside the ring and his utter relentlessness inside of it, his egotism and eternal confidence and faith in himself, his fearlessness and superb courage. Outside the ring he was the soul of generosity. He was a mark for the panhandlers, much like Jack Dempsey in that respect. However, he was also a jokester whose greatest joy was playing pranks on unsuspecting camp visitors who came to idolize him. When he was in New York, he would do his training in Woodlawn, not far from the entrance to the Woodlawn Cemetery. The adjoining territory at that time was wild, with tall grass, huge trees, and few houses within a radius of several miles. It was one of the undeveloped portions of the city, an ideal location for training.