There’s the other side of the picture. Some of the cleverest fighters of the last half-century confessed to me that rather than take further punishment in a losing battle, they preferred taking the count. And who shall blame them when they have seen the products of this misplaced courage—the punch-drunk derelicts who hang around the gymnasiums, their eyes as vacant as their minds? But the fact remains that courage, whether blind or logical, is a must in the make-up of the successful boxer. Sometimes courage ebbs and has to be revived. I can never forget the raw courage of Babe Risko in his fight with Jock McAvoy, December 20, 1935, in Madison Square Garden. This courage forced him to take terrible punishment, although he knew he hadn’t a chance to turn the tide. Six times the American had gone down from the trip-hammer blows of the British middleweight before Babe was counted out with still half a minute to go of the opening round. All I can say is that the boxer with a fighting heart can never be persuaded that he has had enough. But let’s take an example of refined courage—the kind displayed by Gene Tunney when he met Jack Dempsey in their first bout in the Sesquicentennial Stadium of Philadelphia. The pale-faced ex-marine showed remarkable coolness as he walked into the lair of the tiger-man to face blows that had battered the strongest into insensibility. Blind courage would have induced him to swap blows with the enraged, scowling Dempsey after the famous “fourteen” count in their second contest in Chicago, but he chose the way of refined courage, which changes blind instinct to thought and calculation—and so he saved the day. In Max Schmeling’s fight with Young Stribling, July 3, 1931, in Cleveland, and his first with Joe Louis, June 19, 1936, I saw examples of the calculating courage of a great fighter. In both, as indeed in all of Schmeling’s important battles, he plodded along until the opportune moment arrived. Then calculating courage transformed him into a fighting fury, when he had to take as well as give punishment. Packey McFarland, a boxer of consummate skill, was hurt on several occasions but never to the extent that he was forced to display courage to stick it out. He would never let anyone beat him up. On the day after his fight with Matt Wells on April 26, 1912, in New York City, I went to his dressing room. Both men had put up a wonderful show, but Packey had received far more punishment than he normally took, and I was surprised. I asked McFarland how he felt. “Nat,” he said, “I’m a clever boxer. I feel I can hold my own against anybody my weight, or ten pounds above my weight, but when the day comes that my cleverness will no longer protect me, I’ll quit. I don’t believe in what you writers term courage.” “But Packey,” I countered, “you mean to tell me that if you were badly hurt you’d toss in the sponge?” “That’s exactly what I would do.”