Now the most notorious boxer of the first ten years of the present century, a really good fighter, of unorthodox methods and exemplary fortitude, was Tommy Burns. His real name was Noah Brusso, he was said to be a French Canadian by birth, and he had won the World’s Heavy-weight Championship by beating Marvin Hart in 1906. He was born in 1881, stood 5 feet 7 inches, and weighed 12 stone 7 lb. He was very broad for his height, and always somewhat inclined to fatness. In 1907 Burns came to England, and in that and the following year summarily knocked out the best men that England could find to meet him. Our best in this country at that time were very poor indeed. Gunner Moir, quite a third-rate boxer in point of skill, was Champion of England. There was the wildest excitement about his match with Burns, because Moir’s prowess had been trumpeted far beyond its merits. Burns knocked him out in ten rounds. It was a disgraceful affair, because there can be no doubt that the Canadian could easily have beaten him much sooner. On that occasion it certainly seemed as though he were boxing to please, or rather not to disappoint the spectators. The public like to have “value for money.” And, of course, there are always cinematograph rights. What will the much larger public, outside the actual place of battle, say if the film consists, as it has done before now, of five minutes’ display of American pressmen, seconds, and other boxers who have nothing to do with the matter in hand, and half a minute’s fighting with three visible blows? The public will be disgusted, and they won’t go to see that picture, and the film-rights will be negligible. I am unable to remember whether moving pictures were taken of the encounter between Tommy Burns and Gunner Moir, but if they were that would be a sufficient, if not a good, reason for the unnecessarily protracted bout, as it certainly has been the reason in other contests.