At the time of writing this chapter, Joe Beckett is the Heavy-weight Champion of England, and has been ever since the contest described below when, on February 27th, 1919, he first met Bombardier Wells. He is not a very good champion. His skill is not of the first order, and he has neither the height nor weight to supply his deficiencies. Carpentier disposed of him in a round, because Carpentier is incomparably the better boxer. Wells is also a better boxer so far as skill--one might almost say “mere” skill--goes, but as some one said of him once, “He’s too bally refined,” which is a better description of the Bombardier than most loose generalisations. He is too bally (and I might dare also to add--“blinking”) refined, both in his style of boxing and in his appearance. The old-time pug-faced bruiser is dying out, not only because men no longer fight with their bare knuckles, but because their skill is so much greater in defence than it used to be, that a broken nose is a comparatively rare accident; and modern surgery can make a job of the worst battered faces. Your opponent aims chiefly for those places which are most susceptible to temporary but overwhelming effect--the jaw and the mark. The most terrific blows on either spot do not produce disfigurement. What is known as a “thick ear” is common enough still--many amateurs have it: but Wells has managed to avoid even that. His profile might easily be called Greek--at all events by some one who had once seen a photograph of Praxitéles’ Hermes and had rather forgotten it. Even Carpentier, whose personal appearance is discussed much as a good-looking actor’s, and by the same sort of people, looks, at close quarters, more of a bruiser than does Wells. _Punch_ chose to be amusing on this subject not long before the war, satirising the old and new methods of the manner in which celebrities of the ring were photographed. In one drawing you see the old bruiser, a doughty ruffian, stripped to the waist, with a flattened nose, beetle-browed, with a long aggressive chin, piggy eyes and short-cropped hair; in the other you have a smiling young man dressed in the last palpitating extremity of fashion, with longish hair brushed back from a somewhat noble brow, whilst beside him a beautiful young woman smiles into a baby’s cot. The source of Mr. Punch’s inspiration was not far to seek. In the old days a boxer was portrayed at his job just as actors and actresses were, because his job it was that interested people. And like actors and actresses he is still photographed at his job. But to-day just as you will see in the illustrated papers photographs of theatrical people playing quite irrelevant games of golf or making hay which has nothing to do with the point, so you will see photographs of feather-weight champions dandling purely inapposite infants. It is an age when people like to assure themselves (for some inscrutable reason) that show-people are just exactly like people who are not on show.