At Shawfield Park (Glasgow, Scotland), capacity packed with 40,000 and thousands more unable to get in, it was vintage boxing, the likes of which a man would see, if he was lucky that was, only once in a lifetime.
It was Peter Kane at his greatest - unbeaten in 42 professional fights - and Benny Lynch at his pinnacle - and the best man won.
Peter Kane was a youngster of nineteen and had been a pro since he was sixteen - although he had been fighting long before that as a youth in the booths around the market towns of the North of England. Some scoffed at the idea of such a young fellow taking on the likes of Lynch. Nevertheless, Kane was unbeaten.
The English were convinced he was their answer to Benny Lynch.
Tommy Farr said it was the best fight of any weight he had ever seen. Elky Clark, former British flyweight champion, rated it the greatest flyweight match of boxing history. And Victor McLaglen, the former heavyweight boxer turned sucessful actor, picked him up in his arms to announce to everyone that he was holding the Jack Dempsey of the small men. “Oh boy, what a fight,” he said. In his commissioned report of the fight he enthused even more...
"It’s the most exciting fight of its weight I have ever seen and although Kane was the aggressor until about the ninth round, Lynch seemed to have his measure all the time. . . . You would notice that Kane’s punches had little effect on your boy who seemed as fresh as paint after the fight. Indeed, I was surprised when I met him in Mr Russell Moreland’s office afterwards to see how little bruised he was. How Kane weathered the twelfth round I don’t know. Lynch had him at his mercy . . . it wasn’t a knock out in the accepted sense. Kane was too weak to get up in the thirteenth . . . the gamest loser I have ever seen. And what a clean, fair fight it was. If you can promise me another fight as thrilling and sporting as this one then, boy, I’m certainly coming back to Scotland."
No one ever offered that promise.
And there never was another fight like that night at Shawfield Park, although other Scots were to win world titles. It was the fight men were to speak about for the rest of their lives. It was the fight the fifty-bob fighters, the men who knew and suffered their industry, said they never thought they would see the likes of, for they never thought two men could fight like that. Some of them had seen Jimmy Wilde. But no one had ever produced what they said was the ultimate in the sporting science called pugilism that Benny Lynch produced that night.
(by John Burrowes)
