The fighter who dethrones a Pugilant Hero has a hard struggle to win popular acceptance thereafter, as readers of Pierce Egan have reason to know. The microcosm is a worshiper of demigods, like the larger world around it. Gene Tunney is belittled to this day, particularly by fans who never saw him, simply because he whipped Jack Dempsey. The names of the conquerors of Hannibal and Terry McGovern are seldom spoken. The cult of Napoleon envelops the globe, but only Tory biographers have a kind word for Wellington. One thing all these victors have in common is that they went into the ring as long shots; the man who demolishes a concept is never popular.

A protracted terra-cotta-colored prizefighter named Sandy Saddler, whose physique and profile remind me of a praying mantis, has labored under this handicap since the evening of October 29, 1948, four days before the Truman election, when he knocked out a quick-moving Italian named Willie Pep, of Hartford, in Madison Square Garden, and won the featherweight championship of the world. Pep was a 1–3 favorite going in; Dewey, as I remember it, was 1–15. It was to be a week of surprises, and the blushing experts never forgave either winner. Saddler, five feet eight and a half inches tall, was twenty-two and weighed a hundred and twenty-four pounds. Pep, who was twenty-six, is of a height more usual among featherweights—five feet five. Like Saddler he was under a hundred and twenty-six pounds; he had to be, because that is the class limit. Saddler floored the Hartford man twice in the third round and knocked him out with a left hook to the jaw in the fourth. Pep, after the third knockdown, was the theater of a visible psychomachy, or struggle between body and soul. Body won, and he stayed down. Knowing coves—in Egan’s phrase—who on the afternoon of the fight had coupled Pep and Sugar Ray Robinson as twin pinnacles on the horizon of the Sweet Science, announced after Pep’s defeat that he had been a hollow shell, which is a traditional ex-post-facto metaphor.

They even suggested that he had feigned, although his record made this implausible. He had won a hundred and thirty-four fights out of a hundred and thirty-six.

To me Saddler appeared to be what Egan would have called a first-rate bit of fighting stuff, but he never succeeded in making his detractors admit it. He fought Pep three more times—in 1949, 1950, and 1951. In the last two annual renewals he knocked the old champion out, but the critics said that the Pep of 1950 was the mere shell of a shell, while the Pep of 1951 was not even that; he was more like the murmur you hear when you hold a shell to your ear. By that time, Pep admittedly was a bit worn between the shoulder blades, but he was still the second-best featherweight in the world. Part of the public reluctance to accept Saddler is attributable to his height, which spectators feel gives him an undue advantage over his opponents. A moment’s cogitation on observed phenomena would tell them the opposite.

(by A.J.Liebling)