Sport: Peewee Pundits

Billed as the “Herkimer Hurricane” because he comes from Herkimer, N. Y. and fights with less finesse than fury, Louis D’Ambrosio (Lou Ambers) used to be a sparring partner for Tony Canzoneri. That was when Canzoneri was lightweight champion three years ago. Last year, Ambers had progressed sufficiently to fight Canzoneri for the title, not sufficiently to win it. Last week, in Madison Square Garden’s first major indoor fight of the season, they met again. This time, after 15 rounds of sincere if not particularly interesting scuffling, the referee and judges decreed that Ambers’ enthusiasm for his chores had outweighed Canzoneri’s fatigued apathy by more than the difference between Canzoneri’s skill and Ambers’ puppylike clumsiness.

Hailed as a new lightweight champion, Ambers embraced his onetime employer, capered around his dressing room in a cardboard crown, urged his manager to get him a match with Welterweight Champion Barney Ross. Product of a bootleg boxing circuit which flourished in upstate New York when promoters were too poor or too parsimonious to pay for licenses, Ambers is 22, untemperamental, attached to numerous other D’Ambrosios by those ties of affection which all right-thinking young pugilists consider themselves conventionally compelled to profess. He makes his home in a Bronx apartment run for him by his sister, often drives to Herkimer for weekends with his mother, hopes to organize the nine D’Ambrosio children into a jazz band in which he will play banjo and clarinet. Last spring, one of his opponents died as the result of cracking his head on the ring floor. Since then, Lou Ambers has attended no prizefights as a witness.

Last week was the busiest of the season for peewee pugilistic pundits. On the same program as the Canzoneri v. Ambers fight was one between the New York State Athletic Commission’s nominee for world’s featherweight champion, Mike Belloise, and England’s Dave Crowley. It ended in the ninth round when the referee refused to allow Crowley’s claim of foul, counted him out instead. Four nights before in Manhattan, fiery little Sixto Escobar of Puerto Rico improved his claim to the world’s bantamweight title by forcing his opponent, Pittsburgh’s Tony Marino, to stop after the 13th round, when both his eyes were cut so badly that he could not see.