Sport: The Street Fighter

“Call me a come-in fighter, a counterpuncher, an aggressive boxer. Call me anything you want,” said Featherweight Champion Davey Moore, 25. “But if you really want to know what I am, I’m a street fighter, man, the best you ever saw.”

As the best street fighter ever produced by Kiefer Junior High School in Springfield, Ohio, Davey Moore was rough and ready last week to defend his title against the man he had won it from last March: Hogan (“Kid”) Bassey, the broad-shouldered son of a Nigerian farmer, and, by order of Queen Elizabeth, Member of the Order of the British Empire. Bassey’s patriotic flair tickled Moore. “Bassey wants to win for his country,” said he. “Well, that’s nice. Me, I’m not fighting for any high ideals. I’ve got six big mouths to feed. I’m a hungry fighter, very hungry.”

In his dressing room at Los Angeles’ cramped Olympic Auditorium, Moore (5 ft. 3 in., 126 Ibs.) gulped a tablespoonful of honey half an hour before the fight (“It puts the sweetness back into you”), performed perfunctory stoops and bends, and thumbed the Bible (“I just open the Good Book and read whatever I come to”). Then he set out to take Bassey apart. When Bassey did not come to him, Counter-Puncher Moore went to Bassey, blasting home occasional shots to the body with such force that the Nigerian’s gasps were heard in the balcony. By the tenth round, Bassey’s left eye was cut, and his right eye was beginning to close. Moore opened up with left hooks and right uppercuts that had the challenger tottering backward in a grotesque little dance. At the bell, Bassey weakly raised Moore’s hand, then refused to come out for the eleventh. “I’m getting beaten too badly,” he told Referee Frankie Van. “I’m through.”

The son of a Negro clergyman (“He don’t say nothing about my fighting—everybody likes a winner, man”), Moore was already a professional of sorts at the age of seven, fighting in impromptu preliminaries in Springfield’s Memorial Hall and pulling off his gloves to scramble for the nickels and dimes that were tossed into the ring. By 1952, Bantamweight Moore was good enough to win the A.A.U. title, reach the quarter-finals of the Olympics. Turning pro the next year, Moore seemed to be only a so-so fighter until 1957, when he suddenly came alive, has since won 15 straight.

After last week’s fight, Moore was frankly startled at questions about his plans for the future. “Man, what you think?” he cried. “I want the big payday —Becerra [the bantamweight champion], Brown [the lightweight champion], I don’t care. I ain’t working for free passes. I’ll take care of all the business I can get.”