Sport: Fancy Dan Pug

He was the classic pug, a jug-eared middleweight with a flat, stolid face, the thick torso and bulging shoulders of a heavyweight. Even so, Utah’s Gene Fullmer, 28, was no better than an 8-5 underdog for last week’s National Boxing Association middleweight championship fight* in San Francisco. For Fullmer’s opponent was the toughest man in the business at the bloody art of toe-to-toe brawling; in 74 fights New York State’s hatchet-faced, knobby-kneed Carmen Basilio, 32, had never once been knocked out. Only Basilio seemed to have a pro’s real appreciation of Fullmer’s skills: “He kicks hell out of you.”

At the bell, Fullmer began to show a bewildering set of new tactics: in business as a Pier Six battler, he had turned Fancy Dan. Instead of ducking his head and plowing in, Fullmer danced tantalizingly beyond the reach of Basilio’s deadly left hook. When Basilio swung, Fullmer countered with deft precision. When Basilio crowded him into a corner, Fullmer calmly retreated into a cocoon of arms and shoulders, then emerged to give better than he got. When Basilio clinched, Fullmer wrestled him about as he pleased and tossed in an occasional elbow for old time’s sake. In the 14th, eyes glowering behind scarred, gnarled brows, Basilio took a right hand that staggered him back against the ropes. He swayed there for seconds before somehow managing to advance again. But the referee called off the slaughter, and the unmarked pug from Utah was N.B.A. middleweight champ.

“There was no use two bulls going in there and locking horns,” explained the farm-raised Fullmer, who does not let his profession prevent him from being an elder in the Mormon Church.

In his dressing room, Basilio sat back and blew through his mouth. “Whew,” he said, “No sense of crying. He kicked the hell out of me. So what’s the sense?”

*Last May the N.B.A. deprived Champion Sugar Ray Robinson of his title for refusing to fight either Fullmer or Basilio, left the aging (39) Harlem flash the middleweight champ of only the two non-N.B.A. states: Massachusetts and New York.