Up and at it again. Sayers hit his opponent with tremendous force, and Heenan closed and then for the first and only time, forgetting his arm for the moment, Sayers exerted himself and threw the giant down. And he kept cool, watched his opportunities, and gave no chances. Nevertheless, the twenty-first and twenty-second rounds ended in his being knocked sprawling on the grass.
Heenan was fast going blind, and his backers yelled to him to keep Sayers in the sun and to throw him. With those shouts of encouragement in his ears he dashed at the champion and planted a tremendous body-blow which knocked him down and nearly beat the senses out of him.
It was at about this time that several of the police found their way through the crowd and began to come near the ring. But the huge crowd did their utmost to make that approach a difficult one. Sayers was getting weak, Heenan blind. It was really a race between the one failing and the other. Once when Sayers retreated fast round the ring with his man after him, Heenan managed to catch him and close and hit him when on the ground. Cries of “Foul!” went up, but the referee ruled that the blow was “struck in the heat of fighting” and was not to be regarded as a foul. That excuse would not “wash,” as they say, nowadays.
Drawn by G. Sharples Engd. by Percy Roberts.
TOM SPRING.
Heenan’s sight became worse, and once in his own corner he gave his own second a stinger in mistake for Sayers. In the thirty-ninth round he got Sayers’s head under his left arm when in a corner. He was too weak to hit him severely whilst “in chancery,” but leant upon the stake and held on to Sayers as though trying to strangle him. The champion could not move his head, try and pull and twist it as he would, but with a great effort he got his left free and from his awkward position planted a couple of blows. Heenan then twisted round so that Sayers’s neck was tight against the upper rope, and he leaned hard on it. The Englishman gradually grew black in the face, and it was evident that he could not breathe. Both the umpires called out, “Cut the rope,” and this was promptly done. By the rules they should have directed the seconds to separate the men, but no doubt they believed that this method was, in the circumstances, hardly quick enough. The police at this moment appeared at the broken ring-side, and the crowd surged in, leaving only as much room as the men could stand up in face to face. Each now knocked the other down, and then the police stopped the fight.
Heenan’s sight was bad and he had to be led away by the hand; but both he and Sayers walked quite steady; Sayers declaring that he could have gone on for another hour.
The fight had lasted for two hours and twenty minutes and the result was declared a draw.
We are always brought up to believe that Sayers would have won without any sort of doubt at all if they had been allowed to go on for a few minutes longer. Naturally enough, that is the popular view, and the one promulgated (to quote a voice that, so to put it, is still heard) by William Makepeace Thackeray.