"Maybe he couldn't of been knocked down by a blow from his sparring partners," Abe suggested. "Maybe they weren't strong enough."
"That's just what I'm driving into, Abe," Morris said, "which if instead of Willard's manager wasting time by trying to have sparring partners knock him down, he would have gone to work and had Willard knocked down by something which could really and truly knock him down, like a Fifth Avenue stage or a heavy automobile delivery truck, y'understand, the result might have been very different."
"Sure I know," Abe said, "but you could easy overdo such a training method, Mawruss, and end up with an autopsy instead of a prize-fight. Also, Mawruss, the way it looked to experts after this here fight had been pulled off, where Willard made his mistake was in training to receive punishment instead of training to give it."
"Willard didn't believe in training to give punishment," Morris said. "If he had believed in it, he could have gone over to Europe and received pretty nearly a year and a half of the very best training a prize-fighter could get in giving punishment, Abe, and also, Abe, he would have avoided getting called a slacker by some of them prize-fight fans, who seemed to be sore that Willard should have quit after losing only half his teeth and having still another eye to see with, the right one being blinded in the first round, Abe."
"Well, the chances is that when Willard goes to consult a doctor, which he would probably have to do after the licking he got, Mawruss," Abe said, "before he would get the opportunity to tell the doctor that he had been in a prize-fight, the doctor will give one look at him and lay the whole trouble to abscesses at the roots of the teeth, and he will order Willard to go and have the rest of them drawn right away, so he might just as well have stayed one more round and let Dempsey finish the job. Also, Mawruss, them fight fans oser cared whether Willard had served in the army or not. Willard was the loser, and naturally them Broadway fight fans didn't have no sympathy with a loser, so even if there hadn't been no European war for Willard not to serve in, Mawruss, they would of tried to think of some other name to shout at him as he staggered out of the ring, like Prohibitionist or League-of-Nationer."
"Of course them fight fans had in a way a right to get sore, Abe," Mawruss remarked, "because a whole lot of them had bet money on Willard to win."
"Sure they did," Abe agreed, "but gambling on the personal injuries of two human beings, even if they do agree of their own will to see how long they can stand such injuries without growing unconscious, Mawruss, is my idea of nothing to gamble about. But I suppose the typical fight fan don't feel that way about it. Probably when some member of his family has got to go through an operation, he wipes away his tears with one hand and makes a book on the result with the other. He probably offers his friends even money that the party won't come out of the ether, one to two that the party wouldn't rally from the shock, and one to three against complete recovery inside of a month, or he will make a combination offer whereby his friends can play the operation across the board as a two or three proposition, Mawruss."
"And his friends, being also prize-fight fans, will probably take him up," Morris suggested.
"Certainly they will," Abe concluded, "because to a prize-fight fan suffering is not a sight which is to be avoided. It is something which a typical prize-fight fan would take a special train and pay a hundred dollars any time to see."