Great Throughts Treasury

"Courage? It is not being fearless, it is finding the strength from God to do what you have to do - whether you are afraid or not."

"Exercise should be regarded as tribute to the heart. "

"To enjoy the glow of good health, you must exercise. "

"A boxer must exercise and develop every part of his body."

"A boxer's diet should be low in fat and high in proteins and sugar. Therefore you should eat plenty of lean meat, milk, leafy vegetables, and fresh fruit and ice cream for sugar."

"Actually, I started my ring career as a terrific hitter; then my hands cracked up and I had to resort to boxing and tricks to win."

"A concave chest means that your diaphragm is sagging."

"American soldiers were interested in prizefighting. I was more than most - an A.E.F. boxer with some idea of continuing with a ring career in civilian life."

"Although he stood but five feet eight and one half inches above his sole shoes, when he started his winding driving pinwheel attack, they seemed to be raining from the shoulders of some phantasmic giant."

"After a match a good, warm tub bath with 1 lb. of Epsom salts will help you relax, sleep, and prevent sore muscles."

"At that time the boy who later became the heavyweight champion of the world was an unpromising-looking lad."

"As a West Side kid fooling around with boxing gloves, I had been, for some reason of temperament, more interested in dodging a blow than in striking one."

"Being in top shape can make you a winner, while entering the ring in poor shape, not only cuts your chances of winning, but can be very dangerous."

"But in the ring Jack Dempsey was an instinctive fighter. I doubt if he ever planned anything in the ring, or thought about it much."

"But I do say that, if you will regularly devote 15 minutes a day, preferably before breakfast, for 60 days to the simple set of exercises that I devised for conditioning men in the navy, I guarantee that you will enjoy increased physical buoyancy and mental vigor."

"Dempsey was no protective boxer. He couldn't do defensive sparring. He relied on a shifty style, his own kind of defense, and couldn't be hit just any way."

"During the summers I did what most of the youngsters brought up on the west side of New York were doing; I learned to swim in the Hudson River and to dive from barges, trans-Atlantic steamers, and other high footings."

"Fat is one of the chief enemies of the heart because it has to be plentifully supplied with blood and thus needlessly increases the pumping load that the heart must sustain."

"Few human beings fought each other more savagely than Harry Greb and I."

"Ever since boyhood I've made a religion of keeping in shape by regular, conscientious exercise."

"I did six years of planning to win the championship from Jack Dempsey."

"Handball, swimming, running, jumping, basketball, and boxing were as much a part of me as breathing."

"Here I was, sixteen years old, weighing about 133 pounds, long and lanky, with no particular strength or endurance that I knew of. Not having boxed a professional before, and conscious that I was in a real fight, I was bewildered as to what I should do."

"I had learned that bag-punching was as important a part of boxers' training as boxing."

"I verily believe I boxed more rounds on that one day - my tenth birthday - than I was called upon to box in both the Dempsey contests."

"I was an A.E.F. champ, but we service boxers knew well enough that our style of pugilism was a feeble amateur thing, compared with professional prizefighting in the United States."

"I was catalogued not only as a defensive boxer but also as a light hitter, no punch."

"I often been told that Greb couldn't punch much. I wonder how the boys concocted such an opinion. True he didn't have blows like sledge on an anvil, but Greb could punish!"

"If all human lives depended upon their usefulness - as might be judged by certain standards - there would be a sudden and terrific mortality in the world."

"In youth, we get plenty of exercise through games and running around, but as middle life approaches, we settle down, literally and figuratively."

"If you are accumulating pads of fat around hips and abdomen, or if your once lean arm and leg muscles are becoming suety, you must decrease your intake of starches and fats, and take regular exercise."

"Many complain of a chronic weariness that sleep will not banish. Their trouble is that too little blood is pumped through the body per minute; this sluggishness, permitting poisonous waste matter to accumulate in every cell, clogs the channels of energy."

"More hearts have failed from flabby degeneration than from over-exercise."

"My first boxing idol was Jack Goodman, a very good West-Side lightweight. He lived on the same street as I did - Perry - only a few doors away, in Greenwich Village."

"Never eat less than four hours before boxing. Then eat only lightly."

"My own ambition in the ring had always been skillful boxing, speed and defense - on the order of Mike Gibbons."

"One half-conscious thought was burned in my mind: stay on your feet."

"On my tenth birthday my father - who was a great admirer of the old pugilists, particularly Jim Corbett and Bob Fitzsimmons - presented me with a set of new boxing gloves."

"No matter how skilled a boxer may be, he cannot stand up in the ring and give a good account of himself unless he is in perfect physical condition."

"Physical flabbiness has always seemed to me a criminal, even sacrilegious abuse of that wonderful instrument, the human body."

"The first paragraph I ever read I remember distinctly as being part of Bob Edgren's column in the New York Evening World. Edgren excited my curious and childish interest with his cartoons of fighters and fights."

"Normally, I could hit hard enough, as anyone who studied my fights might have known. But the impression was that I was essentially defensive, the very reverse of a killer, the prize fighter who read books, even Shakespeare."

"The man who has allowed his body to deteriorate cuts a pitiful figure - chest collapsed, stomach protruding."

"The way to know about championship quality is to learn from champions, and that I did; studying them with professional purpose during my time in the ring and from habitual interest afterward."

"The laugh of the twenties was my confident insistence that I would defeat Jack Dempsey for the heavyweight championship of the world."

"Though I was not a belligerent kid, I do not think I ever passed up a good opportunity to fight."

"To stay relaxed and avoid tiring mentally and physically, it is necessary to get plenty of sleep and frequent rests during the day."

"We can get along on only 20 percent of our lung capacity, but that dragging sort of existence is a poor substitute for the vitality we enjoy when the twin bellows of our lungs are taking in great drafts of oxygen."

"Upon awakening in the morning, I wondered if the proceedings of the night before had been a dream. It was hard to believe that I was the world's heavyweight champion."