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SHOWMAN
plenty hard, quick killings weren't his style. I'd seen most of Sullivan's "meet-all-comers" bouts at Madison Square Garden in New York— and among other things I'd seen what happened when Charley Mitchell, who was supposed to be taking a dive, forgot what he was paid for and made a real fight of it. If Corbett cracked up his hands on some concretejawed blacksmith in St. Joe, or too many people succeeded in staying three rounds with him, the whole scheme was gone to pot. So I arranged matters to prevent accidents.
We laid hands on a well-known "mixed-ale fighter" named Connie MacVeagh— a mixed-ale fighter being a run-of-mine pugilist, supposed to train on mixed ale, who was willing to pick up some money any old way. MacVeagh looked like several million dollars in the ring and had a good head on him— just what we needed to stooge for Corbett. He was another boxer who could act. His performance of giving and taking tremendous punishment, only to be dropped by a punishing right hook just before the end of the third round, was a triumph of the histrionic art. He had a trick of getting his right glove between his jaw and Corbett's fist that made the finishing punch sound like a pile-driver coming home on a concrete hitching-block— and also made sure Corbett's hand would be uninjured.
But what made him invaluable was his genius at the diplomatic end of the game— which consisted in traveling well ahead of us, arriving in a promising spot and writing to the papers as a boxer just come to town and
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