I
can see his rooms now, with colored pictures of the fights between Tom
Hyer and Yankee Sullivan, and Heenan and Sayers, and other great events
in the annals of the squared circle. On one occasion, to excite interest
among his patrons, he held a series of "championship" matches for the
different weights, the prizes being, at least in my own class, pewter
mugs of a value, I should suppose, approximating fifty cents. Neither
he nor I had any idea that I could do anything, but I was entered in
the lightweight contest, in which it happened that I was pitted in
succession against a couple of reedy striplings who were even worse than
I was. Equally to their surprise and to my own, and to John Long's, I
won, and the pewter mug became one of my most prized possessions. I
kept it, and alluded to it, and I fear bragged about it, for a number
of years, and I only wish I knew where it was now. Years later I read
an account of a little man who once in a fifth-rate handicap race won
a worthless pewter medal and joyed in it ever after. Well, as soon as I
read that story I felt that that little man and I were brothers.
This was, as far as I remember, the only one of my exceedingly rare
athletic triumphs which would be worth relating.
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