advice, bawling outs, and the etc., which on top of all the physical culture I was getting every day used to steam me up. But I got to like it and look forward to my daily chores in the gym with a relish, because I knew it all meant something and it was all speeding me along to the top. The way I looked at it, as long as I was in the ring at all I might as well be a champ. I'd rather be a first-class laborer than a third-class king, no fooling. Say—even when I was a newsboy, I sold a mean paper and don't think I didn't!
Well, having got all that off my manly chest, I will now get down to the business of the meeting, which is my fight with the middleweight champion, in which I knock him so cold his name could of been Battling Zero instead of Frankie Jackson, which it was. Although I knock Frankie stiff, I only get a draw on the account of a technicality. The technicality was that I am likewise knocked stiff myself. Laugh that off!
Within a year after Nate has talked me into laying aside my white coat and apron for a pair of boxing gloves, I have fought my way to the right for a scuffle with the middleweight champion. But it takes two to make a quarrel and the champ don't wish to box me no more than he wishes he had pneumonia. He just simply won't romp with me and that's all they is to it. Instead of that, he plays around with the set-ups, knocking over kids which don't know a left hook from the referee's tonsils and collecting anywheres from ten to twenty-five thousand bucks for each of these aggravated assaults.
