Harry Wills and Luis Firpo by Rob Snell


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Sunday State Journal

Lincoln, Nebraska

24 Aug 1924

Methods of Negro Boxer Are

Totally Opposite From Wild

Bull's Ideas—He Weighs 224.

At Harry Wills' camp at Rose Point, a beautiful spot on Peconic Bay, Southampton, L. I., we learned that Wills' training methods are almost totally opposite from Luis Firpo's. Whereas Luis takes his steak and meat daily, Harry's special training dish is cream cheese of his own making. Harry eats little meat and no steaks or beef until the day of a fight.

Firpo is taking his training fairly easy just now, working gradually more and more up to the fight, he says. Wills has done thirty-three days of hard work until he has got himself in shape to enter a ring today, so has let up in order not to go stale.

Wills eats only two meals a day. Firpo the regulation three. Wills jogs eight miles a day thru heavy sand along the beach. Firpo does but five miles of road work and not much running to it. Instead of punching a heavy bag Wills pulls on a rowing machine.

Can You Answer This?

And while Firpo is losing weight Wills finds the harder he works the more he gains! Luis has lost eight pounds, Harry has gained fourteen, now weighing 224, one pound more than Firpo says he weighs. In one respect only does Wills training idea agree with Firpo's. Harry thinks that every man should train himself according to "his own individual requirements. (This is the idea which the Finnish athletes who proved so redoubtable in the Olympics have given to our own Olympic athletes.) Therefore, both Wills and Firpo are their own trainers.

"Of course these big professional trainers know their business and more about training athletes than I do," Wills admitted. "But I figure I've been in the game long enough now to know just what it takes to get me In condition. I don't think they could help me any. While a trainer can tell a man's condition on the outside by looking at him, he don't know how the man feels on the inside. Some days that eight miles along the beach doesn't bother me at all and I can box five or six rounds and work all afternoon and never feel It. But other times I know that I'm just wearing out my energy inside, and nobody but me knows it."

Wills' boxing arena is indoors, on the former dance floor of Jones casino, a hotel restaurant owned and operated by a well known Southampton character, William H. Jones. Wills lives in a cottage furnished by Jones, a few feet down the beach from the Casino, with his wife, two

sparring partners and a cook. Harry says he chose this place to train in order to avoid big crowds of spectators. He says he can't train playing to the gallery. And yet from twenty to thirty persons a day, many of them fashionable and wealthy people from the Southampton summer resort,

visit him daily.

When we dropped in at Wills cottage we found him and two negro sparring partners, Jeff Clark, the "Joplin ghost," and "Battling" Owens, sitting idle at a time of the afternoon when we expected they' be working in the ring.

"First afternoon off in thirty-three days.'" Wills explained with a contented look. "I'm trained down now to the point where I'm liable to go stale. So I'm giving myself a vacation for a few days. I mean, I'm trained up so fine, for I weigh more now than I did when I started." Wills looked in better condition than we ever saw him, much better than before the Madden fight.

He said he gets up at six every morning for his road work, and doesn't eat till ten. Then it's fruit, or cereal of some kind, ham and eggs and whole wheat bread without butter most of the time, accompanied by his favorite dish, cream cheese with sugar and sweets cream over it.

His work in the ring comes from three to four, shadow boxing, rope jumping, five or six rounds with his two sparring partners, and gymnastic exercises afterward on the mat. At 5:30 p. tn. he eats his big meal, lamb or pork with plenty of vegetables and whole wheat bread. We asked him about the cream cheese dish.

"It's the best training stuff in the world. I learned that from my mother in New Orleans. She sends me the cheese mold and I make my own. I get the best cream from Mr. Jones; let it stand until it gets thick, then pour It in the perforated mold so that the whey runs off and leave the cheese. Let me show you," and Harry got up to get the mold. At this point his wife came in and nothing would do but she should prepare a dish of it to prove its merits. And it was good! But we made a mistake by saying so, for in their good natured hospitality we almost had to fight Wills and the whole camp to keep from eating three or four more platefuls.

There is an air of good natured jollity about Wills' camp that we missed in the Argentine outfit. When "Battling" Owens—he insisted on the "Battling"— gave his weight as two hundred and forty, Wills and Clark laughed him down. "Two hundred and sixty, you mean."

To settle the argument they insisted on taking the barrel-chested giant to the scales, tho he didn't want to go. Behind his back Harry put his foot on the scales, so that the weight went up to 294. "Battling" let out a roar, declaring that the scales were wrong or else he'd never eat again. The rafters shook for ten minutes as they laughed at "Battling's" bewildered expression, but they never told him what was the matter.

End

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