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New Deal in Harvard Boxing Promised By Lamar as He Plans House League

Pugilism Here, Downed by Ban On Intercollegiate Bouts, Faces Revival

By Charles N. Poliak

Last spring big, blond Henry Lamar found himself in a double dilemma. As a University of Virginia alumnus, he had to see a Harvard boxing team, coached by him, meet the scrappers from his former alma mater; and as a Harvard coach, he had to watch his team fight its last intercollegiate match.

The season, and Harvard boxing, did not end in a smashing victory, designed to leave Crimson pugilism just a glorious memory. Virginia won, and so intercollegiate fisticuffs here was terminated in somewhat of an anticlimax.

Down But Not Out

Boxers, Lamar will say, are the kind of athletes who need competition, and not the kind that comes from week after week of sparring with the same partners. There must be a little more incentive to win. Boxing for the joy of boxing may exist, but the majority of fist-flingers want to see more than a bruised sparring partner (whom they've fought a dozen times before) after they get through a few three-minute sessions.

Give Boxing a Long Count!

Matches, bouts, tournaments--in other words, competition--are the things to keep Harvard boxing alive. Coach Lamar has pointed out that the Freshman and University tournaments, held in the spring, are always well attended. So he proposes a tournament a week, to be fought by teams from every House and from Dudley.

The 119 pound midget can find a partner his size under Lamar's new plan, and the man of 200 pounds likewise will be able to find a behemoth of his dimensions.

Boxers Are Alert

According to Lamar, some of the largest crowds ever to fill the basketball floor of the Indoor Athletic Building were there to see boxing matches. Weekly House bouts might be fought between the halves of basketball games, he thinks; at any rate a lively league is surely the thing to bring back the breath of life into "the manly art."

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