Page:The Leather Pushers (1921).pdf/102

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purpose of seein' him knocked dead! I could name a hundred other scrappers which got a Big Time hearin' purely on a managerial-created personality.

Success is a high-powered drink which has flattened as many guys as booze ever did—you gotta know how to handle it or it'll throw you, as sure as the Atlantic is inclined to be damp! What keeps plenty of room for newcomers at the top of the ladder of fame is the fact that simple carelessness is continually forcin' guys that's reached there to slide off. In our case poor judgment and too much ambition caused us to drop back in the heap just when it looked like not even the champ could stop us.

This one-round knockout by Kennedy before a metropolitan jury ruined all my hard work in makin' Kid Roberts a drawin' card in the Big Town, and set us back at least a year—as I thought at the time. Here's a burg where you can get anything in the world with the slight exception of sympathy, where every guy which lands at the Battery with a dialect, a secretary, and four trunks is gave the freedom of the city and a chance to rent Carnegie Hall, whilst a possible future Carnegie, with nothin' but the dialect, is sent to Ellis Island so's he can appreciate what a democracy means at the go in.

The bank roll was shot to pieces, three or four important and exceedin'ly profitable bouts had been canceled, and takin' it by and large, our prospects looked as bright as a guy's which has just finished a course in bartendin'. There was only one way we could come back quick, and that was to get a return scrap with Kennedy and knock him dead, a thing that to my untutored mind looked 99 per cent impossible. In the first