Naturally, being fond of boxing, I grew to know a good many prize-fighters, and to most of those I knew I grew genuinely attached.  I have never been able to sympathize with the outcry against prize-fighters.  The only objection I have to the prize ring is the crookedness that has attended its commercial development.  Outside of this I regard boxing, whether professional or amateur, as a first-class sport, and I do not regard it as brutalizing.  Of course matches can be conducted under conditions that make them brutalizing.  But this is true of football games and of most other rough and vigorous sports.  Most certainly prize-fighting is not half as brutalizing or demoralizing as many forms of big business and of the legal work carried on in connection with big business.  Powerful, vigorous men of strong animal development must have some way in which their animal spirits can find vent.  When I was Police Commissioner I found (and Jacob Riis will back me up in this) that the establishment of a boxing club in a tough neighborhood always tended to do away with knifing and gun-fighting among the young fellows who would otherwise have been in murderous gangs.  Many of these young fellows were not naturally criminals at all, but they had to have some outlet for their activities.  In the same way I have always regarded boxing as a first-class sport to encourage in the Young Men’s Christian Association.  I do not like to see young Christians with shoulders that slope like a champagne bottle.  Of course boxing should be encouraged in the army and navy.  I was first drawn to two naval chaplains, Fathers Chidwick and Rainey, by finding that each of them had bought half a dozen sets of boxing-gloves and encouraged their crews in boxing.

When I was Police Commissioner, I heartily approved the effort to get boxing clubs started in New York on a clean basis.  Later I was reluctantly obliged to come to the conclusion that the prize ring had become hopelessly debased and demoralized, and as Governor I aided in the passage of and signed the bill putting a stop to professional boxing for money.  This was because some of the prize-fighters themselves were crooked, while the crowd of hangers-on who attended and made up and profited by the matches had placed the whole business on a basis of commercialism and brutality that was intolerable.  I shall always maintain that boxing contests themselves make good, healthy sport.  It is idle to compare them with bull-fighting; the torture and death of the wretched horses in bull-fighting is enough of itself to blast the sport, no matter how great the skill and prowess shown by the bull-fighters.  Any sport in which the death and torture of animals is made to furnish pleasure to the spectators is debasing.  There should always be the opportunity provided in a glove fight or bare-fist fight to stop it when one competitor is hopelessly outclassed or too badly hammered.  But the men who take part in these fights are hard as nails, and it is not worth while to feel sentimental about their receiving punishment which as a matter of fact they do not mind.  Of course the men who look on ought to be able to stand up with the gloves, or without them, themselves; I have scant use for the type of sportsmanship which consists merely in looking on at the feats of some one else.