"You 10-round softies of today, get on your feet and salute a man." The man thus challengingly saluted: Frank Crosby, dead in his mid-70s, who 50 years ago fought the longest and strangest knockout fight in history. The saluter: Ed Wray, St. Louis Post-Dispatch sports editor.
The four-ounce-glove fight—and Crosby—lasted 77 rounds, five hours and five minutes.* The winner was a St. Louis printer named Harry Sharpe, whose rewards were 1) the Missouri lightweight championship, 2) a side bet of $500, 3) eleven months in jail for violating an anti-prizefight law. (Crosby was let off.) Both men had trained so well they were still slugging in the 76th round, when they knocked each other down simultaneously. Crosby banged his head and got up dazed. Sharpe put him down for the count a few minutes later.
But Crosby was not the first casualty of the fight. With nips from his bottle, Referee Willie Green had fought off cold and exhaustion until the 65th round. Then he passed out. The last twelve rounds were fought without a referee.
*Longest gloved fight on record: no rounds (7 hr., 19 min.) between Andy Bowen and Jack Burke at New Orleans, La., April 6, 1893. When both men were unable to continue, the referee ruled it no contest.