National Police Gazette: 'Jeffries > Sullivan' -- maybe.......

While searching Cyberboxingzone I ran across a reference to a 'National Police Gazette' article,

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(Sept 10 1904).
Well, that piqued my interest (even granting that NPG was on famously bad terms with Sullivan).

The University library in my locale had an account with American Periodicals Online, and I saw a very hard to read copy of the article. I discovered that the bulk of the article was coverage of Jeffries-Munroe. (There's also discussion of a proposed Corbett-O'Brien contest, the author (Sam Austin) feeling that O'Brien ought be easy for Corbett -- an opinion that suprised me, given Corbett's performance against Jeffries the previous year (though this might also indicate how highly Jeffries was regarded)).

Anyways, the article quotes no one on the relative merits of Jeffries and Sullivan. What I do see -- again, some of this is very hard to read -- is

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(Jeffries)

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Of course, even the implication that Sullivan was still the standard thatJeffries was shooting for -- in people's minds -- is weakened by the fact that Austin doesn't have any quotes to bac up the headline.

In fact, part of the reason I'm bringing up this article is to say it's not very substantive. I'm doing this because I've seen the articles headline used to argue that boxing afficianados of the time largely regarded Jeffries the superior fighter. The title would lead one to believe the article contains interviews with boxing experts. In fact the body of the article contains no quotes of that sort, and goes a bit soft on Jeff's superiority, downgrading it to possible parity.

Anyways, if anyone ever tosses out this articles title as evidence of how Sullivan was regarded at the time, you should know it's not a very substantive piece.