William David "Billy/The Pittsburgh Kid" Conn vs. Gustav George "Gus/Pride of Cliffside" Lesnevich I

11/17/2019 - yes, the fight's "oak anniversary" (eightieth year) is today.

I spent $14.95 for a recording of this NBC radio broadcast on compact disc (from a since defunct website) several years ago. My plan was to wait and listen to it on a relaxing Sunday afternoon when it, a hot cup of tea, my comfiest robe & slippers and the sofa could absorb my full attention ...until it occurred to me that its 75th anniversary (which fell on a Tuesday, but c'est la vie) would mark an even more special occasion. Alas, my life got a bit...hectic around then, and remained so for a few years, and the CD wound up collecting dust in a storage unit.

So, here we are. Relaxing with a nice beverages and snacks, ready to hear Sam Taub's and Bill Stern's call of this classic on a Sunday (which just happens to fall eighty years after it took place live).

It seems to not be uploaded anywhere online, so I figured I'd share.*

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Brief fight summary:
Gus sounded to get the better of the first three stanzas, commanding the ring with his strong jab in the opening pair and then hurting Conn with a powerful right on the ribs in round three - badly enough to very nearly put him down. The fourth was a sea change in momentum as Conn began to dial in his footwork and lay pinpoint counters on Lesnevich, beginning to comprehensively outbox him by the fifth. The next four would see Lesnevich slugging away in frequent rallies, applying very good pressure only to be repelled by Conn's even better return fire and twinkle-toeing brilliance. Neither man neglected to variegate his offense regularly, with blows aplenty to head and body, and yet it was Conn's volume of body shots connected (along with Lesnevich's own grueling efforts) that probably saw the challenger flagging heading into the final third. He did come out gangbusters in round 10, and probably won it on the strength of an early right hand lead and stiff jab combo and some body work of his own, as the champion spent most of this frame reserving his energy and feinting on the go. The next five, however, would see Billy turn it on again, never letting up, while Gus' toughness proved the only thing keeping his legs beneath him, particularly in a brutal-sounding thirteenth in which as described he spent the better part of tottering.

* Experiencing the radio play-x-play is a treat, and the next best option to getting to watch it - but man, it just makes it sting all the more that we can't. Both combatants rank among my all-time favorite LHW's to view on film, and there is too little available of either. Hard to believe they fought two big important contests for the NYSAC and NBA light heavyweight championships (this one at Madison Square Garden in front of nearly 14 thousand people, and then a rematch at Olympia Stadium in Detroit the following June) and there isn't a second of it committed to celluloid ('39 and '40 were before the rise of acetate ), to be immortalized today via digitization and dissemination on the web.

There are whispers, however, that some amount of some version of it on film might in fact exist (perhaps even just a bootleg home-movie):
https://www.boxingforum24.com/threads/billy-conn-vs-gus-lesnevich-i-or-ii.453471/

Here's to hoping it doesn't take another eighty years for it to publicly see the light of day, if so.

 

Dawning on me this is probably wasted on the General Forum, so copying to Classic.

 

Not sure how rare or how sought-after but the storage box I dug this out from also contains a few "career" DVD sets acquired between 8-10 years ago when I dipped my toes in the fight trading waters. On hand I have Johnny Tapia (only a handful of bouts, though), Ike Ibeabuchi, and one disc with a couple fights each of Machen's and Curry's. No clue if any of them are uploaded anywhere yet, but will have a look.

There's more where that came from, too, will have a gander next time at my space (probably dropping off a garbage bag of summer clothes taking up space) but they would all be videos of modern fighters. This is the only radio broadcast I ever obtained (and there aren't too many others I'd be willing to shell out money for; I'm kind of a visual person)

(and one I know for a fact doesn't currently have a decent quality upload of the original U.S. broadcast on HBO - a certain fight of Tapia's - as there is now a dead embed link in a certain thread a certain forgetful Mr. @George Crowcroft was supposed to have looked through , but which I'm going to bump tomorrow anyway because it'll be the five year anniversary of its completion)

 

Funnily enough, while looking up thumbnail pics for the video, there were zero to be found, and yet quite a few of the rematch in Detroit (which in turn wasn't aired on NBC radio and IMO would be far unlikelier to ever surface on video). Again, this was a world championship bout fought between two popular East Coast fighters at MSG, and viewed live by 14k. Nobody thought it opportune to snap a photo? (or was that just down to venue policy?)

There is one in existence (the one I ended up using), near as I can tell, from some rag called the Milwaukee Journal of all things, published the next day - you'd think at the very least a New York paper would have written up a morning-after piece with accompanying imagery.

https://news.google.com/newspapers?...NQAAAAIBAJ&sjid=USIEAAAAIBAJ&pg=6562,4688752[