Henry Armstrong vs Lou Ambers 2

Henry Armstrong lost the world lightweight championship to Lou Ambers at Yankee Stadium on 22 August 1939 after fifteen fiercely contested rounds in which the champion’s persistent low punching became as important to the result as the punches scored in legitimate exchanges. Armstrong weighed the lightweight limit of 135lb, and Amber’s was 134lb. The paid attendance was 29,088, with gross receipts of $137,925.77 and net receipts of $115,651.81. Promoter Mike Jacobs staged the contest, Arthur Donovan refereed, and Frank Fullam and Bill Healy served as judges. Armstrong received $40,947.99 and Ambers $23,398.85. It was their second meeting, almost exactly a year after Armstrong had taken the title from Ambers over fifteen rounds at Madison Square Garden in the bout which made him the only fighter to hold the featherweight, lightweight and welterweight championships simultaneously.

Penalties had also marked the first contest for low punching, and the same difficulty returned almost immediately in the rematch. Armstrong fought in his customary fashion, crowding Ambers, working at close quarters and attempting to maintain a pace at which the challenger had little opportunity to settle. Ambers was again required to withstand Armstrong’s constant forward movement while trying to create enough room to box and counter. Donovan intervened in the second round and penalised Armstrong for a low blow, the first of five such penalties during the fight. The significance was immediate because under the scoring method then in use, the offending round was effectively taken from Armstrong regardless of what he had achieved through legitimate punching. Contemporary reporting later maintained that Armstrong had actually done the better work in four of the five rounds taken from him.

Armstrong continued pressing through the early and middle rounds, but Donovan again acted in the fifth and then in the seventh. The champion’s style made the problem difficult to avoid once the referee had established his interpretation. Armstrong worked with his head close to Ambers’s chest, punched continuously to the body and attempted to shorten the challenger’s room for manoeuvre. Ambers, a clever and experienced lightweight, was better able than most opponents to remain composed under that pressure. He tied Armstrong up when necessary, moved when space permitted and continued scoring enough at range to prevent the champion from simply overwhelming him. The bout became a struggle on two levels: Ambers had to resist Armstrong physically, while Armstrong had to maintain his attack without giving Donovan another reason to intervene. The latter proved beyond him. A fourth penalty came in the ninth round and another in the eleventh.

The five forfeited rounds — the second, fifth, seventh, ninth and eleventh — ultimately determined the shape of the official scoring. Armstrong nevertheless continued to force the action, and there was no suggestion that Ambers had found an easy method of dealing with him. Contemporary accounts described the contest as continuously active, with both men punching at a demanding pace through the full fifteen rounds. Armstrong’s strength remained his ability to stay close and make an opponent fight almost without rest. Ambers’s achievement was that he endured that pressure without breaking as he had threatened to do in their first meeting, when Armstrong had floored him twice. There were no recorded knockdowns in the rematch. By the later rounds, Ambers was still sufficiently organised to box and counter, while Armstrong continued coming forward despite the growing handicap imposed by the penalties.

The interpretation of those penalties divided ringside opinion. One prominent contemporary account argued that the rules had been applied with exceptional severity. It maintained that Armstrong had plainly won four of the five penalised rounds on the actual fighting. Others were less sympathetic. A later examination of surviving film concluded that edited footage which favoured Armstrong could give a misleading impression that he had been robbed, and argued that Ambers had deserved the verdict when the entire contest was considered. What is beyond dispute is that Donovan repeatedly warned and penalised Armstrong, and the champion never sufficiently altered his body attack to prevent the same offence from recurring. Whether the punches were deliberate fouls, borderline blows produced by Armstrong’s crouching pressure, or a combination of both remained part of the argument after the decision. Armstrong’s manager Eddie Mead protested bitterly, while other observers considered Donovan’s enforcement entirely within the rules.

Ambers completed the final rounds without allowing Armstrong to recover the ground lost through the deductions. At the end of fifteen rounds, all three officials voted for the challenger. Donovan scored the fight eight rounds to seven for Ambers, Fullam also had it 8-7, while Healy returned the much wider tally of 11-3. The unanimous decision restored the lightweight championship to Ambers. The closeness of two cards demonstrates how decisive the penalties had been: without them Armstrong’s work in several of those rounds might have produced a different result. The wide Healy card, however, also shows that not every official regarded the bout as simply an Armstrong victory overturned by fouls. Ambers had survived the champion’s strongest periods, remained effective throughout the full distance and satisfied every judge that he had done enough to regain the title.

The defeat ended a remarkable stretch in which Armstrong had gone 46 fights without losing and had continued defending the welterweight championship while carrying the lightweight crown. By August 1939 he had already relinquished the featherweight title because making 126lb had become impractical, and the loss to Ambers reduced his extraordinary collection of championships to one. There were contemporary suggestions that the tremendous activity of the previous two years had begun to blunt some of Armstrong’s earlier force; one report noted that his knockout rate had fallen markedly during his recent contests. Even so, Ambers had not defeated a spent fighter. Armstrong remained one of the busiest and most formidable champions in boxing and continued his exceptional welterweight reign after this defeat.

For Ambers, the decision was both revenge and restoration. He had been dropped twice and lost his championship to Armstrong in their first meeting, yet returned a year later better prepared to withstand the same relentless attack. The rematch did not settle every argument between them, because the low-blow rulings became inseparable from discussion of the result. It did, however, establish that Ambers could survive fifteen rounds with Armstrong at his most persistent and remain sufficiently effective to earn the votes of all three officials. Armstrong supplied most of the sustained pressure, but boxing under championship rules required that pressure to remain legal. Five times Donovan ruled that it had not. Those decisions, together with Ambers’s resistance and countering, returned the world lightweight championship to the man Armstrong had taken it from twelve months earlier.

For me the second Armstrong-Ambers fight was one of those contests where you can argue about the result until closing time. Armstrong had taken the lightweight title from Ambers a year earlier while holding three world championships at once, and by 1939 he was still fighting at an astonishing pace. Ambers was a proper champion himself, clever, tough and experienced enough to know that trying to outfight Armstrong at his own game was asking for trouble.

The problem for Armstrong was referee Arthur Donovan. He penalised him for low blows in the second, fifth, seventh, ninth and eleventh rounds. Five rounds in a fifteen-round fight is enormous. The New York Times reckoned Armstrong had actually won four of those rounds on the fighting itself, and I can understand why his people were furious. Donovan and Frank Fullam eventually had Ambers winning only 8-7, while Bill Healy somehow had it 11-3.

But I wouldn’t call Ambers a lucky champion. He still had to live with Armstrong in front of him for fifteen rounds, and very few men could do that comfortably. Armstrong was like having somebody permanently attached to your chest — punching, leaning, working the body and never giving you a clean second to reset.

My feeling is that Armstrong probably fought enough to retain his title, but he let the referee take it away. Whether those punches were genuinely low or borderline shots caused by his crouching style, five penalties changed everything. Ambers deserved enormous credit for surviving the pressure, but the fouls became the story of the fight, and that will always leave a question mark over the verdict.