Events & Discoveries

During the past 12 months, Jackson, in an attempt to bring a semblance of scientific order to the business, has fought with dissident commissions (Massachusetts resigned from the NBA last January when it was faced with censure for staging an unauthorized welterweight title match between Tony DeMarco and Virgil Akins), reluctant fighters (Joe Brown seemed disinclined to risk his lightweight title against Kenny Lane until Jackson and Texas Commissioner M. B. Morgan forced his hand), Julius Helfand and the International Boxing Club.

"I think the IBC has been very shortsighted in the policy of providing for the future," Jackson says, "but then that's their business. Apparently, they're waxing fat on the boxing business and putting nothing back into it. You know, this country around here [Union Grove, Wis., his summer home] is a farm community, and you should listen to the farmers talk about a shiftless character who farms intensively and depletes the growing qualities of the soil. He takes all the good out of it and doesn't put any fertilizer back in. Same with the IBC."

Jackson is also worried about televised boxing. According to him, "As long as it's under its present operation I am [concerned]. If there were competition set up—and this is D'Amato's idea—we would broaden the field and probably draw in smaller clubs. Then you wouldn't have to submit to the dictates of a monopolistic group. It would be far healthier."

Jackson also has reservations about Helfand, whose New York commission is for bidden by interpretation of state law from membership in the NBA. "I'm not close enough to the picture to know what prompts some of the things Mr. Helfand does," Jackson says. "I don't know if he arrives at his conclusions independently or is swayed by some outside influence. I know it appears at times that he makes a studied effort to upset NBA procedures. I don't know whether that is to demonstrate the superiority of the World Championship Committee [Helfand is chairman] over the NBA, or whether it is personal aggrandizement, or whether it might be promotional interests, to put it mildly. If you take on a responsibility, you owe a responsibility to the people to do that job."

Jackson has taken on a responsibility and has provided the hack-ridden NBA with the most honest, feisty and enlightened leadership it has had in years.

The NBA meets in Las Vegas next week for its annual convention and to elect a new president. There is a strong movement to draft Jackson for another term. "If the consensus is that they want me, I'll do it," Jackson says. "Having no strings, I can go down the middle of the road without having to kow-tow to Truman Gibson [IBC president] or any others. And that feeling has taken hold of the NBA. They like that attitude."

We do, too.

Your Dog and Your Cold

To Tweak contemporary man's fixation on the microbe, Arthur Guiterman some years back wrote a poem about the Antiseptic Baby and the Prophylactic Pup. You may recall they "were playing in the garden when a Bunny gamboled up;/They looked upon the Creature with a loathing undisguised;/—It wasn't Disinfected and it wasn't Sterilized."

"Ho! Ho!" you, or your father, chortled. "That's a good one." Well, you can very well laugh out of the other side of your mouthwash now. Dr. Shyamal K. Sinha, a biological researcher from Kansas City, has advanced the theory that we catch colds from our dogs. Or they catch them from us. Or both, mind you. Dr. Sinha was telling all this to members of the American Veterinary Medical Association, convened in Philadelphia the other day. The way he told it, 13 dogs were inoculated with one of four strains of live cold virus, and turned out with 13 other, unsuspecting dogs. Sure enough, 24 hours later, and 26 were sick. Then, worse to tell, Dr. Sinha infected the recuperated pups with another strain of virus. This time he got sick and so did five assistants—sore throats, fever, the works.