Penn State Sports Magazine
Issue link: https://comanpub.uberflip.com/i/247378
HISTORY THE MAIN EVENT Before basketball and wrestling captured the spotlight, Penn State's winter sport of choice was boxing | W ith the wrestling and women's volleyball teams packing Rec Hall on a regular basis the past few years, the old building on the western edge of campus is having another resurrection in its 85-year history as a focal point of Penn State's indoor sports programs. Over the decades, Rec Hall has been the scene of great games and matches, sometimes with crowds so large that spectators stood two or three deep on the running track circling above the grandstand to watch basketball games, international gymnastics meets and other sports competitions. What may surprise modern day Nittany Lions fans is that in Rec Hall's first 20 years of existence, a sport now barred from varsity status throughout American colleges and universities was Penn State's prime winter sport. Boxing was the king, as popular then as basketball and wrestling are today. "In the '30s and up until World War II, townspeople were asked to stay away [from boxing matches in Rec Hall] because there wasn't enough room for students," recalled Jerry Weinstein, former sports editor of The Daily Collegian and later the editor of the Centre Daily Times, in a 1985 Town & Gown article. Furthermore, Penn State helped create boxing as an intercollegiate sport, and its match on May 9, 1919, at the University of Pennsylvania is the first known meeting between two college boxing teams. It also may be hard to believe, but from the late 1920s to the late 1930s, boxing at Penn State was more popular than football, consistently drawing larger crowds and eliciting more passion than any other sport. That was the dark period of deemphasis at Penn State when scholarships and other forms of financial aid for athletes were banned. One reason boxing became so popular is because it was an everyman's sport. That also made professional boxing attractive nationwide, particularly during the Depression. Several Penn State boxers went on to fight professionally, and two were extremely successful. Billy Soose, a 1939 graduate from Farrell, Pa., was a three-time Golden Gloves champion. As a sophomore in 1937, Soose won all of his 17 Penn State bouts by knockout, including the 155-pound national title. Weinstein recalled a fight that year against defending Eastern champion Artie McGivern of Syracuse: "Soose stalked