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SPO-6 (LEG 7) MIXED · THE TEST RUN, THE PRESS RUNS STANDING
Did the prize ring ever touch Walkerton? The checklists of two legs ask it, and the record reached answers no — no bout, no fighter, no venue in Walkerton is attested in the county histories, the gazetteers, or the open record. The region's famous fight of the era belongs to another place's build and is named here only to keep it out of this one: the Ike Weir–Frank Murphy world featherweight bout of March 31, 1889, eighty rounds to a draw, was fought at Kouts, in Porter County. Walkerton's halls — Bender's Hall, Hudelmyer's opera house — hosted meetings, troupes, and elections in every account reached, never a mill. The test prints negative at the strength of the sources exhausted: the two county histories and the web record are silent, and the Independent's and Tribune's sports pages of 1900–1960, which would carry a local card if one ran, stand as the named residue and settler. A town that produced a Nobel chemist and a pultrusion fortune produced, on this record, no prizefighter — and the sports record is more truthful for printing the empty chair.
Principal sources: the negative run of this section (Chapman 1880; Howard 1907; the open record); Porter County History (porterhistory.org) for the Kouts bout, named to exclude it.