ROUND 15
With three minutes remaining and the Yankee Stadium crowd on its feet, roaring, who holds the advantage is purely a matter of taste.
If you prefer aggression and power punching, Zale has the edge. If you're more the scientific type, with a preference for hand speed, defense and footwork, then it's Burley's fight to lose.
This being 1946, the question lingers of whether the officials will side with a boxing challenger against a slugging champion.
The two fighters, sweating profusely and breathing heavily, grapple through much of the first minute. After Donovan breaks them, Burley steps back and motions Zale to come and get him.
That's all Tony needs, and he rushes in to throw a wild left hook. Burley ducks it and fires a right cross that lands flush, sending Zale stumbling back.
Burley moves in with two hard jabs, setting up another right hand down the pipe that lands with a loud crack. Blood begins spurting from Zale's obviously broken nose.
Zale retreats to collect himself, pawing at the injury with his right hand. This creates an opening for a left hook by Burley that nearly floors the champion.
Burley follows with another left hook, then a right cross that again sends Zale stumbling, his left eye suddenly swelling rapidly.
Burley lands a left hook that sends Zale sprawling along the ropes and into a neutral corner, where he absorbs a series of a half-dozen unanswered headshots, capped by a scythe-like right uppercut that snaps the champion's head back at a 90-degree angle to his body.
Zale falls over the top rope, clearly out on his feet. As Burley moves in, his right fist cocked, Arthur Donovan realizes he has no choice but to save the defenseless and unconscious, but still upright, champion from even more severe injury.
Donovan nearly tackles Burley, then waves one arm over his head to signal a stop to the fight with only six seconds remaining in the 15th and final round.
With no video monitors to magnify the fight's ebb and flow for the tens of thousands for whom the fighters are mere specks, much of the crowd is initially silent, stunned that a championship bout would be halted so close to the final bell. Some even boo.
But by the time Jimmy Lennon steps to the microphone to deliver the official outcome, at least half the crowd has realized the enormity of what it has just seen. The sounds of at least 30,000 feet stomping, accompanied by a chant of "Charley! Charley!" nearly drowns out the ring announcer.
"Ladies and Gentlemen! The winner by technical knockout at 2:54 of the 15th and final round and NEW middleweight champion of the world is Charley Burley!"