[professordp]

Billy Lancaster was quite a character. Not only was he your typical club fighter who was a regular on cards in the small venues that were found in Maine's small hamlets during the 1940s, Billy was also a preacher!

According to a July 1948 article in The Ring, Lancaster would pray to cast out Satan in the dressing room before his fights. Once in the ring, however, Lancaster was not inclined to turn the other cheek.

He got his ring name, "One Man Revolution", from his Greb-like windmill style of fighting. His defense consisted of an attacking offense. According to reports of his fights, he would leap through the air in an effort to hit taller opponents.

From all accounts, he must have put on quite a show. Aside from the leaping and no-stop punching, Lancaster refused to sit between rounds and generally paced around the ring until the bell rang for the next heat.

Lancaster rarely left Maine during his professional career which ran from 1940 to 1947 and really didn't fight anyone of note. He did have a few bouts in Boston Garden and New Hampshire, but he was pretty much content to stay close to home. Billy briefly held the Maine Middleweight title.

The article in The Ring stressed that he worked out daily in the local gyms and keep himself in excellent shape. So intially, I was strongly tempted to grade him as a 1 for his conditioning.

But then I started to think things over. In a career that spanned only seven years, Billy had 172 recorded fights---that's nearly twenty-five fights a year! Sure, working out will keep your muscles toned but it won't heal the internal damage done to the body as a result of all those fights. Thus, I opted to set him at an 8 ("fights too frequently").

In a modern world of pay-per-views and casino cards, club fighters like "One Man Revolution" Lancaster have gone the way of the buffalo. Yet I'll bet that someone watching him whip his arms around and leap through the air at the Rockland, Maine Community Center got a much bigger bang for his buck than most of us do today at an event staged in Las Vegas or Atlantic City.