There was a delicious tickle of wickedness about it.
Prizefighters were such terrible and mysterious men.

In so far as they were out of the ordinary and were not mere common workingmen such as carpenters and laundrymen, they represented romance.

Power also they represented.

They did not work for bosses, but spectacularly and magnificently, with their own might, grappled with the great world and wrung splendid living from its reluctant hands.

Some of them even owned automobiles and traveled with a retinue of trainers and servants.
Perhaps it had been only Billy's modesty that made him say he had quit fighting.