Jobless sportswriter Eddie Willis is hired by corrupt fight promoter Nick Benko to promote his current protégé, an unknown Argentinian boxer named Toro Moreno. Although Moreno is a hulking giant, his chances for success are hampered by a powder-puff punch and a glass jaw. Exploiting Willis' reputation for integrity and standing in the boxing community, Benko arranges a series of fixed fights that propel the unsophisticated Moreno to #1 contender for the championship. The reigning champ, the sadistic Buddy Brannen, harbors resentment at the publicity Toro has been receiving and vows to viciously punish him in the ring. Eddie must now decide whether or not to tell the naive Toro the truth.
The East Side Kids discover that one of their own, Danny, is torn between staying and school and becoming a boxer, and is getting mixed up with gangsters.
Timid milkman, Burleigh Sullivan, somehow knocks out a boxing champ in a brawl. The fighter's manager decides to build up the milkman's reputation in a series of fixed fights and then have the champ beat him to regain his title.
Prizefighter Bob Neal (Ray Walker) is in debt to gangster Vic Santell (Hooper Atchley) for training expenses. Santell orders Bob to take a dive in the fourth round so Santell can recoup prior gambling losses. Taunted by his ring opponent, Bob wins the fight. Realizing that his profession and underworld characters connected to it are causing him problems, Bob decides to join the police force. After taking nurse Mary Prentiss (Geneva Mitchell) to a drive-in restaurant where the total bill is a depression-era cheap eighty-two cents, Bob and his fellow officers round-up a gang of fur thieves in a warehouse shoot-out.
This Universal programmer was based on a Collier's Magazine story by journalist Quentin Reynolds. This story in turn was ostensibly based on a true incident, in which a gangster "returned from the dead" to save an innocent young man from the electric chair. The nurse of the film's title is Katharine McDonald, who falls in love with her prizefighter-patient Lee Burke as he recovers from a beating received in a fixed prizefight. Katharine must fend off the advances of criminal attorney John Dodge, another patient who also loves her and becomes jealous of Lee. But when Lee is framed for the murder of his disgruntled manager, Slice, by a henchman of the fight-fix leader, Joe Largo, Dodge takes on his defense and works with Katherine to discover the real killer. Convicted and sentenced to death, Burke is about to walk the "last mile", as Katharine encourages mortally wounded Largo to a deathbed confession.
The stooges are the trainers of "Chopper", a beefy boxer, and they bet their bankroll on Chopper to win his next fight. When "Big Mike", their boss, tells them to have Chopper lose or they'll lose their lives, the boys try to soften up Chopper so he'll lose. The fight gets canceled and the stooges have to contend with an angry Big Mike and his goons.
Snub plays a rich guy who wants to impress the ladies with his virility. So he pays a tough boxer to take a dive in a staged fight, though the fight definitely does not go anything like expected.
An expedition to the dirty abyss of professional sports. The award winning investigative journalist Benjamin Best (CNN Journalist of the Year 2011) takes a global look behind the scenes at the colourful world of sports and exposes the bitter taste behind the multi-billion sports business.