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By Root 541 0

the fifteen-round match between Joe Louis and Lee Savold, scheduled for June thirteenth at the Polo Grounds, was to be neither televised, except to eight theater audiences in places like Pittsburgh and Albany, nor broadcast over the radio. I hadn’t seen Louis with the naked eye since we shook hands in a pub in London in 1944. He had fought often since then, and I had seen his two bouts with Jersey Joe Walcott on television, but there hadn’t been any fun in it. Those had been held in public places, naturally, and I could have gone, but television gives you so plausible an adumbration of a fight, for nothing, that you feel it would be extravagant to pay your way in. It is like the potato, which is only a succedaneum for something decent to eat but which, once introduced into Ireland, proved so cheap that the peasants gave up their grain-and-meat diet in favor of it. After that, the landlords let them keep just enough money to buy potatoes. William Cobbett, a great Englishman, said that he would sack any workmen of his he caught eating one of the cursed things, because as soon as potatoes appeared anywhere they brought down the standard of eating. I sometimes think of Cobbett on my way home from the races, looking at the television aerials on all the little houses between here and Belmont Park. As soon as I heard that the fight wouldn’t be on the air, I determined to buy a ticket.

On the night of the thirteenth, a Wednesday, it rained, and on the next night it rained again, so on the evening of June fifteenth the promoters, the International Boxing Club, confronted by a night game at the Polo Grounds, transferred the fight to Madison Square Garden. The postponements upset a plan I had had to go to the fight with a friend, who had another date for the third night. But alone is a good way to go to a fight or the races, because you have more time to look around you, and you always get all the conversation you can use anyway. I went to the Garden box office early Friday afternoon and bought a ten-dollar seat in the side arena—the first tiers rising in back of the boxes, midway between Eighth and Ninth Avenues on the 49th Street side of the house. There was only a scattering of ticket buyers in the lobby, and the man at the ticket window was polite—a bad omen for the gate. After buying the ticket, I got into a cab in front of the Garden, and the driver naturally asked me if I was going to see the fight. I said I was, and he said, “He’s all through.”

I knew he meant Louis, and I said, “I know, and that’s why it may be a good fight. If he weren’t through, he might kill this guy.”

The driver said, “Savold is a hooker. He breaks noses.”

I said, “He couldn’t break his own nose, even,” and then began to wonder how a man would go about trying to do that. “It’s a shame he’s so hard up he had to fight at all at his age,” I said, knowing the driver would understand I meant Louis. I was surprised that the driver was against Louis, and I was appealing to his better feelings.

“He must have plenty socked away,” said the driver. “Playing golf for a hundred dollars a hole.”

“Maybe that helped him go broke,” I said. “And anyway, what does that prove? There’s many a man with a small salary who bets more than he can afford.” I had seen a scratch sheet on the seat next to the hackie. I was glad I was riding only as far as Brentano’s with him.

The driver I had on the long ride home was a better type. As soon as I told him I was going to the fight, which was at about the same time that he dropped the flag, he said, “I guess the old guy can still sock.”

I said, “I saw him murder Max Baer sixteen years ago. He was a sweet fighter then.”

The driver said, “Sixteen years is a long time for a fighter. I don’t remember anybody lasted sixteen years in the big money. Still, Savold is almost as old as he is. When you’re a bum, nobody notices how old you get.”

We had a pleasant time on the West Side Highway, talking about how Harry Greb had gone on fighting when he was blind in one eye, only nobody knew it but his manager, and how Pete Herman had been