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By Root 645 0

a lot of bad fights in his early years, but the explanation was simple: he had not had a good manager. Early in 1950, at one of the successive nadirs of his career, Davis had wired from Zanesville, Ohio, his home town, to Pep in Hartford, offering a full contract on his services as boxer, sparring partner, or man of all work for the sum of fifty dollars. Pep had brought the telegram to Salow and recommended the proposition as a good investment. “I took a fifty-dollar bill out of my pocket and handed it to Willie,” Mr. Salow said. “I can see it today, when I remember. By then, Willie must have conned himself, too, because he took out two tens and a five and handed them to me. That made us partners. We sent the money, and to our great surprise Davis showed up on the next train. His first fight under our direction, he beat the lightweight champion of Finland.” There followed more discouraging days, though, Mr. Salow admitted, and during one of Davis’s losing streaks Pep relinquished his twenty-five dollars’ worth of the fighter, because, he said, he was disgusted. “That left him all to me,” Mr. Salow said, “and look where we are today!” By this time the steaks had arrived, and the bar trade was already beginning to drift away in the direction of the gymnasium. I asked the ritual question—“How does he look?”—and Salow said, “He isn’t much of a gymnasium fighter, but he’s in great condition. For the first time since I’ve known him, he’s on edge, snapping, and that’s a good sign.”

Davis turned out to be a dark Negro with a wide face, a strong torso, and stubby, muscular legs, which carried him briskly around the ring on what I should describe as a great-circle course. He was working with Joey Gambino, a six-round fighter who has had about twenty bouts. Gambino played Saddler, and almost every time he threw the imitation Saddler left hook to the kazazza, it landed. It wasn’t a natural punch for Gambino, and he threw it awkwardly, but it went in anyway. If Saddler had been throwing those hooks, Davis would have been a tired man at the end of the three rounds he sparred. Coming back to town in the Cadillac, Canzoneri said, “He gets hit too much. But his trainer tells me he’s a bad gym fighter.”

In consequence of these preliminary investigations, I was not too sanguine of seeing an epic when I took my seat in the Garden on the night of the fight. Uncertainty is not absolutely necessary to my enjoyment of the Sweet Science, however. Davis had what seemed to me an insoluble problem, and I was eager to see how he would apply himself to its solution. He had not knocked out a man of any importance in his entire career, while Saddler hadn’t been knocked out once in his hundred and fifty fights. (The record book shows that he was last stopped on March 21, 1944, in his second professional fight, when he was seventeen years old.) I was pretty sure that Davis wouldn’t set a new precedent. His one chance was to outbox Saddler for fifteen rounds, but Saddler was a better boxer. As for Saddler, his procedural details are so entertaining that it is always a pleasure to watch him, even when the opposition is commonplace. It’s like seeing Bobby Clark in a musical comedy with an inferior book. Although the fight was on television, there were five or six thousand customers in the Garden—an excellent showing for an era when the Sweet Science has become a free handout to encourage beer sales. I naturally assumed that all these customers were, like me, lovers of art for its own sake; it didn’t occur to me that they expected the illusion of close competition. In a wrestling match or a circus chariot race, such an illusion can be prearranged, but not in an honest prize fight.

The semifinal did not long hold my interest, because it was between two young lightweights in such prime condition that they couldn’t hurt each other. They exchanged resounding blows with the disregard of consequences that accompanies regular hours, a clean life, and habitual overindulgence in vitamins, and at the end of eight rounds they left a feeling of nothing accomplished.