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By Root 525 0

A former member of a college faculty named Eddie Shevlin (he taught boxing) used to say, “You never learn anything until you’re tired.” He would therefore let his students bat each other about for ten or twelve five-minute rounds before he began trying to teach them, and I sometimes think the trouble with young fighters nowadays is that they are never allowed to become sufficiently exhausted. Even Davis, in all his hundred and ten fights, had never boxed more than twelve rounds in one evening—a circumstance he was destined to recollect before this one was over.

Davis’s demeanor when he climbed through the ropes after the departure of the eupeptic lightweights was grave; it is possible that he was even then developing a psychomachy. He was accompanied by Salow, who appeared to be thinking hard about the fifty-dollar bill, and two trainers—Freddie Fierro and Chickie Ferrara. He weighed precisely a hundred and twenty-six. Saddler came into the opposite corner wearing an ensemble that, while it did not quite outshine the black-and-gold silk mandarin robe Archie Moore wears into the ring, came within a gleam of it. He had on a two-piece wool outfit in the Wallace tartan, predominantly red and black. The Johnston champions find an emotional outlet in color. With Saddler were Johnston, Briscoe, and Brooks, all smiling as if they had just split a hamper of jelly doughnuts. Saddler weighed a hundred and twenty-four and a half pounds, for a net gain of eight ounces in the six years and four months that had elapsed since his 1948 bout with Pep. When his handlers removed the plaid coverings, his legs, arms, and torso resembled cinnamon sticks, but his profile, a sweeping arc from cranium to chin, rested on his long mandibles as chillingly as it had the first time Pep saw him. He presented an unfriendly appearance. Harry Kessler, the referee, a gray-haired, florid official, viewed the two fighters with the expression of a new Sunday-school teacher who expects to be hit with a spitball if he turns his head. He had never refereed Saddler before, but he had heard about his propensity for bringing out the worst in other fighters’ natures.

From the moment Kessler called the two men to the center of the ring for the conventional admonition—“Now, Sandy and Teddy, I want a nice clean fight,” he said into the microphone—it became evident that the crowd expected a contest between Saddler and the referee, if not between Saddler and Davis. “Watch him, Ref!” persons above and behind me shrieked. “Watch dose tumbs! Watch dose elbows! Watch dat head!” It sounded like the anatomical-catalogue song about Alouette. The booing of Saddler began shortly after the first bell. Davis, because he was so much shorter than Saddler, and because he obviously had very little chance to beat him, had the public sympathy, and the proximity of his kazazza to his waistline encouraged partisan outcry every time Saddler hooked. Encouraged by his supporters, Davis displayed brisk but not dangerous activity during the first two minutes of the first round. In one clinch he placed his open left hand on Saddler’s face and felt for an eyeball with a thumb, but the crowd treated him like Little Lord Fauntleroy; the roles had been assigned. The Philistines were equally prodigal with advice. Beginning with the first round, a tactician behind me shouted, over and over, “Trow your right, Davis—he’s holdin’ his shoulder low.” He forgot that though the shoulder was low, there was a lot of arm in front of it. Davis didn’t forget; Saddler wouldn’t let him. Toward the end of the first round, Saddler hit him with a left to the head that hurt him sorely, and after that the Davis psychomachy became manifest. This particular battle between body and soul ended in a draw. Red Top didn’t soulfully storm the barricade of gloves, but he didn’t lay the body down, either. He just kept boxing, moving away, clutching when necessary, jabbing when it seemed that a jab might make Saddler miss a punch that counted, and as the rounds went by, the unreceptive public had nothing to amuse it but Saddler