The Sweet Science - A. J. Liebling [102]
By the end of the third round, the right side of poor Red Top’s head was beginning to swell from the crashing left hooks, and as the fight continued, it looked like an old, lopsided medicine ball with features painted on it. Often Saddler, trying to pull loose, spun Davis about, and the crowd shrieked its outrage; at the end of one of the middle rounds, Davis spun Saddler, and the crowd cheered. It wasn’t until the eleventh that I heard a kind word for the long fellow. Then a hero off in the arena seats bravely yelled, “You’re my boy, Sandy!” There was a stunned hush for fully three-fifths of a second. After the tenth, it was clear to even the most devoted rooters for the underdog that nothing was to be expected of him, and after the eleventh, the vociferation was merely peevish. If I dwell with distaste on this popular reaction to the original artist, it is because it seemed to me to reflect the influence exerted on the fight crowd by television wrestling, which isn’t watched as a sporting event at all but as a clash of factitious personalities. Saddler and Johnston had been goaded for a year to risk the title the newspapermen said they had been “keeping in mothballs,” and Davis was the best challenger at the weight. In horse racing, when a Native Dancer or Man o’ War outclasses the other horses of his age, it does not detract from his popularity. Davis finished the fight on his feet. Saddler’s failure to flatten him was thoroughly resented by the same coves who would have hated the champion even more if he had flattened him, and the unanimous decision for Saddler was roundly booed.
I went back to Saddler’s dressing room, under the Garden, a few minutes after the champion’s faction left the ring. The fighter, reclining on one elbow on a rubbing table, was telling the newspapermen that once Davis had gone completely on the defensive, he had not tried too hard to knock him out—he didn’t think he could have, anyway. He said that no punch had hurt him, and that the referee had been O.K. He was not breathing hard, and he was unmarked. Jimmy Brooks, holding a small levee for Harlem friends in a corner of the dressing room, was expansively delighted. “You know how glad I am not to have to go back to the country, my friend,” he said to me. “Now for a short-order double helping of gracious living.”
Mr. Briscoe, however, was in a mountainous rage, like the mother of a prima donna who hasn’t had enough curtain calls. “They booed before he even touched the guy!” he howled.
“He looked pretty good in there, I thought,” I said, to cheer him up.
“Pretty good!” he bellowed. “Pretty good! He done the forcing. He done the leading. The feller never come to him, he come to the feller. What other champion ever done that? He ain’t rough. Rough fellers, he tames them. He makes altar boys out of them. Right in the kazazza!” Mr. Briscoe appeared to be so near the point of strangulation that I slapped him on the back. It was a mistake. He regained the use of his voice. “He is the greatest fighter that ever tied on a glove in the history of the world,” he said.
Johnston was more measured in his praise. “Would you say now that Saddler is a great, great champion, like Moore?” I asked him.
“Well, when he’s had as much experience as Moore, he will be,” Johnston said. (Saddler had had a hundred and fifty-three fights, but Moore had had more.) “Right now, I’d call him just great and a half.”
Next-to-Last Stand, Maybe
In April, 1955, I went up to Syracuse to attend the second last stand of an East Side welterweight named Billy Graham, who was thirty-three years old. The failing practitioners of most arts may be spared pain by critics who pretend not to notice; if such kindness is in default, they