The Sweet Science - A. J. Liebling [103]
The fighter is as reluctant as the next artist to accept the evidence of his disintegration, even though it is presented to him so much more forcibly. Between fights he is brisk, active, and lusty, since he is still a young man. He therefore refuses to believe his first couple of bad fights, and blames them on negligence; he has not, he thinks, taken the opposition seriously enough. Then he may lose one or two that he will blame on bad decisions—suspecting, though, that if he had been his old self he would have won easily. Finally, or semifinally, his manager will accept a match for him against a younger fighter on his way up. This is known in the cant of the sports page as the fighter’s last stand, although it seldom is, unless it ends in disaster. If the last-standee makes a creditable showing, even in defeat, the fight turns out to have been his next-to-last stand—the first step in a sequence that may repeat itself several times before he finally renounces the active cultivation of his art.
Graham’s first last stand, against a twenty-three-year-old fellow—half Chilean and half Italian—named Chico Vejar, in Madison Square Garden on the night of March fourth, was a good fight to watch, even though he lost it. Vejar, a tireless, pressing kind of chap without subtlety, carried the fight to him, and Graham, who would have eluded his rudimentary aggressions with ease a few years ago, had to try to knock him out. For Graham this was a novelty; the chief popular criticism of his best previous efforts had been that they were skillful but unimpassioned. He started boxing professionally in 1941, and until the beginning of 1954 he was as good as a fighter can be without being a hell of a fighter. While all East Side fighters are traditionally tough, most of the really good ones come from the lower East Side—from the streets with names rather than numbers, between Broadway and the East River. While Billy was growing up, the part of the East Side he lived in was a crumbling but still almost genteel neighborhood at the foot of the eastern slope of Murray Hill. It centered on St. Gabriel’s Church and St. Gabriel’s Park and on Billy’s father’s saloon, at Thirty-fifth Street and Second Avenue. There was a long line of neat red-brick fronts along the Thirty-seventh Street side of the park, where the East Side Airlines Terminal now stands. The church has since been torn down to make way for an approach to the Manhattan entrance of the Queens-Midtown Tunnel, and the building that housed the saloon fell down of old age. Before these changes came about, the quarter had a provincial air. It had street gangs and street games, but it wasn’t enough of a slum to produce a hell of a fighter.
Billy fought plenty of tough fellows who could punch, but he didn’t let them punch him often. He was a good boxer inside as well as away, and he made them miss their short punches as well as their long ones. He would hit them enough to win, especially with showy combinations of punches that made him look a bit better than he really was—a knack only his adversaries and their managers begrudged him. Once he came near to winning the world championship from the Cuban Kid Gavilan, in New York, but at the end of fifteen rounds the decision went against him. Gavilan was a hell of a fighter having an off night; he fought