The Sweet Science - A. J. Liebling [104]
Graham’s second last stand was also against Vejar. The fight couldn’t be held in New York, since the circus had moved into Madison Square Garden for a six-week run, so the I.B.C. put the match in Syracuse because, by reason of his hard fights in that city, with Basilio, Graham might be expected to draw well there. (The Syracuse promoter, a young man named Norman Rothschild, was to receive a share of the I.B.C.’s television revenue from the fight to protect him against loss in case it didn’t draw.) Vejar’s home town is Stamford, Connecticut, but he has appeared on television so many times that he is well known everywhere. I went to Syracuse, frankly, because I hoped Graham might have learned enough about Vejar to have a plan for taking the youthful bounce out of him; emotionally, I long ago moved over to the middle-aged side of the field, and I root for mature judgment when pitted against the outrageous fortunes of chronology.
I traveled to Syracuse by train the afternoon of the day before the fight, and when I arrived that evening I checked in at the Hotel Onondaga, a big, convivial old pile, which, while not the most modern in town, gets the patronage of visiting members of what Pierce Egan, the Parkman of the London prize ring, liked to call “the fancy.” I learned at the desk, while registering, that both the fighters, along with their factions—their trainers, seconds, and managers—were in residence. There was no evidence of their presence, however. The bar of the Onondaga had only a few customers, rather than one of Egan’s throngs blowing a cloud over the daffy and heavy wet (gin and beer) while devouring the rich points of a flash chaunt (chanson à clef), as there should have been before the combat of two metropolitan heroes in a county town. (Syracuse is the seat of Onondaga County.) I left my bag in my room and went to see how Graham was getting on. The three doors to his faction’s suite were locked, but when I knocked at one of them, Irving Cohen, who has been Graham’s manager since his first bout, opened it at once.
“Come right in,” he said. “Jimmy Wild and I are having a television evening.” Mr. Cohen, a short, plump, blond man, and Mr. Wild, Graham’s trainer, a short, plump, dark man, were in their undershirts and shorts; they were watching a televised moving picture that had a star who looked exactly like Vice-President Nixon and grinned like him. This chap was trying to find a girl whose picture he had painted from memory. (He had seen her only once, but I came in too late to discover why he hadn’t taken that opportunity to ask her name.) Mr. Cohen, who has large, round, blue eyes and a retiring smile, folded his hands contentedly on the front of his undershirt. “A home away from home!” he exclaimed.
Mr. Wild crossed his legs. “Whereya gonna go in Syracuse?” he demanded rhetorically.
I asked about Graham. “He’s out catching a double feature,” Mr. Cohen said. “We want him to stay up a little late tonight, so he’ll sleep late in the morning, not to be restless. We’ll wake him just in time to get over to the weigh-in at twelve o’clock.”
There are fighters no trainer in his right mind would let get out of his sight on the night before a fight, but Graham isn’t one of them. He is an old pro, and a family man. Wild said he had brought Graham up by plane on Monday, three days before; prior to that he had trained for three weeks at Greenwood Lake. In 1926, when Gene Tunney flew from a camp in the Poconos to Philadelphia for his first bout with Jack Dempsey, the flight was intended to be a striking psychological gesture (Tunney got desperately sick), but now it