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is thought old-fashioned to move fighters by train. “A fighter is condition down fine, he goes crazy, five, six hours on a train,” Mr. Wild said. “He wants to get where he’s going.” Wild, I knew, had been with Graham only a short time; Whitey Bimstein, Graham’s usual trainer, had been forbidden by the new state athletic commissioner to work in Graham’s corner because Freddie Brown, Whitey’s partner, was going to work in Vejar’s. It was a sore point with the Graham faction. The explanation of the ruling probably is that the new commissioner, a lawyer, retained in his noodle a legal analogy—that adversaries in a lawsuit should not be represented by the same firm. It is the consensus at the Neutral Corner bar-and-grill that such an analogy is false. The back-room analogy analysts there say that a second is more like a doctor—and can’t two doctors in partnership treat two patients in the same room? The commissioner had announced his ruling before the first last-stand fight, and Cohen and Steve Ellis, Vejar’s manager, had flipped a coin to see who would have one of the partners in his corner. Ellis won. After the bout Ellis refused to sign for the return match unless he could keep Brown—an arrangement that would automatically bar Whitey again. Since Ellis’s man had won, he had the whip hand. “They’re crazy about my strategy,” Freddie Brown had told me. Vejar, who is not too smart of a fighter, as the cognoscenti say, was thus equipped with a set of self-propelled brains, while Graham, who can do his own thinking in the ring, was deprived of Whitey’s ability to read Freddie’s mind and find out what Freddie was likely to tell Vejar to do next. Wild is a capable corner man, but he does not know Freddie as well as Whitey does.

Mr. Cohen said that the contretemps over trainers made no difference with a fighter like Billy, who was no dumb kid. But he ventured to observe that in the twenties, when Whitey was partners with Ray Arcel, Whitey and Ray had worked across from each other almost every Friday night in the Garden—“when it really was the Garden”—and nobody had ever accused either of them of doing a client less than justice. Mr. Cohen got into the fight business twenty-five years ago, because of his wife’s decision to change a small drygoods store that she owned in Bensonhurst into a ladies’-specialty shop. Since that left Cohen with little to do around the place after opening up in the morning, he became a fight manager. He still has the manner of the small shopkeeper, however—eager to please and loath to discuss controversial subjects. Probably because he is that way, he got along beautifully as manager of Rocky Graziano, who was middleweight champion of the world between two fights with Tony Zale. Graziano, a rough rhinestone of the ring, would have blown his top under the needling of a more conventional manager.

Graham came in while Cohen was talking about how things used to be in the Garden. For a doddering old gaffer, he looked paradoxically young in his double-feature clothes—slacks, a sports jacket in a sculptured lattice pattern, and a shirt with the kind of collar that has points so long and so close together that a tie wouldn’t show even if you were wearing one. He is of good height for a welterweight—five feet eight or so, in shoes—and has a Roman nose, which his early well-wishers said some friend of the family ought to hit him on with a baseball bat, so he would not devote so much thought to defending his profile. At the end of a hundred and twenty-six battles, the nose still stands as an impressive testimony to Billy’s cuteness; it has, in fact, been slightly aggrandized by a bump high on the bridge. Today it is a landmark of Stillman’s gymnasium, the graveyard of the Barrymore look.

By this time the guy who resembled Nixon had found the girl whose picture he had painted, but none of us had noticed how, since we were talking of other things. The girl, it turned out, was under the influence of a sinister Russian choreographer. The Russian and the Nixon exchanged high words, and at the prospect of a fight the attention