The Sweet Science - A. J. Liebling [106]
“We lose nothing,” Graham said. “I never see a good fight in the movies yet, except a newsreel. They always corny it up.”
“I saw one picture where a guy was training in a gym the day of the fight!” Mr. Cohen said, his eyes extra wide with astonishment. “What kind of a manager did he have?” Even children—or at least, fight people’s children—know that a fighter rests on the day of a fight.
“I see one,” Graham said, “where the two guys are having their hands taped before they put on the gloves, and who does it? The Boxing Commission physician!”
“And how many times they always have to be knocked down in the beginning, the heroes!” exclaimed Mr. Cohen. “They got to get murdered or they can’t win. The best tip who to bet on in a movie fight is the guy who loses the first fourteen rounds.”
“He makes a miraculous recovery,” Graham said. “His strength is renewed. But the tops I saw on television last winter—the guy is going to defend the world championship the next night and he says to his wife he is sick of the whole business.”
“He’s with his wife the night before the championship?” interjected Mr. Cohen.
“He says he won’t fight no more,” Graham said. “But his little kid, about five years old, comes in in pajamas and says, ‘Daddy, box with me.’ So he has to put on the gloves with the kid, and the kid says, ‘Daddy, I heard what you said. I’ll take your place against that bum’—well, the kid didn’t say ‘bum’ exactly in the television—and the old man begins to cry. So he goes through with the fight and knocks the guy out. How do you like that? What I really go for is Westerns; then I can’t tell when they’re cornying it up.”
As I got ready to leave, Graham and the others were watching a show called “Public Defender,” in which a man who had a .45, a gray Ford, and a record as long as his arm had been charged with killing a fellow who had been shot with a .45 by a man in a gray Ford. All the Public Defender had to do was to get him off.
“Good night,” Mr. Cohen said to me. “We’ll be sitting here some time yet.”
Before going to bed I took a turn through the lobby to look for the members of the opposing faction, but they must have been upstairs, too, and it was now too late to go calling. Although the bar had livened up a bit, the customers, I learned from the barman, were not followers of the milling art but basketball fans. The Syracuse professional team, the Nationals, he said, had just defeated the Fort Wayne, Indiana, Pistons, in the first game of the World Series of basketball. Syracuse had won the Eastern and Fort Wayne the Western championship for the regular season. The Nationals’ home court was the War Memorial Auditorium, where the milling coves would perform next evening, and the basketball teams would play there again on Saturday, in the second game of the World Series. Billy had been crowded out of the Garden by the elephants, and now he was being sandwiched in between two performances of a troupe of human giraffes. In a city the size of Syracuse—population, two hundred and fifty thousand—it was reasonable to assume that the publics for all kinds of sports would heavily overlap, and that basketball followers, under the necessity of shelling out the bustle twice in three days for the World Series, would skip the fight. The bout was due to be overshadowed in the metropolitan press, too, because there was a more important battle in Boston, where the welterweight champion, Johnny Saxton, was defending his title against a Bostonian named Tony De Marco.
I slept late myself next morning, and then made my way over to the weighing in, at the auditorium. Syracuse is not one of those