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By Root 557 0

cities that win your heart at first glance—which this was for me—but it was a fine day. In the Onondaga Coffee Room, I had observed the members of the Fort Wayne Pistons having breakfast. They twined their long legs around the table legs or doubled them back under the chairs. It occurred to me that life must be very difficult for a traveling collection of men who are from six feet six to nearly seven feet tall. They might have special long beds at home, but they could scarcely carry them with them, and they must either bend or step back several paces to look in a shaving mirror. An awareness of their altitude seemed to oppress them—I could imagine how many times they had been asked how the weather was up there—and their heads, at the ends of such long necks, looked small, like guinea hens’. I was rapidly becoming depressed myself, until I thought of what a liberation it must be for a man of that height to get into the company of others who could see eye to eye with him. Instead of feeling himself set apart, he probably begins to think of anyone under six feet five as subnormal. He goes back to his home town a giant refreshed.

Arriving at the auditorium, the outside of which is carved all over with the names of battles, from Belleau Wood to Iwo Jima, I was further gladdened by the sight of a number of familiar Eighth Avenue faces. Freddie Brown and Chickie Ferrara were there with Vejar, who is a shorter but more compact welterweight than Graham. So was Ellis, a swarthy, hand-pumping kind of man who, aside from being a manager, narrates sports events on television. Brown was in an expansive mood; another fellow he trains, named Giovanelli, had scored a knockout earlier in the week against a four-to-one favorite, and he must have felt that this was a good omen. Cohen and Wild were on hand with Graham, whose beard showed dark through his pale skin. Vejar’s tawny cheeks seemed beardless. A moonfaced, jolly trainer named Jimmy August had driven up from New York with a middleweight named Ray Drake, who was fighting in the semifinal. Drake, like Graham, is a student of the niceties of tactics, specializing in leverage. An expeditionary force from the I.B.C. office in New York had also appeared, under the command of Billy Brown, the Garden matchmaker, who is no kin to Freddie. All the briefly expatriate faces shone with a special polish for their out-of-town adventure, reflecting, first, a souci for the Big Town reputation for elegance, and, second, a realization that, as Whitey Bimstein long ago observed to me, “Out of town, anything is liable to happen. You gotta keep your eyes open every minute.” On the scales, before an Athletic Commission inspector, Graham weighed 149 1/2 pounds and Vejar 154 1/2, or two and a half pounds more than he had for their first fight. When, after being weighed, the two men posed together for the Syracuse newspaper photographers, the difference in their ages was more apparent than when they wore clothes. Graham was in excellent trim, but his pale skin appeared stretched over his lean body, while Vejar’s darker skin seemed molded to his flesh to form a single substance. The Graham legs, which had served him well so often, looked spindly compared to the younger man’s. Some joker called to Billy, “Howya feeling, Pop?” and he didn’t look too pleased.

When Graham had his clothes on again, I asked him what he thought of Vejar’s weight, and he said, “I think it’s good. He’ll be slow. Won’t be able to run away so fast.” Before the group broke up, there was quite a bit of talk—more of it about the fight in Boston than about the one in Syracuse, which was natural, since it was an easier fight to talk about without picking against parties present. The universal opinion of the knowing coves was that Saxton, the champion, would win.

I spent the afternoon walking around Syracuse and appreciating the weather, and then had dinner with a fellow I had known during the war, who is now a clubman and engaged in the paper business up there. He said that by then the odds were two to one on Vejar. My friend and I arrived