The Sweet Science - A. J. Liebling [109]
In the first round Billy didn’t enlighten me. He boxed with the habitual Graham elegance. Going under Vejar’s elbows and around him, flicking him with long lefts, like an old-fashioned lightning portrait painter in a variety show, and occasionally getting in a stylish left and right to the body, he made him look crude, but Vejar’s jab, when he landed it, appeared to have more power; in fact, it looked faster. Vejar punched away, too, and although he missed any target worth aiming at, his blows landed on Graham’s arms, his shoulders, his back as he ducked under punches, and his ribs now and then in clinches—all attentions calculated to take some of the steam out of a fellow of Billy’s seniority and to impress the judges, at least, with Vejar’s aggressiveness. The referee, Ray Miller, who was once a good fighter himself—maybe even a hell of a fighter—could be relied on not to be overimpressed, but judges are usually less discerning. I wouldn’t have given Graham that round myself, for all my admiration of him. After the bell, he looked virtually middle-aged. His hair, which he wears rather long, and flattened to his head, hung lank, the gloves had left welts on his white skin, and his nose had been reddened, although not bloodied, as if by a prolonged course of the daffy.
It was clear that salvation did not lie that way; there was even a danger that Vejar would wear Graham down and have him hanging on before the end. The second round was better; Billy caught Junior with one hard right, but Chico got away and took the curse off it with more flurries of elbow busters. In the third, Graham seemed to be tiring, and after that it was all Vejar for a while. Graham’s defensive boxing was brilliant, but he didn’t even look like trying to score points with his left. He was in, under, and out a lot, leaving Vejar looking silly and baffled, but the boy was doing most of the punching, such as it was. I had Vejar winning five of the first seven rounds, and one even.
Then, halfway through the eighth round, Graham nailed Vejar with a right as the boy came off the ropes on the opposite side of the ring from where I sat. Vejar tried to counter and Billy hit him again; Vejar tried to slip away and the right went in a third time. Graham landed at least five hard rights to the side of the head within five seconds, but none hit the jackpot, and the strong young legs carried Vejar away. Blood was streaming from a cut behind and above his left eye, and the theretofore neutral, half-contemptuous crowd—“That’ll be all, Willie!” they had been yelling a minute earlier—roared for Billy to finish him. He tried with the prescribed calm to set the boy up, but he couldn’t. His legs wouldn’t keep him close enough. The clock over the ring showed thirty seconds of the round left, then twenty, and the classic boxer discarded finesse. With his lank locks flying around his head, he stood flatfooted and threw the right after Vejar’s circling form like an old woman throwing a pie, but then the round ended, and he walked very slowly to his corner, while the fighter with a future stumbled toward the ministering arms of Drs. Brown and Ferrara. Brown, who stops the flow from the mountainous crevasses in the craggy countenance of Rocky Marciano, did one of his customary jobs on Vejar. The boy came out looking like the “after” picture in a “remove unsightly blemishes” ad.
Graham’s grim task was to open the cut again, but this objective was so obvious that it put him at a tactical disadvantage. Vejar knew what Graham had to try to do, but Graham didn’t know what Vejar was going to try to do. All he had to do was keep the left side of his face intact and he would win the decision, even if he lost the last two rounds. Actually,