The Sweet Science - A. J. Liebling [110]
Both men came out strong for the final round—“very gay,” Egan would have said. It was a fine, hard round, and Billy won it, I thought, but there was no doubt where the decision would go. It was unanimous for Vejar.
After the fight, I went back to Graham’s dressing room. All the veteran artist’s wounds were on his back and shoulders—probably scrapes from glove laces—although the nose showed an extra bump, and stood taller than ever. Also, Graham had somehow developed a painful blister on the big toe of his left foot. Everybody said he had made a great fight—better than the one in New York—and I asked him if he had been trying from the first to set Vejar up for the right. He said, “Yeah, but he knew I was looking for him.” He talked to Cohen and Wild about the blister on his toe and they decided not to cut it. He was talking easily, as if he hadn’t been fighting. His wind was good. After a while he said wistfully, “Gee, did you see that cut bleed in the ninth when I hit it just once?”
Wild said to me, “We were going for his gut in those middle rounds, to bring his guard down. But he wouldn’t go for it. Anyway, this guy couldn’t get in there like he could have once.”
A reporter for a press association asked Cohen whether Graham would retire now, and Cohen replied, “We are withholding any announcement at present.”
Half an hour later, I was at the Onondaga bar again, waiting for train time, which was a couple of hours away. I was with my Syracuse friend who is in the paper business, and I was lamenting my failure to have bet on a horse named Bobby Brocato, which had won the feature race at the Jamaica opening and paid 19 to 1. I was sure that if I had been there, I would have played him. We were also discussing the news from Boston. The Boston fellow, De Marco, had knocked out Saxton in the fourteenth round and won the welterweight championship. The paper man said, “You could have had three to one against him.”
We were standing at one end of the bar, near the telephone. Graham came in, wearing a dark suit with even a tie, and put in a call to his mother. He drank beer with us while he waited for the call to go through; he was pretty thoroughly dehydrated. After a while he got the connection, and said, “It’s me … . I’m all right … . Sure.” For such an old, ring-wise fellow, he sounded strangely like a small boy minimizing a bad school report. His mother must have known by then how he’d made out, if she had a television set or neighbors. After listening to her for a bit, Graham said, “Oh, sure. They’re all satisfied. They all said I made a good try, but I guess it wasn’t good enough.”
Donnybrook Farr
The Sweet Science, like an old rap or the memory of love, follows its victim everywhere. When Phil Drake, a horse, not a prizefighter, won the Epsom Derby of 1955 at odds of 12 to 1, I had five nickers (Mayfair for pounds) on his nose. After deducting another five I had bet on one of the losers I had a net profit of fifty-five quid, better than one hundred and fifty dollars, which I took with me to the Champagne Bar under the grandstand. After a race won by a 12-1 shot, it is the most accessible section of the buffet. While there, I caught sight of some English boxing writers I know and wanted to see; they were struggling to reach a more animated and less expensive sector of the bar. It was a shame I had to down my champagne so quickly, but there wasn’t enough to go around, so I finished it off and then sneaked up behind them, saying something about the smallness of the world.
It was at the bar, with my profits in my pocket and my champagne in me, that I learned there was soon to be a fifteen-round fight in Dublin for the featherweight championship of Europe. The defending champion, a Frenchman named Ray Famechon,