• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 619 0

had been induced to go there to fight the challenger, a boy from the North of Ireland, but not a Protestant, known as Billy Spider II Kelly. This Kelly, my friends said, was the British and British Empire champion, and a man of promise. One could fly to Dublin in a little more than an hour, and return just as expeditiously the morning after the battle. But what decided me to go was the news that the fight was going to be held in Donnybrook, an outlying part of Dublin that is universally synonymous with an unofficial, free-for-all fight. Professional fights have been less numerous in Dublin, but some of them have been illustrious. Pierce Egan, the Blind Raftery of the London prize ring, was a part-time Dublin man himself, and has recounted the triumphs of Dan Donnelly, the first great Irish heavyweight, against two Englishmen, whose names escape my memory. They fought on the turf of the Curragh, a racecourse where, I am reliably informed by Tim Costello, a restaurateur of my acquaintance, small boys are still led out to view Donnelly’s heelprints. Dan was no tippytoes fighter, and although he fought the Englishmen separately, he could have beaten them both together, make no doubt of it. Within my own lifetime, Battling Siki, the ingenuous Senegalese known to legend as the Ignoble Savage, was lured to Dublin to defend the world’s light-heavyweight title, which he had acquired from Georges Carpentier, against Mike McTigue, an Irishman polished by travel. The bout was on March 17, 1923, and McTigue got the decision. McTigue’s home-grounds success appeared to be the precedent most plausibly applicable to the proposed match at Donnybrook, for I knew that Famechon, who has boxed in the United States, was hardly likely to fell Kelly like an ox; the biggest piece of an ox Famechon has ever felled, I imagine, is a tournedos. The boxing writers told me that the referee was to be a neutral, appointed by the European Boxing Union, but even a neutral might prove suggestible at Donnybrook.

When I got my Aer Lingus ticket and reservation (Aer Lingus is the Irish airline), I found that the line had put on extra flights, rolling out old DC-3s, which take two and a half hours for the trip, to supplement their new English-built Viscounts, which take only an hour and twenty-five minutes. Because I applied late, I was put on a DC-3. When I came aboard, the only vacant seat was next to a large, fair-haired man of resolute and familiar appearance. The seats were narrow, the leg room was limited, and it was easy to see why the place next to the big fellow had been left to the last. To establish relations, I asked him how much he weighed, and he said, as if used to being asked the question, “Fourteen stone eleven and a half,” which works out to two hundred and seven and a half pounds. I said, “I weigh sixteen stone, very nearly”—very nearly seventeen, I meant. We scrunched together like bulls in a horse trailer, and he grunted, “I’m only three pound more than when I fought Joe Louey.”

“Did you?” I asked politely.

“If I didn’t, I don’t know ‘oo put the rooddy loomps on my ’ead,” he said pleasantly, and the hand-stitched face, with the high cheekbones, narrow eyes, and Rock of Gibraltar chin, came back to me out of the late thirties. He was Tommy Farr, the old Welsh heavyweight who went fifteen rounds with Joe Louis in 1937. There is a half-established legend in Britain that he was twisted out of the decision, which he wasn’t. Farr does nothing actively to favor the myth, but he doesn’t discourage it, either. He also fought a series of savage bouts, with varied fortunes, against fellows like Max Baer, and against them, he thinks, he got all the worst of it when he lost. “But I love the States,” he said. “I made a lot of money there. That’s what I fought for, eh? Money.” He rubbed a thumb like a hammer against a rectangular index finger. “Two hundred and ninety-six fights I had. Do you think it was for a rooddy lark?”

I said no, and he said, “It was my profession. I well and truly served my apprenticeship, and then I wanted money. That’s why they