The Sweet Science - A. J. Liebling [112]
I asked him how the American press had robbed him of fifty or sixty thousand pounds, and he explained that it was by saying he would have no chance against Louis. “Spoiled the gate, they did,” he said.
I tried to console him by recalling how extravagantly they had praised him after the fight, but he grumbled, “That didn’t ’elp the gate.”
Somehow the money had slipped between the hard knuckles. So now, he said, he was launched on a second career. I asked him what it was. He was looking fit and prosperous, in a smashing dark-gray pin-striped suit, and wearing a good thin watch. In the light of this exterior, I was scarcely prepared for his answer.
“I’m a write-ter,” he said. “I love write-ting. I give it to them straight. No split affinitives, you know, or other Oxfer stooff. Oh, of coorse I split an affinitive now and then, to show I know how, but I don’t believe in it.” He was writing boxing, he told me, for the Sunday Pictorial, a once-a-week tabloid, with a circulation of five and a half million, that was creeping up on the eight million circulation of the older-established phenomenon, the News of the World. “I thank God I ’ave found a way to make a living for my dear wife and kids,” Farr said. “It seems I’m a natural-born write-ter. I’ve hod five revisions of contract since I came with the Pictorial.”
He was going to report the fight, and I asked him for a bit of professional inside on Kelly. “He’s a very good methodical boxer,” he said, “with a fine sense of anticipation.” It was to prove a practically perfect synopsis of Kelly; he might have added only that Kelly too often anticipates the worst. Farr’s experience in the United States was much in his mind. “I couldn’t be a good-time Charlie,” he said. “When I was a kid, I was taught not to talk or joke or laugh at the table. ‘You come ’ere to eat,’ my old man used to say to me. ‘When you eat, go.’ A man can’t change from what ’e’s brought up to be, can he? He wasn’t a bad old man. He taught me the importance of a good left. He was very aggressive. When he was fighting, they used to say ‘e was a throwback to the cave man. ‘When you go into the ring, you’re a hoonter,’ he’d say. ‘Don’t hop about like you were fighting in a rooddy balloon on the end of a stick.’”
Farr told me he had written in the Pictorial that Don Cockell, the Englishman who recently tried to take Marciano’s heavyweight crown in San Francisco, had no sympathy coming. “He had sixteen pound on Marciano,” Farr said. “’E should of set about ’im. I got ‘oondred and eight letters, all approving. My boss got nineteen letters, all disapproving. He phoned me up. ‘That’s grand,’ he said. ‘Keep up the good work. They’ll be something extra in the post for you tomorrow.’”
Farr said he was going to spend the night at the Royal Hibernian Hotel, where his paper had reserved a room for him, and it was there that I, too, eventually found a room. I met him again at dinner; he was eating with three businessmen from Derry, young Kelly’s home town, whom he had taken into the aura of his greatness. Between courses he autographed cards for the young busboys and the waiters. “Is it true that you fought Joe Louey, Mr. Farr?” they would ask him, and he would reply, with a rugged laugh, “If I didn’t, I don’t know ‘oo put the rooddy loomps on my ’ead.” It had happened before the little busboys were born, and they thought of it as something historic.
After dinner—a modest collation of honey dew melon and darne de saumon au Chablis, the Irish salmon being exceptional—the five of us drove to Donnybrook in the Derrymen’s car. The streets were full of automobiles from the North of Ireland and the three free counties of Ulster; my associates