The Sweet Science - A. J. Liebling [113]
“Oh, Danny Boy—ta loora loo loo loora loo,
Oh, Danny Boy—ta loora loora loo!
Oh, come ye BACK—”
We were the success of the cavalcade.
The fight, as I knew by that time, having had a chance to read an evening newspaper, was to be held in a monster garage, just built by the municipality to house all the omnibuses of Dublin. Six thousand seven hundred and fifty chairs had been borrowed from caterers and undertakers; the one I got was tagged “O‘Connell’s,” but I don’t know which line of work O’Connell is in. The bout was being staged by Jack Solomons, the London promoter, with the cooperation of the officials in charge of An Tóstal, a kind of Gaelic old home week, which included an ecclesiological exhibition at Maynooth, a children’s art competition, and an event listed in the papers as “Dun Laoghaire—Blackrock Ceili—an Tóstal, Aras an Baile (8 P.M.),” and evidently reserved for Gaelic speakers. Famechon was to get three thousand pounds, which makes a tidy sum in francs (three million), or even in dollars (eight thousand four hundred). Kelly was to get two thousand pounds and, in the unanimous opinion of the Derrymen, the European featherweight championship as well, after which Solomons had promised him a match with Sandy Saddler for the world’s title. Saddler fought Famechon in Paris last year, and knocked him out in six rounds. Now Famechon was thirty years old and Kelly twenty-three, and both had made the featherweight limit of a hundred and twenty-six pounds at two o’clock that afternoon. Famechon had been around a long time—a very good fighter by European standards but not top-class by ours. I had heard at the Neutral Corner Restaurant, in New York, which is an international exchange for trade information, that he was definitely on the downgrade.
I had expected a delay at the gate, but Mr. Farr swept me in with him—in the double capacity of journalist and celebrity, he had the run of the house—and an usher conducted me to the O’Connell chair, in the second row ringside, where my neighbors regarded me with the respect due my illustrious sponsorship. The low ceiling of the bus garage kept the cigarette smoke down, and, although the soiree had not progressed past the first preliminary, the ring was enveloped in a blue haze, giving the scene the look of a painting of a club fight by Bellows. The strained, awkward boxers in the ring carried out the motif; the salient feature of “Stag at Sharkey’s,” I have always thought, is that both the central figures are simply pushers. The principals in this bout were a Dublin man and a Belfast man, of whom the former was the more inept. After the fifth round the master of ceremonies announced that the Dublin man had “retired,” and a buzz of sympathy ran through the hall. The restraint was studious, as if each member of the audience had come to the hall determined to keep his temper.
The ushers, who wore badges denominating them “stewards,” were fanatical about making customers crouch in the aisles while any boxing was going on, and conducted them to their chairs only during the one-minute intervals between rounds. It was like Town Hall during a seance of the New Friends of Music. Since horizontal distances were great in the garage, it took some arrivals from two to four rounds to reach their seats. The round before the Dublin man retired, a small, merry-looking man with a pointy nose and an even more finely pointed waxed mustache passed along the aisle in front of the first ringside row, bent over like a crab. The man next to me pulled my arm. “It’s Alfie Byrne, the Lord Mayor,” he said. His Lordship was taking no chances of alienating a voter. There was a large Irish harp in electric bulbs on one wall and another, in green paint, on the wall opposite.