The Sweet Science - A. J. Liebling [114]
The ambiance warmed a bit with the next bout—a lightweight match between a heavy-muscled, pyknic Galwayman, not much more than five feet tall, named McCoy, and a more conventionally constructed fellow from Belfast, named Sharpe. (Belfast, like most industrial cities, produces a large crop of boxers.) Galwaymen, in popular myth, are hot-tempered and unpredictable, and transplanted Galwaymen, of whom there were many in the audience, are vociferously loyal. The little fellow started out at a terrific pace, moving his arms as if in a pillow fight. A cry of “Up, Galway! Come on, McEye!” spontaneously dispelled the decorum of the evening. It seemed impossible that McEye could keep on moving his arms at that rate for more than a minute, but he did, and the astonished Belfast man, after waiting for him to run down, joined in the fun. But each time Sharpe administered to the animated half keg a conventional uppercut to the chin—he knew the antidotes academically prescribed for a violent attack by a short opponent—McEye would loose a flurry of blows that reminded me of a passage in “The Song of Roland”: “I will strike seven hundred or a thousand good blows.” Six hundred and ninety-nine or nine hundred and ninety-eight would miss, but for the Belfast man it was like trying to hit through an electric fan. The fellow sitting next to me jiggled with the effort of maintaining his composure; he seemed to be in the grip of an electric vibrator. After every round, he would grab me and ask, “Would you say the little fellow is ahead now?” I would nod, and he would turn and grab the fellow on the other side, a sporty type who was escorting a platinum blonde. This Blazes Boylan—it is impossible to be in Dublin without Joyce—was a purist. “Sharpe is landing the cleaner punches,” he would say. The man between us would wait until Blazes turned back to the blonde, and then pluck my arm again. “Do you know,” he would say in a conspira-tional way, “I don’t agree with that man at all.” Neither did the referee, who gave the decision to McEye and perpetual motion. There are no judges at European professional bouts, and the referee decides. My neighbor and I exchanged friendly glances, secure in our connoisseurship.
The announcer now had his great moment. “My Lord Mayor, ladies and gentlemen!” he called, and began introducing visiting celebrities—Freddie Mills, the Englishman who briefly held the light-heavyweight championship of the world before Joey Maxim won it; my sponsor Farr, who got a great hand; and, climactically, “the original” Spider Kelly, the father of the hero of the evening. (I had heard of at least one earlier Spider Kelly, the man who said to his seconds, “What I need ain’t advice—it’s strength.” But that had been in California, and it would have been a quibble to bring it up at Donnybrook.) The original Irish Spider Kelly was a puckish little man with a red face and heavy black eyebrows. He had held the British and British Empire featherweight championships himself twenty years before, I knew from my newspaper fill-in, and had guided Spider II’s instruction from his first tottering essays at footwork. The audience included many fathers, more sons, and quite a number of mothers and sisters. (There was also a good speckling of Roman collars.) A cheer for old Spider was an endorsement of the principle of the family, and he got it.
A fanfare of hunting horns was sounded at the remote end of the garage, and another cheer began, distant at first, louder as its object approached the ring. It was Spider II, surrounded by his faction. He was a baby-faced boy with a crew cut, who looked more like eighteen than twenty-three. The calves of his legs resembled those of a school quarter-miler—large and rounded—but his torso and arms, white and boyish, were less impressively developed. The Frenchman, whose entry was heralded by another but less enthusiastic fanfare, was sleek, wide-shouldered, long-armed, and spindle-shanked. He looked not much younger than Spider I, but his antiquity inspired no comparable demonstration of respectful