• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 576 0

affection by the crowd. The master of ceremonies implored the audience to stop smoking during the coming contest, and all the men within my sight extinguished their cigarettes. He next introduced the boxers, giving their weights to the ounce—Kelly had a ten-ounce weight advantage—and, finally, the referee, who received a polite, unsuspicious cheer. I did not hear his name, but the man next to me said, “Some kind of a Dutchman.” It appeared likely, for the referee had the buttery tint so common among Hollanders, and walked about the ring with the exaggerated spryness of a Teuton being dashing. He had a snipe nose that pointed at the ceiling, and held himself so straight that his Adam’s apple created a noticeable deviation from the vertical, pushing a neat bow tie in front of it.

The gong rang, and the men came timidly from their corners amid thunderous cheers. “Don’t let us pretend to be impartial,” a fellow wrote in the Irish Press the next morning. “We all wanted the best man to win, and Billy Kelly was the best man for us.” Confirming Farr’s description, Kelly went to work methodically; he landed a light tap on the Frenchman’s nose, parried a return with his right, and then tapped twice more. Famechon floundered at him a bit, like a fellow reaching over a man’s shoulder to shake hands with someone behind him, and the round ended with no damage to either. The man next to me turned his face from the carnage and said, “Is he doing all right?” I showed him my program, on which I had marked the round even, and he said, “That other fellow has a very dangerous look.”

After the second round, Kelly settled down to work, and a very promising workman he looked, drawing leads, popping the slower Frenchman with fast, precise jabs, and once, in the fourth, even landing a really good right uppercut to the diaphragm in close. When Famechon started a punch, Kelly would be going in another direction. Usually when the Frenchman got close to him, Kelly would cease trying to do harm and concentrate on escape, as if he were fighting a middleweight instead of a gaffer his own size. He was good at ducking and slipping away, but nobody was ever hurt by being ducked away from. Still, he outboxed his man round after round—I gave him four in a row—and the bus garage swelled with the sound of shouting. The jabs had little sting, but since Kelly was younger than Famechon, it appeared reasonable that he would keep on piling up points as the fight went on, and at the end would take the decision. By the seventh, Famechon, having apparently decided that the boy couldn’t hurt him at all, was rushing after him, slapping and pushing but unable to accomplish much. And so they went, round after round—Kelly almost never using his right except to block and never following an advantage beyond a second or third light pop when he had his man set up for a real one. At the beginning of every round he crossed himself, and whenever Famechon’s slaps strayed low he would look appealingly at the referee. As they came up for the fifteenth, I had them all square on my card—six rounds for each and two even—but I had a feeling that Kelly’s margins had been a trifle clearer. I gave him the final round, which was as tantalizingly ineffectual as all the others, and as hard to pick a winner in. Just the same, I was sure that Spider II deserved the decision—and meanly suspected that he would be sure to receive it even if he hadn’t done quite so well. It was then that the Dutchman, to quote one Irish writer, “rose” Famechon’s hand. I thought I could write a fair account of what followed, but when I saw the story on the first page of the Irish Press next morning, I realized that the writer, a Mr. John Healy, had probably had more experience in that kind of going:

There was a long pause as a stunned audience, who had watched the young Spider swap punches at a terrific pace in the last two rounds, slowly gathered what it meant—Billy Kelly had lost the fight.

And then, slowly at first, until it gathered momentum and burst like a rumbling volcano, they got to their feet and