The Sweet Science - A. J. Liebling [116]
They were still booing and cheering Billy when he was escorted from the ring minutes later. All down that long avenue of jam-packed people, they screamed their admiration. “You’re the winner, Billy!” or “You’re the champ!” Grown men cried their rage in the sea of faces … .
That’s just about the way it was. Taking a more moderate line, a Mr. Ben Kiely, on the sports page, wrote, “There’s no doubt in the world about it—the raising of Ray Famechon’s hand was one of the greatest shocks in Franco-Irish history. Because for the crowd in the Donnybrook Garage Billy Kelly was the man for their money.”
Famechon, whose hundred-and-third professional fight it was, looked relieved but not astonished. He probably thought he had won, as any fighter does who has made it at all close. Kelly sat in his corner with head almost between his knees, the picture of dejection, like a bright boy who has failed to get 100 in an arithmetic test because the teacher came up with the wrong answer. He had played it safe for fifteen rounds and failed to obtain the reward of thrift and diligence. The most interesting figure in the ring, for many reasons, was the referee; the man about to get lynched is undeniably the center of attention at a lynching. It is unlikely that it had occurred to him when he rose Famechon’s hand that he would be immoderately happy to see the Amsterdam airport again. The Kelly rooters were standing in the aisles and on the undertakers’ chairs, which assumed a new significance. Devil an usher could make devil a customer sit down. The referee, encouraged by a number of big men in mufti, probably detectives, who had entered the ring, got as far as the ropes, climbed through them to the ring apron, and stood there like a fellow who has never gone off a diving board and wishes he hadn’t walked out to the end. He was as pale as the inside of a Gouda cheese. The Gardai marched to the edge of the ring below him and formed a phalanx, into which they lowered him down. They then marched forward, with the Dutchman in the center. A small man in a raincoat tried to cut in from the rear, swinging a punch under a cop’s armpit. The Garda turned around, laughing, and slung him about twenty feet, using the man’s raincoat as a hammer thrower uses the wire on the hammer. The Lord Mayor slunk out as self-effacingly as he had entered. The wild shouting continued, the ushers were ignored for another five minutes, and then everybody began to laugh and chat and light up cigarettes again, in preparation for the bouts that would wind up the program. (It was apparently permissible to suffocate all boxers except those in the main event.) Since the tag end of the program was of small interest, I soon made my way out into the night and a pouring rain.
By the time I got back to the Royal Hibernian, Mr. Farr was established before a late snack of cold chicken and cold ham, with a few bottles of Guinness. He said he had already filed his story for the Sunday Pictorial, and readily recited what he thought the best bits of it for me. Like me, he thought Kelly had deserved to win. “Kelly hos nothing for the seeker of blood and thunder, but those who enjoy the grace of movement and textbook poonching will be fully satisfied by the Derry craftsman,” he said, which is the way it appeared in the Pictorial, except for the Welsh stresses. He writes a very pretty style. He thought, though, that Kelly had been overcautious—that he had had little to beat. We adjourned to the lounge, in which bona-fide residents are allowed to drink as late as the night porter, a crabbed old humorist, will serve them, and there were