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By Root 649 0

joined by a number of gentlemen from Northern Ireland, including the trio who had transported us to the fight. Before bringing us a new round of drinks, the porter would make each of us give his room number, and we would count off, beginning with a Mr. Cassidy from Derry—I think he had No. 58—and going all the way round to a man from Donegal whose name I forget but who weighed eighteen stone seven and collected first editions. It was not so much that the porter expected our bona-fide status to change between rounds, I think, as that he wished to determine our degree of responsibility. A fellow who forgot the number of his room might have been refused the next drink. But nobody did forget.

Mr. Farr, who had switched from Guinness to Cointreau, was naturally the oracle of the occasion, and won the golden opinion of all until he burst out ingenuously, “The truth is that the lod fights like he was in a rooddy balloon at the end of a rooddy stick. Every time t‘other lod ’it ’im in the goot, ’e looked ot the referee. Is the referee ’is rooddy grondmother? Was he too prroud to reciprrocate?” He rose, granitic and dignified. “I must take an early plane in the morning,” he said. “Bock to my sweet wife and wonderful children. Each Saturday afternoon I take the kids to the cinema and tea. High tea.” He made his way to the lift, the pattern of a literary man who leads a sane family life.

I stayed on until the porter himself decided to go to bed, at dawn. He has insomnia in the dark, he said.

Ahab and Nemesis

Ahab and Nemesis

Back in 1922, the late Heywood Broun, who is not remembered primarily as a boxing writer, wrote a durable account of a combat between the late Benny Leonard and the late Rocky Kansas for the lightweight championship of the world. Leonard was the greatest practitioner of the era, Kansas just a rough, optimistic fellow. In the early rounds Kansas messed Leonard about, and Broun was profoundly disturbed. A radical in politics, he was a conservative in the arts, and Kansas made him think of Gertrude Stein, les Six, and nonrepresentational painting, all novelties that irritated him.

“With the opening gong, Rocky Kansas tore into Leonard,” he wrote. “He was gauche and inaccurate, but terribly persistent.” The classic verities prevailed, however. After a few rounds, during which Broun continued to yearn for a return to a culture with fixed values, he was enabled to record: “The young child of nature who was challenging for the championship dropped his guard, and Leonard hooked a powerful and entirely orthodox blow to the conventional point of the jaw. Down went Rocky Kansas. His past life flashed before him during the nine seconds in which he remained on the floor, and he wished that he had been more faithful as a child in heeding the advice of his boxing teacher. After all, the old masters did know something. There is still a kick in style, and tradition carries a nasty wallop.”

I have often thought of Broun’s words in the years since Rocky Marciano, the reigning heavyweight champion, scaled the fistic summits, as they say in Journal-Americanese, by beating Jersey Joe Walcott. The current Rocky is gauche and inaccurate, but besides being persistent he is a dreadfully severe hitter with either hand. The predominative nature of this asset has been well stated by Pierce Egan, the Edward Gibbon and Sir Thomas Malory of the old London prize ring, who was less preoccupied than Broun with ultimate implications. Writing in 1821 of a milling cove named Bill Neat, the Bristol Butcher, Egan said, “He possesses a requisite above all the art that teaching can achieve for any boxer; namely, one hit from his right hand, given in proper distance, can gain a victory; but three of them are positively enough to dispose of a giant.” This is true not only of Marciano’s right hand but of his left hand, too—provided he doesn’t miss the giant entirely. Egan doubted the advisability of changing Neat’s style, and he would have approved of Marciano’s. The champion has an apparently unlimited absorptive capacity for percussion (Egan