The Sweet Science - A. J. Liebling [15]
The matchmaker is of the build referred to in ready-made-clothing stores as a portly, which means not quite a stout. There is an implication of at least one kind of recklessness about a fat man; he lets himself go when he eats. A portly man, on the other hand, is a man who would like to be fat but restrains himself—a calculator. Weill has a Roman nose of the short, or budgereegah, variety, and an over-all grayish coloration that is complemented by the suits he generally wears and the cigar ashes he frequently spills on them. On his home block—86th Street between West End Avenue and Riverside Drive—he blends perfectly with the tired 1910 grandeur of the apartment houses; he looks like one more garment manufacturer worried by a swollen inventory. This does not stop him from knowing more about the fight business than any of the flashier types who wear long beige jackets and stay downtown after dark.
Weill is a frugal man, and he likes frugal fighters. Every kind of serious trouble a fighter can get into, he says, has its origin in the disbursement of currency—rich food, liquor, women, horse-race betting, and fast automobiles. Once a fighter starts gambling, Weill doesn’t want him. “A gambler thinks he can get money without working for it,” he says. Weill had a big string of fighters before the war, and used to quarter them all in a lodging house near Central Park West, where the housemaster would issue to each boy a weekly meal ticket with a face value of five dollars and fifty cents, redeemable in trade at a coffeepot on Columbus Avenue. The tickets cost Weill five dollars each, cash. A fighter could get a second ticket before the week was out, but only if he showed that the first one had been punched out to the last nickel. None of those fighters ever suffered a defeat that could be attributed to high living. Mere frugality, however, may prove a boomerang, for the fighter sometimes gets to like it. There was once an old colored heavyweight named Bob Armstrong, who, when asked his utmost ambition, said, “To wake up every morning and find a dollar under my pillow.” Naturally, he never got to be champion. Weill wouldn’t want a fighter like that. What he really loves is an avaricious fighter.
When I asked Weill about Marciano he looked happy. “He is a nice boy,” he said. “The dollar is his God. That is to say, he is a poor Italian boy from a large, poor family, and he appreciates the buck more than almost anybody else. Them type guys is hard to get outa there. You want to look out for them young broken fighters.” By “broken fighter,” Weill, who is a purist, meant a fighter who is broke. “He only got two halfway decent purses—with LaStarza and Layne—and it was like a tiger tasting blood,” Weill went on. “So you know how confident he is when he will take a fight like this for fifteen per cent of the gate. Louis gets forty-five. Why, Marciano will bring more money into the Garden than Louis. Connecticut, Rhode Island, and half of Massachusetts will be empty that night.” Marciano hails from Brockton, Massachusetts.
Having considered the morale factor, which with him always comes first, Weill passed to the tactical level. He said Marciano would never be a clever boxer; he wasn’t made for it, anyway, being short for a heavyweight, and wide, with short,