The Sweet Science - A. J. Liebling [17]
One of the first things I saw on getting out of the car was a familiar sweatered figure sprawled in a lawn chair in front of the red frame building that in livelier days housed the bar. It was Mannie Seamon, Louis’s trainer, a white man who stepped into the job after the death of Jack Blackburn, the old colored fighter who formed Louis’s style. Seamon is more of a conditioner than a boxing coach—a jovial, rosy-cheeked man who sometimes discourses learnedly on “bone juice” and keeping the air out of his charges’ bones. He hadn’t changed at all in the intervening years, I noted enviously, but I winced when I thought of how many thousand medicine balls he must have thrown at Louis’s and other fighters’ stomachs since 1938. All the sparring partners of thirteen years ago were gone—working on the docks, most of them, Seamon said—and so were Louis’s managers then, John Roxborough and Julian Black, the two colored sporting men who brought Joe out of the Middle West, and Mike Jacobs, the quondam ticket scalper who once controlled boxing through his control of that great new favorite, Louis.
“Joe’s looking the best he has in four years,” Mannie said. (It was in 1947, in his first match against Walcott, that Louis first showed he was slipping badly.) We talked a while about fellows we had known in the thirties, and I asked Mannie if the terrible monotony of training wasn’t beginning to tell on Louis. Joe made his pro debut in 1934, and he had boxed amateur before that, and the Army meant no letup, for his duty there consisted of boxing exhibitions for other soldiers. So he had been at it for nearly twenty years—light bag, heavy bag, pushups, belly bends, roadwork, and shadowboxing. It is hard to stay interested in your own shadow for twenty years. Even an old race horse gets so he won’t extend himself in works.
“We keep his mind off it as much as we can,” Seamon said. “We got a rule here, we never talk fight. Anything but that. We listen to phonograph records, or we play cards, or handicap horses. I tell him funny stories, and the best is different people come in and talk to him.”
Seamon walked over to the gymnasium to get the fighter ready for his sparring exhibition, and after a while Colonel Stingo and I followed him. When we got to the dressing room, Louis was sitting on the rubbing table while Seamon prepared his hands—bandages, gauze, and flat sponge-rubber pads over the knuckles, and then adhesive tape to hold the structure in place. Seamon said, “Joe, this is Colonel Stingo. He is seventy-eight years old and he wants to work a couple of rounds with you.” Louis looked down at the Colonel and couldn’t at the moment think of anything to say except “Glad to meet you.” I reminded Louis that he and I had last met in Frisco’s, a drinking club on Sackville Street, in London, during the war, and he said, “That man once charged me sixteen dollars for a pint of gin.” With us in the dressing room was a slender colored man named Reed, a friend of Louis’s who had evidently been a patron of Frisco’s at the same time, and he joined in the conversation to say he had once paid a cabby three pounds and six shillings to drive him to Frisco’s from a few streets away. “‘Three-and-six,’ the man said,” Reed recalled. “So I gave him three pounds and six shillings, and then I reached in my pocket and all I had left was a ten-shilling note, so I gave it to him for a tip. I didn’t know if it was enough. That was my first time on leave in London.” Louis began to laugh. “That was a pretty good tip,” he said. “Two dollars for a seventy-cent ride that you already paid him nearly fifteen bucks for.”
Louis, Reed, and I began telling stories about prices we had paid in London, straining the elastic of credulity with each tale—a kind of auction. Louis stuck closest to plausibility; Reed and I were just trying to be funny. Fruit had been fantastically dear