The Sweet Science - A. J. Liebling [18]
By the time Seamon had finished with his hands, Louis was in high good humor. “I’m sorry we got no boxing shoes to fit you, Colonel,” he said to Stingo just before he went into the gymnasium. “So I guess I won’t be able to work with you today. You worked with me wearing those shoes, you might step all over my feet and disable me.”
There was nothing showy about the workout. Two of Louis’s three partners were light heavyweights, much smaller than the old champion, and they worked fast, to speed up his reflexes. He didn’t punch hard at either, since the idea wasn’t to discourage them. One of them, a brown boy from Bermuda, hit Louis pretty freely, but it was reasonable to suppose the Bermudian was a lot faster than Marciano could possibly be. That’s the point of working with a light, fast man. The only partner on hand of the big, rough type that used to staff Louis’s camps was a heavyweight named Elkins Brothers, whom I had seen fight in the semifinal on the Robinson–Turpin card. Brothers, a squat, powerful fellow, played the part of Marciano when he sparred with Louis. He came in crouching, and threw overhand rights at Louis’s jaw. The overhand right, thrown in a rising arc like an artillery shell, was supposed to be Marciano’s best punch. Louis kept jabbing at Brothers’ head, trying to hit him just as the right started coming and keep him off balance. When he succeeded, he stepped in with a right uppercut. It was a pattern of battle, but neither man pressed it to its ultimate implication. They were methodical rather than fierce. Louis’s body looked good—leaner, if anything, than it had in 1938—and the jab was as sweet as ever.
Stingo and I were sitting out on the lawn after the workout, waiting for the car from Greenwood Lake to pick us up, when Louis came along, on his way from the gym to his living quarters. He looked younger with his snap-brim hat on. It hid the bald spot. And in street clothes, after all, a superbly conditioned man of thirty-seven is still young. It’s when he gets into a ring that age comes on him. Louis hovered over us for a while, but none of us could think of much to say. It was no use asking him how he felt, or whether he thought he could win this one, because clearly he was as good as anybody could get him now, and he had never had a match in his life that he didn’t think he was going to win, and sixty-nine times out of seventy-one he had been right. So why would he change his mind this time?
Louis gave a small shiver and said, “Well, I guess I better go in, or I might get a chill.” We shook hands all around, and he went along to play cards with the sparring partners who belonged to a younger generation.
The camp at Greenwood Lake, which I visited three days before the fight, was more lively. Marciano looked like the understander in the nine-man pyramid of a troupe of Arab acrobats. He was bull-necked and wide-shouldered, and even when he was merely walking around in the ring, he kept rippling the muscles of his arms and back, as if afraid that if he let them set they would tie up. He looks as if he should be muscle-bound, but he isn’t. He worked with a big, rangy young heavyweight named Jimmy DeLange, who had the Louis role, and they fought as if they wanted to transcend the limitations of the leather head guards and the huge sparring gloves and knock each other out. Marciano moved around briskly on his stubby legs and threw punches well, especially to the body, but DeLange had no trouble reaching his head with left jabs, and the spar-mate’s right uppercuts to