The Sweet Science - A. J. Liebling [19]
During the workout, I sat alongside the ancient featherweight champion Abe Attell, and after it was over and the trainers had pulled Marciano’s gloves off, Abe called up to the fighter, “Take it easy, Rocky! He’s only a sparring partner!” The fighter held up three fingers and called back apologetically, “Only tree days!”—signifying that, with but three days to go, he was in too good shape to restrain himself.
“I had five hundred on him,” Attell said to me. “And after what I seen today I’m making it a thousand.” Attell, who was himself one of the greatest of boxers, is a knowing man about fights, but he is famous for having an intricate mind. I consoled myself with the thought that he might, in fact, be betting on Louis and speaking favorably of Marciano only to get the odds up.
“Louis is all through,” Attell went on, with what I considered a deplorable lack of sentiment in an old champion who had himself felt the sharp tooth of time. But Attell, who looks at you with cold eyes around his huge beak that is like a toucan’s with a twisted septum, is not a sentimental man. “If they get a referee who don’t let Louis hang on, the kid will knock him out,” he said. He then put a handful of BB shot in his mouth and started to pick his teeth. He uses bamboo toothpicks, which he has tailored for him at a novelty shop on Broadway. From time to time, by means of his toothpick, he propels the pellets, one by one, through gaps between his teeth, hitting with perfect accuracy any object up to ten feet away. A nightclub hostess with a plunging neckline is his favorite target, but a busy bartender in a dimly lighted joint will keep him almost equally happy. En villégiature, he will take targets of opportunity, like the back of a stranger’s neck. “I got hit with an automobile a couple years ago and got three new choppers on the right side, with no holes between then,” he told me. “So now I developed a curve out the left.”
Leaving the unfeeling Mr. Attell, I went over to wait outside the dressing room for Charlie Goldman, Marciano’s trainer, an old bantamweight who has coached Weill’s fighters for years. Goldman is a fine pedagogue, because he brings out his pupil’s qualities instead of trying to change them. “The great thing about this kid is he’s got leverage,” he told me when he came out of the dressing room. “He takes a good punch and he’s got the equalizers. He had leverage from the start, and when you teach a fellow like that, you have to go slow, because you might change the way he stands or the way he moves, and spoil his hitting. Everything new you show him, you have to ask him, ‘Does it feel natural?’ ‘Can you hit from there?’ So naturally he’ll never be a flashy boxer. But he’s in the improving phase. He’s still six months—maybe a year—away. But whether he beats Louis or not, he’s going to be a lot better next summer.”
Goldman is a soft-spoken, merry little man with a large head, buffed to a plane surface in front, and a pair of hands that look as if they had been trampled on. “Looka the bum, how many times he broke his hands!” Attell says loftily. His own magnificent fists carried him through three hundred and sixty-five fights with only one break. Goldman’s more friable maulies prevented him from knocking out many of the four hundred opponents he fought, but they made him a thoughtful kind of boxer.
“Most fighters at twenty-seven have been boxing eight, nine years, and they are as good as they ever will be,” Goldman told me. “But Rocky has only had about the equivalent of one year’s experience. So he’s still learning. Every time we made a fight for him up in New England, we would bring him down to New York for a week and get him a room at the C.YO., and then he would work out four or five afternoons