The Sweet Science - A. J. Liebling [24]
I approved of Robinson’s decision to leave early. Drinking with customers just before a battle was a practice deprecated by Egan. There was, to give you an example from Boxiana, Dan Donnelly, an Irish heavyweight, who was never beaten but who fell dead in his own bar after drinking forty-seven whiskey punches with well-wishers. His epitaph read:
O’ERTHROWN BY PUNCH,
UNHARMED BY FIST,
HE DIED UNBEATEN PUGILIST!
A slim, earnest black man with a briar pipe in his right hand walked down between the tables, saying in a peremptory voice, “A hundred to seventy-five. A hundred to seventy-five.” “What you betting?” another man asked him. “I bet Robinson,” the man with the pipe said. “Everybody here betting him,” the second man said. “That ain’t no odds.” The man with the pipe walked away, and I asked the second man, “Who do you think will win?” “Ray,” he said. “Ray, sure. He always win when the chips are down.” I did not tell him about the statement of Colonel Stingo, whom I had encountered the day before and who had seen the films of the London bout in which Turpin defeated Robinson for the middleweight championship. The Colonel said Turpin appeared to be a very strong boxer, and had kept crowding Robinson from the beginning of the bout. “Ray has never looked too good against a crowding fighter,” the Colonel said, “and now he’s getting old. He’s got to make a different kind of a fight to win this one.” He added that he had just been talking to Jack Kearns, the former manager of Jack Dempsey. Kearns had been out to Pompton Lakes to watch Sugar Ray train, and had said that he was “dry”—not sweating well—which is considered an indication of poor condition. “It’ll take him a year to get back in shape,” Kearns had told the Colonel. “Paris licked him.”
When I arrived at the Polo Grounds, a short time before the first preliminary bout, the place was only half full, but the people running the show had already effected an almost complete strangulation of movement as far as the customers were concerned. By setting up wire gates between various sections of the stand, probably to prevent ticket holders from “creeping” forward to better seats than they had paid for, they had made long detours necessary for anyone trying to get anywhere. Since even the ushers, of whom there were few, didn’t know where the temporary barriers were, they couldn’t tell people how to avoid them. A lane so narrow that it could be threaded only in single file had been left between the lower-stand boxes and the first row of lower-stand seats, and customers coming in through runways at the ends of this lane had to struggle against each other to reach the aisles leading up into the stands. Once I had made it to my own seat, in the first row of the lower stand, the struggle provided a sort of preliminary to the preliminaries.
The “ringside” seats, which covered the baseball diamond and reached well into the outfield, were for the most part empty at that stage of the evening. They filled slowly; many of the people who buy them do not much like boxing but go to big fights so that they can talk about them afterward, and they seldom arrive before the main bout. But I knew they would be along; this was something you had to see, like Guys and Dolls or a van Gogh show at the Metropolitan. Midway through the preliminaries, hundreds of young hoodlums in Hawaiian shirts, all of whom had clearly come in on general admission—unless they had scaled the fence—dashed down the aisles of the stands in back of third base, vaulted the wire barriers with admirable ease, and hurtled onto the field, racing to occupy empty ringside seats. It was a concerted break,