The Sweet Science - A. J. Liebling [26]
Everybody stood up for a long recorded version of “God Save the King,” with a vocal chorus. It reminded me of the time they played the “Marseillaise” for Marcel Cerdan before he knocked out Tony Zale in Jersey City, and the machine wouldn’t stop. “God Save the King” received polite applause. The applause for “The Star-Spangled Banner,” which followed it, was tumultuous.
The principals came into the ring. Robinson, the challenger, was first—tall, slender, and dark brown, wearing a blue-and-white robe. He discarded the robe, revealing white trunks with a blue stripe, and jigged furiously up and down to limber his leg muscles. Turpin followed, in a yellow bathrobe over black trunks with a white stripe, sat down in his corner, and remained seated, even during the introduction, while Robinson stood and waved to the crowd. Robinson acted like a young, nervous fighter; Turpin, eight years his junior and fighting for the first time in this country, was calm as a Colchester oyster. When the bell rang, it was the same way. Robinson was making the play. Turpin wasn’t crowding this time; he was taking it easy, as if sure Robinson would slow down. Jimmy Cannon, of the New York Post, wrote afterward that Turpin “moved with a clumsy spryness and appeared to be serenely anticipating Robinson’s collapse.” The trouble with this policy was that it gave the much older Robinson a chance to make his own pace, fighting in spurts and then resting. He was still about the fastest thing in the world for thirty seconds or so, as Turpin was to find out.
Turpin stood more like some of the illustrations of boxers in Boxiana than a modern fighter. He had his left knee far forward, the leg almost straight out, and all the weight of his body back. It made him hard to get at, but it also made it hard for him to get at Robinson. (I had often wondered, looking at those illustrations, how men could hit from that position. Now I understand why Boxiana lists so many fifty- and sixty-round fights.) When Turpin did hit—with marvelous speed, most of which was wasted in coming such a long way around—it was always at some curious angle. One punch for the body looked like a man releasing a bowling ball; another, a right for the head, was like a granny boxing a boy’s ears. His jab was like a man starting his run for the pole vault. If he hit conventionally, from the shoulder, he would be less disconcerting, but he might also be one of the hardest hitters in history. For he is the strongest middleweight I have ever seen—built like a heavyweight, and tall, too. I haven’t figured yet how he can be so big all around and still make a hundred and sixty pounds.
Turpin was so strong that his unconventional blows shook Robinson when they landed, although Robinson knew that, according to the book, they shouldn’t. When the warning whistle blew ten seconds before the beginning of the second round, Robinson stood up. I thought it a rash gesture, because it meant that now he would have to spend an extra ten seconds on his feet at every interval. If he stayed down, it would be a public confession that he was tired. Turpin sat the full minute.
“The kid’s got nothin’, nothin’, absolutely nothin’,” one of the fellows next to me began saying during the fifth or sixth round, meaning Turpin, and he continued to repeat it, like an incantation: “Nothin’, nothin’.” He must have had a good bet on Robinson, because he sounded worried.
“If Turpin hasn’t got anything, what’s Robinson got?” I finally asked him. “It’s even, isn’t it?”
“Even?” He looked at me as if I were mad. “Turpin ain’t took a round,” he said.
The referee’s card had four rounds for each fighter and one even, up to the tenth round.
A stout colored man in back of me was wearing a bright-green