The Sweet Science - A. J. Liebling [27]
I was beginning to resent my neighbors bitterly by the time the tenth round came and Robinson, with his eye cut, either by a butt or by a blow, put together the really amazing attack that finished poor Turpin off—or didn’t quite, according, next day, to Turpin’s manager and to some of the British boxing writers, who hadn’t been hit. When the referee stepped between the fighters and grabbed Turpin in his arms, I thought I had never seen a man so game or so beaten as the mulatto from Leamington Spa. Within a minute, the ring was full of policemen, who lined the ropes; I don’t exactly know why, since there appeared to be no danger of a riot. There seemed to be nothing to argue about.
On the way down the ramp to the exit, I saw a sight that struck the proper note—a tall, grave, fair-haired man, with a pipe in his mouth, walking silently beside an equally grave blond boy of around fifteen, who was carrying a furled Union Jack. By contrast, as I got out onto Eighth Avenue, under the “El,” I nearly bumped into three men who turned out to be sailors from the Elizabeth, and though they were wearing Turpin buttons in the lapels of their land-going clothes, they were all laughing. “I feel like ’iding my fice,” one of them was saying. “What a ’iding ’e took!” “What I’m laughing at,” said another, “was old Bill, ’ere. ‘Go right in, Randy,’ ‘e says. ‘What are you afraid of?’” They were, I felt, devoid of proper patriotic sentiment.
Since there were no taxis to be had and the subway entrances, choked with struggling human bodies, looked slightly less inviting in that heat than gas chambers, I started to foot-toddle down Eighth Avenue, hoping to encounter a cab along the way. After I’d gone a block or so, I was stopped by another British seaman, a square-faced bloke who looked as if he might once have boxed a bit himself. He wanted to know the way to the entrance to the Eighth Avenue subway I had just passed up. I told him, and added consolingly, “I never saw a gamer man than your fellow.” “Oh, ‘im,” the seaman said. “’E’s a good lad, sir, but no experience. No defense. No class, sir. Forget about ’im.” This, too, seemed hardly right.
Eighth Avenue, from the Polo Grounds south, is Harlem, but it’s poor Harlem, unrelieved by bright lights or jive. I walked past store fronts fetid with the smell of old vegetables, and dismal houses that never were much and now are less, where ill-dressed Negroes sat on the doorsills. Other people walking from the fight, or perhaps a radio bulletin, had carried the news ahead of me. (The fight itself, of course, hadn’t been broadcast or televised—for New York audiences, at any rate.) All along the way, the people in the doorways knew that Sugar Ray had won, but they didn’t seem excited. Perhaps it was the heat.
I stopped in at a bar at 145th Street for a drink—if was not festive there, either—and then switched over to Seventh Avenue, still looking for a taxi. At 143rd and Seventh, two men in their twenties were bullying a boy of about eighteen. They had him backed up against an automobile, and whenever he turned on one, the other would kick him. A crowd of women had gathered around, at a safe distance. The men had been drinking and looked rough. “You let him alone!” a woman cried. “He’s only a young boy!” In a nearby saloon, there was another row going on. Just then, I sighted a cab headed uptown empty, and I stopped it and got aboard. “Drive me downtown, past Sugar Ray’s,” I said.
As we approached the Theresa, the avenue was so jammed up with traffic that we could barely move. People were packed around the safety islands and overflowed onto the street. Somebody