The Sweet Science - A. J. Liebling [29]
Kearns is as rutilant a personality as Maxim apparently isn’t, and from many of the newspaper stories that appeared in the weeks leading up to the fight one would have thought that Kearns, not Maxim, was signed to fight Robinson. This was an impression Kearns seemed to share when I met him six days before the date set for the fight, in the large, well-refrigerated Broadway restaurant operated by his former associate Dempsey. The old champion and his manager quarreled spectacularly back in the twenties, but are now friendly. “This is my big chance,” Kearns said, buying me a drink and ordering a cup of coffee for himself. He was one of the big speakeasy spenders but says he has been on the wagon for eight years. “Up to now, I had to stuff myself up and fight heavyweights,” he said. “Me, the only white guy with a title. But now I got somebody I can bull around.” By this he meant, I gathered, that, in order to obtain what he considered sufficiently remunerative employment in the past for Maxim, he had had to overfeed the poor fellow and spread the rumor that he had grown into a full-sized heavyweight. Then, after fattening him to a hundred and eighty, he had exposed him to the assault of more genuine giants, who had nearly killed him. But now, he implied, Maxim had an opponent he could shove around and control in the clinches. I said I hoped it would be a good fight to watch, and he said, “I got to be good. I can’t afford to lay back. I got to keep moving him, moving him.” As he said this, he picked off imaginary punches—Robinson’s hooks, no doubt—with both hands and shoved straight out into space, to show how he would put on the pressure.
Most managers say “we” will lick So-and-So when they mean their man will try to, but Kearns does not allow his fighter even a share in the pronoun. He is a manager of the old school. His old-school tie, on the day I met him, was Columbia blue covered with sharps and flats in black, green, and cerise. The weaver of his shirt had imprisoned in it the texture as well as the color of pistachio ice cream. It was a wonder children hadn’t eaten it off his back in the street, with the weather the way it was outside. He was wearing a pale-gray suit and skewbald shoes, and his eyes, of a confiding baby blue, were so bright that they seemed a part of the ensemble. He has a long, narrow, pink face that widens only at the cheekbones and at the mouth, which is fronted with wide, friendly-looking incisors, habitually exposed in an ingenuous smile. The big ears folded back against the sides of his head are not cauliflowered. They are evidence that in his boxing days he was never a catcher. Kearns is slim and active, and could pass for a spry fifty-five if the record books didn’t show that he was knocked out by a welterweight champion named Honey Mellody in 1901, when he must have been at least full-grown.
In the course of his boxing career, which was not otherwise distinguished, Kearns had the fortune to meet the two fighters who in my opinion had the best ring names of all time—Honey Mellody and Mysterious Billy Smith. Smith was also a welterweight champion. “He was always doing something mysterious,” Kearns says. “Like he would step on your foot, and when you looked down, he would bite you in the ear. If I had a fighter like that now, I could lick heavyweights. But we are living in a bad period all around. The writers are always crabbing about the fighters we got now, but look at the writers you got now themselves. All they think about is home to wife and children, instead of laying around saloons soaking up information.”
He told me in Dempsey’s that he played nine holes of golf every day to keep his legs in shape. Since Kearns was obviously in such good condition, I saw no point in taking the three-hour ride to Grossinger’s, in the Catskill Mountains, to see Maxim train.
I did go out to look at Robinson next day, however. He was training at Pompton Lakes, New Jersey, which is only an hour’s drive from town. I got a free ride in one of the limousines chartered by the