The Sweet Science - A. J. Liebling [31]
The newspapermen agreed that tepid sparring was all right, since Sugar Ray was as sharp as a tack already, and this was almost the end of his training. The thing about Robinson that gets you is the way he moves, even when shadowboxing. He finished off with a good long session of jumping rope, which he enjoys. Most fighters jump rope as children do, but infinitely faster. Robinson just swings a length of rope in his right fist and jumps in time to a fast tune whistled by his trainer. He jumps high in the air, and twists his joined knees at the top of every bound. When he jumps in double time to “I’m Just Wild About Harry,” it’s really something to see.
On the way back to town we all said he had never looked better.
The fight itself, as you have probably read, was memorable, but chiefly for meteorological reasons. It was postponed from the night of Monday, June twenty-third to that of Wednesday, June twenty-fifth, because of rain. Wednesday was the hottest June twenty-fifth in the history of the New York City Weather Bureau. I rode the subway up to the Yankee Stadium, where the fight was to be held, and the men slumped in the seats and hanging to the straps weren’t talking excitedly or making jokes, as fight fans generally do. They were just gasping gently, like fish that had been caught two hours earlier. Most of those who had been wearing neckties had removed them, but rings of red and green remained around collars and throats to show the color of the ties that had been there. Shirts stuck to the folds of bellies, and even the floor was wet with sweat.
My seat was in a mezzanine box on the first-base line, and I felt a mountain climber’s exhaustion by the time I had ascended the three gentle inclines that lead to the top of the grandstand, from which I had to descend to my seat. A fellow in a party behind me, trying to cheer his companions, said, “And you can tell your grandsons about this fight and how hot it was.” The preliminaries were on when I arrived, and two wretched forms were hacking away at each other under the lights that beat down on the ring. I could see the high shine on the wringing-wet bodies, and imagined that each man must be praying to be knocked out as speedily as possible. They were too inept; the bout went the full distance of six rounds, and then both men collapsed in their corners, indifferent to the decision. A miasma of cigarette smoke hung over the “ringside” seats on the baseball diamond, producing something of the effect you get when you fly over a cloud bank. There was no breeze to dispel it, and the American flags on the four posts at the corners of the ring drooped straight down. It was a hundred and four degrees Fahrenheit in there, we were to learn from the newspapers next morning.
I missed the next two preliminaries because I was up at the top of the stand, waiting in line for a can of beer. The venders who usually swarm all over the place, obstructing your vision at crucial moments in a fight, had disappeared, on the one night when their presence would have been welcome. So the customers had to queue up—a death march to get to a bar tended by exactly two men. Meanwhile, the fights were invisible, but once one was locked in the line, the thought of giving up one’s place unslaked became intolerable. Our line inched along toward a kind of Storm Trooper with a head like a pink egg. Rivulets of sweat poured from the watershed of his cranium, and his face appeared behind a spray, like a bronze Triton’s in a fountain. At every third customer, he would stop the line and threaten to pack up and call it a day. We would look at him beseechingly, too thirsty