The Sweet Science - A. J. Liebling [32]
By the time I got back to my seat, Robinson and Maxim were in the ring and the announcer was proceeding with the usual tiresome introductions of somebodies who were going to fight somebody elses somewhere. Each boy, after being introduced, would walk over and touch the gloved right paw of each principal. The last one in was old Jersey Joe Walcott, the heavyweight champion, and the crowd evidenced torpid good will. I could see the vast Gainford in Robinson’s corner, over toward third base, and, with the aid of binoculars, could discern that his face still wore the portentous, noncommittal expression of a turbaned bishop in a store-front church. Kearns had his back to me, but I could tell him by his ears. He was clad in a white T shirt with “Joey Maxim” in dark letters on the back, and he seemed brisker than anybody else in the ring. Maxim had his back to me, too. When he stood up, I could see how much thicker and broader through the chest he was than Robinson. His skin was a reddish bronze; Sugar Ray’s was mocha chocolate.
Fighting middleweights, Robinson had always had a superiority over his foes in height and reach, together with equality in weight. Against Maxim he had equality in height and reach but the weight was all against him. His was announced as a hundred fifty-seven and a half and Maxim’s as a hundred and seventy-three. The first ten rounds of the fight weren’t much to watch. Maxim would keep walking in and poking a straight left at Robinson’s face. Robinson would either take or slip it, according to his fortune, belt Maxim a couple of punches, and grab his arms. Then they would contend, with varying success, in close. Some of the fans would cry that Robinson wasn’t hurting Maxim at all in these interludes, others that Maxim wasn’t hurting Robinson at all. There seemed to be some correlation between their eyesight and where they had placed their money. Because of the nature of the combat, most of the work fell upon the referee, Ruby Goldstein, a former welterweight then in his forties, who had to pull the men apart. In consequence, he was the first of the three to collapse; he had to leave the ring after the tenth round. I have never seen this happen in a prizefight before. Old-time photographs show referees on their feet at the end of twenty-five-round fights, and wearing waistcoasts and stiff collars. It is a bad period all around.
Robinson had been hitting Maxim much more frequently than Maxim had been hitting him, but neither man seemed hurt, and both were slowing down from a pace that had never been brisk. Now the relief referee, Ray Miller, a snub-nosed little man with reddish hair, entered the ring, bringing with him more bounce than either of the contestants possessed. He must have been sitting on dry ice. Miller, also an old fighter, enjoined the fighters to get going. The crowd had begun clapping and stamping, midway in the fight, to manifest its boredom. Miller broke clinches so expeditiously in the eleventh and twelfth that the pace increased slightly, to the neighborhood of a fast creep. Up to then, it had been even worse than the first ten rounds of the previous year’s fight between Sugar Ray and Randy Turpin, the milling cove. But that fight had ended in one wildly exciting round that made the fancy forget how dull the prelude had been.
This fight was to produce excitement, too, but of a fantastically different kind. In the eleventh round, Robinson hit Maxim precisely the same kind of looping right to the jaw that had started Turpin on the way out. The blow knocked the light heavy clear across the ring, but he didn’t fall, and Robinson’s legs, those miracles, apparently couldn’t move Ray fast enough to take advantage of the situation. It may have been as good a punch as the one of the year before, but it landed on a man fifteen pounds heavier. Maxim shook his head and went right on fighting, in his somnambulistic way. Now all Sugar Ray had to do was finish the fight on his feet and he would win