The Sweet Science - A. J. Liebling [33]
And then Robinson, the almost flawless boxer, the epitome of ring grace, swung, wildly and from far back of his shoulder, like a child, missed his man completely, and fell hard on his face. When he got up, Maxim backed him against the ropes and hit him a couple of times. The round ended, and Robinson’s seconds half dragged, half carried him to his corner. He couldn’t get off the stool at the end of the one-minute interval, and Maxim was declared the winner by a knockout in the fourteenth, because the bell had rung for the beginning of that round.
Sugar Ray, according to the press, was pretty well cut up over his defeat, and in his dressing room, after enough water had been sloshed on him to bring him to, he raved that divine intervention had prevented his victory. This refusal to accept the event is also an old story in the ring, but in the words of John Bee, a rival of Egan, it is “a species of feeling which soon wears out, and dies away, like weak astonishment at a nine days’ wonder.” On the day after the fight many of the sports writers took the line that Robinson had been beaten by the heat alone, and some of them even sentimentally averred that he had been making one of the most brilliant fights of his life right up to the moment when his legs gave out. They tried to reconcile this with their assertions that Maxim was a hopelessly bad fighter and had made a miserable showing until his unbelievable stroke of luck. It would have required no brilliance on anyone’s part to outpoint the Maxim they described. But Goliath never would have been popular anyway.
The heat was the same for both men. This much is sure, though: Whenever a man weighing a hundred and fifty-seven has to pull and haul against a man weighing a hundred and seventy-three, he has to handle sixteen pounds more than his own weight. The other fellow has to handle sixteen pounds less than his. And when you multiply this by the number of seconds the men struggle during thirty-nine minutes of a bout like this, you get a pretty good idea of why they weigh prizefighters. The multiplication is more than arithmetical, of course; a man who boxes four rounds is more than four times as tired as if he had boxed one. I had no idea, from watching the fight, whether Maxim was pacing himself slowly, like Conn McCreary, the jockey who likes to come from behind, or whether he just couldn’t get going any faster, like even Arcaro when his horse won’t run. But I talked to Kearns a couple of days after the fight, and he left no doubt in my mind about what he wanted me to believe had happened. The nine holes of golf a day, he said, had kept him personally in such condition that he could exercise all the natural alacrity of his perceptions during the conflict. “The heat talk is an alibi and an excuse,” he said. “Robinson was nailed good in the belly in the tenth round, and again in the twelfth, and he got a left hook and a right to the head at the end of the thirteenth, when he was on the ropes. If the bell hadn’t a rang, he’d be dead. I didn’t move Maxim until the twelfth round. I didn’t have to. I knew I could win in any round when I got ready. The only reason I shoved Maxim in at all was because I wanted to win with a one-punch knockout. Robinson escaped by luck.”
I paused to commit this to memory, and then asked Dr. Kearns, who seemed in high good humor, to what he attributed his victory. “Oh, I don’t know,” he said modestly. “Anybody who was around those old-time fights we used to have in the