The Sweet Science - A. J. Liebling [35]
As soon as I learned that Rocky had been made with Jersey Joe, I went in quest of Weill, to hear how his fighter’s education was getting on.
Weill’s office then was on the third floor of the Strand Theatre Building, and he had worked out of it for nearly thirty years, retaining it even when he was the Garden matchmaker, as if he knew he would be back there someday. It was impregnated with the smell of the cigars he smokes and decorated with framed photographs and cartoons of boxers he has managed at one time or another. The wide window across the front of the room looked out on Broadway, a street fraught with temptations for fighters to spend money. For this reason, Weill kept his boxers as far from it as possible, usually within earshot of Goldman. He knew he could resist the temptations all right himself. Also, a fighter learns more when sufficiently secluded. Out of sheer boredom, he may listen to some of the pearls of wisdom Goldman casts in his direction, such as “If you’re ever knocked down, don’t be no hero and jump right up. Take a count,” or “Always finish up with a left hook, because that brings you into position to start another series of punches.” Goldman frequently voices less technical advice, too, such as “Never play a guy at his own game; nobody makes up a game in order to get beat at it,” and “Never buy anything on the street, especially diamonds.” Weill now has an office in the Hotel Lexington, on the more fashionable East Side, as befits the manager of the heavyweight champion of the world, but it doesn’t smell right yet. It takes a heap of smoking to give a hotel suite the atmosphere of a humidor.
On the morning of my call, I found Weill looking out the window and smoking a cigar while waiting for, he at once informed me, telephone calls from Pittsburgh, Providence, Honolulu, and Salt Lake City. A prizefight manager will never admit he is waiting for a telephone call that costs less than a dollar. “People all over the country are going crazy about this fight, and everybody expects me to get them a good seat,” he said. “I already sold fifteen thousand dollars’ worth personally.” Looking like a kind of gray-haired Napoleon, he wore a white-on-white shirt, fresh that morning—an evidence of prosperity—while his chief assistant was in not-so-white-on-not-so-white, out at the elbows. A prizefight manager’s assistants assist him in waiting for telephone calls, especially when he goes out for a cup of coffee. Sometimes they inherit his shirts.
Mr. Weill, aware that I don’t smoke, offered me a cigar and then said, with a romantic intonation, “You know, this fight means a lot to me. I’ve had three champions—a feather, a lightweight, and a welter—but never a heavyweight champion. I had Godoy, who fought Louis twice, and gave him a lot of trouble, but he didn’t make it. And I had a good young prospect named Marty Fox, but he went wrong. He was fighting Unknown Winston in Hartford, and he was stabbing Unknown to death. The referee waves to him to go in and fight, because they were stinking out the joint, and you know what the damn fool done? He done what the referee told him. Winston knocked him cold. When I heard what he done, I told him, ‘You are too dumb to be a fighter.’ So I retired him.”
The manager threw to the floor a cigar only four-fifths smoked, for him an evidence of great emotion, and ground the stub with his right heel, as if obliterating an evil memory. “I can’t fight for them,” he said. “They got to help me.” But he brightened when I asked about Marciano. “He come a long way since you seen him,” he said. “You wouldn’t know him. I got him up at Grossinger’s.” Grossinger’s is a legendary and dietary resort hotel in the Catskills. With its attached golf courses and airfield, it is only slightly inferior in area to the King Ranch, in Texas. A prizefighter training for a big match is one of the attractions at Grossinger’s, giving the guests something to talk about between meals and getting the hotel publicity every time a fight writer files a dispatch datelined Grossinger, New