The Sweet Science - A. J. Liebling [36]
I flew up to Grossinger’s on the Tuesday just two weeks before the fight, in a plane chartered by the I.B.C., which had arranged the match, and freighted mainly with photographers going up to take pictures of the challenger posing with Jack Dempsey, the old heavyweight champion and restaurateur, who was scheduled to watch him spar and then make the customary Delphic prediction. On the next day, Dempsey and the photographers were booked to visit Walcott, in Atlantic City. I found Rocky and Charlie Goldman and the rest of the camp, including Rocky’s father, sprawled on cots in the sun in front of the training quarters, which were on the rim of the airfield, a couple of miles from the hotel and its potential distractions. The fighter and his faction had a rather large cottage and an annex to live in, and an old airplane hangar had been fitted up as a gymnasium, with benches for spectators, who paid a dollar a head to watch workouts. The airfield is used only by occasional small planes, and at night the quiet is mountainous. In between Rocky and Charlie was Al Columbo, the fighter’s friend, contemporary, and assistant trainer, who is from his home town. All three were wearing blue-and-yellow checked peaked caps with red pompons; it is part of a trainer’s role to provide small sources of amusement for his fighter, and Goldman thinks there is something particularly funny about headgear. (In town, he usually wears either a bowler or a beret. “It takes a handsome man to carry them off,” he says.)
Marciano isn’t a hard man to keep in a good humor; he doesn’t go in for the rough practical jokes with which some fighters both enliven their camps and get rid of their apprehensions. His outline has a squareness and his skin a terra-cotta tint that make you think of an Etruscan figurine. His body has no Grecian grace; he has big calves, forearms, wrists, and fingers, and a neck so thick that it minimizes the span of his shoulders. He is neither tall nor heavy for a heavyweight—he weighs around a hundred and eighty-five in fighting trim—but he gives the impression of bigness when you are close to him. His face, like his body, is craggy—big jaw, big nose (already askew from punching), high cheekbones—and almost always, when he is outside the ring, has a pleasant asymmetrical grin on it. It is the grin of a shy fellow happy to be recognized, at last, as a member of the gang in good standing. His speech doesn’t fit the type caster’s idea of what a prizefighter’s should be; he speaks with that southern New England accent in which the “a” in “far” is sounded as New Yorkers sound the “a” in “hat,” and the “a” in “half” is sounded as we sound the “a” in “far.” Grammatical constructions are more carefully worked out there than in most parts of the country, and Marciano (whose name in this dialect becomes “Masiano,” with two short “a”s) sometimes sounds more like former Senator Lodge than like one of his own professional colleagues working on the New York—Chicago—California axis. He is, in fact, as much of an exotic, in his way, as was Luis Angel Firpo, the man in the celluloid collar. Weill, mindful of the pitfalls of Broadway, is anxious to keep him that way. Marciano goes back to Brockton after every fight. Each expedition into the outside world has for him the charm of an overnight trip with the Brockton High School football team, on which he once played center, and, like the team, he is accompanied by hundreds of home-town rooters. When I asked him, for lack of a more original question, how he felt, he replied, with an accent I remembered from my days on the Providence Journal, “Peufict.” He is not exactly gabby.
The workout in the hangar that day was not spectacular. Marciano boxed two rounds with a colored light heavyweight from California named Tommy Harrison, a fast, shifty fellow who kept stabbing and going away while Rocky slid along after him. It was logical to expect evasive action from