The Sweet Science - A. J. Liebling [38]
A fortnight later I boarded the five-o’clock train to Philadelphia at Pennsylvania Station with a twenty-five-dollar ticket in my wallet and a small but good pair of binoculars in my pocket. There were six Brocktonians across the aisle from me. They made no secret of their civic identity. Florid men with small, merry eyes, all in clothes slightly tight for them—probably, like trees, they added a circumferential ring each year—they might have been either union officials or downtown businessmen, types hard to distinguish between in their part of the world. They were organizing a two-dollar pool among themselves on which round Rocky would win in. One, addressed by the others as Mac, caused indignation, which I judged to be not entirely feigned, by saying that for his two dollars he would take Walcott by decision.
“Then we’ll be laying you five to one,” one of his townsmen said.
“You don’t think Walcott has a chance, do you?” Mac asked. “I’m doing you a favor.” I could see he had raised a doubt in their minds, and at the same moment he saw he was losing popularity. “I just said it for laughs,” he added lamely.
But their journey to Philadelphia had been spoiled. Mac had opened up a possibility they had shoved resolutely into the back of their minds. In forty-two fights, Rocky had never even been knocked from his feet.
On arrival, I took a subway to the center of town and walked about for a while, looking for Lew Tendler’s restaurant. Tendler is an old Philadelphia fighter who has remained a Philadelphia idol because, I think, he embodies the city’s sense of being eternally put upon. He once had Benny Leonard beaten when Leonard was lightweight champion; Leonard was on the floor but got up before “ten,” and it was a no-decision bout. I thought I knew where Lew’s restaurant was, and wouldn’t ask anybody the way. I soon got tired of walking, though, and ate in a place called Mike Banana’s. A minute after I had finished and left, I found Tendler’s, but I saw I couldn’t have eaten there anyway. I couldn’t even have got as far as the bar, it was so packed. The sidewalk on Broad Street in front of the restaurant was jammed right out to the curb, and gentlemen with embossed ears were struggling to keep from being pushed under taxicabs. Everybody (I use the word in its Ward McAllister sense) who goes to Philadelphia for a fight meets at Tendler’s and tries to put the lug on somebody for a free ticket. On the night of the twenty-third of September, the people with the free tickets had apparently sold them to scalpers. Some, in their enthusiasm, had even sold their own seats, and were now looking for friends to put the lug on. It was a scene of great confusion. Joe Walcott, in a car preceded by a police escort, passed by on his way to the fight. The main bout would not go on until ten-thirty, but he wanted to get there in plenty of time. Walcott is from Camden, New Jersey, across the river from Philadelphia, and the crowd in the street cheered. I had thought I could put the lug on somebody for a ride to the stadium, but the only acquaintance I met who had a car had to wait for somebody who had promised him a ticket. I was lucky to get a seat in a taxi.
The Municipal Stadium, situated in a kind of Gobi Desert at the end of all transportation lines, can, it is said, seat a hundred thousand. The crowd of forty thousand in attendance filled one end of the oval grandstand and,