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By Root 579 0

the one high living standards might bring on, has been caused by the popularization of a ridiculous gadget called television. This is utilized in the sale of beer and razor blades. The clients of the television companies, by putting on a free boxing show almost every night of the week, have knocked out of business the hundreds of small-city and neighborhood boxing clubs where youngsters had a chance to learn their trade and journeymen to mature their skills. Consequently the number of good new prospects diminishes with every year, and the peddlers’ public is already being asked to believe that a boy with perhaps ten or fifteen fights behind him is a topnotch performer. Neither advertising agencies nor brewers, and least of all the networks, give a hoot if they push the Sweet Science back into a period of genre painting. When it is in a coma they will find some other way to peddle their peanuts.

In truth the kind of people who run advertising agencies and razor-blade mills have little affinity with the Heroes of Boxiana. A boxer, like a writer, must stand alone. If he loses he cannot call an executive conference and throw off on a vice president or the assistant sales manager. He is consequently resented by fractional characters who cannot live outside an organization. A fighter’s hostilities are not turned inward, like a Sunday tennis player’s or a lady M.P.’s. They come out naturally with his sweat, and when his job is done he feels good because he has expressed himself. Chain-of-command types, to whom this is intolerable, try to rationalize their envy by proclaiming solicitude for the fighter’s health. If a boxer, for example, ever went as batty as Nijinsky, all the wowsers in the world would be screaming “Punch-drunk.” Well, who hit Nijinsky? And why isn’t there a campaign against ballet? It gives girls thick legs. If a novelist who lived exclusively on applecores won the Nobel Prize, vegetarians would chorus that the repulsive nutriment had invigorated his brain. But when the prize goes to Ernest Hemingway, who has been a not particularly evasive boxer for years, no one rises to point out that the percussion has apparently stimulated his intellection. Albert Camus, the French probable for the Nobel, is an ex-boxer, too.

I was in the Neutral Corner saloon in New York a year or so ago when a resonant old gentleman, wiry, straight, and white-haired, walked in and invited the proprietors to his ninetieth birthday party, in another saloon. The shortly-to-be nonagenarian wore no glasses, his hands were shapely, his forearms hard, and every hair looked as if, in the old water-front phrase, it had been drove in with a nail. On the card of invitation he laid on the bar was printed:

Billy Ray

Last surviving Bare Knuckle Fighter

The last bare-knuckle fight in which the world heavyweight championship changed hands was in 1882. Mr. Ray would not let anybody else in the Neutral buy a drink.

As I shared his bounty I thought of all his contemporary lawn-tennis players, laid away with their thromboses, and the golfers hoisted out of sand pits after suffering coronary occlusions. If they had turned in time to a more wholesome sport, I reflected, they might still be hanging on as board chairmen and senior editors instead of having their names on memorial pews. I asked Mr. Ray how many fights he had had and he said, “A hun-dert forty. The last one was with gloves. I thought the game was getting soft, so I retired.”

When I was last in Hanover, New Hampshire, faculty members were dropping on the tennis courts so fast that people making up a doubles party always brought along a spare assistant professor.

This discussion of the relative salubrity of the Sweet Science and its milksop succedanea is what my friend Colonel John R. Stingo would call a labyrinthian digression.

It is because of the anticipated lean aesthetic period induced by television that I have decided to publish this volume now. The transactions narrated in it happen to comprise what may be the last heroic cycle for a long time. The Second World War, which began