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what happened, yelled, “I can’t believe it! He knocked him cold with a left hook. Who said he could hit with a left?” This miserable creature, who by sheer luck had been looking when I wasn’t, invited my contempt, and I shouted back, “Who said he couldn’t? He knocked Louis crazy with lefts! He belted Matthews cold with a left!” Actually, as I learned later, Rocky had knocked Walcott out with a right that traveled at most twelve inches, straight across his chest to the champion’s jaw. The guy next to me hadn’t seen the punch at all; Marciano had had his back toward our side of the ring. But Marciano had grazed Walcott with a left hook as the champion fell, already dead to the world. “He trun it for insurance,” a fellow who had been in his corner told me later. The fan could be excused, of course. The sports writer of the Philadelphia Inquirer, sitting at ringside, wrote that Rocky had hit Joe with a “roundhouse right, swung from his hip and his heart.” The punch was the antithesis of a roundhouse; it was a model of pugilistic concision. The newsreel film of the fight shows that both men started right leads for the head at the same moment. Walcott, the sharp, fast puncher, figured to get there first in such an exchange. But Marciano hit sharper, faster, and, according to old-timers, about as hard as anybody ever hit anybody. Walcott, the film shows, flowed down like flour out of a chute. He didn’t seem to have a bone in his body. And so, after old Jersey Joe had piled up a lead by fighting the way he wasn’t supposed to, Rocky knocked him out with the kind of punch he wasn’t supposed to know how to use. “In other words,” Charlie Goldman said to me at Jimmy Tomato’s party in the Hotel Warwick after the fight, “he equalized.” Mr. Tomato, whose real name few of his acquaintances remember, is a businessman and patron of the arts who has been known to bet on Marciano. From the scale of the party it was safe to conclude his investment had been more than nominal.

When the referee, a Pennsylvanian named Charlie Daggert, had counted Walcott out—a hollow formality—all the ringside-seat holders from Brockton, Swansea, Taunton, New Bedford, Attleboro, Seekonk, Pawtucket, Woonsocket, East Providence, Providence, and even Hopkinton, Hope Valley, and Wakefield climbed over the shoulders of the sports writers, kicked them under the typewriter benches, stamped on their typewriters, and got up into the ring to shake hands with Rocky. It seemed that they might pluck his arms off like petals from a daisy, but somehow he escaped and came shooting through the crowd, propelled by the long line of admirers pushing along behind him. A group of police cleared the way and the fellows from his corner locked arms behind him to keep the jubilious from pawing him over. He disappeared under the stand almost at a dead run.

As for Walcott, I can’t even remember seeing him leave.

Long Toddle, Short Fight

The spectator who goes twice to a play he likes is pretty sure of getting what he pays for on his second visit, especially if the cast is unchanged. If it is a three-act melodrama when he first sees it, he can be reasonably sure it won’t have turned into a bit from the repertory of burlesque the next time he drops in. This is not true of the form of entertainment that the Herodotus of the London prize ring denominated the Sweet Science. For one thing, a prizefight contains within itself the seeds of its own abrupt termination, a possibility of which the members of the fancy are well aware but which they push back into a neutral corner of their unconscious when they set out for the scene of a return match. For another, it is always possible that there has occurred, subsequent or consequent to the first encounter, a change in the emotional relationship of the two principals.

This last was the case with the pair of combats between Tom Oliver the Gardener, the hero and champion of Westminster, weighing a hundred and seventy-five pounds, and Ned Painter, whom the great Egan describes as “a customer not easily to be served,” weighing a hundred and eighty.