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By Root 533 0

Langtry, Texas, was lighting a cigar when Fitzsimmons knocked Maher out in a minute and thirty-five seconds. A Norwegian ship broker on whose integrity banks have ventured millions in pounds has assured me that after a trip from Oslo just to view the fight at the London National Sporting Club, in 1913, between Georges Carpentier and Bombardier Wells, he was verifying the number of his seat when Carpentier dispatched Wells in the first round. My friend Colonel Stingo, who in 1908 took the then heavyweight champion, Tommy Burns, a Canadian, to Dublin to fight an Irishman named Jem Roche on St. Patrick’s Day, is exceptional in that he had his eyes fixed on the principals when Burns leveled Roche in a minute and twenty-eight seconds. “He dazed him with a grazing left to the chin,” the Colonel told me, “and then, while Roche stood there as if frozen, he struck him a blow that would have felled an ox. He fell like an avalanche instead, and I could see on Honest Tom’s face a puzzled expression that denoted, ‘How long has this been going on?’ Only blind chauvinism could have induced those people to think Roche had a chance.”

I should have had in mind all these gloomy precedents before I took the plane to Chicago to see the return bout between Rocky Marciano and Jersey Joe Walcott. No unpleasant thoughts marred my journey, however. In the words of Colonel Stingo, I “let disinclination limit the horizon of my anticipation”—always a dangerous procedure. I like going to fights.

When I awoke in my Chicago hotel room on the morning of May fifteenth, the date set for the championship match, the sun was already high in the heavens, although, since my chamber gave upon a court, I was not immediately aware of it. I was reminded of where I was by the sound of the police whistles, which in that city sound like sea gulls’ cries, except that they have two syllables. Instantly remembering the occasion of my presence, I arose and called room service for two three-and-a-half-minute eggs—they arrived hard-boiled—and the newspapers, from which I learned that the combatants were to weigh in at noon at the Chicago Stadium, the scene of the fight that night. I had been of the opinion, ever since the previous fall, that Marciano probably would repeat his victory, because he was of an age when a conscientious fighter is still capable of improvement, while Jersey Joe was of an age when most boxers have long retired from competition and the best any fighter can hope for is a slow rate of deterioration. But the lapse of eight months since their Philadelphia go seemed hardly enough to make the return bout one-sided. Marciano would have the advantage of added confidence, but he had always had plenty of that. Since one thing I couldn’t find in the papers was an advertisement saying where tickets were on sale in downtown Chicago, I decided to go out to the Stadium for the weigh-in and buy my ticket there. I could have bought one in the hotel lobby, I suppose, but the prices were quite steep enough without paying a commission. And, besides, it was a lovely morning and I had nothing else to do.

Most of the sports writers in the papers seemed to take roughly my view of the probabilities, although they phrased them more elegantly than I would have thought possible before I boarded the plane. “Bald on top but smart inside, old Jersey Joe Walcott is razor sharp and ready to shear boxing’s gold-crusted heavyweight crown off champion Rocky Marciano’s proud, unbowed head tonight at the Chicago Stadium,” a figure-of-speech man named Wendell Smith, of the Chicago American, began his piece. “The most amazing, durable antique in the museum of mayhem, the thirty-nine-year-old challenger intends to cut the rugged champion down with his slashing, powerful tools of destruction as quickly as possible and become the first fighter in history to regain the heavyweight title. Tradition says he can’t do it. Seven others have had the same opportunity and failed. The gods of chance are against him, too. They’ve made old Joe the 3—1 underdog. They’re heaping their affections and blessings