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By Root 615 0

invulnerable, more heavily muscled than a boxer is supposed to be and whiter than he had been in September, which was natural, since he had trained for the Philadelphia fight under the summer sun. He doesn’t verbalize his cockiness, but he has a kind of negative confidence, like a sleepy bulldog. Walcott was massive, elephant-colored, and preoccupied. Some of the journalistic eyewitnesses later wrote that he had the air of a doomed man, but he has never been renowned for gaiety. I attributed his air to the slow, pleasurable digestion of a hearty breakfast. A chap at a microphone announced the weights as each fighter stood on the scale—Marciano a hundred and eighty-four and a half, Walcott a hundred and ninety-seven and three-quarters. That meant that the champion was eight ounces heavier than at their first fight; Walcott had put on a pound and three-quarters.

Directly in front of me sat a delegation of Marciano’s home-town friends—four young men in green silk windbreakers whose backs were prophetically lettered, in red, “And Still Champion, Rocky Marciano.” They were accompanied by four young women of a southern New England small-town high-school freshness never previously observed in a fighter’s entourage. I would have laid a bet that none of the eight had ever seen a fight before Rocky turned professional. The girls looked at Walcott with a hauteur generally reserved for members of the visiting basketball team.

There had been some of the usual synthetic acerbity between the fighters’ managers during the training period. Walcott’s manager, an acidulous little character named Felix Bocchicchio, from Camden, New Jersey, had accused Marciano of butting Walcott in their Philadelphia fight and blinding him so he couldn’t see the fatal punch. (The official program for the Chicago fight described him as “smiling, good-natured, and soft-spoken Felix Bocchicchio, who, among many other enterprises, handles Jersey Joe Walcott.”) In cultured circles, these charges were recognized as strictly publicity stuff, but to the girls with the boys in the green silk jackets they must have been as bad as saying Brockton High played dirty football.

The advance sale of tickets had not been particularly brisk, I had read in the newspapers, but on the morning of the fight the management reported three hundred and eighty-five thousand dollars already in hand, a statistic that later proved to have been purely imaginary. To judge from the failure to advertise on fight day, the Stadium must be operated by book publishers. Television rights—for regions outside the Chicago district, which was blacked out—were supposed to have been sold for another three hundred thousand dollars, and a 3-D feature-length movie of the fight was to bring in unknown sums. Bocchicchio and Walcott had been guaranteed a flat sum of two hundred and fifty thousand dollars, regardless of the amount taken in at the gate, along with thirty per cent of the 3-D rights. The champion was to have thirty per cent of the gate, thirty per cent of the television and radio take, and thirty per cent of the 3-D rights.

I bought a thirty-dollar ticket, which entitled me to a seat in Row F of the first balcony, overlooking the ring. This essential preliminary disposed of, I took a streetcar back to the Loop and walked to Mike Fritzel’s restaurant, where I had a date with a friend. Fritzel’s is a kind of Chicago Lindy’s, and as I went in I met a New York comedian named Jack E. Leonard, who told me he was playing at the Chez Paree, a Chicago night club. Leonard was sad because he wouldn’t be able to see the fight. The headliner at the Chez was Tony Martin, the singer, and Martin also was a fight fan. Somebody had to do the early show, and Martin had pulled rank on Leonard, who would therefore miss the fight. He is probably still laughing.

The fellow I was lunching with told me a bit about Mr. Duggan. Duggan, he said, had had a sports program on N.B.C. television, in the course of which he had needled the identical ownership of the Stadium and the International Boxing Club, and had predicted