The Sweet Science - A. J. Liebling [47]
Then the ring was cleared. As the hour hand of the big clock on the balcony facing us neared nine, the principals went to the center of the ring to hear the referee make his brief speech, and then returned to their corners. Marciano jumped up and down in his—he was trying to warm up for a fast start—and Walcott sat quiet, waiting for the bell. In a moment, the fight started. Because all these anterior events had been crammed into a half hour, it was still very early in the evening. There were great blocks of empty seats at the ends of the vast shed, both on the arena floor (euphemistically called ringside), and in the mezzanine and first balcony. All the empties were fifty- and thirty-dollar seats. In retrospect, the judgment of the people who didn’t buy them seems excellent. (After the bout, the I.B.C. announced that the fight had been attended by around sixteen thousand people, of whom a bare thirteen thousand were paid admissions. It drew a gross gate of $331,795, which included the federal and state taxes on each ticket.)
Marciano had a whole swarm of handlers in his corner—Weill; Charlie Goldman, described in the program as “an elf from Brooklyn with a broken nose”; Columbo; Freddie Brown, a fight handler good at stopping cuts; and Marty Weill. When they left the ring and the bell rang, the champion looked lonely. He sought the company of the only other human up there with him, Walcott. But the wholesome, religious father of six children was not in a sociable mood.
A small colored man far off to my left cried encouragingly, “Come on, Satchel!”—a reference to Satchel Paige, a big-league-baseball pitcher, who was even older than Walcott but sometimes came through in tight spots. There was no great conviction in his voice, and none at all in the way Walcott handled himself. In September, I had seen Walcott walk out and beat Marciano to the punch. But this time he neither punched nor skipped; he just backed away. And Marciano, never a fast starter, couldn’t think of much to do but walk after him. When he got close, Walcott grabbed his arms. It appeared to be the kind of fight we could all settle down to. The excitement, if any, would not come until the late rounds. The pace was so slow that I looked a couple of times at the big clock that measures off each three-minute round. Walcott flicked a couple of left jabs at Marciano as he retreated, but he was going away so fast that they fell short. Marciano missed a couple of right swings that were so clumsy I thought they were feints, designed to draw some counteraction. If so, they failed. Then, while the two men were groping about in Marciano’s corner, the champion with his back toward our side of the house, I saw Rocky throw a high left hook, and Walcott hit the floor. I learned afterward that Marciano had thrown a rising right to the jaw immediately after the left, but I couldn’t see it land from where I sat. So I simply assumed Jersey Joe had been knocked down with a left hook.
It wasn’t a crashing knockdown, the kind that leaves the recipient limp, like a wet hat, or jerky, like a new-caught flatfish. This appeared to be a sit-down-and-think-it-over knockdown, such as you might see in any barroom on a night of full moon. Jersey Joe must have begun the process of ratiocination right away. But the