The Sweet Science - A. J. Liebling [50]
It was another Brown—Freddie Brown, the white “cut man” in Marciano’s corner—who was worrying then. He used adrenalin to check the bleeding, a mineral jelly over the surface, and a quick-hardening plastic shield over all, but he knew a good punch would wreck his repair job; the cut was two inches long and an inch deep. “With a cut like that, you got to be nervous,” he said afterward. “A quarter of an inch further in and it would of run like a faucet.”
Marciano kept on swinging in the fifth; as the bell rang, Charles hit Marciano one punch, and the champion came back with a couple of determined swings, both launched well after the round ended. Charles looked very gay, to use an Eganism, when he came back to his corner; you could see that he felt he had the champion flustered. And there was always the cut to work on, a deep and promising little gold mine. There is a difference of a couple of hundred thousand dollars between the champion’s and the challenger’s share of a million-dollar gate. If Charles could work his vein properly, the return match would be sure to draw that. Jimmy Brown was still looking happy, as a man looks at Belmont when he sees his horse in good position and running easy. Both corners covered their men with robes of Turkish toweling between rounds; the night was cool, and a sweating fighter stiffens if the chill gets to him. Standing behind Charles and with his back toward me was one of his managers, a big Greek, who kept a hand on the fighter’s left shoulder, as if to steady him, while he talked into his right ear. Charles is a temperamental boxer and sometimes has emotional blocks. Ray Arcel, a trainer who handled him in an exasperating failure, once said, “He is like a good horse which won’t run for you.” Arcel is severe and decisive, like a teacher in a Hebrew school. This time, Charles’s corner was trying sweetness. The Greek’s hand was soft and manicured, and a large diamond on his middle finger refracted the ring lights. As the ten-second klaxon warned the seconds to leave the ring, the hand gently urged the fighter forward, taking the robe as Charles stepped out of it.
Then came the sixth round. It was a round in which Marciano’s apparently clumsy blows began to rock the challenger. The blow that really started Charles’s decline, though, was a short, jarring left hook to the jaw that wasn’t clumsy at all. One of the things that make Marciano a disconcerting opponent for a good boxer like Charles is that even his awkwardness is inconsistent; every now and then he does something highly skilled. Abruptly, Charles began to go slack, like every other fighter I have seen after Marciano’s punches have begun to tell; they have a cumulative effect that asserts itself suddenly. When Charles sat down in his corner after that round, Jimmy Brown’s face was grave, and the Greek’s fingers beat a brief tattoo on the toweled shoulder before they remembered that they were there to soothe. I thought the finish would come in another round or two. It had been quite as good a fight as I had expected. I had not taken too seriously the reports from the training camp that this was a “new Charles,” determined to do or die, but even if I had, I shouldn’t have thought he was strong enough to take Marciano’s blows for fifteen rounds. The spring came back into his legs after the bad round, though, and he went out and fought savagely, never avoiding the issue, in the seventh and eighth. This was the Indian summer of Charles’s fight.
The bounce and snap had left him for good now, but what the sports writers had said about his determination