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By Root 537 0

was true. As for his endurance, it was unbelievable. His face—rather narrow, with a high, curved nose—changed in shape to a squatty rectangle as we watched; it was as though he had run into a nest of wild bees or fallen victim to instantaneous mumps. He moved, hung on, twisted his body, rolled his head on his columnar neck, which was now a cable between aching body and addling brain. He broke to his right, away from Marciano’s swinging rights, but he didn’t run. He even punched—straight but without power. He was doubtless admonished in his corner that he still had a chance to win on points if he could just keep going. But between rounds his toweling was getting soaked with blood, and Jimmy Brown’s face—concerned, anxious, horrified, and finally despairing—was like Bill Richmond’s in my picture. Some of the newspaper experts (trying, it seemed to me, to make too much of a good thing) said the next day that it was still a close fight in the late rounds, because the men were almost even in rounds won; Charles had taken five of the first six, by some counts. If he had rallied and won the last three, they said, he could have earned the decision. But there was no possible chance that he could rally, since the strength was out of him; there was a much better chance that he would collapse. That he didn’t is great credit to his gameness, but if, like Cribb and Molineaux at Thistleton Gap, he and Marciano had been fighting to a finish, Marciano must have finished him off. After the announcer, Johnny Addie, who looks like a younger and plumper Billy Rose, had read the decisions of the two judges and of the referee, Ruby Goldstein, all agreeing on Marciano, Jimmy Brown achieved a histrionic triumph. He managed to look indignant.

It had been a hard fight but not great, in my opinion, because there were none of the sudden changes of fortune that mark a great one, as in the first Walcott-Marciano match. This time, Charles’s success in the early rounds was expected, since he is a faster, better boxer than Marciano. The cut he inflicted on Marciano in the fourth round gave the champion’s backers, including his vociferous fellow townsmen from Brockton, only temporary anxiety. The one true surprise was the loser’s capacity for punishment. As Egan said of the Thistleton Gap mill, “The hardiest frame could not resist the blows of the Champion; and it is astonishing the Moor stood them so long.”

It was a mighty crowd—paid admissions 47,585, and, counting deadheads like me, a total attendance of more than fifty thousand. There were fifteen hundred occupants of working-press seats alone, including a major general in uniform and Joe Louis. As is usual at big outdoor fights nowadays, platoons of young hooligans from the bleachers stormed down on the field in successive waves, to take over better seats than they had paid for. Legitimate ticket-holders who arrived late managed as best they could. In some cases, with the aid of ushers and special cops, they expropriated the squatters. These, however, made it a point of pride always to move forward instead of back, so that by the time the star bout began, they were standing all over the poor devils who had paid forty dollars for the use of a folding chair. The goal of the game, apparently, is to get to literal ringside, with the press photographers. This proved impossible during the big fight, but after it was over and the photographers went away, a swarm of adenoidal lummoxes came clambering over reporters’ shoulders to get to ringside for the four-round bout that always follows a main event. “We’re in fifty-dollar seat zat last!” one boy brayed as he dropped down by my side after a hurdle race over the backs of chairs. I was happy to note that the lagniappe bout ended with a sudden knockout while he was still breathing hard.

After the fights, I walked up to 167th Street to get a seat on a subway train before it reached the Stadium, which is at 161st. Several hundred other people seemed to have thought of the same stratagem, and it worked for all of us; the squares who got on at the Stadium found