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By Root 624 0

new psychiatric orientation, I attributed it to compulsive eating, caused by anxiety. The champion looked as placid, pleasant, and unassuming as ever. His placidity, it appeared, had in the course of years spread to all his faction. Al Weill, who in the past had been a fuming, worrying kind of man, wore a fat, paternal smile. Charlie Goldman, who three years before, when Marciano was training for Louis, had acted like a tutor trying to teach a boy the whole of mathematics in time for a college-entrance examination three days away, now had the relaxed air of a professor emeritus. Charles, taller than Marciano and of a fashionable charcoal shade, looked about as excited as a man waiting for a subway train. The weather forecast for the next day, Thursday, was unfavorable, and it occurred to me that a forty-eight-hour prolongation of the dreaming period might accentuate Charles’s internal conflict, if Dr. Moreno was right in diagnosing one. I voiced this thought to Mr. Jimmy Brooks, a Harlem boulevardier and associate of pugilists, who chanced to be at my elbow, and he agreed. “It does not pay for a fighter to be too intellectual, brainy—you get my meaning?” Mr. Brooks said. “They get to laying awake and thinking too much about their physical body—what might happen to it, you know?”

Mr. Brooks did not attend the second weighing-in, which was held on Friday, September seventeenth, when the weather cleared. Neither did any of the other people who had come to the first one for purely social reasons, since nothing to talk about had developed in the intervening two days. Just the newspapermen and photographers showed up, to repeat the routine of the first ponderation. This time Marciano weighed a hundred and eighty-seven, a gain of an inconsiderable half pound (he had been doing enough gymnasium work to hold his edge), and Charles registered no change. After the weighing-in I had lunch in Gilhuly’s saloon, near the Garden, with a fellow who said that a movie producer had wanted to bet him thirteen hundred dollars to two hundred on Marciano, but that he didn’t see how Charles could win.

“Oh, I don’t know,” I said. “He is a very complex MacTavish. If he could wipe out his inhibitions for just thirty seconds, he would be like a tiger fighting for his mate.”

“I never thought of that,” the fellow said. “Excuse me while I give this wise guy a bang on the telephone.” He came back and said he had taken the bet.

Late that evening, I made my way up to the Yankee Stadium by subway. The curtain for the main bout was to be fashionably late—at eleven o’clock. It was practically a supper show. This was in order to avoid a conflict with a baseball game at the Polo Grounds, half a mile away, where the Giants were playing the Phillies; the game had begun at eight-fifteen. On Wednesday night, when the fight had been rained out, the Giants had not been scheduled to play. The late hour of the match made for a long, straggling evening, with the crowd assembling slowly.

The preliminaries were, if possible, worse than usual, to judge from the three I saw. The six principals in these three had all appeared on the Marciano—Charles card in June, and none had improved over the summer. This time, I sat behind the corner that was to be Marciano‘s—in June, I had landed behind Charles—and during the next-to-last preliminary Al Weill sat down in front of me, to root for a moderately belligerent hundred-and-seventy-five-pound man in whom he had a proprietary interest. “Stop hoppin’!” Mr. Weill would shout at him, and then “Stick, stick!” meaning stick him with your left hand. “I know what they should do,” he said when he happened to turn around and see me, “and it hurts me when they don’t do it.” Since Mr. Weill’s champion was going to defend the world’s heavyweight title within twenty minutes, his preoccupation with such a trivial performance indicated to me that he wasn’t worried.

The notorious dreariness of the preliminaries at championship fights is due to a feudal arrangement whereby the managers of the main-bout fighters get berths for all their fighter