• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

Because of this matter-of-fact approach to the fight, I suppose, Araujo’s managers didn’t take him to a training camp in the country before the fateful evening. They must have reasoned that for a young fighter who has been performing as often as he had—he was twenty-two and had had fifty-two bouts in the previous four years or so—a training camp is simply a touch of swank. Besides, it costs money. So a week before the fight they checked him into the Capitol Hotel, a gaunt hostelry on Eighth Avenue, one block north of the Garden and three south of Stillman’s Gymnasium. He worked out at Stillman’s and did his running in Central Park. Carter, more of a traditionalist, trained in Summit, New Jersey.

Araujo had been a year short of birth when I left Providence, so when I climbed the stairs to Stillman’s to see him work out three days before the fight, I had, perhaps, a fuller sense of the civic responsibility that weighed on his shoulders than he had himself. As I entered Stillman’s the challenger was in the ring sparring with a slightly heavier boy. I could see that he moved gracefully, and with almost too much confidence, in and out under the other fellow’s leads, bouncing around as if his legs were so good he enjoyed using them. Naturally, with the fight so near, he wasn’t trying to kill his partner. A fight manager watching the workout said that he thought the boy held his hands too low—he was open for a right counter over his left. But I couldn’t believe that this was inadvertent; I decided it must be his style, and that he relied on speed of eye and head to slip such punches. It is the style of fools and perfectionists. It is also the kind of thing that only a fellow very sure of himself can do, and to be so sure of himself he must have boxed thousands of rounds. This was in fact the case with Araujo, I learned from his senior manager, Frankie Travis, a sallow, heavyset man with grizzled, wavy hair and a jutting chin, to whom I was introduced at ringside. “I saw George the first day he came up to the Catholic Youth Organization, on South Main Street, and put the gloves on,” Travis said. “He was eight years old, and he had so much stuff I said, ‘That kid is going to be a champion.’ I’ve been training him ever since.” (When Travis said “South Main Street,” he brought to my mind a water-front street with flophouses and tattooing shops in eighteenth-century buildings and Portuguese barbershops and ship chandlers’ stores whose windows were decorated with prints of Lisbon before the earthquake. It is on the east side of the Providence River, which is the head of navigation on Narragansett Bay, but no great ships have come that far up the bay for a long time. The great ships of Providence’s great days as a seaport drew precious little water.) “But he didn’t start seriously until he was thirteen,” Travis added, as if to discourage the thought that there had been anything unusual about Araujo’s childhood. In Providence, Travis is sometimes a Portuguese name—an Anglicization of Tavares. But the manager said his name had originally been Italian—Trevisano. Araujo’s other manager was Sammy Richman, a younger, Broadway sort of fellow, who came into the act six months before the Garden fight. He was the outside man, or negotiator, while Travis was the professional instructor and personal counselor. Out-of-town managers, like out-of-town lawyers who have cases in New York, frequently retain metropolitan associates. “He’s a good boy,” Richman told me, “and I don’t think he will get too pent up—you know, freeze.”

The boy came down from the ring. He is a mahogany lad, the son of one of those sailors from the Portuguese Cape Verde Islands, off the west coast of Africa, whom New Englanders sometimes call Bravas, although Brava is the name of only one island in the group. Long ago, Cape Verdeans used to make up a good portion of the crews of New England whalers, and hundreds of the islanders still come to New England in