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By Root 625 0

sailing schooners every spring to work through the summer on construction jobs and on farms. In the fall the schooners sail back to the islands—thirty-five to fifty days away—occasionally leaving behind a part of their spring complements and carrying home other Cape Verdeans, some of them naturalized American citizens. A lot of Cape Verdeans born in the islands are American citizens because their parents were born or naturalized in New England. They are the last sailing-ship people anywhere, I suppose, who aren’t yachtsmen and don’t use auxiliary engines; even the Finns have given up their grain fleet. Araujo’s father, one of the island-born Americans, sailed to the United States and stayed. He worked on the Providence docks, married, and begot seventeen children, and now there is nothing in his son’s voice that isn’t New England, and nothing in his manner that isn’t Hope High School.

Travis introduced the fighter to me and then sent him along to the locker room for his rub. Araujo, I noticed, had a small head, a compact torso, and big, round arms and calves—not much reach but a good build for endurance and mobility. “He’s my baby,” Travis said. I asked him if he had had other good boys, and he said, “I once had a fellow named Ernie Mandell that was pretty good, but he got flattened by a Filipino. And I had a boy named Al Mancini that beat Sixto Escobar, but it was over the weight.” I figured he had been waiting at least thirty years for a big fighter.

We went into the locker room and sat around the rubbing table in the cubicle rented for Araujo. While the boy sat on the table, we talked about Providence. A fighter I remembered named Eddie Holmes was now a bus driver, I learned, and another named Billy Lynch, who once gave Lou Ambers a lot of trouble until he got a bad cut—the old Providence luck—was a lieutenant in the Fire Department. Young Montreal had a job with a labor union. Knockout Billy Ryan had dropped dead, and old Joe Murphy, the retired bare-knuckle fighter who ran the bottling works on Transit Street, had finally passed on. With the money earned from his fifty-two fights, Araujo had moved his family away from South Main Street and into a neighborhood with less character but more sanitation.

Neither Travis nor George professed any worry about Carter. “He can box, but he’s not an expert boxer. And he can fight, but he’s not an expert fighter,” Travis said. “And he’s better than a fair hitter. But he’s not getting any younger.” This was about what I had heard elsewhere concerning the champion. George had little to say, but he appeared to feel the Wunderkind’s contempt for the plodding mediocrity. Travis said he had lost just two decisions in fifty-two fights and had been knocked down only once in his life. That had happened four years before, and he had got up to win easily. I asked George who had taught him most of his stuff, and he said Travis had taught him everything. “I would practice moves with another fighter, and he would coach me,” he said. “If a thing didn’t work this way, we’d try it that way.”

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On the night of the fight, I stopped by the out-of-town newsstand in Times Square on my way to Madison Square Garden and bought a copy of the Providence Evening Bulletin. It carried a first-page story on the fight by Mike Thomas, the Bulletin’s boxing writer, who not unnaturally picked Araujo to win, “home-town view or not.” Mike had written, “He should take the decision over the titleholder, Jimmy Carter of the Bronx, in their 15-round go at Madison Square Garden. But there is the distinct possibility he could win on a knockout by the 12th or 13th round. That is, if his plan of speed first and then explosion is not disturbed. He figures to start bombing by the 10th or 11th. By then, the champion ought to be set up for the kill.” Thomas said that more than three thousand Rhode Islanders were coming down for the fight. I am not a Rhode Islander, but I had a lot of fun working there, and I had become as partisan as any of them.

I had plenty of time, so I walked on past the Garden to the Capitol Hotel,