• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 552 0

which I figured would be Providence headquarters because Araujo was staying there. The curb in front of the place was parked solid with cars bearing Rhode Island license plates, and the sidewalk between the cars and the hotel was covered with feet more accustomed to the pavements of Dorrance and Westminster Streets. The air was musical with the flattened “a”s and squeezed “e”s of southern New England speech; a man smoking a pipe to maintain his cam told me that patties had come on by caa and bus as well as by special train. “We’ve taken over the town,” he said modestly, removing his pipe from his mouth and waving it bravely in the direction of the eight million beyond the stockade of automobiles. I stood around for a while, half expecting to see somebody I knew, and then left to rejoin my fellow aborigines.

When I walked into the Garden, a Berber from Morocco was in the ring, whacking away ineffectually at a long, stringy Negro from Cuba; it seemed unbelievable that two men could have come so far to fight so little. The Berber and the Negro banged away awkwardly for a couple more rounds and then disappeared, after one of the least important decisions of the century. Next, a short but barrel-chested Puerto Rican lightweight came on with a thin fellow from Philadelphia; the weights were even, and it was a contest between a vertical line and a cube. This was better—the Philadelphian was resolute, although unduly prolonged, and the Puerto Rican appeared to be a great hitter, in a shot-putting style. “Look at him!” a man behind me cried. “He looks like a monkey—you know, a griller.” Having found his mot juste, he stuck to it for eight rounds. “A griller!” he would exclaim whenever the Puerto Rican would up to pitch a fist. “A griller! A griller!” The griller did not succeed in converting the Philadelphian into a horizontal, but he made him look like two sides of a triangle in search of a third. “A griller!” the man in back of me said in awe when the boxers left the ring.

The hands of the Garden clock were now so near ten, the mystic hour of television, that the Garden’s baritone soloist had to sing the national anthem at the tempo of “The Darktown Strut-ters’ Ball.” The heroes of the evening entered the ring without the draggy solemnity that used to enhance the dignity of the beginning of a championship fight. The sponsor was paying fifty thousand dollars for radio and television rights, considerably more than the match was expected to attract at the gate. (It drew thirty-eight thousand dollars.) Carter was longer, leaner, blacker, and older than Araujo—he was twenty-nine—and wore a white robe on the back of which was lettered, with unexpected formality, “James Carter.” He had a kind of desiccated look that I mistook for evidence of brittleness. When Johnny Addie, the announcer, introduced Araujo, there was a thunderous cheer from the Rhode Islanders. They greeted Carter with equally thunderous boos. The visitors must have made up half the audience.

At the bell Araujo came out on his toes and started circling Carter, jabbing his left to the champion’s face as the taller man advanced. They were flicking, fast jabs, usually double, like a cat striking twice at a butterfly, and, since George was generally going away when they landed, they were not stiff enough to set Carter back on his heels. If I had not read the Bulletin, I would have thought our man had an exaggerated respect for Carter’s hitting power, but I knew the battle plan. As the round went on. I thought George looked a good bet. He was on his toes all the way, bouncing wastefully, but his legs were marvels; that kind of underpinning is an asset to be exploited, like reach or hitting power. And he was not using his legs to carry him in one direction; he was moving in and out of range and hitting repeatedly. Carter, bent slightly forward, with his elbows high, moved steadily after him feet flat on the mat, a perfect picture of the deadly hitter I had been assured he wasn’t. He had, in fact, knocked out only a small percentage of his opponents up to the previous April