The Sweet Science - A. J. Liebling [62]
I was relieved to find that the man and woman in front of me were of my persuasion in this matter, for there is nothing less agreeable to me than having to turn my attention from the ring to explain the rudimentary principles of the sweet science to my fellow customers. At the end of the round I penciled a large “I” on a sheet of yellow paper I had on my knee and marked next to it a large “A.” The woman, who had been peeping over her shoulder, smiled and said, “I agree with you exactly.” At the end of the next round I marked “2—E,” for “even,” and the lady said, “Right.” In the third Carter caught George in a neutral corner and landed a few solid raps. With an impartiality that aroused my own admiration, I marked “3—C.” But in the fourth and fifth, things went so well for Providence that it looked to me “as safe as the Bank,” to borrow a phrase from Pierce Egan, the Thucydides of the London prize ring. The mahogany boy opened a cut over Carter’s right eye, and in the fifth he began hitting him with left hooks to the stomach. Carter ended the body attack by crouching lower and bringing down his elbows, but he was no nearer nailing Araujo than he had been at the beginning of the fight. They had now covered a third of the course, and it wasn’t until the tenth or eleventh round that Araujo was even supposed to open up with his heavy guns. For the moment, I thought Carter might not get that far. But Carter’s seconds stopped the blood from the cut and he got going again, while Araujo, gradually coming down from his toes, seemed to take a breather. After both the sixth and seventh rounds I marked a “C,” and it occurred to me that just as a man might convince himself he was a hitter by acting like a hitter, so might his opponent fall victim to the same delusion by taking the man at his own valuation. Here were two men of equal weight, equally hard to hurt and, in their records, almost equally damaging punchers—Araujo had actually scored more knockouts in fifty-two bouts than Carter had in eighty-two. Yet the fight was falling into the pattern of a match between a boxer and a puncher, or a light man and a heavy man.
In the eighth the Providence hope did better, beating Carter to the punch, cutting his eye again, and making him look slow, old, and angry. As the hand of the big clock timing the rounds swept past a minute and a half it appeared to me that we were ahead at the halfway mark of the fight, although not far enough to mean anything. The ninth started like every round before it, with Araujo moving and stabbing, landing a succession of those double flicks to the face. Carter hit him with a right to the body that landed below the line. The referee warned the dark, persistent fellow, and then Carter lashed out with a right to the jaw, over that left hand Araujo insisted on carrying low. The boy may have dropped it still lower in involuntary reaction to the body punch. There were a couple more punches, and then Araujo was on the mat. He bounced up almost as soon as he hit the floor. Now, when he was hurt, instead of moving out of danger as he had been doing all evening, he leaped at Carter like a kid in a schoolyard. He went down again, came up again, slugged some more, and then, just before the end of the round, took a wicked right-hander to the jaw that had him wandering aimlessly at the bell.
An older, or a less well-conditioned, boxer would not have lasted out the first thirty seconds of the tenth, but Araujo, moving uncertainly at first, got back on his toes and boxed. He lost the round, of course, but he opened Carter’s cut again. The eleventh was even more trying for him, but in the twelfth he seemed completely recovered, jabbing, dancing, and generally