The Sweet Science - A. J. Liebling [64]
Technically, Whitey and Freddie can do a lot for a fighter—excise redundant gesture and impose a severe logic of punching, as demonstrable as old-fashioned mathematics. When I walked into Stillman’s gymnasium one day, for example, Freddie was tutoring a pale, big-boned boy at least as strong as a policeman’s horse. (“Strength, most undoubtedly, is what a boxer ought to start out with,” wrote Pierce Egan, the Holinshed of the London prize ring, “but without art he will succeed but poorly.”) “Throw a left hook,” Freddie would say. The boy would pull his left elbow back to a line even with his hip, and Freddie would slap him on the left side of the face and push. “What happened?” Freddie would ask. “I don’t know,” the boy would say. And Freddie would say, “All right, throw a left hook.” The boy would pull his left elbow back again and they would go through the same performance. When Freddie finally saw that the Socratic method was no go, he said wearily, “You dropped your shoulder and I come over it is what happened. Hook with your elbow in.” He demonstrated what he meant. After he had sent the boy upstairs to do body exercises, he said to me, “He had a couple of fights in Canada, can you imagine? Up there it is like the amateurs.” The next time I visited the gym, the boy wasn’t there. He was back in Canada, I imagine.
It is the psyche that makes Freddie and Whitey sweat. Like authors, fighters of exemplary moral quality may be bores. And fighters who do a lot of beautiful things nobody else does may be children emotionally. The good boys get married. The bad ones get in jams. It is hard to tell which may mean more trouble for a trainer. “The worst trouble is assorted maniacs,” Whitey says, “because you never know when it is going to break out.” A fellow Whitey and Freddie know named Maurie Waxman had a fighter who could move almost as well as Benny Leonard, but he habitually lost his prey. As soon as the other fellow showed signs of damage, Waxman’s fighter would back away. One night, in the ring with a tough Puerto Rican, Waxman’s fighter hit his opponent in the first round, at which, according to Whitey, “the guy’s eye come up like a grape.” After that, Waxman’s fighter refrained so studiously from hitting the eye that the other fellow made up much of the ground he had lost. Just before the last round, Waxman leaned over his fighter and said, “Julie, I ain’t cruel, but just a touch on that eye would do it.” The fighter looked up at his manager and said, “Maurie, I’m sorry, but I can’t. I’m allergic to blood.” In relating this to me, Whitey said, “That must of been a nice time to find that out.” But where you suspect genius, you’ve got to go along. A harsh insistence on conventional methods may spoil an original style.
I have known Whitey for more than twenty years (he had been a trainer for fifteen years before that), and by now I can tell from looking at him whether he thinks genius is lurking just the other side of the horizon. Four years ago he was desperate for talent. Prosperity had ruined the future, he said; any kid just out of school could get a job for sixty dollars a week, and as a consequence dilettantism was rife in boxing. The faintest frown of fortune would send a boy back to well-paid labor. Boys boxed only to attain social prestige. “Garbage,” Whitey said then, when I asked him about the season’s vintage. But this spring he was wearing the expression of an editor who has found two new poets and a woman novelist with an acid talent. The mild recession was not solely responsible, he said, although it had made the boys more serious about boxing as a vocation.