The Sweet Science - A. J. Liebling [65]
I asked him how big the animal was, and he said it was a colored heavyweight, six feet one and a half and over ’90. “His name is Tommy Jackson,” he said. “Until you know him, you don’t know what you got to put up with.” Freddie joined us and said it was a shame they had television. “This kid is still two or three years away,” he said, “but how can a learner eat when television’s killed off most of the small clubs? The only money is the feature, so they got to fight features or quit. This fellow had fifteen fights and then they made him with Rex Layne and Clarence Henry. Dog eat dog.” I asked how the animal had made out against Layne and Henry, and Whitey said he had won big, but the trouble was now he had to keep on meeting name fighters. “How does he fight?” I asked. “He throws a lot of leather,” Whitey said. “Like a noctopus!” Whitey is a small man—he used to be what he calls a bantyweight—with a rosy face and white eyelashes. His face and features are small in proportion to his head, and this gives him the look of a medium-old baby, which is disconcerting when he hasn’t shaved for a couple of days. “He takes the best punch in the business,” Freddie said. “The best thing he has is endurance.” Freddie, an ex-featherweight, is bigger than Whitey and has a broken nose. I gathered from the two of them that Jackson won his fights by inducing exhaustion in his opponents, who collapsed like men worn out from slapping at horseflies. He stopped them without knocking them down.
As he talked about Jackson, Whitey looked a trifle self-conscious. “He is a ninstinctive fighter,” he said. “He imitates what the other fellow does.” “Can’t you teach him anything?” I asked, and Freddie said, “Yeah, we are teaching him not to jab with his palms up, which he did so in case he changed his mind he would be ready to uppercut.” Shortly after that I read in the paper that Jackson had stopped a fellow named Bucceroni; it was another case of exhaustion.
The first time I saw Jackson, it was on television and he was fighting a small heavyweight named Jimmy Slade, a trickster. Jackson did what I had been told to expect, but Slade didn’t collapse. He cuffed Jackson around and made him look silly. I thought this might be good for Jackson, as his managers might now drop him back into his own sort of competition, where he would have a chance to practice. Instead, they got him a match in Madison Square Garden with a fellow named Norkus, whom he stopped, although he didn’t knock him down. Managers have to eat, too. But they didn’t take Slade again. Meanwhile the sports writers had adopted Jackson—whom they called Hurricane—as a dull-day subject. They said he couldn’t read or write, made up songs, had a punch called the double uppercut, and blamed the Slade defeat on too much fresh air inhaled during roadwork. What attracted them most, I suspect, was the recurrent sports-page myth of the man who can do a complicated thing without learning how. It is an old dream of childhood, and, while it never comes true, people like to read about it.
At Stillman’s, after the Norkus fight, I was puzzled to find that Whitey and Freddie themselves were taking Jackson seriously. At least they said they were. The Slade defeat, Freddie said, had been due to an intense but ephemeral romance, followed by a debauch. “Jackson drunk five bottles of Coca-Cola before going into the ring,” he said. “Naturally, that slowed him up starting. But in the last round he was getting to Slade.” “A nanimal,” Whitey said. “You don’t know what you got to put up with.” But now Whitey and Freddie had persuaded him to swear off soft drinks until after fights,