The Sweet Science - A. J. Liebling [67]
When I entered the waiting room outside the office of the Commission’s medical examiner I saw Sammy Golden, one of the three men who split Jackson’s contract—thirty-three and a third per cent each way. Golden is a diminished, skinny old manager who hasn’t had any luck since a fighter named Georgie Ward retired in 1923. Ward was a real good welterweight and is now a cop in New Jersey. I like to talk to Golden, because I know a fellow who used to fight Ward on odd Saturdays in Boston. (On even Thursdays they would fight in Newark.) This time we had barely exchanged greetings when a man named Lippy Breidbart came up behind me and plucked at my sleeve. Breidbart also owned a third of the animal. He is a fattish man who dresses sharp.
I asked Golden whether it was true that Jackson could neither read nor write.
“Ask me,” Breidbart said. “I’m the manager. Every time I look at a paper, Sammy is making a quotation. He is strictly Georgie Ward, he lives in the past. The answer is Jackson can read and write, but not good.”
“You’re the manager?” Golden said with spirit. “We should never have took you in.”
“Shut your mouth!” Breidbart said. “You’re an old man.” His tone implied that only Golden’s decrepitude protected him.
At this point, Frank Leonetti, the third owner, came up and turned on Breidbart. Golden withdrew to a far corner of the room and made faces. Leonetti is a bulky, bull-necked man, a division superintendent on a bus line, and it was he who discovered Jackson down at Rockaway Beach. “When you make a move, you don’t tell us,” he said. “You think that’s nice?”
“That’s a perposterous statement!” Breidbart said.
“Any time I made a perposterous statement, you let me know about it!” Leonetti shouted, shoving Breidbart with his belly.
Breidbart was the manager of record, which means he was the one authorized by the Athletic Commission to make matches and sign contracts for the fighter. He was now advancing the contention that he also had the sole right to make statements. Jackson, who had joined us, put his hands on the shoulders of the two quarreling men. “Why can’t you guys get along?” he asked. “I’m the fighter. I’m the one should do the worrying, not you.” He turned to Freddie Brown, who had brought him into town on a bus from his training quarters at Greenwood Lake, New York. “I don’t like it here,” Jackson said. “I want to go back to the mountains, shoot a mouse. No mouses here.”
“You can’t go back now,” Brown said in a soothing voice. Then he turned to me. “Hurricane found a new interest,” he said. “He shoots rats with a twenty-two. He calls them mice.”
“Mouses,” the fighter corrected him. “I shoot them between the eyes.” He seemed depressed.
“He finds them on the dump,” Freddie said.
When Jackson saw that Freddie wasn’t going to take him back to the mountains, he wandered away and sat down, morosely staring at his feet.
“I don’t know where he gets the energy,” said Freddie, who looked underweight. “The hardest worker I ever seen before him is Marciano, but Marciano works steady and then he rests good. Also he eats good. Jackson don’t sleep enough and he don’t eat enough. These boys that ain’t used to good food, it don’t agree with them.”
“What kind of food is he used to?” I asked.
“He wants hot dogs,” Freddie said. “And also ice cream and pie. We got him to accept hamburgers as a substitute, but you got to watch him all the time. He fell out of a canoe which I had told