The Sweet Science - A. J. Liebling [68]
Valdes and his manager, Bobby Gleason, had observed the ruckus between the three owners with polite amusement, like members of Miss Hewitt’s Classes visiting a school for delinquent children. “The board of stragedy is having a tough time,” Gleason said when I walked over to them. Gleason is a stocky man who runs a gymnasium for prizefighters in the Bronx. Valdes is the color of blond mahogany, and his shoulders look as wide as a door. He was wearing a raspberry steamer cap, a pink silk shirt (18 neck, 37 sleeves), and white pants. Gold teeth provided extra flash. Valdes and Gleason communicate in a lingua franca of English, Neapolitan, and Spanish, and Gleason interprets for others when he thinks it advisable. “Mucho wise guy, Bobby,” Valdes says.
When Valdes took the pink shirt off in the medical examiner’s office, we could see that he was wearing a gold chain with an amulet around his eighteen-inch neck, which he considers his most impressive feature. He got the neck by carrying three-hundred-and-thirty-pound sacks of sugar on his head when he was a boy. It makes him look slightly pinheaded. Dr. Vincent Nardiello, the examining physician, had the fighters spread their arms, so that he could measure their reach, and it made a good shot for the photographers, who ordered them to go through numerous repeats. Valdes said something in Spanish to Gleason. “He wants to know which one they are measuring for a casket,” Gleason told me. The Cuban was six feet three, an inch and a half taller than Jackson, but Jackson had longer arms. Jackson, who had continued to look glum, cheered up for a minute when Dr. Nardiello allowed him to listen to his own heart through the stethoscope. “It sounds good!” he shouted. “Solid!” But soon he was pouting again. In the elevator, going down to the street, he closed his eyes and allowed his chin to droop on his chest, while he leaned his weight on Freddie Brown. “I don’t like three men over me,” he said. “If you don’t take me back to the mountains, I’m going back alone.”
Two days later, I heard that Jackson had run away from the mountains, because Freddie wouldn’t let him ride a horse, and had reported to Whitey at Stillman’s. Whitey had stayed there to handle the three bright boys. Jackson was like a child of divorce running from one parent to the other. When Jackson got to Stillman’s, Whitey told me afterward, he said, “This is where I feel at home. No country air in my belly.”
On the night of the fight, I was more excited than I had been before any match for years, and for purely subjective reasons. If the animal won, it meant that the Sweet Science was mere guesswork, requiring not even a specialized intelligence. It would be quite a different thing from the victories of immortals like Griffo and Dutch Sam, who were irresponsibles only when they were outside the ring. There have been plenty of musicians and painters who didn’t have much sense otherwise, and Dostoevski was a political imbecile. I had nothing against Jackson qua Jackson, and I wished Whitey and Freddie all kinds of luck with their more conventional clients, but if the animal could beat even a fair fighter, it meant that two hundred and fifty years of painfully acquired experience had been lost to the human race; science was a washout and art a vanity, and Freddie and Whitey had queered their own game.
The preliminaries were unusually good and, from my point of view, reassuring. A tough-looking middleweight from Yorkville, named Schulz, knocked out a boy from Chicago with a short, economical right to the jaw—one out of the book. A dark, knowledgeable featherweight from Harlem prevailed tactically and strategically over a Fighting Newsboy from Columbus, Ohio, who punched in wider arcs. The Fighting Newsboy did not attempt to upset the artistic canon; he simply operated too near its edge. The ancient laws appeared still to be operative when the principals