The Sweet Science - A. J. Liebling [69]
Whitey, Freddie, and Breidbart all came into the ring with their primitive. Jackson weighed a hundred and ninety and a half, which indicated that he had overdone his self-induced training sessions. Valdes’s weight was announced as two hundred and four, which showed that he had done more work than customary, but not too much. In the first round Valdes, boxing straight up, moved forward methodically and punched at Jackson’s body. Jackson, fidgeting about, did not accomplish anything. A Cuban sitting next to me, possibly a political exile, said happily, “Well, Valdes gets cut up tonight, no?” Valdes is for Batista. There was no sign that it would happen.
Jackson stood up in his corner halfway through the one-minute rest period and did what gym teachers call “running in place,” at the same time waving his arms. When the bell rang, he rushed out to meet Valdes, dabbing and slapping. Valdes took aim like a bowler and knocked him through the ropes, at which point, since Jackson’s body was very nearly horizontal, the referee should have started a count, in my opinion, even though the lower strand prevented the animal’s body from touching the canvas. Valdes—“mucho nice boy,” as he would have said—turned and went to a neutral corner. The referee disentangled Jackson and upended him, and Valdes knocked him down again a couple of times. Each time Jackson fell—he did even that grotesquely, landing once sitting, once kneeling—he bounced up at the count of two or three. But the referee, because of a fairly new rule of the New York State Athletic Commission, had to stand in front of him and count eight before permitting the opponents to resume action. According to a collateral rule, if one boxer knocks the other down three times in one round, the referee has to stop the fight. (This is well intentioned but silly, because a boxer like Jackson, who doesn’t know what to do with his feet, can be knocked down several times without being hurt much, while a fellow who is helpless but remains upright takes a beating without respite, the kind that is most likely to end in permanent injury. It has long been within the referee’s discretion to stop a fight at any time, and that’s the way the matter should have been left.) By my reckoning—and I was not alone—the second knockdown was really the third, and the referee, Al Berl, should consequently have stopped the fight there if he was going to be a pre-cisionist. But Berl let them go to it again. Jackson was fluttering like a winged bird, making a difficult though harmless target, and Valdes, conscious of the three-knockdown rule, was following him about, eager to bring him down, even for a half second, before the round ended. Valdes has had many fights, has always finished strong, and was in good condition, but he seemed at this point to be heaving. Perhaps it was merely emotion, for he could not have anticipated a chance to knock off work so early. Several times he aimed as deliberately as if he were about to hurl a sack of sugar at a toad but missed. Finally he missed Jackson’s head with his right fist and, in recovering, hit him on the back of the neck with his forearm, as big around as a normal collar. He may simply have been trying to keep himself from falling. Anyway, Jackson’s knees hit the floor, and Berl, perhaps to compensate for the time he hadn’t counted, flung his arms wide in token of a technical knockout. Jackson promptly jumped up. In Pierce Egan’s time the victor might have offered to knock the loser out again to satisfy him, but that was before the Athletic Commission. (I know an old boxer who was awarded a fight on a foul because the other fellow was biting him. My friend was enjoying himself, so he said he would go on with the match if the fellow would promise to stop biting. The opponent promised, but he didn’t keep his word. “Maybe he hadn’t ate lately,” my man says.) Gleason towed Valdes into the corner of the ring farthest from Jackson and, snuggling against his flank, make him hold up his right hand