The Sweet Science - A. J. Liebling [70]
Meanwhile Jackson was standing in his corner, shaking his head and refusing to leave the ring. He demanded the privilege of being hit some more. I could see Whitey and Freddie and a policeman arguing with him, and then they were joined by Dr. Nardiello, for whom I imagine Jackson has a lot of respect since the incident of the stethoscope. At last they persuaded him to leave.
After an early ending like that most of the customers stay to watch the four-round “emergency” bout that is put on as a postscript. I watched a couple of rounds of it myself. One of the principals had been an early professional opponent of Jackson’s a scant twenty months back. On the basis of what I saw, I can’t figure how Jackson beat him.
The show had drawn forty-five hundred cash customers—possibly six thousand in all, including deadheads, but even that is only a third of the Garden’s capacity, and there was no trouble getting around. The evening seemed so incomplete that I decided to visit Jackson’s dressing room, off the corridor on the north side of the arena, to hear the losing faction’s story. There were perhaps twenty colored people outside the door, including several attractive girls. As I approached, the door flew open, and Jackson, dressed and carrying a suitcase, dashed through the group and ran up the stairs that lead to an exit on 50th Street, about midway between Eighth and Ninth Avenues. “Tommy, come back!” one of the girls yelled. I followed Jackson out, not knowing quite what he might do, and ran slap into a storm, of which I had been unaware. It was a short, intense squall that had just hit the city, and it seemed to me an exaggerated reaction to the defeat of Tommy Jackson. To him, however, marching off into the rain, it may have seemed a fitting recognition of the occasion. He turned south on Ninth, and my curiosity was not strong enough to draw me more than a short distance into the rain after him. Then I began working my way back toward Eighth, taking advantage of intervening marquees and saloons for cover. At Muller’s, on the north side of the street, they have Miinchner beer on tap, and I sheltered there longer than at any other place. By the time I got around to the main entrance of the Garden the storm had died to a drizzle, but there were still a couple of dozen fight people under the big marquee talking about the night’s events. I saw a second named Izzy Blanc, who had worked a pair of the minor bouts, and asked him if he knew what had happened to Jackson. “He’s walking around the Garden in the rain,” he said. “He’s been around ten times since I’ve been standing here.” We waited, and within a minute Jackson swung by—silent, head forward, looking like a priest who has found he has no vocation or like an actor hissed from the stage.
I asked Izzy if he had seen the disputed knockdown, but he, a diplomat, offered a good alibi. “After the second knockdown I was on my way to the dressing room,” he said. “I had the emergency.” He meant he had been engaged to second one of the boxers in the final four-rounder, and he had sensed that it was going to be needed earlier than anybody had expected. “I had my back to the ring,” he said.
The rain was easy to ignore now, and Izzy said he was going to walk up Eighth, stopping by a couple of bars where he might meet other fight people. “We’ll probably find Whitey at the Neutral Corner,” he said. The Neutral is a bar on the southwest corner of 55th and Eighth, and when we got there, Whitey was on a stool smoking a cigar and having a glass of beer. “If they want to rune boxing,” he said, “that’s the way to do it. He wras-tled him to the ground just when the kid was hitting his stride.”
“His what?” I said.
“Sure,” Bimstein said. “He was just beginning to come on good.”
“How about the first three knockdowns?” I asked.
“There was only one knockdown,” Whitey said. He rejected