The Sweet Science - A. J. Liebling [75]
The scheme of decoration, like the atmosphere, has a Regency flavor. At the Castle Tavern, Egan wrote, “The numerous sporting subjects, elegantly framed and glazed, have rather an imposing effect upon the entrance of the visitor, among whom may be witnessed animated likenesses of the renowned Jem Belcher [Tom’s brother] and his daring competitor, that inordinate glutton, Burke … the Champion, Cribb, and his tremendous opponent, Molineaux … Tom Belcher and his rival, the Jew phenomenon, Dutch Sam … with a variety of other subjects, including one of the dog ‘Trusty,’ the champion of the canine race in fifty battles.” The boxers whose likenesses cover the Neutral’s walls are of more recent vintages, ranging from John L. Sullivan to one of the bartenders—Tony Janiro, a talented welterweight who retired only a few years ago. The pictures are photographs, instead of hand-tinted engravings, but the faces and torsos are interchangeable with those of 1814. Only Trusty, the champion of the canine race, has no opposite number on the Neutral’s walls.2 Dogfights have gone out of fashion. Janiro has a didactic as well as a utilitarian function; trainers point him out to young fighters as a horrible example. He failed to take his profession with sufficient seriousness, and consequently he never became a champion and is now working union hours. Tony doesn’t seem to mind.
I was in the Neutral late one afternoon, enjoying an instructive conversation with Whitey Bimstein, a Mr. Chips of the boxing metier, who was showing me a pound of metal slugs he had confiscated from a pair of his charges, upstate boys, who had intended to use them in coin-box telephones. “They never been away from home before except maybe overnight and they don’t want to get homesick,” Mr. Bimstein said. “So they bring the slugs along to call their girl friends. Crazy kids. They don’t know they can get into trouble that way.” He smiled with sympathetic indulgence for youthful sentiment. “Just when their manager gets them a match, they could land in the pokey. ‘Write your broad a postcard,’ I told them. ‘She can wait.’”
Another notable educator present—Charlie Goldman, Rocky Marciano’s trainer—said, “One of the troubles with fighters now is they don’t start before they’re interested in dames. When they used to start at ten, eleven years old, they didn’t have the distraction. By the time they did, they knew something.” Mr. Goldman, who wears a bowler, bow tie, and chesterfield, in the best tradition of the Jimmy Walker era, is the Beau Brummell, as well as one of the Nestors, of the Neutral. He was a barnstorming flyweight when he was fourteen, fighting feature bouts in places like Savannah, Georgia, and he believes that as the twig is bent, so will be the nose. It is his greatest regret that he didn’t get Marciano when Marciano was in about the second grade of public school. “He would have learned to do things right without thinking,” Mr. Goldman says. “Then all he would have to think about is what he wanted to do.”
These pedagogical reflections were interrupted by a fellow farther along the bar, who was using qualificatives that the bartender on duty—Chickie Bogad—couldn’t go along with. Mr. Bogad is one of the three proprietors.
“Excuse me, Jack,” Mr. Bogad said, “but you got an awful dirty mouth.”
“I don’t see no women here,” the customer said defiantly.
“There ain’t any,” Chickie said, “but suppose there was?”
The fellow took this hard. He was a bald, lumpy man with normal ears, and not even a broken nose to make him look at home. “I guess I’m just