The Sweet Science - A. J. Liebling [76]
“If you are,” the bartender said severely, “this ain’t the joint for you.” He moved off toward the beer pumps, under the impression that he had won the argument, but he hadn’t. The lumpy man took off his glasses and put them in his pocket.
“Who are you to call me a qualified hoodlum?” he yelled after Mr. Bogad.
“You said it yourself,” Mr. Bogad replied.
The man yelled, “What business is it of yours, you qualified moralist?”
At that, Mr. Bogad started to come around the end of the bar, grumbling “I don’t have to take that from nobody” as he untied his apron, but a squad of gentle young prizefighters formed a wall between him and the customer, while their colleagues shooed the fellow out onto Fifty-fifth Street, explaining that the Neutral was no place for that kind of language.
“See that?” Whitey said. “We got a nice class of kids in the business today. But I sometimes wonder where they going to wind up.” This was an allusion to the technological unemployment with which television threatens all boxers who are not already headliners. There is hardly a night of the week now that doesn’t offer a nationally televised bout (usually only the main event is shown), and small flesh-and-blood clubs throughout the land have gone out of business because they can’t meet this free competition. This condition constantly narrows the opportunity for development of young fighters and—although Whitey isn’t so sensitive on the subject—young seconds and trainers. The failure of new stars to emerge is hurting the interests of the television programs themselves—a class isn’t in a healthy condition unless it has at least six or eight real contenders—so, as Whitey says, it all adds up to a vicious circle.
The system is taking money even from the star-bout fighters. During the late twenties, the last period of comparable prosperity, Friday-night shows at Madison Square Garden regularly drew from forty to eighty thousand dollars, and each main-bout principal took down from ten to twenty thousand. If the boys weren’t fighting at the Garden, they could get almost as much out of town. Now principals in the Garden’s Friday-night fights get four thousand dollars each from television, plus a derisory twenty-five per cent of a gate that would have been subnormal in Tiverton, Rhode Island, in 1929—less than five thousand dollars in all. At televised clubs like the St. Nicholas Arena or the Eastern Parkway, they collect about three thousand. In the long view, the best hope for a revival of the dulcet art is that as the television boxing shows run out of new talent, the big and silly television audience will lose interest in them, and national sponsors will let them drop. Then the small clubs will start up again, for the hard core of customers who like boxing well enough to pay for it but who now get it free. This, the cognoscenti say, will insure not only increased employment but a restoration of artistic standards.
“The fellow who used to pay a dollar and a half for a seat in the gallery would never stand for feature bouts like the ones now,” an old fighter named Al Thoma, who had stopped by at the Neutral on his way to the Plaza’s Oak Room, said. “What you don’t pay for, you can’t complain about.” Thoma, when fighting, was always known as a cultivated fellow, like Gene Tunney, but with a faster linguistic change of pace. “The masses are asses,” he said with distaste. “There are no more connoisseurs. The way most of these guys fight, you’d think they were two fellows having a fight in a barroom.”
Whitey took note of a small, weatherworn taxi-driver, dining modestly off a short beer and a hard-boiled egg. “Benny Tell,” Whitey said. “He fought the best. He once fought Pancho Villa.” As Villa died after a fight with Jimmy McLarnin in 1925, this placed the hackie chronologically. “How many fights you have, Benny?” Whitey asked.
“About a hundred and fifty,” the driver said, pleased at being recognized. All he had to show for them was a moderately thickened left