The Sweet Science - A. J. Liebling [77]
“New faces, they want new faces all the time for the television shows,” said a trainer named Izzy Blanc, who is younger than most of the sages, but knowledgeable. “But the new faces ain’t got the experience, so they get knocked out. And where could they get the experience, with no clubs? Either you got to rush a prospect or let him starve to death.”
If television relinquishes its hold on boxing, and open competition matures a new lot of stars, it is, of course, possible that the new stars’ names will titillate the curiosity of the rumpus-room audience that sponsors covet. It is also possible that by then television will have gone the way of such other gadgets as radio and the silent movies. In the meanwhile young boxers must live, even though, like modern poets, they have scant means of communication with the general public. Since the Guggenheim Foundation has expressed no concern for their problems, a lot of them run tabs at the Neutral. The tabs are usually guaranteed by their managers, and since the managers can’t take the money out of the boys until the boys get a fight, the proprietors of the Neutral show a constructive interest in any move to re-create the pugilistic equivalent of an off-Broadway theater. “If we tried to collect now,” Nick Masuras, one of the Neutral’s three bosses, said to me, “we would lose our total clientele.”
Masuras is an old middleweight—tough, but not classy—who used to box in the armories of the New York National Guard in the twenties, when the state permitted the buildings to be used for professional boxing shows on the condition that all participants were Guardsmen. As the required drills were infrequent and there was no prospect of a war, it was a highly successful form of recruiting. Nick’s registration card said that he belonged to the 102nd Medical Regiment. After his unspectacular ring career of thirty-eight bouts, he worked in restaurants and then, in 1949, opened the Neutral. He thought of the name himself. Two years later, he pieced the joint up with Bogad, a former matchmaker at the Garden, and with Frankie Jacobs, a veteran fight manager, who contributed social cachet to the establishment.
My visit to the Neutral that particular afternoon was connected with the first attempt by the Metropolitan Boxing Alliance, which consists mostly of managers who hang out in the Neutral, to run a boxing show of its own, with no television, no promoter, no one-sided matches, and—as it turned out—almost no newspaper coverage. For the most part, the members of the Alliance handled young fighters who appeared in preliminaries and semifinals at New York clubs; many of their boys would be fighting features regularly in small cities if television had not blighted the out-of-town spots. The M.B.A.s were in the midst of a highly personal intra-industry feud with the leaders of the International Boxing Guild, a larger and older association of managers, who handle most of the star-bout fighters. The I.B.G.s, according to the M.B.A.s, tried to use their monopoly of the fighters who appear “on top” (in the features) to control employment “underneath” (in the preliminaries). The trainers, like Charlie Goldman and Whitey, were neutral, since they teach and second boys for members of both groups. But they were in favor of any effort to run more fights.
The M.B.A. show, Whitey had informed me, would be a small gem, because in each of the three feature matches scheduled, both the managers concerned figured that they had a shade the better of it. “For a thousand, they might put their kid over his head,” Whitey said, “but not for no three hundred.” Each of the principals in the three eight-round feature bouts was to receive three hundred dollars, less a hundred for his manager, the customary fees for his seconds, and, possibly, a payment on account on his tab at the Neutral. The managers, Whitey said, were unwilling to get their boys beaten for small