The Sweet Science - A. J. Liebling [78]
It was a Thursday, one of the two weekday evenings without television competition, and the show was to be held at Sunnyside Garden, a dance hall at 45th Street and Queens Boulevard, in a region that motorists are always so eager to get through on their way to the races that they never remember what it looks like. It was raining like the devil, and nobody at the Neutral seemed to know how to get out there without an automobile. A cross-section of opinion had it that the place was on the B.-M.T., a transportation complex more extensively ramified than the upper Amazon. Mr. Bogad, whom I mistook for the best geographer present, specified that the tributary flowing nearest to Sunnyside Garden was known as the Astoria Line. This was to prove an error of pre-Columbian dimensions, but I didn’t know it when I left the Neutral. It was then about six-thirty, and the first bout was to begin at eight-thirty. The last sentence I heard as I stepped out into the rain was “You c’n get there in fifteen minutes.”
Since I was not in training to fight anybody, I felt I could sneak out on the Neutral’s fare, and I had dinner in a Chinese restaurant near the 49th Street entrance to the main stream of the B.-M.T., which I counted upon to float me under the East River and as far as Queens Plaza. There, I reasoned, I might find a native to guide me to the mouth of the Astoria Line. I was suffering from a severe head cold, a specific for which, I have always believed, is watercress soup and Chinese tea. Over the tangled watercress and, later, on the subway, I read a mammoth, lavish, baby-blue brochure, printed on the best coated paper, which the M.B.A. had put out in honor of the occasion. This publication, entitled “M.B.A., The American Way,” assured me that I would see “the cream of the crop” at Sunnyside Garden. The Sunnyside Garden Corporation had taken the inside front cover to convey the best wishes of “The Showcase of Queens,” and “Ideal Spot for Club Dances, Social Functions, Banquets, Weddings, Large Meetings, Rallies, Bazaars, Exhibits, Benefit Shows, Special Events, Boxing, Wrestling, Basketball.” There was also a panel of portraits of M.B.A. officers, all of whom I knew as conspiratorial faces in the Neutral, and a message from the M.B.A. president, Al Braverman, a former Army boxing instructor who takes a photograph like the late Heywood Broun. “Boxing was never meant for a self-chosen few to force the rank and file members of the boxing fraternity to do as they would have them do,” the message said, in not too closely veiled allusion to the I.B.G. “The Gestapo did not work out in Germany, nor will it work out here in our grand and glorious country.”
The ads—three dozen pages of them (the revenue was counted on to forestall any deficiency at the gate)—were taken by fight managers (mostly M.B.A. members), fighters’ relatives, fight clubs (generously welcoming competition, the International Boxing Club, which promotes at Madison Square Garden, had taken a full page), fighters’ daytime employers (a loyal lot), gyms, pawnshops, sporting-goods dealers, barbershops, luncheonettes, and a gentleman who simply proclaimed himself “Max Greenaut, No. 1 Fight Fan, Always at the Ringside.” Among the managers’ cards I liked best one that said, “Tony Rojas, Latin-American Manager and Sport.” There was a small advertisement of the Claire Bridal Shoppe, of 243 Grand Street, and one of a firm called Time Pleating & Stitching, Inc., which I assumed to be one of Mr. Luce’s new tentacles. The journal also included two full pages of “Neutral Corner Boosters,” with facsimile signatures (the boys had paid a dollar apiece, I learned later), and a number of greetings from purely social organizations: the Veteran Boxers Association of New York; the Leather-Pushers A.C., of Brooklyn; the Roland La Starza Social Club, of the Bronx; the Cestus A.C., of Newark; and the Village Owls Social Club, of 234 Mulberry Street. By the time I emerged from my Astoria Line train onto a rain-swept mesa that was apparently