The Sweet Science - A. J. Liebling [79]
When I arrived the first preliminary, an affair of no moment, was already on. The publicity director of the M.B.A., Maurie Waxman, a hyperthyroid fellow who is happiest when strangling with rage, escorted me to the working-press section, which I shared during the evening with a man from the Long Island Ad - vocate and a fellow from the New Yorker Staats-Zeitung, who arrived just in time for the last bout, in which one of the principals was a German-American. The ideal boxing card, like a music-hall bill, builds from the opening number, and the bout under way when I entered made it evident that the Sunnyside matchmaker, an old-timer named Joe McKenna, knew his business. It was the kind of match that is bound to make the next one look like an improvement. The very bad first bout is a pleasant tradition of local clubs. It gives the connoisseurs a chance to find their seats, tune their voices, and warm up their assortment of wisecracks. While doing this, they estimate the size of the gate, upon which, they know, depends the likelihood of more shows at the same address, and try to locate acquaintances in the audience. This time, while the fighters hesitated, a hearty burgher far off in the rear rows landed the first bon mot. “Swing now!” he yelled. “You got the wind wit’ ya!” I looked around and was glad to see that the gate was good for a hall the size of Sunnyside. At a neighborhood club, you can count the total attendance early in the evening, because the patrons arrive promptly, to get their money’s worth. It isn’t like a big fight, where the expense-account hosts and their guests begin to flock in just before the conversation piece, or like off-nights at the Garden, when spectators come late because they are on the cuff. I knew that the boxers and their managers had been out selling tickets, just as in the old days, and the concentrations of sound indicated which areas were tenanted by the delegations brought along by the various boys. At the Neutral earlier in the evening, I had heard the manager of a colored fighter, now going into the ring for the second four-rounder, boast that his boy had sold forty dollars’ worth of tickets, and I had no trouble telling where the purchasers were sitting. The boy had against him one of those rigid, determined-looking youngsters who create the impression that they can hit because they obviously can’t do anything else. A boxer of this type induces first respect and then incredulity in an inexperienced opponent; by the time the colored boy had decided that the determined fellow was as bad as he looked, he had only a couple of rounds left to slap him around in. The determined fellow, who was white and whose name was Ronnie, had even more friends in the crowd, and they advised him courageously, “Steady up, Ronnie; weave, Ronnie,” no matter how hard he got hit. He appeared to be trying to lead the colored boy as a gunner leads a bird, punching a yard or so in front of where the colored boy would have been if he had kept going in the same direction.
By the time the first of the feature eight-rounders came on, the crowd was in fine voice. It was a neighborhood crowd, except for the concentrated groups of fighters’ friends, and the neighborhood is not tough but hearty. As it happens, this is the region to which the authentic Manhattan accent has emigrated, according to a learned cove I met at Columbia years ago, who went about making recordings of American regional modes of speech. The more habitable quarters of Manhattan, he told me, have been preempted by successful inlanders who speak Iowese and Dakota-homan; the inhabitants of West Harlem talk like Faulkner characters, and East Harlem speaks Spanish. “Just as the anthropologist who wishes to study pristine African culture must seek it among the Djuka Negroes of Surinam, who were snatched from Africa in the eighteenth