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The contestants in this first feature bout were welterweights with only a pound’s difference between them, both Negroes in the dark-umber range, and both with first names that lent themselves admirably to the accent of the Diaspora—Earl Dennis and Ernie Roberts. They were both young and in beautiful condition—“trained up like Kid Lewis,” as Captain Hector Macdonald-Buchanan once observed to me when discussing Hitler’s Army. (Lewis was a chap who could box twenty rounds without increasing his rate of respiration.) I had once seen Roberts make a savagely correct fight at the Garden, going eight rounds without clinching or stepping back, and I had Whitey’s word that Dennis was at least as good. Whitey was in Dennis’s corner, along with Mr. Braverman, the author of the presidential message I had just been reading, who is Dennis’s manager. With Roberts and his manager, Bennie Allesandro, in the opposite corner, were two seconds, Chickie Ferrara and Jimmy August, both of whom, in the Neutral’s idiom, “know what’s all about it.” Roberts is tall for a welterweight, five feet eight or nine, and has a small, well-shaped head, wide shoulders, and a narrow waist—a classic boxing build. Dennis is a more compact boy—bigger head, longer waist, shorter legs, wide shoulders, and long arms. He has a Sam Langford kind of physique. His face is broader and shorter, too, with wide, white teeth that give him a genially anthropophagous look. It was the sort of contrast in structures that inspires resourceful spectators to devise battle plans for the objects of their interest even before a fight begins.

I knew from talking with their managers that both Dennis and Roberts were married men and fathers, and that they both held down full-time jobs. Roberts, a clerk in a hardware store, got to work at eight each morning and left at seven. His employer let him have three hours off in the middle of the day, during which he trained at Stillman’s and had his lunch. After work, he went home to his wife and child, in Harlem, and at five the next morning he was in Central Park, doing his roadwork—five miles in about forty-five minutes every day before breakfast. He was twenty-five. Dennis, who was only twenty-two, although he had been married for five years and had two children, lived in Brooklyn and worked normal hours for a firm on the fringes of the garment center, making women’s belt buckles. After work, he went up to the Broadway Gym, a small place near City College, to train, and a couple of hours later headed for Brooklyn. He, too, did his roadwork in the mornings. Roberts had had about forty fights and Dennis about thirty-five. Their daytime bosses were at ringside.

“Hookum, Oil!” a cheerful Queens voice called to Dennis as the men left their corners. Roberts, in purple trunks, received advice just as prompt and resonant—“Up, Poiple! Uppercut!” Roberts came in on a straight line, his waist pulled back, his shoulders and elbows forward. He hit straight or in light arcs—short, jarring punches. Dennis went to meet him scrunched forward, too, presenting the top of his head as the only target of opportunity. (“The head is the hardest part of the human body,” Roberts said to me a couple of days later, when I talked to him and Dennis about the fight.) Larry Baker, the fellow I had seen Roberts beat in the Garden, had moved around him and hit from a distance. Roberts may have expected Dennis to do the same thing, but when Dennis didn’t, he saw that he would have to make the best of it. (“If you back up, you lose points,” he said to me later. “So I knew I had to stay and chalk it up as experience.”) Roberts hit fast, but with measured fury, because he realized he had to pace himself. (“When I started out as a fighter,” he told me, “I had just a willing heart—threw punches in the wind. I used to punch myself out. When I sampled Dennis’s right, I knew I couldn’t afford that.” Dennis told me that he had formed a slightly optimistic prognosis on the basis