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By Root 570 0

of those first short, jarring blows. “Tap, tap,” he said. “I told myself, He can’t hurt me. Then bam! It really rang bells. I thought, I got a tough boy on my hands. I better play possum and try to let him play hisself out.” Dennis, who comes from Wilmington, North Carolina, has a less polished conversational style than Roberts, an old Harlemite.) Dennis and Roberts fought out the round without a second’s respite. When two boxers come straight toward each other and don’t hit, they wind up in each other’s arms, and the same thing is likely to happen if both are swinging wildly; one fellow’s arm will go around the other’s neck, and he will have to grab to save himself. But Oil and Oinie, as their public hailed them, maintained the minuscule distance between them by hitting each other away. Hitting at such short range, the boxer leaves a correspondingly brief opening; the trick is to take the initiative by anticipating the opening or by moving the other fellow off balance. Having done that, one boy sometimes can land a whole series of blows before the other breaks into the rhythm. And there is never the brief surcease a fighter gets at longer range. A smart old fighter can sometimes slide through ten rounds on the equivalent of one round of such fighting.

I marked that first round for Roberts, though there wasn’t much in it, but Dennis won the second. They were fighting the same way, but now Oil’s sequences of punches were more sustained, and he was spinning the taller boy when they got near the corners. He had a lower center of gravity and he was using it. Dennis’s idea of “playing possum” was to ride out a whole flurry of punches, rolling and bobbing, and then launch a flurry of his own. (He adopted this method of biding his time, he explained to me later, because he had found it safer than retreat. “I used to be a runner,” he said, “but more boys get knocked out that way than inside.”) Oinie’s unpaid second out in left field—“Up, Poiple!”—had noted the diminution of his man’s fortunes, and he now showed that his strategy was flexible. “Stickum, Oinie!” he yelled, advising Roberts to stay away and jab. But Roberts would have considered this a species of moral abdication; besides, there is no use in sticking the top of a head. Instead, he came back in the third round with a fine determination to discourage the Brooklyn man. (“I hit him so many times he was visibly out, as far as I could see,” he said afterward. “Yet he was still there a second later. Tit for tat, he is the meanest man I ever lived with.”) He took the third, and then Dennis carried the fourth. By that time, the man in left field had thought of a refinement. “Stick ‘n’ hook, Oinie,” he was yelling. (Translation: “Punch straight with the left and then hook with it.” This is sometimes called hooking off a jab.) The “Hookum, Oil!” man, who was now riding high on a wave of euphoria, howled back mockingly, “Hook ‘n’ stick, Oil! Givum tha yopposite!” (This, as he knew, was hilarious nonsense; you can’t jab off a hook. The laugh he got proved there were other knowing coves present.)

But Roberts carried the fifth—and they hadn’t clinched yet, nor had either man taken a backward step except under the impetus of a fist. They moved often, of course, drifting about the ring in a tight circle. (“I thought then I better pace myself so I can finish good,” Roberts said afterward. “There is a difference between being too cautious and overcautious, which is to be just cautious enough.” At about the same time Dennis, although it still seems incredible, was deciding that he had “played possum” long enough. “At the beginning of that fight,” he said, “I was thinking of how tired I was before I went in the ring, even though my boss had given me the day off, yet I couldn’t sleep, because of my children in the apartment crying. They been sick with a cold. That was a mistake I made thinking of how tired I must of been, because I wasn’t.”) In the seventh, Dennis went out and, for the first time, “changed the theme of the fight,” to quote his manager, Al Braverman. He began throwing