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item in the Moore repertory. The champion had boxed him four times, winning three. Johnson had got one decision, in Milwaukee in 1951, but its authenticity has never been accepted by the cultists. Nobody expected much of Johnson in the Garden match; it is an index of Moore’s reputation that the second-best man in his class was not considered to be in his class at all. The advance publicity therefore centered on Moore’s alleged difficulty in getting down to the necessary hundred and seventy-five pounds, although he is of just about normal size for a light heavy—five feet eleven inches tall, and not especially massive. If he debilitated himself sufficiently to make the weight, the report implied, he might collapse from malnutrition.

One reason Moore hadn’t appeared at the Garden before was, I knew, the character of his manager, Charlie Johnston, who is an independent chap and likes to operate off his own bat, even if it means opening up unfamiliar territory. As recently as 1951, for example, he had Moore working in Flint, Michigan (Herman Harris; K.O. 4), and Cordoba, Argentina (Victor Carabajal; K.O. 3). In 1949 Moore knocked out somebody named Esco Greenwood in two in North Adams, Massachusetts, and in the course of his ten seasons under Johnston’s management he has given twenty recitals in Baltimore alone, becoming as much of a local institution as Henry L. Mencken. Since winning the championship, he has shown up in Sacramento, Spokane, San Diego, and Buenos Aires (besides Ogden and Miami), to name a few, and has beaten some of the most unknown prizefighters in the world.

About a week before the fight I telephoned Mr. Johnston, whom I had never met, and arranged to visit Moore’s training camp at Summit, New Jersey, to see him work. Mr. Johnston promised to pick me up at the curb on the Broadway side of the Times Tower at precisely noon; he said he would be driving a De Soto sedan. Arriving a minute early, I saw a couple of young colored men standing there who looked as if they might be interested in boxing. Surmising that they were waiting for Johnston, too, I joined them. The De Soto stopped at the curb a few seconds later. Johnston, a ginger-haired middle-aged man with a sharp, merry face, waved me in beside him, the two other fellows climbed into the rear seat, and we were off. I talked to Johnston all the way through the Holland Tunnel without getting an answer. I was beginning to simmer when he turned to me—he had stopped for a light—and announced, with high good humor, that he had a bad right ear. “I’ll put up the window at my left, and you can bounce your voice off it,” he said, but I shouted that there would be plenty of time for talking after we got to Summit. Meanwhile, the fellows in the back seat were chattering away, so I listened. The larger and darker of the two—he was an inch or two over six feet—was Frankie Daniels, I had learned, and he was on his way to spar with Moore. “I’m going to finish him off—spar with him every day from now until he winds up training,” he said, and added that he was looking forward to the opportunity, because he had a fight of his own coming up later in the month and Moore would sharpen him more than he would sharpen Moore. Also, he would get paid for it. “I’m bound to learn something,” he said. “Archie so smart he exercise your brain as well as body.”

Jimmy Brooks, the other fellow in the back seat, was not a sparring partner but a friend of Sandy Saddler, the world featherweight champion, who is also managed by Johnston and was at the same training camp, preparing for a fight in Venezuela. (The airplane has opened new vistas for a manager with a grasp of geography. Johnston told me later that after Venezuela, where there is a lot of oil money in circulation, he was planning fights for Saddler in Thailand and Japan, two countries that are enjoying featherweight-boxing booms. “They’re all little fellows there,” he said. “No heavyweights to take the play away.” Moore and Saddler both enjoy travel; they are not like a fighter named Terry Young, whom Whitey Bimstein once had to