• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 566 0

me at the National Sporting Club in London,” he would explain, “and the sonorousness of the effect compensates the redundancy.” The “Philadelphia” was to distinguish him from the numerous other O‘Briens and pseudo-O’Briens active in the American ring in his era. (The current edition of Nat Fleischer’s record book, The Ring, lists only three O‘Briens; the Irish are in a professional decline.) The agility of Mr. O’Brien’s mind exceeded even that of his footwork, which was the most spectacular of his generation. Once, in his robust, athletic middle years, which coincided with the Depression, he was shy the rent for a gymnasium he conducted atop a Broadway building. He therefore invited the landlord, a dropsical old German gentleman, to a free boxing lesson, in the course of which he pretended that the old fellow had knocked him out. The landlord, fearing a damage suit, avoided O’Brien for months, and never bothered him about the rent.

This, however, is what my (and, during O‘Brien’s life, his) friend Colonel Stingo would call a labyrinthian digression. What enshrined O’Brien in the memory of millions who never enjoyed the privilege of his personal acquaintance was that in March, 1909, he was knocked into a cerebral hiatus, unique for him, in the last five seconds of a ten-round bout with a less deservedly eminent contemporary called Stanley Ketchel, the Michigan Assassin after he, O‘Brien, had won six or seven rounds of the fight. Because the bell interrupted the referee’s count, there was no knockout, and under the present rules of the New York State Athletic Commission he would have been entitled to the decision, even though prostrate. The state law then forbade decisions of any kind, and fellows in barrooms have been arguing intermittently ever since over who won the fight. Both O’Brien and Ketchel, according to all qualified observers, were great middleweights, but I sometimes wonder whether their encounter wouldn’t be remembered as just a pretty good fight, instead of an epic, if it hadn’t ended the way it did.

What made me think of the O’Brien—Ketchel fight was the fact that in the last second of the final round of a run-of-the-mill fight at Madison Square Garden in October, 1954, I saw a young colored light heavyweight named Floyd Patterson knock Joe Gannon through the ropes with a punch that would surely have been a knockout if the final bell hadn’t sounded just as the victim fell. It’s the only time I’ve seen this happen in what must be several hundred fights I’ve watched. (I started going to them in about 1920, and while I’ve never attended more than about a dozen cards in a year, they begin to mount up.) Since this was an eight-round bout, the mathematical odds against the thing’s coming off in the last second were 1,439 to 1. Another odd feature of the bout was that it was limited to eight rounds to protect Patterson, who is not yet twenty and therefore, in the eyes of the Athletic Commission, too tender a vessel for a longer course. If there had been a ninth round, the other fellow wouldn’t have been able to come up for it.

Fight snobs will consider my analogy with O’Brien and Ketchel sacrilegious, because, as I have said, this Garden bout wasn’t much of a fight. Moreover, it developed later that Gannon wasn’t leading on points in the opinions of the judges, the referee, the newspapermen, or the people watching the show on television. He was walking a tightrope from the first round on. But for two friends of Gannon’s who sat behind me he had run up a bigger lead than old Philadelphia Jack enjoyed when Ketchel caught him. I went to the fight because I wanted to see how far Patterson had progressed since turning professional in 1952, and I suppose that the same curiosity brought out most of the rest of the small crowd. Among the exceptions were half a hundred Occidentals wearing Chinese lampshade hats, whom I took to be delegates to some convention of Shriners or Red Men of the World. I learned later they were Philadelphia rooters for a lightweight named Jimmy Soo, whose father runs a Chinese restaurant down there.