The Sweet Science - A. J. Liebling [98]
From my seat in back I could converse with Mr. Johnston at the wheel more easily than if I had been sitting beside him, because of his deaf right ear. As we threaded our way between the filling stations and Howard Johnsons of northern New Jersey, I gathered some intelligence about Red Top Davis. Davis, I learned, had gained his position as challenger by beating a fellow named Percy Bassett, who had previously beaten another fellow who couldn’t fight at all. On such tenuous foundations are featherweight reputations now reared. Davis, Johnston said, was thirty-one, three years older than Saddler. “As a matter of fact,” he went on, “Davis was two of the last six guys Pep licked before the first time we licked Pep. He used to be a sparring partner for Pep, I hear, and that summer Pep decisioned him twice in Hartford in two weeks just to keep busy.” Subsequently Davis had campaigned all over the place, losing as often as he won, until the last couple of years, when he started winning more often than he lost. “Some fighters improve late,” Johnston said.
In the bare dining room of Ehsan’s main building we found Bertie Briscoe, Saddler’s trainer. He is a grizzled Brooklyn Irishman who fought as a bantamweight in the Edwardian era. I asked him how Sandy looked, and he said seriously, “How he looks? He’s the best fighter ever tied on a glove in the history of the world.” Moore, Johnston’s other champion, has his own trainers—Cheerful Norman and Tiny Payne. Johnston calls them “Moore trainers,” and Briscoe a “Saddler trainer.” The Moore trainers were in California, so Briscoe got no argument. “Name me another fighter in the history of the world fought in every country and never brought no soft touch with him to fight,” he said fiercely. “We fight the best they got, and we hit them in the old kazazza.” He returned, breathing hard with anger, to the perusal of the boxing column in the New York Enquirer. “This feller,” he said, poking a rectangular index finger into the boxing columnist’s photographically reproduced eye, “picks Davis!” Johnston equably ventured the suggestion that maybe such talk might bring a few customers into the Garden, but Briscoe, as soon as the manager turned away, glared at his back and grumbled, “Anything for a dollar.” He was only half mollified when Mrs. Johnston presented him with a box of jelly doughnuts for himself alone. In the kitchen Mr. Jimmy Brooks, Saddler’s fidus Achates and junior trainer, was feeding a week-old lamb from a nursing bottle. For Brooks, the dashing Harlemite who admitted he was a boulevardier and connoisseur, this was an unprecedented surrender to the austerity of the environment, and he felt called upon to explain it. “She fell into a pond, and when they fish her out, the mother wouldn’t feed her,” he said. “She must have smelled different.” Looking at the lamb with an affection of callousness, he added, “She wouldn’t make but one order of lamb chops.” The lamb, having emptied the bottle, made a noise like a baby’s rattle, and the boulevardier panicked. “Don’t be mad, Baby,” he implored. “Daddy going to get you more soon as he can heat it.”
When we had had our ham and eggs—the invariable lunch for visitors at Ehsan’s—Johnston and the Argentine and I headed for the gymnasium, farther up the hill, where Saddler was working out. Mrs. Johnston stayed in the farmhouse with the Sunday newspapers. The Argentine had managed to eat, and felt better. Johnston had a new Argentine import—a middleweight named Merentino—going at St. Nick’s on Monday night, and the announcer said he would broadcast that one. “How is this Merentino?” I asked him, and he said, “Very good poonch, poonch. No much reflection.”
Saddler was wearing long sweat clothes like old-fashioned red-flannel underwear, which made him look less like a mantis than usual and more like a Christmas candle. Before he put on his sparring helmet, he pulled a cellophane shower cap over his carefully plastered-down hair. The sweat clothes might have meant