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that he was having trouble making the weight or merely that he had a sensible aversion to drafts. His sparring partner, Georgie Collins, a chunky, muscular lightweight, operated in the fashion expected of Davis, circling and bobbing much as Pep used to do. (Davis was supposed to have picked up a lot of Pep’s stuff sparring with him.) Every now and then he tried to bob up inside the effective arc of Saddler’s long arms and work him over in close. Saddler, flat-footed and elastic, practiced assiduously with a long left hook to the region denominated by Mr. Briscoe as the kazazza—the torso between the diaphragm and the waistline. (Mr. Briscoe’s slang is as archaic as his lingerie; he wears thick winter drawers that he calls bulletproofs.) The hook to the kazazza of a bouncy fellow is intended to exercise a numbing effect upon his transmission; after a few applications, he ceases to be such a gadabout. When Collins got inside, Saddler would retract his arms to the position of prayer, and uppercut. All was good nature, and I thought I could tell from the way he worked that he wasn’t much worried.

I got out to see Davis two days later, on Washington’s Birthday. He was training at Long Pond Inn, in Greenwood Lake, New York, and it was to be his final day of sparring before the fight, on Friday night. This trip had more of the air of an official outing than the other; I set forth from the I.B.C., at the Garden, in a hired Cadillac and in the company of Harry Mendel, an I.B.C. press agent, and a free-lance photographer who had been chartered for the day, like the Cadillac. The photographer arrived even sleepier than Sunday’s Argentine. “Out of a cold blue sky, they call me on five minutes’ notice,” he complained.

“You look great—who’s your embalmer?” the driver said.

“The same stiff that writes your material,” the photographer replied. They must have been listening to the same television comedian. The other members of our company were Al Buck, a sports writer from the Post, and Tony Canzoneri, the old featherweight, and then lightweight, champion. (He now weighs a hundred and sixty-five.) Canzoneri was to observe Davis and tell Mendel how he thought he looked; the next day he would go down to Summit and observe Saddler. It would make good publicity for the fight, and also for a restaurant Canzoneri was opening on Broadway. I never see Canzoneri without thinking of the great excitement he used to set up without making a single spurious move. He never took an unnecessary step to call attention to his agility, or threw a silly, slapping punch to catch the crowd’s eye; he was an aggressive stylist who kept the pressure on the opposition and then came through with bursts of patterned, synchronized blows that either brought out the best in the other fellow or flattened him.

At Greenwood it was still deep winter. From the windows of the inn, a long, rambling place on the edge of the lake, we could see men fishing through the ice for pickerel. Inside, the bar was doing a good business. It was a holiday, and up there fighters are a standard attraction, like the Central Park Zoo in Manhattan. The bouts go on in a gymnasium above the long dining room and bar. There is none of the monastic atmosphere of Ehsan’s at the inn; it is more cheerful and at the same time more distracting. At the inn the I.B.C. always buys you a steak dinner, and you always meet some trainer you know who is stuck up there with a fighter he can’t leave overnight. The trainer’s nostalgia for Stillman’s is invariably heart-wringing. You would think he was in the middle of the Australian bush.

While I was waiting for my steak I talked with Mush Salow, Davis’s manager. He is a large, friendly, youngish man from Hartford, which has long been more of a sporting center than you would think from reading insurance-company brochures. Mr. Salow said his business was installing and servicing cigarette-vending machines, and this, naturally, brought him in contact with a number of people who run saloons where sporting people congregate. Davis, Mr. Salow conceded, had made