• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 501 0

you only get one chance to spell the word. The best two moves I ever had come to me when I was shadowboxing, but I was not just going through the motions with a swelled head, thinking of some broad. I always used to have a move where I feinted a jab and stepped to the left to get away, and one day it come to me, 'Why not really jab when I step that way? If I hit, I am in position to throw a right, and if I miss, I got my right hand up anyway.' “ Goldman went to his left, jabbed, and threw a right. “Then the thought come to me,” he said, “ 'Why not throw a left hook for the body instead, and that will bring me in position for a right uppercut?' Now, when I straighten up with that uppercut the guy is going to cross me with a right, ain't he? Sure! He can't stop himself. So then, as I throw the uppercut, I duck to the left in one motion, see?” The little man moved his feet and swayed to his left. “And I come up under his right!” he exclaimed.

Dell had been watching with the detached interest of a boy who has no talent for mathematics but must pass a required course in trigonometry. “Do you get it?” Goldman asked him, abandoning his pretense of talking to me. “Sure,” Dell said without enthusiasm, “but I guess I would rather just wear the guys down.” He went away, saying he had to write a letter to his girl.

In addition to listening to Goldman's expositions of theory, routine for the prize fighters at Mrs. Braune's includes a long run around the reservoir early every morning and laboratory exercises at Stillman's Gymnasium on Eighth Avenue from noon until about three o'clock. At Stillman's, the fighters box against boys from other managers' strings, to avert possible upheavals in the Braune home. A boy who has had a hard workout is content to do nothing for the rest of the day, which is exactly what a trainer wants him to do.

Mrs. Braune, who used to take a normal matronly pleasure in promoting marriages between young people, has come to feel differently about marriage now that she is interested in prize fighters. Most managers don't like fighters to get married. “One manager is enough,” they often say. Mrs. Braune concurs in this prejudice, because when the boys get married they stop living in rooming houses. Also, she takes a proprietary attitude toward any fighter who has lived in her house and she thinks that no young woman can give a pugilist proper care. Lou Ambers got married last year. He had lived in the rear parlor of Mrs. Braune's house for four years, remaining there even after he had become lightweight champion of the world and a great drawing card. The rear parlor has cooking arrangements, and a fellow named Skids Enright, an old shortorder cook from Herkimer, New York, Lou's home town, used to live with him and do the cooking. The fighter was never extravagant. After his marriage Ambers went to live in Herkimer. A few months later he was knocked out by a lightweight named Lew Jenkins, who was also married but had been in that condition long enough to develop a tolerance for it. Another Weill fighter, Joey Archibald, won the featherweight championship, got married, and then lost a decision to a bachelor from Baltimore. Archibald is not acutely missed at Mrs. Braune's, however. Because of his unbearable erudition, her other lodgers never felt close to him. “Do you know what Archibald said to me?” Ambers once asked Goldman. “He said 'equilibrium.' “ Goldman and Whitey Bimstein, Ambers' trainer, had a hard time restoring friendly relations. Arturo Godoy is also married, but Mrs. Braune feels that, being a South American, he can stand it.

I gathered that because of all the marriages and the absence of a couple of fighters who were on expeditions to the provinces, there are not as many boys as usual stopping at Mrs. Braune's. Goldman mentioned, besides Spider and Dell, a clever welterweight named Al Nettlow, Marty Serve, a coming lightweight, and Tony, the twentyyearold heavyweight who hasn't fought yet. Tony came in while we were talking, and, after Goldman had introduced him to me as “possibly a future heavyweight