Men without women
“I’ll come around for you about a quarter to seven and we’ll go and
eat.”
“All right.”
Up at the hotel Jack took off his shoes and his coat and lay down for a
while. I wrote a letter. I looked over a couple of times and Jack wasn’t
sleeping. He was lying perfectly still but every once in a while his
eyes would open. Finally he sits up.
“Want to play some cribbage, Jerry?” he says.
“Sure,” I said.
He went over to his suitcase and got out the cards and the cribbage
board. We played cribbage and he won three dollars off me. John knocked
at the door and came in.
“Want to play some cribbage, John?” Jack asked him.
John put his kelly down on the table. It was all wet. His coat was wet
too.
“Is it raining?” Jack asks.
“It’s pouring,” John says. “The taxi I had, got tied up in the traffic
and I got out and walked.”
“Come on, play some cribbage,” Jack says.
“You ought to go and eat.”
“No,” says Jack. “I don’t want to eat yet.”
So they played cribbage for about half an hour and Jack won a dollar and
a half off him.
“Well, I suppose we got to go eat,” Jack says. He went to the window and
looked out.
“Is it still raining?”
“Yes.”
“Let’s eat in the hotel,” John says.
“All right,” Jack says, “I’ll play you once more to see who pays for the
meal.”
After a little while Jack gets up and says, “You buy the meal, John,”
and we went downstairs and ate in the big dining-room.
After we ate we went upstairs and Jack played cribbage with John again
and won two dollars and a half off him. Jack was feeling pretty good.
John had a bag with him with all his stuff in it. Jack took off his
shirt and collar and put on a jersey and a sweater, so he wouldn’t catch
cold when he came out, and put his ring clothes and his bathrobe in a
bag.
“You all ready?” John asks him. “I’ll call up and have them get a taxi.”
Pretty soon the telephone rang and they said the taxi was waiting.
We rode down in the elevator and went out through the lobby, and got in
a taxi and rode around to the Garden. It was raining hard but there was
a lot of people outside on the streets. The Garden was sold out. As we
came in on our way to the dressing-room I saw how full it was. It looked
like half a mile down to the ring. It was all dark. Just the lights over
the ring.
“It’s a good thing, with this rain, they didn’t try and pull this fight
in the ball park,” John said.
“They got a good crowd,” Jack says.
“This is a fight that would draw a lot more than the Garden could hold.”
“You can’t tell about the weather,” Jack says.
John came to the door of the dressing-room and poked his head in. Jack
was sitting there with his bathrobe on, he had his arms folded and was
looking at the floor. John had a couple of handlers with him. They
looked over his shoulder. Jack looked up.
“Is he in?” he asked.
“He’s just gone down,” John said.
We started down. Walcott was just getting into the ring. The crowd gave
him a big hand. He climbed through between the ropes and put his two
fists together and smiled, and shook them at the crowd, first at one
side of the ring, then at the other, and then sat down. Jack got a good
hand coming down through the crowd. Jack is Irish and the Irish always
get a pretty good hand. An Irishman don’t draw in New York like a Jew or
an Italian but they always get a good hand. Jack climbed up and bent
down to go through the ropes and Walcott came over from his corner and
pushed the rope down for Jack to go through. The crowd thought that was
wonderful. Walcott put his hand on Jack’s shoulder and they stood there
just for a second.
“So you’re going to be one of these popular champions,” Jack says to
him. “Take your goddam hand off my shoulder.”
“Be yourself,” Walcott says.
This is all great for the crowd. How gentlemanly the boys are before the
fight! How they wish each other luck!
Solly Freedman came over to our corner while Jack is bandaging his hands
and John is over in Walcott’s corner. Jack puts his thumb through the
slit in the bandage and then wrapped his hand nice and smooth. I taped
it around the wrist and twice across the knuckles.
“Hey,” Freedman says. “Where do you get all that tape?”
“Feel of it,” Jack says. “It’s soft, ain’t it? Don’t be a hick.”
Freedman stands there all the time while Jack bandages the other hand,
and one of the boys that’s going to handle him brings the gloves and I
pull them on and work them around.
“Say, Freedman,” Jack asks, “what nationality is this Walcott?”
“I don’t know,” Solly says. “He’s some sort of a Dane.”
“He’s a Bohemian,” the lad who brought the gloves said.
The referee called them out to the centre of the ring and Jack walks
out. Walcott comes out smiling. They met and the referee put his arm on
each of their shoulders.
“Hello, popularity,” Jack says to Walcott.
“Be yourself.”
“What do you call yourself ‘Walcott’ for?” Jack says. “Didn’t you know
he was a nigger?”
“Listen—” says the referee, and he gives them the same old line. Once
Walcott interrupts him. He grabs Jack’s arm and says, “Can I hit when
he’s got me like this?”
“Keep your hands off me,” Jack says. “There ain’t no moving-pictures of
this.”
They went back to their corners. I lifted the bathrobe off Jack and he
leaned on the ropes and flexed his knees a couple of times and scuffed
his shoes in the rosin. The gong rang and Jack turned quick and went
out. Walcott came toward him and they touched gloves and as soon as
Walcott dropped his hands Jack jumped his left into his face twice.
There wasn’t anybody ever boxed better than Jack. Walcott was after him,
going forward all the time with his chin on his chest. He’s a hooker and
he carries his hands pretty low. All he knows is to get in there and
sock. But every time he gets in there close, Jack has the left hand in
his face. It’s just as though it’s automatic. Jack just raises the left
hand up and it’s in Walcott’s face. Three or four times Jack brings the
right over but Walcott gets it on the shoulder or high up on the head.
He’s just like all these hookers. The only thing he’s afraid of is
another one of the same kind. He’s covered everywhere you can hurt him.
He don’t care about a left-hand in his face.
After about four rounds Jack has him bleeding bad and his face all cut
up, but every time Walcott’s got in close he’s socked so hard he’s got
two big red patches on both sides just below Jack’s ribs. Every time he
gets in close, Jack ties him up, then gets one hand loose and uppercuts
him, but when Walcott gets his hands loose he socks Jack in the body so
they can hear it outside in the street. He’s a socker.
It goes along like that for three rounds more. They don’t talk any.
They’re working all the time. We worked over Jack plenty too, in between
the rounds. He don’t look good at all but he never does much work in the
ring. He don’t move around much and that left-hand is just automatic.
It’s just like it was connected with Walcott’s face and Jack just had to
wish it in every time. Jack is always calm in close and he doesn’t waste
any juice. He knows everything about working in close too and he’s
getting away with a lot of stuff. While they were in our corner I
watched him tie Walcott up, get his right hand loose, turn it and come
up with an uppercut that got Walcott’s nose with the heel of the glove.
Walcott was bleeding bad and leaned his nose on Jack’s shoulder so as to
give Jack some of it too, and Jack sort of lifted his shoulder sharp and
caught him against the nose, and then brought down the right hand and
did the same thing again.
Walcott was sore as hell. By the time they’d gone five rounds he hated
Jack’s guts. Jack wasn’t sore; that is, he wasn’t any sorer than he
always was. He certainly did used to make the fellows he fought hate
boxing. That was why he hated Kid Lewis so. He never got the Kid’s goat.
Kid Lewis always had about three new dirty things Jack couldn’t do. Jack
was as safe as a church all the time he was in there, as long as he was
strong. He certainly was treating Walcott rough. The funny thing was it
looked as though Jack was an open classic boxer. That was because he had
all that stuff too.
After the seventh round Jack says, “My left’s getting heavy.”
From then he started to take a beating. It didn’t show at first. But
instead of him running the fight it was Walcott was running it, instead
of being safe all the time now he was in trouble. He couldn’t keep him
out with the left hand now. It looked as though it was the same as ever,
only now instead of Walcott’s punches just missing him they were just
hitting him. He took an awful beating in the body.
“What’s the round?” Jack asked.
“The eleventh.”
“I can’t stay,” Jack says. “My legs are going bad.”
Walcott had been just hitting him for a long time. It was like a
baseball catcher pulls the ball and takes some of the shock off. From
now on Walcott commenced to land solid. He certainly was a
socking-machine. Jack was just trying to block everything now. It didn’t
show what an awful beating he was taking. In between the rounds I worked
on his legs. The muscles would flutter under my hands all the time I was
rubbing them. He was sick as hell.
“How’s it go?” he asked John, turning around, his face all swollen.
“It’s his fight.”
“I think I can last,” Jack says. “I don’t want this bohunk to stop me.”
It was going just the way he thought it would. He knew he couldn’t beat
Walcott. He wasn’t strong any more. He was all right though. His money
was all right and now he wanted to finish it off right to please
himself. He didn’t want to be knocked out.
The gong rang and we pushed him out. He went out slow. Walcott came
right out after him. Jack put the left in his face and Walcott took it,
came in under it and started working on Jack’s body. Jack tried to tie
him up and it was just like trying to hold on to a buzz-saw. Jack broke
away from it and missed with the right. Walcott clipped him with a
left-hook and Jack went down. He went down on his hands and knees and
looked at us. The referee started counting. Jack was watching us and
shaking his head. At eight John motioned to him. You couldn’t hear on
account of the crowd. Jack got up. The referee had been holding Walcott
back with one arm while he counted.
When Jack was on his feet Walcott started toward him.
“Watch yourself, Jimmy,” I heard Solly Freedman yell to him.
Walcott came up to Jack looking at him. Jack stuck the left hand at him.
Walcott just shook his head. He backed Jack up against the ropes,
measured him and then hooked the left very light to the side of Jack’s
head and socked the right into the body as hard as he could sock, just
as low as he could get it. He must have hit him five inches below the
belt. I thought the eyes would come out of Jack’s head. They stuck way
out. His mouth come open.
The referee grabbed Walcott. Jack stepped forward. If he went down there
went fifty thousand bucks. He walked as though all his insides were
going to fall out.
“It wasn’t low,” he said. “It was a accident.”
The crowd were yelling so you couldn’t hear anything.
“I’m all right,” Jack says. They were right in front of us. The referee
looks at John and then he shakes his head.
“Come on, you polak son-of-a-bitch,” Jack says to Walcott.
John was hanging onto the ropes. He had the towel ready to chuck in.
Jack was standing just a little way out from the ropes. He took a step
forward. I saw the sweat come out on his face like somebody had squeezed
it and a big drop went down his nose.
“Come on and fight,” Jack says to Walcott.
The referee looked at John and waved Walcott on.
“Go in there, you slob,” he says.
Walcott went in. He didn’t know what to do either. He never thought Jack