The Professional

by W. c. Heinz

  At about 12:30 I was lying on my bed and reading and Doc was napping on his. The window was open and I heard car wheels on the gravel and got up and looked out. It was one of those big black for-hire Cadillacs, with driver, and the newspapermen—six of them—were getting out.

  “What is it?” Doc said, sitting up. I hadn’t said anything, so he must have sensed it.

  “The riot squad. The gentlemen of the press.”

  “It’s about time they showed.”

  “It’ll be a riot, too. Tom White’s with them.”

  “I was afraid of that, but I was hoping he didn’t come to camps any more.”

  “He doesn’t. Just for the big ones. I haven’t seen him in a year. You’re supposed to be honored.”

  “A year is too soon. Why does he have to be like that?”

  “You know as well as I do. He’s getting old.”

  Doc had put on a tie, and was getting into his jacket.

  “We all are, but not like that. What’s the matter with him?”

  “He can’t take the competition. His seams are showing.”

  “Then he should quit.”

  “Don’t get drunk and tell him that.”

  “I’m not crazy.”

  Doc went down and I washed and thought about it. When I was just starting in New York, Tom White had already come down from Syracuse and it was all new then and he was new and he took the town. You should never take those years from him because he was the best, but then it became the second time around for him and the third, and somewhere along the way, he got tired of working and resorted to the impression that he owned it all—that the ball games were played for him and the fights fought for him. I could see him starting to resent the new ones among us and, when I read him, I could taste that tangy wine turning to vinegar and the whole thing spoiling before the bottom of the barrel and the grave.

  I looked in on Eddie, but he was asleep, with the white candlewick spread pulled up over him, so I closed the door again and went down. They were spread along the bar, Doc in the middle with Tom White, Tom doing the talking and Ernie Gordon hovering at his side, calling him “boss” and making certain to be listening and to light Tom’s cigarette and to signal Girot for another martini for Tom.

  “What the hell are you doing here?” Tom said, and we shook hands.

  “Hello, Tom.”

  “What are you doing here?”

  “I want to ask the same about you.”

  He was a good-looking guy, even at sixty and dissipated, and he still dressed with the best.

  “Well, I thought I’d write a few columns about this damn fight. I don’t think it’s going to be so much but, for some reason, there’s a lot of interest in it.”

  “It’ll be a good fight.”

  “It better be, after those stinkers they’ve been putting on that television. What are you doing here?”

  “I’m doing a magazine piece about Eddie.”

  “Still with that magazine stuff? Why don’t you get back in an honest business, like ours? Those magazine editors don’t know what they’re doing.”

  In the time they’ve been here, I was thinking, he can’t have had more than one. He sure comes out of the gate fast these days.

  “Magazine editors. What the hell do they know about sports?”

  I watched him. He had three at the bar, and kept insisting that Doc keep up with him. When we sat down he had another, and ordered another one for Doc. He seemed in a pretty good humor, talking about the old days and what he once told Kearns, in front of Dempsey, but he just picked at his food.

  By the time we had finished eating, Eddie was going into the gym, so we all went in there. They were too many for the small dressing room, so they waited for Eddie to come out, and then he sat on the ring apron, with Doc sitting next to him, and they sat in the chairs. There were four of them in the first row and I sat in the second row with Tom and Ernie Gordon.

  It was so warm in the gym, even with a couple of windows open, that Eddie did not need his robe, and he sat there in just his white T-shirt and brief white-knitted trunks and white woolen socks and his ring shoes. Freddie Thomas handed him some gauze, and he started wrapping the right hand, his legs dangling, while they asked him the questions. It was so warm, in fact, that when I looked over at Tom his eyelids were heavy, and I figured that, with the drinks in him, he might fall asleep.

  “So what makes you think you can win this fight?” he said suddenly, stirring.

  “I just believe I can,” Eddie said, still bandaging.

  “Great! That’ll make big news. You ask him something, Ernie.”

  “Eddie,” Ernie said, “what do you think of the other guy, technically? I mean, what do you think is his best hand?”

  “Who the hell cares about that?” Tom said, turning on Ernie.

  “His best hand?” Eddie said. “His left.”

  “What do you want me to ask him?” Ernie said to Tom.

  “Get a story! Get a story! What the hell do you think I got you up here for?”

  This is going to be great, I was thinking. The only trouble is that I’ve seen this play before.

  “You say his left hand?” one of them in the front row said. “He’s knocked a few of them out with his right.”

  “I know,” Eddie said. “He’s got two hands, but I think his left—that jab and hook—is his best.”

  “The left is the fighter’s working hand,” Doc said. “The right just comes in for the pay-off.”

  “Like you,” Tom said. “You ought to know.”

  I looked at Doc and saw him look at Tom, and his face set. I was thinking that I ought to go out and get Tom another drink. If he didn’t knock it out of my hand it would put him to sleep, and that would be a way out of it.

  “What about those three fights you lost, Eddie?” one of them in the front said.

  “I lost three. I won eighty-seven.”

  “I don’t mean that.”

  “I’ll answer that,” Doc said. “He got two bad decisions, one in Philadelphia and one in Boston.”

  “That’s right,” Ernie Gordon said. “I saw the one in Boston.”

  “What are you siding with him for?” Tom said, turning on Ernie.

  “The other fight he lost,” Doc said, “I got him licked on purpose.”

  “I’ll bet,” Tom said, raising his voice.

  “What do you mean, Doc?” one of them in front said.

  “About seven years ago he licked a guy pretty good in a semifinal in Pittsburgh. It was outdoors, with a couple of heavyweights on top. He started to think he was pretty good.”

  “I’ll bet,” Tom said, again loudly.

  “The next fight he had he looked lousy. He beat the guy, but he was trying to make me out a liar and—”

  “That’s no great feat,” Tom said.

  “He thought he knew it all, now, so I got him a semifinal in Cleveland. I got him a guy licked him, not bad, but he licked him. He needed it.”

  “That’s right,” Eddie said, smoothing the tape on the hand and nodding. “I know it now.”

  “You want us to believe that?” Tom said.

  “What?” Doc said, and I could see it all over his face now.

  “You know what.”

  “Look, Tom. I don’t give a damn whether you believe it or not.”

  “Oh, you don’t?”

  “No.”

  “You think I’m going to believe that stuff, like that line you handed Dave Scott in that column he had yesterday morning?”

  So that’s it, I thought. It’s that competition and how he resents Dave.

  “I don’t give a damn what you believe.”

  “Let’s forget it,” I said. “Let’s have a drink.”

  “I’m not going to forget it,” Tom said. “That stuff about why he never had a champion before. Why, you couldn’t have won that title with Rusty Ryan or anybody, and you won’t win it with this guy, either. You’re nothing but a loud mouth.”

  “If y
ou weren’t drunk,” Doc said, “I’d belt you.”

  “Easy, Doc,” Eddie said, sliding off the ring apron with Doc.

  “Who’s drunk?” Tom said, standing up, Ernie holding him by the right arm. We were all standing now.

  “You are,” Doc said. “You’re a miserable, goddamn dirty drunk, who stands on corners and abuses people in that column. You don’t know the first goddamn thing about boxing and you never did. You can’t even write good any more because the rot has set in from the inside and you’re dead and you don’t know it. Don’t think you can intimidate me with your lousy column. Not any more.”

  “Come on, Doc,” I said. “Knock it off.”

  I knew it was not only the drinks talking, but the fight and Jay and many years and everything.

  “Knock it off?” Tom said, sneering at me. “He’s going to get knocked off. That fighter of his there is going to get flattened, and I’m going to say it in that paper tomorrow—that and a few more things.”

  “I don’t give a damn what you say,” Doc said.

  “Come on,” one of those in front with Doc said.

  “You’ll see all right. You’ll see it in the paper.”

  “No I won’t,” Doc said, “because I haven’t read that stinking column of yours for five years, and I won’t read it tomorrow. And I’ll tell you something else. Don’t talk like that about this fighter here.”

  “Forget it, Doc,” Eddie said.

  “Why not? I’ll say and write what I want about him.”

  “And show your stupidity. He’s not only gonna knock that other guy out but, when he does it, the other guy will go down with his face right in front of yours. Print that.”

  With that Doc pulled his arm away from Eddie and turned and walked to the back of the gym. Freddie Thomas followed him, and I looked at Eddie and he shrugged at me.

  “I’m getting out of here,” Tom said. “I’m going down to that other camp. Where’s that damn driver?”

  “He’s in the bar,” Ernie Gordon said. “What are the rest of us supposed to do?”

  “I don’t give a damn what you do. I’ll send him back.”

  After Tom left, Eddie boxed four rounds and Doc said nothing to him the whole time. Then the rest of them went into the dining room and found their typewriters and started to write their pieces. When I came into the dressing room Freddie Thomas had just brought the tea and Doc was trying to make work for himself, picking things up and putting them down again, while the fighters drank their tea.

  “Well,” I said, “now that it’s over I’m glad I was here to hear it.”

  “I’m glad you were, too,” Doc said.

  “I’d have done anything I could to have stopped it, but I couldn’t think of anything.”

  “What difference does it make?”

  “He’ll rap you in the column tomorrow,” Eddie said.

  “He’ll rap you, too,” Doc said, “but what difference does it make? It’s about time somebody in this business told him off.”

  “That’s right,” I said, “but you really burned that bridge.”

  “Who needs it? What do I have to worry about him for any more? I’ve got a fighter that’ll stand up for me in there. You knock that guy out and you’re the champion, and what have I got to worry about? Tom White? He only picks on little people.”

  The next day, right after the workout, I took Eddie’s car and drove into the town and got the paper. I read the column, standing in the cigar store, and when I got back Doc was in the room and I handed it to him.

  “He never mentions you or Eddie,” I said. “He just datelines himself from the other camp and writes about the other guy.”

  Doc read the column, quickly, and then threw the paper on the bed.

  “I knew he had no guts,” he said.

  “Of course not. He’s afraid Eddie’s going to win.”

  “No guts,” Doc said. “Absolutely no guts.”

  23

  Then came the quiet days, the quiet days loud with implication.

  “All right,” Doc said. “That’s enough.”

  It was that Monday afternoon, in the gym.

  “How many rounds was that?” Eddie said, when Doc took the mouthpiece out.

  “Seven.”

  “I feel like more.”

  “Good. Never mind the bags today. Go in and cool out. We’ll weigh after your shower.”

  It is one of the most difficult of scientific endeavors, this struggle to bring an athlete up the mountain of his efforts to the peak of his performance at the precise moment when he must perform. That peak place is no bigger than the head of a pin, shrouded in the clouded mysteries of a living being, and so, although all try, most fail, for it requires not only the most diligent of climbers but the greatest of guides.

  “You have to play the probability,” Doc said, explaining it, standing by the window and looking out across the parking space at the fresh greenery beyond and waiting for Eddie. “You ask a fighter how he feels and he says: ‘Good,’ or ‘All right.’ Does he know for sure? You got to be able to see your fighter better than he can see himself, and play the probability.

  “Most of them, they go wrong trying to bring a fighter right up to some fine point the last day. Figure the chances of the miss, under or over. Either way you’re just as bad off. You can’t ask for odds in this life. You’ve got to make them. I found out. You hit a level where he’s almost where you want him to be four or five days before the fight. It’s not as hard to hold that. Then the next step he takes is the step into the ring, and he’s there and that’s where he fights.”

  The scale was in the room with the frosted rectangular light with the silhouette of the Colonial dame over the door. Eddie slipped out of his shower clogs and Freddie Thomas took the robe off him and Eddie stood naked and statuesque on the scale. We waited while Doc moved the weights along the bars.

  “One sixty and a half,” he said.

  “That’s good,” Eddie said.

  He stepped down and Freddie helped him into the robe and then Eddie slipped his feet back into the shower clogs. I held the door for him, and Freddie and Doc followed him out.

  “You trust that scale?” I said to Doc.

  “I should. It cost me fifteen bucks for Girot to get the guy up here to test it and set it right. He’ll make fifty-nine and a half, exactly what I told that Doc Martin. So don’t hold any more doors for him.”

  Freddie Thomas was following Eddie into the dressing room.

  “What do you mean?” I said.

  “He’s no invalid. He can open his own doors.”

  “I was just being polite. What’s eating you?”

  “Nothing. The last few days before a fight everybody bows and scrapes for a fighter so you’d think he was Prince Rainier. There’s enough pressure building up inside him as it is.”

  “Sorry.”

  “When I’m not thinking, I do it myself. Let’s have a drink.”

  It was that evening and in the sitting room we sat, all of us—Eddie and Doc and Freddie Thomas and Artie Winant and Memphis and DeCorso and Girot—and watched Al Penna fight his semifinal. They were two green kids, all arms and elbows and gloves, trying to knock each other out in a hurry, their heads snapping back with the punches and the crowd hollering, and in the fifth round Penna was cut over the left eye.

  “Oh-oh,” Eddie said. “Come on, Al.”

  “Dreadful,” Doc said.

  They were trying to stop the bleeding in the corner, but in the sixth round it opened again. Now the other kid was going for the eye, and the referee was looking at Penna every time he broke them, and after that round, and after the seventh, the doctor was in the corner. In the eighth round Penna hurt the other kid, the two of them flailing away and the crowd across the ring on its feet, screaming.

  “Al made some fight,” Eddie said, while we waited for the decision. “I think he won it.”

  “The guts of a burglar,” Doc said.

  “I still think you’ve got hi
m wrong,” I said.

  “The decision,” the announcer said, “is a draw! A draw!”

  The crowd was still standing and applauding.

  “I thought he won it, cut and all,” Eddie said.

  “The other guy lost it,” Doc said, “going for the eye.”

  “That’s no fighter,” Girot said, shaking his head. “Al Penna, he’s crazy. He keeps fighting and he’ll be hurt. You watch.”

  “Come on, bon ami. You know you were rooting for him.”

  “For him? I don’t root for him. I root for you.”

  “Thanks, and good night,” Eddie said.

  It was that Tuesday, and it rained all day. It was coming down as early-morning mist when Freddie Thomas and I walked with Eddie and the sparring partners and Artie Winant up the driveway to the road. It was building on the new leaves and on the branches, and the only sound was the sound of the feet on the gravel and of the dripping from the leaves and from the branches.

  “Let’s just walk to the top of the hill,” I said to Freddie, when the fighters started off. “I want to see how it looks today where they’re running.”

  From the top of the rise of the road we could see them making the curve, beyond and below, Eddie in the lead and the three of them in the rhythm of it but Artie Winant lagging. Then they ran into that gray-blue mist that hung so low.

  When it was time for them to get back we walked back up the driveway and, when they came in, the mist was on Eddie’s wind jacket in droplets and on his face like sweat and on his short hair like hoarfrost. His breath hung in front of him like cigarette smoke until it mingled, lost, with the mist, and as we walked down the driveway I noticed the small swamp maple, green now, where the ruby-crowned kinglet that Jay had thought was a canary had rested. I thought to the willow beyond the roof line of the hotel, the willow light green now, too, and I wished we were sitting in the sun again, listening to Memphis tell about Australia. I wanted us once more to have all that time.

  It was that Wednesday, and I called the AP in New York again and found out that Booker Boyd had knocked his man out in three rounds and I told Eddie. That afternoon he boxed his last in the silence of the gym, just the squeak of the shoes on the canvas and the thud of the big gloves and the sound of the breathing for two rounds, one with DeCorso and the last with Memphis. In that round he turned it on and was the complete fighter and spoke as eloquently as I ever heard a man speak.