The Winning Side

by Peter Corris

  ‘What happened?’ I said.

  ‘Well, it was him and this stocky bloke. I don’t think they even gave the negro’s name, they were just four round prelims. He had this dressing gown on that was too small for him, looked like he’d just picked it up in the dressing room. Well, he came out and his skin was shiny and smooth, like …’ He rubbed his battered fist on top of the bar.

  ‘Satin?’ I said.

  ‘Yeah, that’ll do. He had about six inches reach on our bloke and he just put his left in his face twice, hardly seemed to be hitting him at all, but his head snapped back.’ He demonstrated the movement and drank some beer.

  ‘And then … ?’

  ‘Then he crossed with the right and the other bloke just came apart. His knees went on him, sort of buckled, and he went down slow on his face. He didn’t move. I reckon he could have made him go sideways or any bloody way he liked.’

  ‘What happened then?’

  ‘Negro went back to his corner, didn’t even wait for the count. Put the dressing gown back on. There wasn’t a drop of sweat on him. He didn’t even have a shower.’

  ‘How d’you know that?’ I asked quickly.

  ‘Eddie Miller told me later. You know Eddie Miller?’

  I said I knew Eddie.

  ‘According to Eddie, he came in off the street and said he wanted a fight. Eddie said okay and offered him five quid for the four rounds, and the negro said that was a good deal. Turned out he did about fifteen seconds work so I suppose it was. Anyway, Eddie said he collected the fiver and went off without a shower.’

  ‘And he never came back?’

  ‘Eddie says he never saw him again.’

  ‘His name must have been in the paper.’

  ‘I never thought of that. But I’ll tell you this, it wouldn’t be his real name.’

  ‘Why? Who do you reckon he was?’ I signalled for another beer, I’d hardly touched mine. He thanked me when the schooner came and leaned down close to my ear.

  ‘Sugar Ray Robinson’, he whispered.

  I stared at him and he gave me a wink and took a big pull on his schooner. Then somebody called out to him from the other side of the bar and he nodded to me and moved off. I got up, left my beer, and made the phone call.

  I checked in with the chief sub at about eight, did a few quick jobs and then dived behind a typewriter. It didn’t come easy and I threw a few false starts away, but then it began to flow. I put together a sort of insider’s view of the boxing game during the war, harked back to the negro fighters of earlier days—Jackson and Felix and ‘Tiger’ Payne—and then I told Tommy Cossey’s story. I made it humorous but put it up as a semi-serious proposition—that Sugar Ray had been in town.

  I dropped the piece in Lenny Evans’s basket and went back to work feeling good. After knocking off around three a.m. the night subs usually went to the Journalists’ Club, but I gave it a miss and went home.

  Lenny ran it the next afternoon under the head: Did Sugar Ray Robinson fight in Sydney? He dressed it up with some pictures of Robinson and it looked pretty good. With the Butten fight coming up there was a good deal of interest in boxing again, so the timing was right. I was living in Chippendale; it was a small and hot room and the woman who ran the house didn’t like coming up the stairs with telephone messages. I had quite a few that afternoon. I called a few people back and we kidded about things, and before I knew it it was well past six o’clock and I hadn’t had a drink. I had an appointment next day with Rolly Meares, the deputy editor of the paper, and I decided to stay dry. I didn’t work often and money was short; I sometimes tossed up between eating and drinking. That night I went out and had a good meal.

  In the early afternoon the next day I went for a walk around Victoria Park. It was good to be sober and steady and feel the wind on my face; I sat on a bench and smoked. For no reason I looked under the seat and saw six wine bottles lying there, scattered at funny angles like dead bodies on a battlefield. I jammed my hat down and ran for the bus.

  Rolly sat me down in front of his desk, gave me a smoke, and looked me over.

  ‘Good piece.’ He stroked the fringe of hair around his bald head and peered at me over his specs.

  ‘Thanks’, I said.

  ‘I hear you’ve been on the piss for a while, Charlie.’

  I nodded and smoked.

  ‘Woman trouble, too?’

  ‘A bit.’

  ‘Are you off the grog now?’ I could feel him taking in the details of my appearance—eyes, shirt collar, shave.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Good. Look, we’ve had a bit of a reaction to that story of yours—blokes phoning in about checking with the US military records, a couple saying it was bullshit, and one character swears he met Robinson in Brisbane in 1944.’

  I laughed with him, but I was feeling very nervous; he was going to offer me something, and I didn’t know whether I was up to it.

  ‘D’you know Robinson’s real name, Charlie?’

  ‘Walker Smith Junior’, I said automatically.

  He nodded. ‘Thought you might. The thing is this, I need to do an interview with Butten and to cover the fight. Reckon you can handle it?’

  The room was hot and smokey; the typewriters were hammering and a telephone was ringing insistently and being ignored. It was the world I’d struggled hard to get into and which had given me some satisfaction, but which I’d found confusing in the end. I’d written stories about the problems of Aborigines in the city and the bush, and seen them put on the spike and forgotten. ‘Too strong, Charlie’ I’d been told. ‘Not yet, Charlie.’ But the world still attracted me, and that day the sounds of work were good.

  ‘I can do it, Rolly’, I said. ‘Thanks.’

  ‘Right.’ He was all business now. ‘I’ll put you on three days casual from today, and you can get some money for expenses. Set up the interview and sniff around a bit on Butten. Do a good job, Charlie, and we’ll look after you. See Brenda, she’ll give you a desk.’

  It went like a dream after that. I arranged to interview Butten, and talked on the phone to his manager. I read what they had on him in the library, and rang up everyone I could think of who could give me some background. I had a couple of full notebooks when I went out to see Butten.

  He lived in St Peters with his wife, in a pretty neat little house. We had a lot in common, the tent fighting, Queensland and the Aboriginal thing. We talked about the tents. Of course he’d have picked me as a quarter-caste in a second, but we didn’t get on to that. He’d read the Sugar Ray piece and we had a laugh about that. He knew a bit about the game in America from talking to some of the imported fighters. He said it was controlled by gangsters and he didn’t think an Australian would get a title shot. It didn’t seem to worry him; his ambition was to own a dairy farm and he reckoned he was well on the way. He was pretty smart, Butten, and I meant it when I wished him luck.

  I went back and wrote the piece using the gangster angle and it scrubbed up pretty well. I went to the pictures on the Thursday night, and when fight night came I still hadn’t had a drink since the time in the pub with Tommy Cossey.

  It was a capacity crowd, they had the signs out before the prelims started and everyone was saying it was like the old days. The fight was to decide the lightweight championship which Vic Patrick had left vacant when he retired. He’d been the best home-grown lightweight since Hughie Dwyer and it was hard for anyone to follow him, but Butten had the colour and the punch to do it.

  I got a few helloes from the other press men on account of the pieces I’d written, and I was feeling pretty good when I got to my seat. The stadium had a big fight atmosphere—the bleachers were shrouded in smoke and there were a lot of women around, all dressed up to the nines.

  Stripped, Campbell and Butten just didn’t go together at all. Jim was tall for a lightweight, about five ten, with all the weight in his chest and shoulders. His legs were stick-thin. Campbell was just plain unimpressive: he was well-enough proportioned, but th
ere was something fragile about him. He was part-Chinese and you could see it in his features and straight, black hair—they were a pair of mongrels all right.

  I was three rows back, nicely centered, and Knobby Barnes from the Globe dropped into the seat beside me just as they were booing Joe Wallace, the ref.

  ‘Who d’you like, Charlie?’

  I wanted to say that I didn’t like the look of either of them; Butten looked trained down too fine to me. He looked edgy and Campbell looked the way most Melbourne boys looked at Rushcutters Bay—pale and a long way from home.

  ‘Jack’, I said.

  ‘Blood brother, eh?’

  I sighed and let it pass. I’d had it said to me about Freddie Dawson and Chief Little Wolf.

  Wallace beckoned them in, they touched gloves and got down to it. I’d seen Butten fight a few times before and he was always the same, flat-footed, but with a good range of punches. He hit hard at long and short range and the hitting didn’t seem to take much out of him which meant he was doing it right. Campbell was a lot faster though, and a better boxer. He used the ring well, cut Jim off a couple of times and made him look green. He outboxed him for the first seven or eight rounds but didn’t hurt him one bit. With that plodding style and economical punching, Jim was still fresh in the ninth when Arch started to slow up. He took a few hard ones and didn’t look good in the break. He was hanging on a bit in the tenth and Wallace bulldozed them apart with that great fat gut of his.

  Campbell looked sick when he came out for the eleventh and a few people were saying Wallace should stop it.

  Knobby Barnes grinned. ‘Wallace wouldn’t stop a fight unless the blood was knee deep.’

  Campbell was only trying to stay out of the way now, but he was slow and awkward. He kept waving that neat little Oriental-looking head around and Jim couldn’t get a shot at it. Eventually Butten was sure he wasn’t foxing and he caught him in a corner and ripped him hard. Jim let out grunts with the punches which was unusual for him. Archie Campbell looked as if a giant hand had gone down his throat and pulled his guts out. He looked empty. Most of us were on our feet shouting at Wallace, and Jim looked at him to ask him the same thing. Wallace waved Butten on as Campbell came lurching off the ropes; Butten landed two rights on Campbell’s head which wasn’t weaving anymore and then he hung a wicked left on his jaw. Arch went over backwards and his head thumped on the ring floor. Wallace counted him out. Then the ring filled up with people—the seconds, stadium officials and the ambulance men. The ring doctor straightened up and shook his head.

  Knobby Barnes was on his feet, craning to look into the ring and chomping on a cigar. ‘Great fight, Charlie’, he bubbled. ‘He’ll be the first Abo to be world champ.’

  Butten was standing near his corner; his handlers were paying more attention to Campbell than to him. Jim’s long face was set and worried. The gloves looked big and lumpy at the ends of his skinny arms. He didn’t look like a world champ, he looked frightened.

  I went back to the office and tried to write about the fight but I couldn’t. I wanted to write about the yellow man stretched on the canvas, with blood oozing from his mouth and one leg rucked up and the oscenely fat white man counting over him, and the lean dark man breathing hard and looking scared. But I couldn’t write it. I kept phoning the hospital through the night and in the morning they announced that Mr Campbell had died without regaining consciousness.

  I tore up the paper I’d written on and dumped it. Then I went to the club and got blind, stinking, Darwin drunk.

  3

  MARSDEN was worse than I’d expected; the air seemed to hold a hundred different smells, all of them suggesting hot, unpleasant work. There was a grittiness from the limestone quarries and a sulphurous tang that came from the match factory. I’d heard that the area supported timber mills and fishing but those clean, natural smells weren’t on the wind.

  As I lifted my bag I noticed that the arm I’d had out of the window for a good part of the way from Sydney had darkened with the sun. I was darkening as I got older anyway, and my eyebrows, which were a bit thickened from boxing cuts, seemed to be growing heavier. It was funny, there’d be no more chance of pretending to be white as I’d done in my younger days. And Marsden would be the place to underline the fact, the place where I’d get a boot sole on my flash city shoes and no apology; where I’d have to speak very politely to get a drink. And I didn’t want to be within five hundred miles of the bloody place anyway.

  I was there because of Tony Moondi; and he was there because he shot a man. After the war I’d written to the Queensland Aboriginal Affairs Department to find out what had happened to my family. My mother had died on the mission and my father at Palm Island. I got the address of my sister Margaret and wrote to her occasionally. Through Margaret I got in touch with Thomases and Bentons and a whole network of Aboriginal families in Queensland and northern New South Wales. Tony Moondi was a sort of cousin of mine who shot a man he found in bed with his wife. He shot the wife too, but she lived, the man didn’t. He’d been fairly wild, Tony, a bit of a drunk and a bit of a thief; nothing serious though. But his wife and the man he’d killed were white and they gave him twenty years with hard labour.

  He started it at the Bay, was transferred to Goulburn and from there to Marsden, where he was classified as an intractable. Prison life would have been hell to Tony and, if what I’d heard was right, he wasn’t prepared to put up with hell much longer.

  I tramped into the town. It was near midday and hot. The bar of the Commercial Hotel was cool and the temperature went down a bit further when I ordered a beer. The barman took in my haircut, shave, tie, clean sports clothes, and pulled the beer.

  ‘Thanks’, I said. ‘Who do I see about a room?’

  ‘All taken’, he grunted.

  ‘I see.’ I drank some beer and looked around. Midday drinkers have their own problems, the other men in the bar weren’t paying me any particular attention. I finished the drink and put the glass back on the bar. The barman didn’t leap to pull me another.

  ‘Where can I find Bill Oliver?’ I kept my voice quiet and neutral.

  ‘Why d’you want him?’

  I didn’t answer and he flushed; he wasn’t used to word games with Abos, but he decided to play it safe. ‘He’ll be over at the Longhurst’, he muttered.

  The Longhurst Hotel was across the street and almost a replica of the Commercial, except that it was doing better business. The man I asked pointed out a burly giant who was standing as close to the bar as his gut would let him. He was bald, his hat was on the bar beside his schooner and a pile of notes and coins. I stood beside the two men he was drinking with, and when there was a pause in their conversation I stuck my hand out.

  ‘Bill Oliver?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Charlie Thomas, up from Sydney, friend of Jim Swan.’

  He shook my hand. ‘Gidday, Charlie—Perc Brown, Ernie Darby. Beer?’

  When it was my shout I handed over Swan’s note along with the schooner. Oliver unfolded it and read while he sipped. He sighed and stuck the paper in his pocket. ‘Great man, Jim Swan’, he said. ‘Bloody hero in the Depression. What can I do for you, Charlie?’

  ‘I want a room in the Commercial; barman says they’re full.’

  He grinned and showed a mouthful of cracked, stained teeth.

  ‘Come on, you blokes.’ Perc and Ernie picked up their glasses and the four of us walked out through the bar door on to the footpath. Oliver cleared his throat, and roared in a voice like a bull-horn:

  ‘Harry!’

  After a minute or so a man appeared on the balcony of the Commercial; Oliver raised his glass to him, and then mimed sleeping by laying his head sideways on his hand. He rested the hand holding his glass on my shoulder. The man on the balcony nodded then disappeared inside. We went back into the bar.

  ‘Drink up, Charlie’, Oliver said. ‘Anything else I can do, just let me know.’

  I thanked him, finished the beer, and
went across to book a room in the Commercial Hotel.

  The next day I had an appointment to see my cousin for the first time in eight years. I shaved carefully, put on a fresh shirt, combed my springy hair down and ate breakfast with the six other guests in the hotel. None of them spoke to me; Bill Oliver could get an Abo a room in a hotel, but he couldn’t make people like it. After being ignored on the street a couple of times, I found the taxi rank. The driver looked dubious when I told him I wanted to go to the gaol. He drove nervously the whole way and barely gave me time to get out of the car.

  The place was smaller than I’d expected, a compact, stone-walled fortress with a few shrubs showing a defiant green against the greyness. It was an overcast day with a low, grey sky that seemed to settle protectively over the prison walls. Inside, I signed the book and declared myself as Tony’s cousin. I submitted to a search and followed a six foot, beefy guard down a flag-stoned corridor, on which his heavy boots rang like steam hammers. We went through grilles and heavy, metal-bound doors. I addressed a few questions to the guard, who slammed bolts and banged doors by way of reply. But I got to him in the end.

  ‘Tony popular here, is he?’

  ‘He laughed, and the keys on his belt jangled. ‘Oh yeah, he’s popular all right.’

  The room we went into was dark and smelled of dust; there was one light bulb burning, no natural light. Three chairs, set a few feet apart, faced a six foot high partition; in front of the chairs were sections of heavy metal mesh, about eighteen inches square. The guard waved me into the middle chair. I peered through the mesh into dimness; a door opened and a man shuffled forward. The shock was as if the guard had belted me with his nightstick. Tony had shrunk and got much darker; looking at his seamed face was like looking back into our past—to some old full-blood tribesman. It was partly a trick of the light and the signs of weather, work and misery in the face, sickness too.