"All right," he said to the fighter. "Move around. Let's see how fast you can move. Now slow it down. Good.
"You see?" he said to me. "He slows the action down to where he wants it—to one punch. I've taught him that speed is detrimental, because if you're moving fast you're also moving your opponent fast. If you're out hunting, would you rather shoot at a slow-moving or a fast-moving target? It's the same thing. He's been taught how to put two thirds of the ring behind him. He doesn't want it, but those jabbers and runners do, and he deprives them of it."
Jack had the fighter box three rounds then, but there was the same shortage of fighters in Seattle as everywhere else, and the light-heavyweight he was in with had been around Jack and the fighter too long. As soon as the fighter would start to build up a move the light-heavyweight would know what was doing, but you could see one thing. You could see that this was another Hurley fighter, and if you knew anything about boxing you could tell a Hurley fighter from the others as easily as an art expert can tell a Rembrandt from a Harry Grunt. There was that shuffle step, that came out of Heudicourt and the bayonet drill that Jack perfected with Petrolle, and there were those moves, with the hands low and in punching position, inviting you to lead and have your block knocked off with the counter.
"But don't you see?" Jack was saying to the fighter when it was over. "You were jumping in instead of sneaking that right foot up. You gotta sneak it up so they don't know it's coming. They think you're just jabbin', but that's only the camouflage so you can move the artillery up behind the jab. I don't even care if the jab misses."
With Jack eating every three hours and not going to bed until two or three in the morning because he had trouble sleeping, we spent a lot of time sitting around restaurants and cafeterias and the lobby of the Olympic with Jack's cronies, talking about the way things used to be and what the world was coming to. That was Jack's hobby.
"Isn't it terrible, the condition the fight game is in today?" Jack would say. "You wouldn't believe it, would you? A lot of Johnny-come-lately booking agents who call themselves managers and don't know the first thing about it. Amateurs! Why, amateurs just clutter up the world. They louse up everything they put their hands to.
"Look at what that television did, too," he'd say, "and it'll do it to pro football next. Why, you can't give your product away free and have people still respect it. That TV cheapens everything it touches. It would even cheapen the Second Coming."
Late every afternoon, of course, we would be over at the Eagles Temple, with Jack hounding the fighter. No matter what the fighter would be doing—boxing, shadow-boxing, punching the bag, or skipping rope—Jack would be after him.
"No, no," Jack would say, the fighter shadow-boxing around the ring. "Don't set your feet. Just walk. Now the left hook to the head. You're too tense. Just turn with it. All right. Now you jab, and the guy is a runner, so you're too far away. Now you gotta step again. Now the guy is pulling away, so you gotta throw three punches, but only one is gonna land. Now you're with a guy throws an uppercut. Now turn away so it misses, and throw the right hand up into the body. Good.
"You see?" Jack said to me. "He's like a pool player, practicing those draw shots. He's gotta get that ball back there, so he practices hour after hour until it becomes instinct. Like a pool player, he's also playing position at all times, and you know how long this practice lasts? His entire career. He'll still be practicing it when he quits, and you know something? If he's having trouble hitting a left hook to the body, it's nothing for me to sentence him to two weeks of doing nothing else. He wants to learn it to get rid of me.
"All right now," he'd say to the fighter. "You're in there with one of those runners, so you don't want to scare him or he'll start running again. Easy now. Left hook to the body. No, no! Let him see it. Start it back farther so he'll be sure to see it, because you want him to drop his hands. Good. Do that again.
"You see?" Jack said to me. "Other guys breed fear, but it's like cornering a frightened pig. This guy has been taught to encourage them, to make them feel safe. He'll sometimes miss a jab to give 'em courage, and Petrolle even had the facial expressions to go with it. The first thing you knew, he'd catch those suckers moving in."
The last afternoon, though, Jack was discouraged. We had to be in Boise the next day so Jack could go on TV and radio and talk up the fight. The fighter was going to come in two days later, just in time for the weigh-in, with Marino Guaing, the little Filipino who was training amateur fighters around Seattle and helped Jack.
"No, no," Jack was saying to the fighter, watching him hit the big bag. "The left hook is too tight. It's got to be looser. Just throw it up there. No good. Your feet were off the floor. No. Bend those knees a little. It's like you're on stilts.
"Isn't that terrible?" Jack said to me, turning away from the fighter and shaking his head. "He never did that before. You gotta watch 'em every damn minute of the day.
"Now start soft," he said to the fighter. "Easy. Now increase the power a little. Now your stiff-legged again. Start over."
The sweat was dripping off the fighter's chin. The floor under the bag was speckled with it, but Jack was still unhappy walking back to the hotel.
"Now where would he have picked that up?" he said. "You see what I mean? He picks up a bad habit, or he goes on the road and he steps on a pebble and he turns his ankle. He's liable to sleep with the window wide open and catch a cold. He comes to the gym and he may get his eye cut or hurt his hand. That's why, when you manage a fighter, you end up with cancer, heart trouble, or ulcers. I took the least."
"But look at the rewards," I said, hoping to kid Jack out of it. "How about all that fame and fortune?"
"Yeah," Jack said. "You raise him like a baby. That ring is a terrible place to be in if you don't know what you're doing in there, but you teach him how to survive. You teach him how to make his first steps, and you bring him along until he becomes a good fighter and starts to make money.
"Now, when you come into the ring with him you don't do nothin'. He's a professional fighter. He doesn't need people pawing at him and dousing him with water and tiring him out. He needs a little quiet advice, but no one sees that. So they see me up there, and they say to the fighter, 'What's he do for you?' Twenty guys say it, and it means nothin'. By the time eighty guys say it, though, the fighter forgets. This one will too.
"I'll tell you," Jack said. "Regardless of the outcome, this is my last fighter."
At 7:30 the next morning I met Jack in the lobby, and a bellhop named Harry carried our bags out and wished Jack luck. In the cab on the way to the airport Jack was looking at the heavy traffic heading into town.
"Look at the mules," he said. "Isn't that terrible? At 4:30 they'll all be heading the other way to take those paychecks back to the creatures. When I started out, my mother wanted me to get a steady job. I said, 'Mom, a steady job is a jail. I see these fellas I grew up with here, and they're in prison ten hours a day. I want to see something, go somewhere, and I can make a living doing it.' You care where you sit on the plane?"
"No," I said.
"I like to sit over the wing," Jack said. "It kinda gives you the feeling you've got something under you. Besides, I couldn't sleep last night. I think I slept an hour, so I want to grab a little nap."
We were the first in line and the first on the plane, and I had Jack take the window seat where he wouldn't be bothered by the traffic in the aisle. I reached up and got him a pillow, and he had just settled his head back and closed his eyes when I heard the small voice right behind us.
"Eeee choo-choo, Mommy?" the voice was saying, "Eeee choo-choo?"
"No," the woman's voice said. "Not choo-choo, dear. Airplane."
"Eeee choo-choo?"
Jack opened his eyes. He had that pinched look on his face again, and he sat up.
"Isn't that something?" he said, shaking his head. "With the whole plane to pick from I gotta draw a creature and her kid. Wouldn't you know it? Ninety per cent of those
eye operations are successful, too, but I gotta be in the other ten per cent."
It didn't make any difference, because Jack wasn't going to sleep anyway. We weren't off the ground more than twenty minutes when Jack's rheumatism started to act up, and he had to stand in the aisle, holding onto the arm of my seat, almost all the way to Boise.
"Isn't that terrible?" Jack said, as we were getting off. "A whole plane, and that creature and the kid have to sit behind us."
"But he was a cute kid," I said.
"Yeah, you're right," Jack said. "I took a look at him, and he was."
Then Jack really went to work. After we checked into the hotel we walked down Main Street, with Jack saying he couldn't see a thing in the bright, shimmering sunlight and with me helping him up and down the curbs, to Al Berro's. Al Berro was promoting the fight, but for a living he was running the Bouquet Sportsmen's Center. The Bouquet had one of those long Western bars down the right side, with the meal for the day chalked on a blackboard at the far end, and along the opposite wall a half dozen tables with faded green baize covers and the nine-card joker rummy games going.
"Am I glad you're here!" Berro said, shaking Jack's hand.
"How's it look?" Jack said.
"Pretty good," Berro said.
"There goes that 'pretty good' again," Jack said to me.
"I think we'll do all right," Berro said, "but I've got you lined up for the radio and TV. You ready to start?"
In the next eight hours, with Berro driving us around town, Jack was on two television and four radio stations, and at 9 o'clock that night he was over at the Idaho Daily Statesman.
"Now what brings you to Boise?" one of them, interviewing Jack on the TV or the radio, would say, as if he didn't know.
"Well, I've got Boone Kirkman boxing Archie Ray, from Phoenix, at the Fairgrounds arena on Thursday night," Jack would say. "My best friends in the boxing game tell me I may be making a mistake, though, because my fighter has had only four fights and Archie Ray has had twenty-three, with eighteen wins, ten by knockout."
"What's going to happen at the Fairgrounds arena on Thursday night?" another would say.
"Well, it's hard to tell," Jack would say. "All the people in the fight game tell me Archie Ray is gonna lick my fighter for sure, but of course I don't think so."
"Jack, is Boone going to shoot for a first-round KO," another would say, "or is he going to play with this fella?"
"He doesn't play with anybody," Jack would say. "You see, all my boxing friends tell me Archie Ray is gonna be too much for my guy, but we'll find out Thursday night at the Fairgrounds arena."
Jack did some job. Knowing how he felt, and that he hadn't slept much the night before, I was amazed that he got through the day.
"Ah, I don't have the enthusiasm for it anymore," he said when we got back to the hotel.
"You've got me beat," I said.
"I'm old and I'm sick and I'm tired," he said, "but you can't let the bastards know it. They'd kill you."
On the day of the fight, the fighter and Marino, the trainer, got in about twenty minutes before the one o'clock weigh-in at the State Capitol. The elevator operator who took us up was a middle-aged woman wearing a white uniform blouse and dark skirt. She was sitting on a stool in front of the panel of buttons and, open on her lap, was an instructional volume of the Famous Writers School.
"Do you subscribe to that course?" I asked her on the way down.
"Yes," she said, looking up at me and her face brightening. "Do you?"
"No," I said, "but I've heard about it."
"I think it's just wonderful," she said. "I'm really enjoying it."
"Good," I said.
"What was all that about?" Jack said to me when we got off.
"She's taking a correspondence course in how to be a writer," I said. "It costs over four hundred bucks, and I think that, for the ones like her, it's a lonely hearts club."
"That figures, don't it?" Jack said.
When we got back to the hotel, Jack had the fighter rest until 3:30. Then we took him to the restaurant across the street.
"You'd better bring him two of your top sirloins," Jack said to the waitress, "and a baked potato and hot tea."
"The baked potato doesn't come on the menu until five," the waitress said.
"In Idaho?" the fighter said.
"Isn't that terrible?" Jack said, looking at me. "They want you to eat what they want you to eat when they want you to eat it."
After the fighter finished eating he took a walk with Marino, and Jack and I went down to a cafe he liked on Main Street, and he had a ham sandwich on whole-wheat bread, sliced bananas, and a cup of tea. At 7:30 Jack was sitting in the hotel lobby when the fighter and Marino came down from their rooms with Marino carrying the fighter's black zipper bag.
"Listen," Jack said to the fighter, "when you finished eating across the street there, did you remember to tip the waitress?"
"Gee, no," the fighter said. "I forgot."
"Here," Jack said, handing him a bill. "Go over and do it now."
When the fighter came back we all got in a cab and went out to the Fairgrounds. In the dark the cabbie missed the main entrance, so we rode around between a lot of barns before we got to the arena with the sign SALES PAVILION over the door.
"You see?" Jack said when we got inside, the customers milling around us. "It's like the old Cambria in Philadelphia."
From where the ring was set up in the middle of the floor the solid planking of the wooden stands went back and up like steps on all four sides to where the walls and the ceiling rafters met. The stands were about half full, with more customers climbing up and sliding along the rows and sitting down.
"You gonna fill up?" Jack said to Al Berro.
"I don't know," Berro said. "I've got eleven hundred and fifty bucks in, and I've only collected at the Stagecoach, Hannifin's and a couple of others. I've got Homedale and Mountain Home coming in yet, so we'll do pretty good."
"There goes that 'pretty good' again," Jack said.
They had the fighter dressing under the stands in a small room with a wash basin and a toilet in it and a shower without a curtain. There was no rubbing table, only a green painted bench, and when the fighter stood up, he had to be careful not to hit his head on the naked light bulb sticking down from the low ceiling.
It was hot in the room, so the fighter had stripped down and was in his black trunks with white stripes. He had put on his white socks and was lacing his ring shoes. Through the wall you could hear the ring announcer bringing on the first preliminary.
"Marino," Jack said, "tell them I'm gonna start bandaging and to send somebody over here if they want to watch."
"But I just there," Marino said. "They don't come in yet."
"Then the hell with them," Jack said. "I'm gonna start anyway."
"Oh, excuse me," one of the customers said, looking in. "I thought this was the men's room."
"Next door," the fighter said.
"This will go on all night," Jack said. "They sell a lot of beer here."
With his bad eyes Jack had to squint to see what he was doing, but after bandaging fighters' hands for a half century, he could have done it with his eyes closed. While he was putting it on—the gauze around the wrist, and then across the palm and between the thumb and index finger, and then back around the wrist and around the hand and across the knuckles, and then the tape—we could hear the crowd hollering and then, over our heads, the stamping of feet.
"All right," Jack said to Marino when it was over. "Grease him up."
Marino rubbed the cocoa butter on the fighter's arms and shoulders and chest and neck and face. When he had finished, Jack sent him to watch the other people bandage and put the gloves on. The fighter was sitting on the bench, his bandaged hands in his lap, serious now.
"The hell with them," Jack said after a while. "We might as well get into the gloves. Then you'll have plenty of time to loosen up, because they take that intermission to sell m
ore beer."
"Good," the fighter said.
Jack helped the fighter into the right glove first, the laces down the palm and then around the wrist, then tied the ends and put a strip of tape over it. When he had finished with the left glove, Marino was back.
"They all done now," he said.
"All right," Jack said to the fighter. "Loosen up, but be careful of that light. Now jab . . . hook . . . jab . . . move up behind it. All right, but don't stand there. You gotta move right up behind it. And another thing, if you start to miss punches just settle down and start over again."
"I know," the fighter said.
"We're ready to go Jack," Al Berro said, sticking his head through the doorway after the fighter had had about five minutes of it. "You ready?"
"Yeah," Jack said, and then to Marino, "You got the mouthpiece?"
Once They Heard the Cheers Page 17