Flanagan's Run

by Tom McNab

  “Mike Morgan!” bellowed Anderson. “The Mike Morgan of the Trans-America foot-race?”

  Morgan nodded, as the crowd responded with applause and shouts.

  “Well, ladies and gentlemen,” stressed Anderson. “This is one challenger who should stay the course.”

  He raised his hands above his head. “This, ladies and gentlemen, is indeed an honour. So let’s hear it for Mike Morgan, a worthy challenger indeed.” He started to applaud, both hands still above his head, and was immediately joined by the crowd now pressing hard against the flimsy wooden stage of the booth.

  Morgan knew that Anderson was already sizing him up. The “Professor” had gripped Morgan’s left arm to pull him up on to the stage, and now he tapped him jovially in the stomach to check his abdominal tone. The barker then nodded to one of his assistants, a nod which meant only one thing. They were going to put a heavier man against him, someone to whom Morgan would have to surrender at least twenty pounds. It was not going to be easy.

  On cue, Professor Anderson picked out a sweaty Leonard Levy in the front row of the packed crowd. Levy’s right arm was raised.

  “Yes, sir,” shouted Anderson. “What can I do for you?”

  Levy pushed his way up on to the wooden steps leading to the stage and whispered into the Professor’s ear. Anderson returned to the microphone, raising both hands for silence. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he shouted. “We have a further, special challenge!”

  He again raised his hands for silence and beckoned Levy, dressed in a white lightweight suit and Panama hat, to the microphone.

  “Ladies and gentlemen. May I proudly introduce to you one of the truly great sportsmen of our time, the creator of last week’s great race in St Louis, Mr Leonard H. Levy.”

  There was sustained applause, for Levy’s St Louis promotion had made him a considerable figure. Levy pulled the microphone to him and spoke in an unsteady voice.

  “Most of you know,” he said, “that Mr Flanagan has already made a small side bet on the result of this match.” He paused. “I wish to offer yet another challenge to Mr Flanagan. I offer him an additional wager of five thousand dollars at the generous odds of six to one that his champion cannot beat one of Professor Anderson’s picked men over four rounds. That, ladies and gentlemen, is my challenge.”

  There was applause, followed by whoops and cheers from the packed crowd in front of the booth.

  Anderson swooped on to the microphone, and said, “Would Mr Flanagan care to step up on to the stage?”

  Flanagan, already prepared at the steps leading up to the stage, walked confidently up on to the platform and lowered his head to the microphone.

  “I reckon everybody here knows me.”

  The crowd shouted their agreement.

  “So I reckon everybody here knows that above all things I am a sportsman?”

  The crowd again voiced their agreement.

  “So what do you think, my friends? Should I take on Mr Levy?” He turned to put his right hand on Levy’s shoulder. “Yet again?”

  There was no doubting what the crowd thought and they voiced it.

  Flanagan smiled his cracked, toothy smile.

  “Okay, okay,” he said. “You good people have made up my mind for me.”

  He fished into his inside pocket, pulled out a wad of notes and peeled off a thick wadge. He held it up to the crowd.

  “Five grand more in the pot,” he said, “says Mike Morgan, the Iron Man, can beat any man the Professor here puts up.”

  Levy responded by withdrawing an even thicker wad of dollars and the men, with Professor Anderson standing between them, solemnly shook hands, Anderson placing both hands on top of theirs.

  “The booth fight of the century,” he bellowed into the microphone. “Mike Morgan, versus . . .” he paused for a moment. “Ladies and gentlemen, I think we’ll keep you in suspense as to his opponent. Simply let me say that it will be the best man my booth can offer. So roll up, one and all, for the booth fight of the century.”

  There was almost a riot as crowds surged towards the narrow entrance to the booth on the right of the stage. Anderson’s fighters had to be summoned to control them, eventually forming them into a noisy, jostling line which stretched for over a hundred yards. Flanagan followed Morgan and Hugh in, while Levy and Anderson stood in conference on the platform.

  “We’re gonna have to beat them back with clubs,” enthused Anderson. “I reckon I can pack in more than five hundred – six hundred, say, if they stand on each other’s feet.”

  “Great,” said Levy. “But what about your man? Have you got him set up right?”

  “No problem,” said Anderson. “My best, a real pro. Anyhow’s, he’ll spot Morgan more than twenty-five pounds. No way some goddam runner can beat a pro. But I gotta give the paying customer a show, Mr Levy. So he’s got to hold this Morgan guy up for a coupla rounds, make him look good. Then it’s lights out in the third. That all right by you?”

  Levy nodded. “Just make sure that he puts him out clean. I don’t want any points decision.”

  “No,” said Anderson. “Not with your fancy Colonel Cranston as referee. I just saw him a few minutes ago. Looks as if he’s come straight from West Point. There’ll be no points decision. I just told my boy he’ll be canned if he doesn’t take Morgan in three.”

  Morgan and Hugh had meanwhile entered the silent, empty booth, leaving Anderson and the pressing crowds outside. Anderson, knowing of Morgan’s challenge, had gutted the stage of its normal benches to increase its audience capacity, leaving only a rectangle of faded red velvet chairs around the ring for local dignitaries. Morgan pulled himself up on the slack, greasy ropes which encircled the ring. He walked slowly into the centre and looked around him, absorbing every detail.

  The stale and bitter smell of sweat and sawdust was unchanged from his days boxing in Kansas – the same sagging ropes, the same dirty, uneven canvas floor, the same low worn stools, the almost tangible atmosphere of human sweat mixed with the sweetness of wet grass and the sour smell of liniment.

  He looked down at his gloves – brown, lumpy and patched – and picked them up as Anderson entered the booth with Colonel Cranston. Anderson’s eyes narrowed when he saw that Morgan had already started to tape his hands.

  “You fought before?” he asked, climbing up into the ring.

  “A little,” said Morgan, putting his left hand into his glove and thudding it hard against the palm of his right.

  Alan Cranston was the next to push his way under the ring-ropes. He took the right glove from Morgan and shook his head. “Disgraceful,” he said. “They might as well fight with bare fists. No bout will take place under my jurisdiction using these.”

  “This ain’t no Golden Gloves tournament, Colonel,” said Anderson testily.

  “Perhaps not,” answered Cranston. “But these gloves are in an appalling condition. So change them, man, change them.” Anderson scowled, too surprised to say anything further, and after a moment’s hesitation strode off towards the front of the booth.

  Cranston watched him go, then walked round the ring, checking the ropes. He frowned. After the formality of St Louis this was not really what he had expected. Perhaps he should have stopped back at Coolidge stadium, while he was still ahead. The gloves he could change, but there was little he could do about the slack ropes, the dirty, patched, uneven ring or the low beams.

  A few moments later Anderson returned, levering his way through the crowds now pouring into the booth, up the narrow gangway leading to the ring. He pushed two pairs of gloves at Cranston through the ropes. “Do these meet your honour’s requirements?” he growled.

  Cranston put his fist into each glove, punched into the palm of his hand, and checked them thoroughly. “They’ll do,” he said, handing a pair to Morgan. “Only one more thing: time-keeping.” He pointed to a neutral corner where a burly, flat-nosed man in a polo-necked sweater was standing. “Sergeant O’Brien. He’ll keep time.”

  Anders
on scowled again. Time-keeping had always been flexible in his booth: long rounds to sap novices, short counts when they hit the canvas.

  “If you insist, Colonel.”

  “I most certainly do,” said Cranston, pulling on the ropes. “And try to get something done about these.”

  Morgan sat quietly on his stool, gloves dangling between his legs, and looked round the ring. Under-size as usual, to give novices nowhere to hide. That suited him: he had not come to run. He looked above him. Low wooden beams, about six and a half feet up from the ring. Most novices would tend to duck under the beams, misjudging their height, and in that moment of doubt a left hook would put them away. He stood up and walked slowly round the ring, testing it for soft spots, areas where he would be liable to lose balance. Booth boxers knew such spongy areas by heart and would be ready for those moments in which balance was lost and a single punch could put their opponent down.

  As usual even the stool was low, to make it uncomfortable, difficult to rest on between rounds. Anderson was indeed a sportsman of Olympic calibre.

  But to Morgan it was like coming home. In 1930 he had spent three months in a booth, chinning bumpkins around Kansas and Nebraska in a certain Colonel Marshall’s Academy of Boxing. There he had been schooled by Packy Paterson, an aging middleweight who had once hovered on the fringe of championship honours. Old Packy had taught him every trick of the booth boxer’s trade – how to pull men into punches, to sap them by elbowing and wrestling, to dig to the kidneys, to thumb the eye. Packy’s speciality was a long, looping, round-the-corner left to the head, followed by a short left hook to the chin. Both these punches were, admittedly, often amplified by the introduction of a lump of plaster of Paris inside his left glove, but the recipient was by that time past caring, the audience equally unconcerned.

  The tent was now bulging, with more desperate, noisy spectators pressing in from the ticket booth at the entrance, causing those at the front to press forward, protesting, over the fragile rectangle of VIP seats with which Anderson had framed the ring. Air-conditioning was not yet one of Professor Anderson’s amenities and the tent was like a sauna. Levy, sitting beside Flanagan in the VIP area, dripped sweat on to his immaculate suit, so that it stuck uncomfortably to his skin. He loosened his silk tie and undid his top shirt button.

  “Looks like the Professor’s got himself a full house,” he said, looking to each side. “Nothing like good clean sport to bring people out.” He held back a smile. His bet with Flanagan had nothing to do with money. Leonard H. Levy did not like to be outsmarted, and Flanagan was not going to make his way on to New York with Levy’s scalp under his belt. He looked up at the ring. Anderson, who by some sleight of hand had changed into evening-dress, had a megaphone to his lips. The din of the crowd diminished.

  “It is my pleasure, ladies and gentlemen, to announce tonight’s special challenge bout,” he boomed. “In the corner to my right, the challenger, the Iron Man of the Trans-America, Mike Morgan, now lying fourth in the race and coming up fast. Entering the ring now, the undisputed champion of the booths of Illinois . . .” Behind him, a hunched, shadowy figure in a hooded dressing-gown pushed his way through the crowd.

  Flanagan groaned inwardly as Anderson’s man ducked under the ropes to mixed cheers and boos. Kate, standing directly under Morgan’s corner, looked across at Flanagan anxiously. The man was a burly 180 pounds, a classic booth boxer. Flanagan summoned a weak smile and made an even weaker fist. “Easy,” he mouthed silently to Kate. “A piece of cake.”

  It was like the old days, only Doc had never before faced an audience of such size. A crowd of four thousand stood around him, only the first few rows clear in the pool of light from the stage, whilst in the background whirled and blared General Honeycombe’s carnival. For Doc Cole was now a celebrity, and even if he had said nothing or simply run about on the spot his audience would probably have considered they had got their money’s worth.

  Doc stood at the microphone, a tiny sun-bronzed figure in the bright lights of the stage, standing in front of a wooden table on which rested a turtle shell and a row of coloured glass bottles purchased that morning from the local drug store. At the side of the table stood a human skeleton, borrowed from the proprietor of the fair’s “Haunted House”. There was a roar of welcome and thunderous applause and the front rows of the audience pressed in on him.

  He held up his hands for silence. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he said. “I don’t come to you tonight as Doc Cole, Trans-American. No, I come to you as the bearer of great and important news. Great news that will transform the life of every man, woman and child in this audience.” Doc’s voice had dropped an octave, for he was now Doc Cole, huckster extraordinary. It was also slower, as he gave weight to each key word and syllable.

  “Let me first tell you a story, a tale from China. During the reign of the Whang Po dynasty the nation’s birth rate suddenly dropped like a stone. Rich and poor alike were affected; there was no escape for anyone.

  “The emperor offered ten million yen – that’s one hundred thousand silver dollars in our money – for a remedy to restore normal vitality to China’s population. But all efforts met with failure – until a scientist named He Tuck Chaw made a remarkable discovery.”

  Doc moved across the stage and picked up the turtle shell from the table, holding it in front of him with both hands.

  “He Tuck Chaw,” he said, “was exploring a volcanic area in Southern Mongolia when he noticed untold numbers of small, turtle-like animals. At first glance they seemed identical in appearance. Occasionally, however, he found one with beautiful golden stripes. One day it occurred to him: why was it that there were so few turtles with golden stripes? Why?”

  Doc paused, put down the turtle shell, unbuttoned the middle button of his I908 Olympic blazer, and held up seven fingers to the audience.

  “He Tuck Chaw studied seven thousand – I repeat, seven thousand of these striped turtles. And do you know what they were? Do you have any conception?”

  He did not wait for an answer.

  “They were all, each and every one of them, males. Male turtles.”

  He paused again. “But the really important thing was that the ratio of male to female of this type of turtle was one male to twelve hundred females.”

  Doc paused a third time to allow the ratio to sink in.

  “He Tuck Chaw was now certain that he was on the brink of a major discovery. And was not the fate of all China in the balance? He must determine the source of this incredible vitality possessed by these pitiably few, but undoubtedly potent, male turtles.”

  He lifted a glass of water to his lips and sipped slowly. The audience was hushed.

  “And what did he find, gentlemen? More to the point, what did he find, ladies?”

  Doc lowered the glass to the table, raised a finger and wagged it at his audience.

  “I’ll tell you what he found, my good sirs and ladies,” he said. “He found that, in contrast with the female, the male turtle possessed a small pouch at the base of its brain. This was known as the ‘Quali Quah’ pouch.”

  He held a small leather pouch over his head.

  “The Quali Quah pouch,” he repeated. “So He Tuck Chaw worked swiftly. He removed the pouches of hundreds of males, dried them and reduced them to powder, then rushed off back to the emperor’s court. The emperor, desperate at the fall in population, told He Tuck Chaw that he should be immediately given several patients upon whom to experiment.”

  Doc put down his glass.

  “Do you know, my friends, what sorry, hopeless victims of impotence the emperor presented to He Tuck Chaw? Each man had reached at least seventy years of age. One, the emperor’s own cousin, had passed four score and nine. Just think of it! Some of them were too weak to stand, let alone perform their manly functions. These, then, were the poor wretches brought forth to test the goodness of Quali Quah . . .”

  His audience roared with laughter.

  Doc paused again, wagging his fi
nger, maintaining his composure. “It was no laughing matter, I assure you, when He Tuck Chaw looked upon these – these virtual eunuchs – and contemplated his own fate were he to fail in his task. He knew that the emperor, tired of the charlatans of the past, had set him the supreme test.”

  He lowered his voice to a whisper and pulled the microphone to him.

  “Gentlemen, in the space of four hours those feeble examples of manhood were flexing muscles unused for decades, and were crying aloud ‘Pong Wook Ee!’ which, as many of you know, is the Chinese equivalent of ‘Eureka’.

  “Delicacy does not permit me to reveal what happened next. Suffice to say that in a mere nine months the efficacy of Quali Quah was proved beyond all doubt. And what is the population of China, now, ladies and gentlemen? I’ll tell you. Six hundred million – a quarter of the population of this planet!

  “Now, gentlemen, there is a sufficient quantity of Quali Quah in the Chickamauga remedy to restore you to the identical condition of virility that has made China a marvel, as well as a problem, to the modern world.”

  Doc picked up a bottle of Chickamauga.

  “And gentlemen, I am not going to sell you bottles of Chickamauga tonight. No sir, I am going to give them away. Every one of you who buys my autographed photograph at one dollar gets a five-dollar bottle of Chickamauga free. Just think of that!”

  There was a roar of applause. Times had changed, and few in the audience had much belief in the ‘virilizing’ qualities of Quali Quah. But who cared? Doc was a voice from a lamp-lit, cozy past, when men believed in such nostrums as Vital Sparks, Perry Davis’ painkiller or Dr Perkins’ Metallic Tractors. To them Doc Cole was John Philip Sousa, Jim Thorpe and Teddy Roosevelt rolled into one; within an hour he had sold out of Chickamauga and was selling the photographs alone at a dollar apiece.

  Morgan sat on his stool and looked across the ring. Of course, it was old Packy. A year had put a little more fat round his waist, his pectorals were beginning to sag, but he had still the broad, muscle-slabbed back and shoulders of an old pro. Morgan had not fought Packy since that first time in 1930 when the veteran had danced with him for a couple of rounds before despatching him in the third, but he knew that the older man must still have a good few shots in his locker.