The Harder They Fall (29 page)

I feel confident I will snap the Man Mountain’s winning streak tonight. Although I have plenty of respect for his strength and punching ability, I expect to outbox and out-general him in our 15-round bout in the Garden. Giving away 75 pounds doesn’t frighten me. He may be a giant but giants have been licked before. Don’t forget Goliath. The bigger they are, the harder they fall. I have never been in better shape and am betting on myself to dispose of this Argentine invader and go on to become the first ex-champion to regain his crown.

When I was in Argentina I have heard already of Gus Lennert. He was Champion-of-the-World then. Even though he no longer holds the title, I realise he is still a great fighter and the most dangerous opponent I have faced. But I will be surprised if he is still there for the sixth round. My advantage in weight, age and strength should wear him down in the early rounds. After that I am counting on my mazo punch to put him away. I predict that this fight will be one more step up the ladder toward my goal of achieving what my idol, Luis Ángel Firpo, came so close to doing – bringing the championship to Argentina.

I read back over these brilliant pieces of creative writing I had just knocked out. Not bad, I thought. As convincing as this stuff ever is. Toro’s essay was a rewrite of one I had written a year earlier for a French middleweight, but who’d know the difference? Certainly not the suckers who read the stuff. The other one sounded more like Lennert than Lennert himself. Next thing I know he’ll begin to think he’s Tunney and want me to write his speeches on Shakespeare to give the boys at Harvard.

Next, I dreamt up a follow-up piece for Gus on ‘How I Got Licked’, for the morning after the fight. Usually I had to knock out those first-person post-mortems in that high-tension interval between the end of the fight and the
Journal
’s deadline. But this time I figured I might as well clean up all the literary labours at once. So I batted out something that began, ‘In my thirteen years in the ring, I have stayed with the best of them. So I can honestly say this Argentine Giant is the most powerful puncher I ever faced. I look for him to take the mighty Buddy Stein and go on to the championship.’

Most of the time you just threw this stuff together, slapped the guy’s name on it and shoved it in. But Gus was exasperatingly particular about the way his name was used. Wise to all the angles on how to gather unto himself that extra buck, Gus saw a profitable sideline for himself as a spot commentator on the big fights. He had even suggested that I might be able to work up a daily column for him. On the chance that there might be something in it for me, I had promised to take these byline pieces out to him to check them over before I sent them through.

Gus lived in a modest white frame house in a middle-class section of West Trenton. His wife met me at the door in an apron. She was just getting the boys’ lunch ready, she said. With the purse from the Stein fight and his savings, Gus must have had at least a hundred Gs in cash and securities, but I don’t think they had ever had a cook. Gus liked to make you think it was because he was so fond of the missus’ cooking. But what he was really fond of was that lettuce in the cooler.

Gus was sitting in the breakfast nook in a worn red bathrobe, an old pair of pants and bedroom slippers, with a lot of papers spread out in front of him. His hair, sharply receding from his forehead and showing signs of grey at the temples, was unkempt, as if he had just gotten out of bed. He hadn’t bothered to shave, in the old fighters’ tradition that the extra days’ growth was an additional protection to his face. He looked much older than when I had last seen him at Green Acres. You would have put him down for closer to forty than thirty. The Stein beating seemed to have taken something out of him. I could count where the six stitches had been taken after Stein had split his right eye in the fourteenth round.

When I came in he frowned at me as if his head was hurting.

‘Goddamit, you sure take your own sweet time getting out here,’ he greeted me.

‘Sorry, Gus,’ I said. ‘I missed the ten o’clock train. Hope it didn’t inconvenience you.’

‘Well, we still got telephone service,’ he said. ‘Thank God I can still pay my phone bills. You could of called
Emily. I got up at nine-thirty especially to be ready for you. What’s a matter, too much celebrating last night?’

‘Hell, no, I was in the sack before midnight. I wanted to be sure and be in shape for the fight tomorrow night.’

I thought that might get a rise out of him, but he didn’t even smile.

‘I had a lousy night,’ he said. ‘Must a been three o’clock before I could get to sleep. Finished two whole murder mysteries. That’s why I coulda used the extra hour this morning.’

‘I’m sorry,’ I apologised again. ‘I guess I should have called you, Gus.’

‘Well, that’s the way it is,’ Gus said in a voice surly with self-pity. ‘When you’re on top the phone never stops ringing. But when you’re on your way out, nobody gives a damn.’

From the kitchen came a loud, boyish screech, and then a general hubbub. Gus jumped up, opened the door and shouted in, ‘For God’s sake, Emily, how many times do I have to ask you to keep them quiet? I knew I shoulda gone to the hotel last night. Now are you gonna make ’em shut up or do I have to come in there and knock their heads together?’

He came back to the table, closed his eyes and pressed his fingers against the right side of his forehead.

‘Feeling okay, Gus?’

‘Just a lousy headache,’ he said. ‘Hell, no wonder, the racket those kids make around here.’

He squeezed his eyes together and massaged the triangle between his eyebrows.

‘Jesus, it looks like I have to do everything.’ He picked up some of the pages in front of him, on which there were long rows of figures. ‘I pay a business manager two hundred bucks a month to handle my investments and he can’t even add right.’ He tapped the papers irritably. ‘Found two mistakes already. And these fifty Gs I make tonight, he’s trying to sell me on the idea of putting it in annuities. Annuities is a lot of bunk. I been figuring it up and it don’t pay. I carry a hundred thousand straight insurance. That’s the only kind to have. If I got fifty thousand to invest, I’d rather put it in something like Treasury Bonds.’

He was starting to figure out how 2.9 per cent of fifty thousand compared with setting up a trust fund. You could see he loved to write those big figures down and multiply them.

‘Look, Gus,’ I said. ‘I’ve got a lot to do yet today. Want to take a gander at this stuff?’

He read it over as if he were Hemingway guarding his literary reputation, with his pencil poised critically over each word, occasionally shaking his head and rereading a sentence. ‘This line here,’ he quibbled, “Don’t forget Goliath.” That don’t sound good. Maybe some people don’t even know who Goliath is.’

‘Anybody who reads the
Journal
and doesn’t know who Goliath is,’ I said, ‘deserves to read the
Journal
.’

‘If you wanna succeed in this writing business,’ Gus insisted, ‘you gotta write so everybody can understand you.’

‘But since you’re comparing Goliath to Toro, it’ll remind everybody who he is.’

‘Goddamit, why does everything have to be an argument,’
Gus said, his voice rising. ‘My name’s going on this, so I guess I can have it the way I want it.’

He took my copy and began correcting it, erasing several times. ‘There,’ he said, ‘that’s a little more like it.’

I looked at it and said nothing. What he had written was, ‘Don’t forget how David overcame Goliath.’ He went through the rest of the copy, making his petty and niggling changes and handed it back without looking at me.

‘There,’ he said. ‘Every goddam thing I’ve got to do myself.’

I kept quiet. But I couldn’t figure why he was under so much pressure for a fight he was going to throw.

He stood up, rubbed his head again, and walked me to the door. ‘How does the house look?’

‘Even Jacobs can’t kick. Nothing but some three-thirties left and they’ll be gone by fight time. It’s a hundred and fifty easy.’

‘If it wasn’t for those goddam taxes I’d make myself some money,’ Gus said.

‘I wish I were paying those taxes,’ I said. ‘Well, see you, Gus. Take it easy.’

‘I just hope it looks all right,’ Gus said. ‘That big clown better fight enough to make it look good. All I need now is for the Commish to smell a rat and tie up our purses.’

‘Stop worrying,’ I said. ‘It’ll be all right. It’s money in the bank. You haven’t got a thing to worry about.’

As the front door closed behind me, I could hear the Lennert kids cutting up in the kitchen again. ‘For God’s sake, will you keep those damn kids quiet?’ Gus shouted. ‘How many times do I have to tell ya? I got a headache!’

Toro had driven into town with Pepe and Fernando. He wanted no part of us. Fernando, moving in, took him up to the suite at the Waldorf. We didn’t see him until the
weigh-in
at noon.

‘Howya feeling?’ I said.

Toro looked away. He wasn’t talking to any of us.

‘Don’t forget now, a good lunch around three o’clock,’ Doc said. ‘But remember, no fats, no gravies and no lemon-meringue pie.’

But Toro wouldn’t acknowledge Doc either. Fernando rubbed Toro’s back possessively as he stepped off the scales in his shorts. ‘We will take care of him,’ Fernando assured us.

Gus got on the scales wearing an old towel that had printed on it in faded letters,
Hotel Manx.

‘Well, anyway, Gus, after this fight you oughta be able to go out and buy yourself a towel of your own,’ Vince said as Gus stepped down.

Most of the boys laughed. But Gus was a humourless man at best and this afternoon he was not at his best.

‘At least I don’t do nothing worse than swipe hotel towels,’ he said. It was not so much what he said as the irritable way he said it that infected the atmosphere.

Toro was waiting to step onto the scales as Gus stepped off. This is a moment of importance in the drama of any fight. The reporters watch the faces of the principals to see if the underdog betrays any fear of the favourite, or for those displays of bravado that may be part of a preconceived plan of psychological warfare, or for a sign of some highly publicised hostility, or for that exchange of smiles and good wishes that never fails to delight the sentimentalists.

But between Toro and Gus nothing happened at all. Gus just stepped on and stepped off with the indifference of a man punching in for work in the morning. Not to greet Toro wasn’t snubbing him any more than the man punching in shows any discourtesy by ignoring the fellow behind him. But as Gus walked away, Toro watched him from the scales. Reporters who had no way of knowing what had happened to Toro in the last forty-eight hours may have described his eyes as being full of hate. But Gus had no special significance for Toro as an individual. He had simply become the most immediate target for Toro’s exploding resentment against a world which had tricked and belittled him.

An hour before the fight you could feel the tension growing in the Garden lobby: the late ticket seekers, the sharp-eyed scalpers, the busy little guys making last-minute book, eight-to-five on Toro, five-to-nine on Lennert, playing the percentages.

Around nine, Toro came down from the Waldorf with Pepe and Fernando. Danny wanted to throw them out. Strangers in a dressing room always made him even more nervous. But Toro was stubborn. ‘They are my friends,’ he insisted. ‘If they go, I go too.’

Danny had never paid much attention to what Toro said before, but this time Danny sensed something in Toro that was not to be denied, something wild inside him that wanted violence.

Usually Toro had waited to go down to the ring with the patient amiability of a prize Guernsey standing by to make its appearance at the county fair. But this time he
asked how much longer it would be every few minutes. And finally when Doc told him to start warming up with a little shadow-boxing, Toro lashed out at his imaginary opponent with a fury none of us had ever seen in him before.

Lennert was first to enter the ring. As he worked his feet slowly in the rosin box, he responded to the cheers of his supporters with a tight, cheerless smile. His face was ghastly white in the glare of the ring lights.

Toro’s white satin bathrobe with the blue trim and the Argentine flag on back got a tremendous hand as he climbed through the ropes. He didn’t jackknife over the top rung as I had had him do for the previous fights. Something about that omission vaguely worried me. It was a trivial but significant protest against the kind of circus presentation we had set up for him. I didn’t know what could happen, but I had the same sense of apprehension a playwright would feel if one of his actors began the play by speaking unfamiliar lines that were not in the script.

I kept my eyes on Toro while the announcer introduced the usual celebrities, followed by some future attractions – the ‘highly regarded lightweight from Greenwich Village who has emerged victorious in seventeen consecutive contests’, the Bronx middleweight ‘who has recently established himself as a fistic sensation and who never fails to make a spectacular showing’, and several other boys whom Harry Balough managed to describe with artless and incongruous pomposity. Toro sat on the edge of his stool, anxious to begin. Even when a great cheer went up from the crowd and Buddy Stein swung through the ropes and mitted the crowd in a broad, ham gesture, Toro paid no attention. Stein
was dressed sharply in a loud-check sports suit that set off his wide shoulders and his trim waist. The body that tired sports writers were always comparing to Adonis’s moved with jaunty arrogance. He trotted over to Lennert’s corner and, instead of the conventional and perfunctory handshake, kissed him on the forehead. The crowd laughed and Stein laughed back. They loved each other. Then he skipped across the ring to shake hands with Toro. Toro just let him lift his glove. He still didn’t seem to see him. He didn’t see anybody but Lennert.