Eddie Brown was the fighter that Doc Carroll had wanted to be. To this union the one gave his youth and its riches and the other his years and his genius and now, as they approached together their moment, I felt, as I had known I would, the growing weight of my own involvement.
It is something that happens to most of us in my business. I have seen it happen over a ballplayer and even a racehorse, and I have felt its beginnings within myself in as small a thing as a gesture.
One day I sat in the press box in Yankee Stadium and watched, below us, Eddie Lopat going on the full count and with the tying run on third. I do not remember the hitter or the game, for in time they have become unimportant, but I watched Lopat chance that small, slow curve, and I remember the ball coming up there so big and then twisting high and foul to the circling first baseman. I remember, then, Lopat. I remember him not even glancing up at the flight of the ball, but taking one last look at the hitter before walking to the dugout and becoming, forever after, one of my pitchers.
We attempt to fight this in our business, but it is a losing struggle. We would maintain our poise and what we would wish to be our objectivity, but what we fight is the admission of our own defeat in the willingness with which we ascribe so quickly to another the remnants of what we once believed to be our own claim to success, even greatness.
I can no longer recall when I first met Doc Carroll, but I remember the night I first saw Eddie Brown. I was in Pittsburgh and researching a story, and it was late in July and there was an outdoor fight show at Forbes Field. It had been hot and humid for days, but about mid-afternoon the storm had come, darkening the daylight and the city, but cutting the air open with the flashing strokes of a huge cleaver. Now it was twilight and I walked over to the ball park from the Schenley through the greenery, feeling the air on my face and hands and in my lungs and watching it, after many almost breathless days, bring life back again into the people on the street with me. I watched it revive their eyes and saw them regaining the will to walk freely once more, and I heard it, uncontained now, breaking out in the beginning laughter of their voices.
At ringside I sat watching the preliminary bouts, not expecting much and so not asking much, and in the intervals between rounds and between bouts I listened to the crowd sound and felt the night come and tried to find the stars I knew were there above the ring lights and above the thin, blue-gray pall of cigarette smoke that lay, translucent, above us. Then the semifinal came into the ring, and there was Doc, climbing through the ropes and holding them open for a light-haired kid in a green and white satin robe.
He was not more than twenty feet from me and he and the other second were busy seating the kid on his stool and fussing around him and then Doc was leaning back against the ropes, his arms spread out along the top rope, squinting at the other corner where the other kid was just coming in. Then he straightened up and I saw him looking around the working press, nodding here and there, older than when I had last seen him and thin and narrow-shouldered in his white coat sweater. Then he saw me looking at him and he opened his mouth and threw his head back in evidence of surprise. He pointed at me and formed some words with his mouth, and I nodded to let him know that I would wait there for him later.
“And from New York City,” the announcer said, “weighing 152 pounds, Eddie Brown!”
There was the small spattering of applause that comes from the polite irregulars, and I saw the kid, preoccupied, stand up and nod and turn and Doc take his robe. The kid had a good body, perhaps a little short in the arms, and I looked where he was looking, at the other kid, and saw that the other was about two inches taller and had the reach.
When the bell rang I watched Doc’s kid walk out slowly and then start to circle, his hands low, looking out of the tops of his eyes, and there was no question about it. He was Doc’s fighter. It is what a painter does in his paintings so that you would know them, even without his signature, and what the writer does in his writings, if he is enough of a writer, so you know that no one in the whole world but he could have been the writer.
For five rounds it was not too much of a fight, two earnest kids trying, the one patternless but inventive, desperately improvising as he went along, and Doc’s kid always knowing what he wanted to do, but a little confused yet, making the other kid miss and then not quite being able to bring off the counter. In the sixth round it happened. Doc’s kid, working underneath, missed a right hand, but slid his right foot forward with it and, rising with the punch, brought the left hand up and over to the other kid’s jaw.
It was one of those sudden, picture punches, and it snapped the other kid’s head back and he landed first on his rump and then on his back. He rolled over slowly and at nine he was up, shaking his head, trying to clear it, while the referee wiped his gloves. Then Doc’s kid was on him again, throwing to the head until the referee stopped it.
In the main event two big maulers disqualified each other as serious heavyweight contenders, and when it was over I waited while the crowd thinned toward the exits and then I watched the newspapermen working at ringside under the yellow of the ring lights, and I envied them. I knew many of them, and I realized that what I envied was the assurance in the clicking of their typewriters, and their habits of concentration. Above them, in the center of the ring, a loud-mouthed Irish foreman was abusing an aging, muttering Italian who was one of the crew starting to roll the ring canvas, and yet the clicking of the typewriters and the higher, faster, tittering cicada-sound of the telegraphers’ bugs went on.
In a while I saw Doc coming, with the kid following him and carrying his bag and Doc trying to pick a path toward me through the tree-stump disarray of the forest of wooden folding chairs. I signaled to him to wait there, and when I found my way out to them, I shook hands with Doc and he introduced me to the kid.
“Congratulations,” I said, shaking the fighter’s hand.
“Thanks,” he said. His light-brown hair was crew cut, and he had young blue eyes.
“You have a live one,” I said to Doc, motioning with my head toward the kid.
“Who can tell?”
“You can.”
“Ah,” Doc said, putting on that sour expression. “At my age you hate to start at the beginning again with another one.”
“Where are you going?”
“I want to take him out and get him something to eat.”
Outside the park we finally found a cab and went to a small restaurant where the fighter had some stewed prunes and a cup of hot tea and lemon. He was a quiet kid, and Doc and I had a drink and talked about people we hadn’t seen in years, and then the three of us took a cab back to the Schenley and went up to the room Doc and the kid were sharing.
“You go in and take a hot tub,” he said to the fighter.
“I already had a shower at the park,” the kid said.
“I know that,” Doc said. “Now take a tub. Put some of that Epsom salts in it, and soak about fifteen minutes.”
“Okay,” the kid said.
Doc pulled the spread off one of the twin beds and folded it at the foot. Then he pulled the covers back.
“You want to go out somewhere?” I said.
“Nah. I saw enough people for one night. I got a bottle of Scotch here, hardly touched. We’ll go to your room and let this kid try to sleep.”
“Fine.”
Doc opened the bathroom door and said something to the kid above the sound of the running water and went to the closet and got the bottle. We went up to my room and Doc called room service and in a while a boy came up with a bucket of ice and a large bottle of club soda and two glasses.
“What kind of stuff is this?” Doc said, looking at the bottle of soda.
“It’s very good,” the bellhop said. “Everybody uses it.”
“I never heard of it,” Doc said.
“It’s all right with me,” I said, signing the tab. “I don’t use any.”
“You got nothing else?” Doc said.
“Everybody drinks this,” the bellhop said.
“All right,” Doc said, and then he tipped the boy a buck and the boy, surprised, thanked him and went out and closed the door.
“All a guy needs is a bathtub with running water and a tank of bottled gas and he’s in the soda-water business,” Doc said, showing me the bottle with the strange label. “I should have thought of something like this.”
“That’s not a bad-looking fighter you’ve got,” I said.
“Ah,” Doc said, pouring the Scotch. “He’s a beginner.”
He handed me mine, with the ice in it, and I went into the bathroom and added a little water. When I came out, Doc was sitting on one of the beds, his drink in his hand.
“Sure he’s a beginner,” I said. “They all are at one time.”
“He’s green,” Doc said. “Got too much to learn.”
“Sure,” I said, “but I watched him carefully tonight. I could see the Doc Carroll in him.”
“You could, hey?”
“Certainly.”
“He executes pretty good at that, don’t he, for a kid with less than two dozen fights.”
“That’s what I mean.”
“That wasn’t a bad sequence he dumped the other guy with, hey?”
“I thought it was great.”
“You liked it, hey?”
“I did.”
“You know he missed that right hand on purpose?”
“I was hoping he did.”
“Sure. That’s that shift to southpaw. The other guy is still thinking about that right hand that missed him when the hook unloads on him.”
“It’s a pretty thing to see.”
“Name me the other fighters could do that.”
“Dempsey.”
“Right. Another.”
“Petrolle.”
“Another.”
“I pass.”
“McLarnin, and that’s all. We named the only three in thirty years.”
“Why don’t you stop kidding me?”
“What?”
“You’re really high on this kid.”
“He should have had that other guy out of there in three.”
“Possibly.”
“Possibly? Absolutely. Definitely. From the second round on I told him: ‘Now go out there and throw that shift into this guy. He won’t know what hit him.’ Do you think he’d do it? No. He’s out there wading around like a guy lost in a swamp and coming back to the corner and I finally said to him: ‘Look. What are you tryin’ to do, make me out a liar? You’re disgracing me here in front of a lot of people, and some of them are my friends. You throw that shift into him this round or when you come back I won’t be here.’”
“I like that.”
“So he finally threw it,” Doc said, nodding. “Have another drink.”
“I’ll help myself.”
“You know why he finally threw it?”
“Why?”
“Because he was more afraid of coming back to the corner and finding me gone than he was of throwing it. Dreadful.”
He got up and mixed himself another drink and sat down again on the bed.
“I understand it, though,” I said.
“Understand what?”
“The kid. Until he tried it he couldn’t believe in it.”
“Aah! Three months we worked on it in the gym between fights. He’s got it down perfect.”
“I know, but a fight is another thing. This is for real. You believe in it because of Dempsey and Petrolle and McLarnin and thirty-five years in the business. What has the kid got? Two years, and your word?”
“Did I ever lie to him?”
“Of course not, but a man has to find out for himself.”
“They’re not believers, none of them. I could name a half dozen—you can remember them—that could have been something if they just believed in it.”
“I know.”
“You don’t just tell them. You show them. The only thing any man’s afraid of is the unknown, so you try to show them and then there’ll be no unknown. When a kid starts to fight he’s like a newborn kitten. He can’t see. All he sees in there is gloves. The air is full of them, until he learns he can ignore most of them. Then the mystery starts to disappear, and you really start to work on his own punches. You build up a sequence, and he won’t throw the big one. It’s the unknown again. He’s afraid of what might happen if he commits himself. What can happen, if he’ll just believe? Does he think I want to get his head knocked off? So you scare him into it. Understand?”
“Certainly. You’re using fear to fight fear, and that’s basic.”
“That’s right, but isn’t that dreadful?”
“But the price is right. Now he knows. Now that’s his move. As long as he’s a fighter he’ll have it, and believe in it.”
“So you should have seen him when we got to the dressing room. He’s alive. He’s saying: ‘It worked. It worked! Did you see that?’ I said: ‘Of course it worked, but you should have thrown it in the third round.’ He said: ‘I know. I know. I’ll do it the next time.’ I said: ‘You should have done it this time. Look at the punches you took from the third round on.’ He said: ‘I didn’t take too many.’ I said: ‘Of course not, because I taught you not to, but when you go to bed tonight just lie there and try to remember the punches you took from the third round till the sixth. Try to count them, and remember that you wouldn’t have had to take a one, if you’d gotten that guy out of there when you should have.’
“And I told him something else, too. I said: ‘When that guy got up, why didn’t you hit him one shot in the belly?’ He said: ‘I know. I just got excited.’ I looked at him and I said: ‘Excitement is for amateurs. You’re supposed to be a pro.’”
“You haven’t changed, Doc,” I said. I was enjoying it.
“So the kid is taking his shower and I walked out and I bumped into one of those pants pressers that have the other guy. He says: ‘My kid wasn’t right tonight.’ I said: ‘He looked all right to me.’ He says: ‘Well, you were lucky.’ I said: ‘How do you figure that?’ He says: ‘That kid of yours misses that right hand and gets lucky with the left.’ I said: ‘Sure.’ I walked away. Isn’t that dreadful?”
He had stood up and he walked to the bureau and was mixing himself another drink.
“Lucky,” he said. “For months we worked on that—left foot, right foot, right hand, shift, spacing, leverage—and this guy calls it luck.”
“Ignore him. You’ve already called him a pants presser. What do you expect from him?”
“Nothing. I used to ignore them.”
He was beginning to feel the drinks a little now.
“I used to ignore them,” he said. “Ignore them. All my life I ignored them, but can you imagine that?”
“What?”
“That SOB. Can you imagine? ‘You were lucky,’ he says.”
“Forget him. He’s not worth it.”
“That’s what I used to think, but how the hell are you going to ignore them?”
“Why not?”
“There’s too many of them. You can’t ignore them. They outnumber us ten thousand to one. You know that, don’t you?”
“Certainly, but that’s nothing new. They were always ten thousand to one. Why do you think Ted Williams, at 31, with eight years in the majors and the best of them all with that stick, makes what they call those insulting gestures at the fans?”
“Why?”
“Because once, when he was young, he was going to show the world with that big bat. He was going to walk up there and keep hitting that ball and the world would know he was a great hitter. He’s done it for all these years, and finally, when the world still boos him, he can think of nothing except to display to them his contempt.”
“You think that’s why he did it?”
“I know it’s why. So they boo him all the more. You mustn’t insult the amateurs.”
“Amateurs. How many people in that park tonight could read what my kid was doing out there?”
“I don’t know. Very few.”
“Two? Three?”
“Possibly.”
“Isn’t that dreadful?”
“But it doesn’t really make any difference.”
“That’s what I used to say. I used to say: ‘I’m Doc Carroll, and this is the way you do it.’ The hell with the rest of them, I used to think. I’ll put it right up there, and they can see it. I’ll walk right through them, and where the hell am I?”
“You’re in Pittsburgh right now.”
“I’m fifty-eight years old in Pittsburgh with another green fighter. That’s where I am.”
“Oh, come off it. The amateurs have always crowded the highways to everywhere, so it’s never been easy for the pros to get through. Now you’ve got a real good-looking kid who looked fine tonight. If I was a fight manager I’d wish I had him.”
“You liked him, hey?”
“I think he’s got a hell of a chance.”
It seemed to pick him up.
“He’s got a chance, all right,” he said.
“A hell of a one. You’re just afraid to let yourself enthuse.”
“I’ve had so goddamn many disappointments.”
“Who hasn’t? This is a new deal.”
“He likes to fight, too. You know?”
“I could see that.”
“He got that guy hurt, he wanted to kill him.”
“I saw it. So you bawl him out, telling him excitement is for amateurs.”
“You know what I mean.”
“A fighter’s got to feel excitement, or he’s nothing.”
“Sure. He’d just be a guy going through the motions.”
“But he’s got to learn to control it, and let it go in the right place.”
“Certainly.”
“I wanted him to put that excitement into one good shot in the belly.”
“I know.”
“That’s the hardest thing in the world to do. People don’t know that. It’s the hardest thing in the world to teach a fighter to control that excitement without killing it.”
“It’s the secret of everything, from painting to, hell, selling.”
“It’s the hardest thing in the world to teach.”
“Or to do.”
“Do? Hell, if I can teach it, he can do it.”
“Yes.”
“This kid might, too. This kid’s a learner. I abuse hell out of him, but he’s a good kid.”
“I can see that.”
“You have to abuse them. You can’t let them think it’s easy. This kid has never had an easy fight, and he never will. I won’t let him. I get him guys he can lick, but guys who look to knock his block off. I get him guys like that one tonight, that he can learn on, but no cousins. This is the toughest business in the world, and one easy fight could ruin him.”
“You worry too much. You wouldn’t let it ruin him. You’d find a way to bring him back to size.”
“You can’t always do that. Guys in this business, they worry about bringing a kid back if he gets licked. Hell, that’s no problem. You match him right and he gets licked in a tough fight, so he either comes back or he doesn’t. If he don’t, he’s not enough fighter and you can forget it.”
“I suppose so.”
“It’s the other ones. I’ve lost fighters the other way. You’ve seen it.”
“I have.”
“You put a kid in with a guy figures to be tough and something happens. Maybe your guy gets lucky or the other guy is off his feed and takes a couple of good punches and resigns. You look at your kid, and you can see it in his face. ‘Oh, boy!’ he’s saying. ‘This is for me.’”
He was room-walking now, his glass in his hand, and he stopped at the foot of my bed and looked down at me sitting there and watching him.
“He’s gone,” he said. “You’re looking at a fighter that just left. Gone.”
I know, I was thinking. I’ve seen it happen to fighters and to ballplayers, too. I could tell you about some writers.
“I lie awake nights over this kid. Every fight I take for him I worry. Half the time I’m in the corner there rooting for the other guy to belt him a couple. Isn’t that dreadful?”
“It’s the way it should be.”
“It’s hard as hell to make matches for a kid like this.”
“It’s like Granny Rice said about horse racing. There’s a slight element of chance involved.”
“Can you imagine?”
“What?”
“He wants to get married.”
“They usually do.”
“Kids. They can’t understand. They got one chance. They got ten years. They make it in ten years, or they don’t. So they want to get married.”
He had finished his drink and he stood up and walked over to the bureau and put the glass down on it.
“Doc, you’re going against the laws of nature and civilization. It’s quite normal for a normal human being to want to get married.”
“Fighters aren’t normal human beings,” he said, staring down at me through those rimless glasses, and raising his voice at me. “Get that out of your head. You should know that. A fighter is a freak. He’s got ten years in the toughest business in the world, a business that calls for every ounce of his strength and every second of his life. There isn’t a goddamn thing he does that doesn’t affect his business. He’s not a paper hanger, a lawyer, a writer. He can’t spread it over thirty, forty years. He’s got to give it all now, or never.”
You have always asked too much, I was thinking. There have been many of us who have asked that of ourselves or others at one time or another, but we have deserted you in compromise and now you are the only one I know who, after all this time, still carries on that lonesome crusade against reality.
“Goddamn dames,” he said. “What do they want?”
“They only want what everyone else wants. They’re bound by the same laws, too.”
“What does she want with a fighter?”
“Maybe she doesn’t want anything with a fighter. Maybe she just wants a nice young guy named Eddie Brown, who happens to be a fighter.”
“Not this one. I met her.”
“And didn’t like her.”
“Of course not. She’s a good-looking kid, with big brown eyes and a nice figure. I can read her.”
“I suppose so.”
“She wants Eddie Brown, the fighter. He’s the best grab she knows. He’s a fighter. It’s glamorous. He’s starting to get his name in the paper. He might even become a champion. ‘There’s Eddie Brown’s wife,’ people will say. She’ll have a mink coat. They’ll go to nightclubs. The head waiter’ll know them. It’ll be a ball. The hell it will.”
“You’re imagining all this.”
“The hell I am. I met her. She’s got a head of her own. That’s the trouble. If she was some cow-eyed little thing I’d say maybe this’ll work, as long as she keeps looking up at him that way. Not this one. This one has a mind, but she don’t know she’s marrying a freak.
“What can it be? Hell, he’ll be home two weeks and gone for three. What kind of a marriage can that be? He’s a long shot to make it at best, right? Now let’s say he doesn’t make it. Twenty years from now he’s still trying to figure out why. There he sits some night, a working stiff just trying to meet expenses, his dreams gone and hers, too. He looks over at her. She’s put on twenty pounds, and she’s sitting there in some old house dress and he says to himself: ‘Maybe if I didn’t marry her I’d have made it.’ They do that, you know. The ones that don’t make it are always grabbing at something. Won’t that be a beautiful marriage?”
He picked up the bottle. There was still some Scotch in it.
“I’ll leave it here,” he said. “You can finish it.”
“I’m not a lonesome drinker, either.”
“The hell with it.”
“When you leaving?” he said as I walked him to the door and we shook hands.
“Oh, I may be here two or three more days.”
“We’re flying back at eleven.”
“I’ll see you back in town.”
He walked out into the hall and turned back to me.
“Can you imagine that?” he said.
“What?”
“That guy says: ‘Well, you were lucky tonight.’ Can you imagine? Amateurs.”
I watched him start down the hall, and then I closed the door.