When we stepped out of the cab onto the curb I could feel the surface tension that held the crowd. Invisible, untouchable, nowhere but everywhere, fragile but all-imprisoning, I have felt it hold an infantry company before an attack, the witnesses before an execution, a courtroom before a verdict, a family before the moment of death. Now it held this crowd, the moving bodies milling on the sidewalk and the still bodies and the turning faces, black and white, in the balcony line. It held the mounted cop and horse walking the gutter and confined the low murmur, rent only by the police whistles and the car horns, that is distinctive of fight mobs. Inside the Garden and within two hours, a little more or a little less, something would happen and then this thinnest unseen film of oneness would burst and it would all come out.
“There’s Eddie Brown!” ... “Hey, Eddie!” ... “Eddie Brown!” ... “Eddie Brown!” ... “Get him, Eddie!” ... “Good luck, Eddie!” ... “Eddie Brown!”
We pushed through quickly, Doc and Freddie Thomas leading the way, Eddie with his head down, the crowd parting and calling. Ahead of us the ticket taker signaled and a man stepped quickly aside to let us by. Then another shook his finger at Eddie, and called after him.
“Hey, Eddie! I got all my dough goin’ on you! Remember that, Eddie!”
In the molecular movement of the crowded lobby a path opened, some of them calling, and then we were out of it, walking the long gray catacomb and up the step into the dressing room at the Ninth Avenue end. Behind us the uniformed guard closed the door.
This is the place, I was thinking, the gray walls and the steel lockers, the rubbing table in the middle of the rectangular room, the benches against the walls. There it is, the door to the toilet and the shower, and that is all.
“They keep it plenty warm in here,” Eddie said, looking around.
“Good,” Doc said. “Take off your coat.”
“Here, I’ll take it,” Freddie Thomas said.
“Doc!” the uniformed guard said, his head through the partially opened door. “Somebody out here.”
Doc went to the door and looked out. The door opened and Louie came in, in a dark blue suit and forcing a smile.
“How are you, kid?” he said, walking up to Eddie.
“Fine,” Eddie said. He was sitting on one of the benches. “Good. I thought you’d come up to the hotel.”
“I couldn’t. My old lady’s sick, so when I got away from the place I went over to see her. I’d rather see you here, anyway.”
“Good.”
“Some difference from the first fight I put you in, hey?” Louie said, looking around and saying it to the room and then sitting down next to Eddie.
“That’s right,” Eddie said. “Remember that night?”
“The whole mob’s here. They all send their best.”
“Thanks, Louie. Tell them thanks.”
“So we’ll be in after the fight, and we’ll all go over together, hey?”
“Good.”
“You’re all invited,” Louie said to the rest of us. “A real blowout.”
“Thanks, Louie,” I said.
“So I better go,” he said, standing up and then looking down at Eddie and slapping him once on the shoulder. “Good luck, champ.”
“Thanks.”
“We’re all with you, and we’re not worried, either. You’ll lick him.”
“I’ll see you, Louie,” Eddie said, looking up at him. “Don’t worry.”
“Who’s worrying?”
Louie went out. Doc was hanging his jacket in one of the lockers and Freddie Thomas was hanging Eddie’s robe on a hanger over an open locker door. It was a dark blue satin robe with white collar and cuffs and the name Eddie Brown in white letters on the back. He took two white coat sweaters out of the other bag and then he started placing his gauze and tape on the rubbing table.
“Here,” Doc said to Eddie, handing him new white woolen socks and the ring shoes and a pair of long, new white laces. “You might as well start on this.”
It is a time-killer that some of them use. Eddie took the old laces out of the shoes and then, slowly and carefully, he started a new lace in one shoe. He flattened the lace at each turn, always measuring the two ends. He did a half-dozen turns, and then put the shoe on the bench beside him and started on the other.
The guard opened the door and the commissioner came in, followed by a tall, smiling man whom the commissioner introduced as the lieutenant governor, and by one of the people from the Garden. Eddie stood up when the commissioner introduced the lieutenant governor to him and then to Doc, the smile never leaving the lieutenant governor’s face.
“There’s a fine crowd out there, Brown,” the commissioner said. “So good luck to you.”
“Thank you.”
“The best of luck to you,” the lieutenant governor said, and he was still smiling when they walked out and he nodded to the guard.
“Politicians,” Doc said. “Everything that’s wrong in this business you can blame on them. Amateurs.”
Eddie sat down again and slipped out of his loafers and took off his socks. Freddie Thomas took them and put them in the locker, and Eddie pulled on the new white woolen socks. Then he put on the left ring shoe and swung around on the bench and put that foot up on it and carefully and slowly laced it. When he reached the top he brought the laces around the back and to the front again, certain that they were flat, and then knotted them. Freddie Thomas bent down and cut the laces near the knot with his gauze and tape scissors and then he cut a length of the one-and-a-half-inch tape and handed it to Eddie. Eddie placed the tape around the shoe near the top so it covered the laces and, in the front, the knot, smoothed it so that it was a neat white band and then put on the right shoe and started on that.
Freddie Thomas’ brother came in, carrying the pail with a bottle in it, the bottle freshly taped around the neck. He couldn’t have been more than twenty-five or twenty-six years old and he smiled and nodded around the room.
“Hello,” Eddie said, looking up.
“Hi, Eddie. Doc.”
“Make some strips of that tape, Joey,” Freddie said to him.
“Where do you want them?”
“Right along the edge of that table. Make some extras, too.”
“What are you doing there?” Doc said, looking down at Eddie.
“It’s Jay’s ring,” Eddie said. He had laced the second shoe up to the last pair of eyelets and now he held the ring up to Doc in the palm of his hand. Doc took it and turned it over and looked at it.
“I thought I’d just put it on the lace. It won’t be in the way. I just thought I’d carry it for luck.”
“Never mind that luck stuff,” Doc said, still holding the ring. “You know better than that.”
“I know. I just thought of it this afternoon in the room, that Jay was with me for all those fights.”
“Put it on if you want to,” Doc said, handing the ring back to Eddie and walking away. “I don’t care what you do with it.”
Eddie looked at me and smiled and shrugged. He put one end of the lace through the ring and then crossed the laces and put the ends through the last two eyelets and finished the shoe. Freddie Thomas cut the ends and handed him another length of tape.
When he finished with the tape he stood up and walked up and down, the shoes squeaking a little. Then he did a couple of deep knee bends, letting his heels come up off the floor, the weight forward on his feet to settle them into the shoes.
“What bout’s on now?” he said.
“The second bout was just starting when I came in,” Freddie’s brother said.
“Memphis Kid?”
“Yeah, I saw him climb in.”
“Find out how he makes out, I mean, when it’s over, will you?”
“Sure.”
Now and then we could hear the crowd noise, distant and low. When Freddie’s brother finished stripping the tape and sticking the ends to the side of the rubbing table he went out. In about five minutes he came back.
“Memphis won it. A decision.”
“Good,” Eddie said, still walking. “A good fight?”
“I don’t know. I just saw the last round and a half. Some of the crowd was booing for more action.”
“Dreadful,” Doc said.
“Get Memphis in your story, will you?” Eddie said to me. “He’s a great guy.”
“Sure, Eddie.”
One of the commission deputies came in. He had a sheet of paper in his hand and on his face was the harassed look all subordinates wear at such times. He nodded around the room.
“When you going to tape?” he said to Doc. “It’s about time.”
“I’ll tape right now,” Doc said. “Tell one of the other guy’s people to come in.”
“I have to stay here.”
“I’m going down there to watch,” Freddie Thomas said. “I’ll tell him.”
“And you stay right with them until they’ve got the gloves on in that ring,” Doc said. “We’ll see you down there.”
“Right. Joey’ll get some ice for you later.”
“He doesn’t have to stay there,” the deputy said. “Once the tape is on and stamped and initialed he can come out.”
“He can stay, too.”
“But why?”
“Because I’m protecting my fighter.”
“Have it your way,” the deputy said, shrugging to me and sitting down on the bench.
Joey moved the tape and gauze to one side and Eddie boosted himself up onto the rubbing table, his feet dangling. A couple of minutes after Freddie had gone, the champion’s man came in, tall and dark, nodding and smiling and big-voiced.
“Mr. Eddie Brown. Gentlemen. Gentlemen. Gentlemen.”
Since Robinson and Gainford, I was thinking, they all try to play it the same. They’ve even got it right down to the voice inflection.
Doc started on the right hand, the clean white gauze around the wrist and down around and around the hand and back between the fingers and around the hand. One roll of gauze and a small piece of tape to hold it, the narrow strips, pinched once in the middle, between the fingers, and then he walked away and opened a locker door and reached for one of the two long strips of tape hanging there.
“Wait a minute,” the champion’s man said, with that big voice.
“Are you hurting?” Doc said, one hand on one of the strips of tape and turning to look at the champion’s man.
“Let the gentleman measure it in front of me.”
The deputy took a tape measure from his pocket, pulled it out and measured the first strip. He could see that they were both of the same length.
“Two feet,” he said. “Exactly.”
“You still hurting?” Doc said.
“I just go by the rule,” the champion’s man said.
“What do you think I go by?”
“All right, fellas,” the deputy said.
Eddie shrugged at me and Doc finished that hand with the tape, Eddie opening and closing the hand, and Doc did the other. When he finished with the second he motioned to Eddie and Eddie held his hands out toward the champion’s man and turned them, the white bulks on them beautifully done, palms up and palms down.
“All right with you?” the deputy said.
“All right,” the champion’s man said.
“So,” the deputy said. He had a small ink pad and stamp and he stamped the three lines of blue wording across the tape on the back of each hand. Then he took out a ballpoint pen and wrote his initials under the imprint on each hand.
“So I’ll see you gentlemen,” the champion’s man said, affecting a bow, and then he left.
“The SOB,” Doc said. “Dreadful. That’s amateur stuff. Get your things off.”
Eddie slid off the table and, alternating hands, drove one fist into the palm of the other a couple of times. Then he loosened his belt and dropped his slacks. He sat down on the bench, and Joey pulled the slacks off and hung them in a locker. Then he helped Eddie out of the maroon shirt, and Eddie got out of his underwear and, walking across the room naked except for the ring shoes and socks and the bandaged hands, he hung those up. Then he walked into the toilet.
When he came out he put on the supporter and Doc handed him the white trunks with black and he put those on. Without the cup under them they seemed too loose, and he started to move around the room, first doing deep knee bends, then rotating his arms and shoulders and then shadowboxing. In the silence of the room, disturbed only by an occasional noise from the crowd, you could hear the squeak of the ring shoes and then Eddie’s breathing starting to come in rhythm.
Doc stood to one side, never taking his eyes off Eddie, and Freddie’s brother went out and then came back with another pail filled with a couple of chunks of ice. He waited for Eddie to move by, and then he carried it into the toilet and I could hear him cracking it against the washbowl. Then he came out and got the ice bag and went back in.
“How are you these days?” the deputy said, coming over to me.
“Fine. You?”
“I don’t know,” he said, dropping his voice. “He looks good, don’t he?”
“Eddie? Yes.”
“You think he’ll win?”
“Yes.”
“Myself, I should be up at Candlewood Lake right now.”
“Why?”
“I got a cottage up there. We like to go up weekends, but how you can do it with the Friday night fights? We have to go up Saturdays now. These people that come here, they pay big money for ringside. I don’t get it. I’ve seen too many fights. No fight is worth it.”
Eddie came by us now, his face set, his head down, hooking and then hooking again. Then he turned easily and started back, and I could see a little sweat just starting on his back. I looked at my watch and it was 9:46 and I walked over to where Doc stood, his arms folded in front of him, watching Eddie.
“The sweat looks good,” I said. “He looks in perfect shape.”
“He’s never been far off in seven years,” Doc said. “When you come to the last step it shouldn’t be any steeper than the rest.”
“How do you feel yourself?”
“Lousy.”
He motioned to Eddie and Eddie stopped and walked over to him, breathing deeply. Doc took a towel off the rubbing table and wiped Eddie’s face quickly and then he wiped Eddie’s chest and back and arms and, bending down, his legs. He motioned to the rubbing table where Freddie’s brother had spread a couple of fresh white towels. Another was folded at the head, and Eddie boosted himself up and lay down on his back. Doc took still another clean towel and placed it over Eddie’s chest, and then he got the robe and spread it over Eddie.
“Give me a towel for over my eyes,” Eddie said.
He was lying directly under the ceiling light, his eyes shut, and Doc folded another towel and placed it over Eddie’s forehead and eyes. Eddie lay there, the robe moving up and down with his breathing.
“How did you feel?” Doc said.
“A little stiff, in the shoulder and thighs. Not stiff, but not loose.”
“That’s all right,” Doc said.
Eddie lay there for five or six minutes, the breathing quieting. Doc had come over and was sitting on the bench next to me.
“What the hell can I tell him?” he said in a low voice, not really as a question but as a statement of fact.
“Nothing.”
“In seven years you tell him everything. He’s ready. The last thing I’ll remind him in the corner is just don’t let that other guy back him up. The first round he’ll get his distance, then he’ll either do it, or he won’t. There’s nothing I can do about it now.”
“That’s right. Just remember that yourself.”
We heard the door open and the clang of the ring bell and the crowd.
“Last round of the semifinal!” the guard said, sticking his head in and announcing it. “Main event next!”
Eddie sat up, the robe sliding to his legs, and Doc got up. Eddie slid off the table and Doc wiped him again with a towel. Then he helped Eddie out of the trunks and Eddie went into the bathroom.
“You got everything?” Doc said to Freddie’s brother. “All my stuff and Freddie’s?”
“I got it.”
He had on his white coat sweater and Doc went to the locker and put on his and buttoned it. Eddie came out and Freddie’s brother handed him his cup and Eddie stepped into it and pulled it up. Then Doc helped him into the trunks and he moved around, swinging his head on that fine neck and rotating his shoulders, until he saw Doc holding the robe and he put his arms back and Doc lifted the robe up onto him and, walking around him, tied it in the front.
“All right! Main event! Eddie Brown!” the guard said, holding the door open, and we could hear the rising expectant mumble of the crowd.
“That’s us,” the deputy said.
“The best, Eddie,” I said as he went by.
“Thanks, Frank,” he said, looking at me quickly, his face very serious.
I followed them out and down the aisle behind the cop, the crowd noise high now and the cries for Eddie, and when they passed my seat I took one more look at Doc’s back and climbed over the back of the seat. Tom White was sitting on my left.
“Hello,” he said. “How are you?”
“Fine. You?”
“All right. I suppose you still like your guy to win.”
“I don’t.”
“I read your piece today.”
“I think he’ll get licked good.”
The crowd was still noisy for Eddie when the champion came into the ring to our left, vaulting the held middle rope with a flourish, his head towel-hooded and his robe flying, then his arms out to the crowd, the noise swelling then for him. One of the deputies was bringing the gloves to Eddie’s corner to our right and I saw Doc, leaning on the rope and squinting through those rimless glasses at the other guy. Then he was bending over Eddie, who was on the stool, and then Eddie was standing up and putting his weight down into one glove, as Doc held it, and then the other. Then he sat down for the lacing.
“You see that?” Tom White said. “Look what he’s got there on his shoe.”
“What are you talking about?”
“A ring. He’s got a ring on the lace of his right shoe.”
“I know.”
“He doesn’t even trust that great Doc Carroll with his jewelry while he’s in the ring.”
“I was there when he put it on. Do you want to know what it’s about?”
“Don’t tell me. You can have your Doc if you want him. I don’t have to buy him.”
It will be enough if you knock him out, Eddie, I was thinking, but it will be more if you can pull it off the way Doc said and drop him face to face with Tom White. I know it’s impossible, but do it.
“—and a former middleweight champion of the world!” Johnny Addie was announcing.
By the time they were through with the introductions the gloves were on. I saw Freddie Thomas leave the other corner and walk across to Eddie’s. Now he was on one knee in front of Eddie and Eddie had first one foot up and then the other and Freddie was scarring the soles of the shoes with the points of his scissors. Then the lights went out and we stood forever and I watched Eddie standing forever in the semi-darkness while Gladys Goodding played it with that glissade introduction on the organ and Bill Ferrell sang the “Star-Spangled Banner.”
“Fifteen rounds for the middleweight championship of the world. In this corner, wearing white trunks with black stripes, from New York City, weighing one-hundred-fifty-nine and three-quarter pounds, Eddie Brown!”
“... and weighing one-hundred-fifty-eight and a half pounds, the middleweight champion of the world ...”
The referee was making his little speech for television now, and then they touched gloves and turned and Freddie Thomas slid the robe off Eddie’s shoulders as they walked back to the corner and Doc had one leg outside the ropes and one still inside them and you could hardly hear the buzzer above the crowd. Doc was slipping the mouthpiece into Eddie’s mouth, saying one last thing, shouting it at Eddie to be heard in the noise, and Eddie’s face was stony, looking across at the other guy, and then the bell rang and Doc slapped Eddie on the back and Eddie walked out of that corner.