HEAVYWEIGHT RIVALS IN CRUCIAL BATTLE TONIGHT—MAKE FIGHT PREDICTIONS
“Toro to Get Boxing Lesson And First Licking,” says Ex-Champ
by
GUS LENNERT
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 out-box 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.
“I Will Knock Him Out in Five Rounds,” says Argentine Giant
by
TORO MOLINA
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 realize 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 Angel 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 re-write of one I had written a year earlier for a French middle-weight, 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 labors 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 by-line 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 G’s 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 gray 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 apologized 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 G’s 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 percent 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 humorless 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 favorite, or for those displays of bravado that may be part of a preconceived plan of psychological warfare, or for a sign of some highly publicized 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 jack-knife 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 seven-teen 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’ moved with jaunty arrogance. He trotted over to Lennert’s corner and, instead of the conventional and perfunctory hand-shake, 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.
The ring was cleared now. The referee brought the fighters together for final instructions. Gus stood quietly with a towel draped over his head, looking bored as he listened to the routine warnings about foul punching and breaking clean he had heard hundreds of times before. Toro fixed his eyes on his opponent’s feet, nodding sullenly as the referee went through his spiel.
Then they were back in their corners, with their bathrobes off, alone and stripped for action. Toro turned to his corner, in a gesture of genuflection and crossed himself solemnly. Lennert winked at a friend in the working press. The crowd was hushed with nervous excitement. The house lights went down and the white ring was sharply outlined in the darkness.
At the bell, Gus put out his gloves to touch Toro’s in the meaningless gesture of sportsmanship, but Toro brushed him aside and drove him into the ropes. This aroused the fans’ erratic sense of fair play and they booed. Gus looked surprised. Toro was leaning on Gus, flailing his arms with ineffectual fury. When the referee separated them, Gus danced up and down, flicking his left into Toro’s face and preparing to counter with the clever defensive timing that everyone expected of him. But Toro rushed him into the ropes again, not hitting him cleanly, but roughing him up, punishing him with his great weight, clutching him with one arm and clubbing him about the head with the other.
That was the pattern of the first round. Lennert wasn’t able to make Toro fight his fight. His movements were listless. He lacked the strength to stand off Toro’s wild rushes.
Toro looked even more aggressive as he came out for the second round. Up from the floor he lifted a round-house uppercut, the kind Gus had easily blocked and countered a thousand times. But this time he seemed to make no effort to avoid it and it caught him on the side of the head.
He shouldn’t let Toro hit him that easily, I thought. Nobody is going to believe that. But I had to admit Gus put on a very good show. He actually seemed hurt by the blow. At least he fell into a clinch as if to avoid further punishment. Toro kept on trying to hammer at him even in the clinch. He wasn’t what we’d call an in-fighter, but he had enough strength to pull one of his arms free and club away at Gus’ back and kidneys. Gus was talking to him in the clinches, mumbling something into his ear. I wondered what he could be saying. Perhaps, “Take it easy, boy. What you so steamed up about? You’re gonna win.” Whatever it was, Toro wasn’t listening. In his clumsy, mauling way, he was taking the play away from Gus. As we had figured the fight, Gus would outbox Toro for the first two or three rounds and then ease himself out around the sixth, whenever he caught one that would look good enough for the K.O.
But Toro wasn’t giving him a chance to show anything. He was fighting him as if possessed, as if he had to destroy Gus Lennert. Just before the round ended, Toro rushed Gus again, clubbing the smaller man viciously, and his gloved fist came down heavily on top of the ex-champion’s head. It wasn’t a punch known to boxing science, just the familiar downward clubbing motion that cops like to use. Gus sagged. Toro clubbed him fiercely again and Gus sank to his knees. The bell sounded. Gus didn’t look badly hurt, but he didn’t get up. He remained on one knee, frowning and staring thoughtfully at the canvas. His seconds had to half-carry, half-drag him back to his corner.
“He’s a bum, he wants ta quit,” someone yelled in back of me.
Smelling salts, massage at the back of the neck and a cold wet sponge squeezed over his head brought Gus around by the time the warning buzzer sounded for round three. He opened his eyes and then closed them again and shook his head slowly as if trying to clear it.
“He’s faking,” the guy said behind me. “Look at him, he wants ta quit.”
Several other skeptics took up the cry.
At the bell, Toro ran across the ring. Gus tried to hold him off with a feeble jab, but Toro just pushed it aside and brought his fist down on Lennert’s head again. Gus dropped his hands and turned to the referee. He was muttering something. Whatever it was, the referee didn’t understand and motioned him to fight on. Toro clubbed him again. Gus stumbled back against the ropes and sat down on the middle strand with his head buried in his arms. There was a wild look in Toro’s eyes. He was going to hit Gus again, but the referee slid between them. Gus continued to sit on the ropes, cowering behind his gloves. The way it looked to the fans, he hadn’t really been badly hurt. It looked as if that guy behind me was right. It looked as if he were doing an el foldo, all right. I couldn’t figure it. Gus had more sense than to quit without going down. Even if he wanted to go home early, he had enough ring savvy to give the crowd the kind of kayo they paid to see. But he just kept sitting there on the rope, with his head bowed in his arms as if he were praying. The referee looked at Gus curiously. Then he raised Toro’s hand and waved him back to his corner. The crowd didn’t like it. The guy behind me was yelling, “Fake!” The cry began to spread. Apparently just enough had leaked out about Toro’s record to make some of the cash customers hypercritical. Lennert’s handlers jumped into the ring and led Gus back to his corner. He slumped down on his stool and his head fell forward on his chest. Part of the crowd had begun to file out, muttering their disappointment to each other. But thousands were still standing around, booing and crying, “Fake!”
“This act oughta bring vaudeville back,” the comic behind me shouted. People around him were still laughing when Gus suddenly pitched forward and slid off his stool. His head hit the canvas heavily and he lay still.
The powerful lights beating down on Gus’ inert, expressionless face gave it a ghostly hue. A couple of news cameramen shoved their cameras at him through the ropes and flashed their pictures. The crowd wasn’t booing any more. Around the ring curiosity seekers were pressing forward for a closer look.
The house doctor, portly, genial, inefficient Dr. Grandini, bustled into the ring. The handlers grouped themselves anxiously around the doc. This sort of thing didn’t happen very often and they were frightened.
The guy behind me who first started yelling “Fake!” was pushing past me to get a better view of Gus. “He’s hurt bad,” he was telling a companion. “I knew there was something funny the way he sat down on those ropes.”
“He just can’t take it any more,” his companion declared.
“I seen him put up some great battles here in the Garden,” someone said.
“Well, he sure stunk up the joint tonight,” said a gambler who had bet Lennert to stay the limit.
Barney Winch, and one of his lieutenants, Frankie Fante, came along.
“Hi, there, Eddie,” Barney grinned behind his fat cigar. “How’s my boy?”
“Looks like something’s wrong with Gus,” I said.
“Come on, Barney,” Fante said. “We c’n see it at the Trans-Lux. We gotta meet those fellas outside.”
“Have a big night?” I asked Barney.
“Not bad,” Barney said.
Not bad, for Barney, meant twelve, fifteen thousand, maybe twenty.
They were carrying Gus out now. They carried him up the long aisle to the dressing rooms, with his white face staring sightlessly at the fans who had been abusing him with their cynical cat-calls a few minutes before.
In our dressing room, Pepe was inviting everybody to be his guest at El Morocco. Vince had managed to place the fifty grand for him and Pepe wanted us all to help him start spending it. But Toro was more excited than anybody else. He grabbed me when I came in and shouted, “Toro no joke. Toro real fighter. You see tonight, huh?”
“Everyone in Argentina will be talking about you tonight,” Fernando said, coming in from somewhere. “This is a great victory for Argentinidad, for the pride of Argentina.”
For the pride of Toro Molina, I thought. That’s all that was at stake, and that’s enough.
Doc came in from the hall. Nobody had missed him in the excitement. His hunchback and his damp, pale face framed in the doorway, he looked like a herald of doom. His nasal voice knifed through the celebration din.
“Gus is still out,” he said. “He’s going to the hospital.”