The Sweet Science by A.J. Liebling

Author:A.J. Liebling [Liebling, A.J.]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Tags: Philosophy, Classics, Boxing, Sports, History
ISBN: 9781466801868
Publisher: North Point Press
Published: 1949-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

On the following Sunday morning, I called Travis at his hotel to find out why things had turned out so, and he said to come right over; he would be waiting for me in the lobby. “George is with me,” he said. When I got there, the Capitol, which had been buzzing with Rhode Islanders on fight night, was as quiet as a training camp in the Adirondacks. It is a big place, built to be a hotel for the Knights of Columbus, who lost it to the infidels during the Depression, but for some reason the fellow who designed it gave it a lobby no larger than the front room of a police station. Araujo, looking rather subdued, was wearing a sports jacket and slacks. His face was somewhat swollen, and he was even less talkative than he had been before the fight. Travis, like a father who knows his boy has made mistakes but is willing to forgive him, said Araujo had been following instructions by boxing with Carter in the early rounds. “If you’re a fighter, and I’m a fighter and boxer, why should I go along with you at your game from the start?” he asked. “Isn’t it better if I box you the first nine or ten rounds and cut you? Then I can come on to win. That’s what we were planning to do,” he added, confirming the battle plan in the Evening Bulletin. “It was working, too. George had him cut pretty good. But just when I was going to open George up, we hit the bad luck. He got knocked down, and, never being used to it, he jumped right up. That was stupid!” he said to Araujo. “It was a stupid thing to do.”

“I was just angry and excited,” the boy said. “I lost my head.”

“The bad luck was that he went down with his back toward his corner,” said Travis. “If he could have seen us, we would have motioned to him to stay down. If he had taken nine, his head would have been clear, and meanwhile Carter would have had to walk to a neutral corner. George would have gone on the bicycle as soon as he got up, and we would have been all right again before the end of the round.”

“Couldn’t you have yelled to him?” I asked.

“He couldn’t have heard us,” the manager said. “In Providence, I might take a chance and run around the ring to where he could see me, but here they might disqualify us for that. And when he got knocked down the second time, he had his back to us again.”

“It was my own fault,” Araujo said. “I was going good, my wind was fine. In another round, I was going to start to take him.”

“It’s one of the things we can’t ever prove, George,” said Travis. “When you bounced up, it was the turning point. I was amazed.”

Sammy Richman, Araujo’s New York manager, who wandered in just then, had a less tactical, more general explanation.

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