The Harder They Fall

  Toro moved into the big room slowly, shyly, and again I had the impression of a great beast of burden moving along with an obedient eye on its master. Acosta looked up and said something to Toro, and he began to go through warming-up calisthenics. He bent at the waist and touched his toes. He sat on the floor and raised his enormous torso until his head was between his legs. He was limber and, for a man of his size, surprisingly agile, though he didn’t perform his exercises with the authority, the zip, of the boxers around him. Again I had the image of an elephant that performs its feats in the circus ring. Slowly, mechanically and with a sullen acquiescence, it executes every command its trainer gives it.

  When Danny thought he had warmed up enough, Acosta and Doc prepared him for the ring. They fastened around his neck the heavy leather headgear that protected the fighter’s ears and the vulnerable areas of the brain. They fitted over his teeth the hard, red rubberised mouthpiece. With the big sixteen-ounce training gloves on his hands he climbed up to the ring; the bulky headgear and the way the mouthpiece exaggerated the already abnormal size of his mouth gave him the frightening appearance of an ogre from some childhood fairy tale. On the apron, just before climbing through the ropes, he paused a moment and looked over the hundred-odd spectators staring up at him with casual curiosity. He would never face a more critical audience. Some of them were Eighth Avenue aficionados who paid four bits to Curley at the door for the privilege of seeing some favourite scrapper knock his sparring partners silly. But most of Toro’s audience were professional appraisers who chewed their cigars with cold disdain and sized up the newcomers with shrewd eyes.

  ‘Moliner,’ Stillman said matter-of-factly, his gravel voice lost in the general hubbub, and Toro climbed into the ring. Toward the ring at a shuffling pace came big, easy-natured George, muttering one of his favourite songs:

  ‘Give me a big fat woman with the meat shakin’ on her bones …

  Give me a big fat woman with the meat shakin’ on her bones …

  And every time she shakes it some skinny woman loses her home.’

  Danny put his hand on George Blount’s heavy black forearm to give him last-minute instructions on how he wanted him to fight Toro, the different points of Toro’s style he wanted George to test. I saw the Negro nod with his warm, good-humoured smile. ‘You get it like you want it, Mr McCuff,’ George said, climbing up into the ring with the businesslike air of a labourer punching in for a hard day’s work.

  The bell rang and George shuffled toward Toro amiably. He was a big man himself, six foot two and around two fifteen, but he fought from a crouch, hunching his head down into his thick shoulders to present a difficult, weaving target. He could be a troublesome fighter, though men who knew what they were doing straightened him up with right-hand uppercuts, reached through his short, club-like arms to score with stiff jabs and stopped him with a hard right-hand over the heart every time he flat-footed in for his roundhouse, haphazard attack. Toro held his long left hand out as Acosta had undoubtedly schooled him and pushed his glove toward George’s face in what was supposed to be a jab. But there was no snap to it. George waded in, telegraphing a looping left, and Toro moved as if to avoid it, but his timing was off and he caught it on the ribs. George walked around Toro, giving him openings and feeling him out, and Toro turned with him awkwardly, holding out that left hand, but not knowing what to do with it. George brushed it aside and threw another left hook. It caught Toro in the pit of the stomach, and he grunted as they went into a clinch.

  Acosta was leaning against the ropes just below them, tensed as if this was for the championship of the world and not just the warm-up round of a training workout. He shouted something up to Toro in shrill Spanish. Toro charged in, moving his body with awkward desperation, and hit George with a conventional one-two, a left to the jaw and a right to the body. George just shook them off and smiled. Despite the size of the body from which they came, there was no steam to Toro’s punches. His fists shot out clumsily without the force of his body behind them. George moved around him again, ducking and weaving in the old-time Langford style, and Toro tried his one-two again, but George easily slipped his head out of reach of the left, caught the slow right on his glove and drew Toro into a clinch again, tying him up with his left hand and his right elbow, but managing to keep his right glove free to work into Toro’s stomach.

  The bell rang and Toro walked back to his corner, shaking his head. Acosta jumped into the ring, talking and gesticulating excitedly, jabbing, uppercutting, knocking George down in pantomime. Toro looked at him gravely, nodding slowly and occasionally looking around in bewilderment, as if wondering where he was and what was happening.

  The second round was no better for Toro than the first. George was moving around him with more confidence now, cuffing him almost at will with open-gloved lefts and rights. Acosta cupped his hands to his mouth and shouted, ‘Vente, El Toro, vente!’ Toro lunged forward with all his might, swinging so wildly with his huge right arm that he missed George completely and plunged heavily into the ropes. Some of the spectators laughed. It made them feel better.

  Just before the round ended, Danny caught George’s eye and nodded. George closed his gloves and crowded Toro into a corner, where he feinted with his left, brought Toro’s guard down and cracked a hard right to the point of Toro’s jaw. Toro’s mouth fell open and his knees sagged. George was going to hit him again when the bell rang. Like a man who drops his hammer at the first sound of the whistle, George automatically lowered his hands, ambled back to his corner, took some water from the bottle, rolled it around in his mouth, spat it out, and, with the same easygoing smile with which he had entered the ring, climbed out again.

  Toro leant back against the ropes and shook his head in a gesture of confusion. For two rounds his giant’s body had floundered as if it had lost all connection with the motor impulses in his brain.

  Acosta was at Toro’s side quickly, wiping the sweat from his large, solemn face while Doc Zigman kneaded the long thick neck with his capable fingers. Then, while Acosta held the ropes apart for him, Toro climbed ponderously out of the ring.

  ‘Didja see that big bastard?’ a regular behind me said. ‘Couldn’t lick a postage stamp.’

  ‘From one of them chile-bowl countries,’ said his companion. ‘El Stinkola, if you understan’ Spanish.’

  I turned to Vince, who was quiet for a change. ‘You sure know how to pick them,’ I said.

  ‘Don’t jump me,’ he said. ‘Nick’s the brain and he thinks he can build ’im.’

  ‘If we could only get them to decide the championship on form like a beauty contest, Toro would walk away with it. But how can a guy who looks so invincible when he’s standing still turn into such a bum when he starts moving?’

  ‘Danny can teach him plenty,’ Vince said.

  ‘Danny’s the best,’ I agreed. ‘But if Danny knows how to make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear, he’s been holding out on us.’

  ‘Why don’t you try talkin’ like everybody else?’ Vince said. ‘All them five-dollar expressions, nobody knows what the futz you’re talkin’ about.’

  ‘In other words, you become nobody by self-appointment,’ I said. ‘You got something there, Vince.’

  George was leaning against the wall near the ring, waiting to go another round with a new Irish heavyweight from Newark, just up from the amateurs. I could recognise a couple of lines of the song that seemed to play continually in his head.

  ‘Gimme a fat woman for a pillow where I can rest my head …

  Gimme a fat woman for a pillow where I can rest my head …

  A fat woman, knows how to rock me till my face is cherry red.’

  ‘How do you do, Mr Lewis?’ George said when I came up. He always asked it as if it were really a question.

  ‘How do you feel, George?’

  ‘Ready to go,’ George said. I had never known him to give any other answer. The night Gus Lennert banged him out in one round, when Gus still had something, and
George hadn’t come to until he was back in his dressing room, that had still been his answer to ‘How do you feel?’ – ‘Ready to go.’

  ‘What do you think of Molina, George?’

  ‘Big man,’ George said.

  George never put the knock on anyone. Anger seemed unknown to him and the common expressions of derision and contempt in which nearly all of us indulge were never his way. I’ve often wondered if George hadn’t fought all the meanness and bad temper out of his system, if it hadn’t all been blotted up in the canvas along with his sweat and his blood.

  ‘Think he’ll ever make a fighter, George?’

  His black face creased in a wise smile. ‘Well, I’ll tell you, Mr Lewis. I’d like to have the job of working out with him all the time. I’d like that fine.’

  As I went into the dressing rooms, George was squaring off with the Irish heavyweight. The big Irish kid fought with a set sneer on his face and neither knew how to nor wanted to pull his punches. He tore into George at the bell and whacked him a terrible punch under the right eye. I saw George smile and work his way into a clinch as the door swung closed behind me.

  Inside, Toro was stretched out on one of the rubbing tables and Sam, a bald-headed, muscular fat man was working him over. Toro was so oversized for the ordinary rubbing table that his knees reached the end and his legs dangled down over the side. Danny, Doc, Vince and Acosta were standing around. Acosta turned to me and began a long-winded, excitable explanation. ‘El Toro, today you do not see him on his best. It is perhaps the excitement of his first appearance before such important people. Since the climate is very different from when he fight in Buenos Aires, I think …’

  ‘I theenk,’ said Vince, exaggerating Acosta’s accent, ‘he’s a bum. But don’t worry, chumo. We’ve made a dollar with bums before.’

  ‘All right. Out of here! I want everybody out of here,’ Danny said. The only way you could tell he had been at the bottle was that his voice was pitched a little louder than usual. But it wasn’t only the bottle talking. It was Vince, to whom he had given the silent treatment ever since that Sencio affair. It was Acosta, who was getting on Danny’s edgy nerves. It was Toro, this Gargantuan excuse for a fighter.

  Nobody moved. Danny became petulant. ‘You think I’m talking for my health? I want everybody the hell out of here!’

  Acosta drew himself up to his full five-feet-five. ‘Luis Acosta is not accustom to such insult,’ he said. ‘El Toro Molina is my discovery. Wherever El Toro is, I must be also.’

  ‘Nick Latka owns the biggest piece of this boy,’ Danny said clearly. ‘I work for Nick. A boy can only have one manager telling him what to do. I don’t want to hurt no feelings, but I’ll see you outside.’

  Acosta puffed up as if he were going to do something, but he only bowed his head stiffly and went out.

  ‘That’s puttin’ the little spic in his place,’ Vince said.

  ‘I said I want everybody out,’ Danny snapped.

  ‘Listen, I’m one-a the partners, ain’t I?’ Vince demanded.

  Danny never addressed him directly. ‘I’m responsible to Nick for his fighters’ condition. I don’t want to have to tell him people are getting in my way.’

  The word Nick dropped on Vince like a sandbag. ‘Okay, okay, the bum is yours,’ he said and sauntered out.

  ‘I think I better go take a look at Grazelli’s hand,’ Doc Zigman said. He and Danny were old friends. He knew the order hadn’t been for him. ‘See you later, Danny.’

  I started to follow him out, but Danny said, ‘Stick around, laddie. You handle this boy’s lingo, don’t you?’

  I went over to the table and looked down at Toro. ‘¿Puede usted entenderme en español?’ I said.

  Toro looked up at me. He had large, liquid, dark-brown eyes. ‘Sí, señor,’ he said respectfully.

  ‘Good,’ Danny said. ‘I’ve got a few things I want to tell him about that workout before I forget. But we’ll wait till Sam gets through. A boy’s got to be relaxing completely when he’s being rubbed down. That’s why I ran those guys out of here.’

  After Sam finished up, Toro raised himself to a sitting position and looked around. ‘Where is Luis?’ he said in Spanish.

  ‘He is outside,’ I said. ‘You will see him soon.’

  ‘But why is he not here?’ Toro said.

  I nodded toward Danny. ‘He is your manager now,’ I said. ‘Danny will take very good care of you.’

  Toro shook his head and, with wide, thick lips in a child’s pout, he said, ‘I want Luis.’

  ‘Luis will continue to stay on with you,’ I managed to say. ‘Luis is not going to leave you. But to be a success here you must have an American manager.’

  Toro shook his head sullenly. ‘I want Luis,’ he said. ‘Luis is my jefe.’

  It’s time he heard, I thought. Time for this great hulk of an adopted son to learn the pugilistic facts of life. Better to hear them from me with all the cushion I could give them in my limited Spanish than to pick them up from the gutter-talk of Vince and his brothers, as he was sure to do.

  ‘Luis no longer owns you,’ I said, wishing I had more words with which to make the subtle shadings. ‘Your contract is divided up among a group of North Americans, of whom Mr Latka has the largest share. You must do everything he says, just as if he were Luis. He knows much more about boxing than Luis or your Lupe Morales, and can teach you many things.’

  But Toro just shook his head again. ‘Luis tells me to fight,’ he said. ‘Luis takes me to this country. When we have enough money to build my big house in Santa Maria, Luis will take me home again.’

  I looked at Danny. ‘Maybe we better get Acosta back in here to straighten him out,’ I said.

  ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘Call him in. What I got to tell the boy will still be good tomorrow.’

  I found Luis pacing up and down on the spectators’ side of the rings. From the way he looked at me I could see his insides were tied into knots. ‘Your boy is all mixed up,’ I said. ‘He doesn’t know what’s happening to him. You better go in and get him straightened out.’

  ‘You are all jealous of me,’ Acosta said as we walked back toward the dressing rooms. ‘You are all jealous because it is Luis who has discover El Toro and so you want to separate us. You do not understand that I am the only one who can make El Toro fight.’

  ‘Look, Luis,’ I said, ‘you’re a nice little guy, but you might as well get straightened out yourself. You can’t make Toro fight. There’s nobody in the world who can make Toro fight. If anybody comes close, it’s Danny, because there isn’t a better teacher in the business than Danny McKeogh.’

  ‘But Luis Firpo himself has tol’ me how magnificent is my El Toro,’ Acosta said.

  ‘Luis,’ I said, ‘on Sunday I listened to all this crap, because I was trying to be polite. And because I hadn’t seen this overgrown peasant of yours yet. But now you might as well have it between the eyes. Even your Luis Firpo was a bum. All he had was a Sunday punch. He didn’t know enough boxing to get out of his own way.’

  Acosta looked at me as if I had insulted his mother. ‘If you will pardon me,’ he said, ‘how do I know that is not just your North American arrogance? Actually Firpo has knock out the great Dempsey that day, but the judges did not want to let the title go to the Argentine.’

  ‘If you will pardon me,’ I said, ‘that is just pure Argentine horse manure.’

  Acosta sighed. ‘For me this is very sad,’ he said. ‘Always I dream of New York. And from the first moment I see El Toro…’

  ‘I know, I know,’ I cut in impatiently. ‘We’ve had all that.’ And then I thought of that epic figure of a man and that big trusting puss being cuffed around by an old pro like George Blount and I was seized by the indignity of it and I said, ‘Goddamit, Luis, you’ve pulled him out by his roots. You should’ve left him there in Santa Maria, where he belongs.’

  Acosta shrugged. ‘But it was for his own good that …’

  ‘Oh, if you will pardon
me,’ I said, ‘balls! All your life you were a little frog in a little pool. A little frog with big dreams. And all of a sudden you saw a chance, saddled yourself on Toro’s back, to make a big splash in a big pool.’

  ‘In my country,’ Acosta said pompously, ‘such a remark can lead to a duel.’

  ‘Don’t take me too seriously, Luis,’ I said. ‘In your country I hear you like to shoot off guns. Here we just like to shoot off our mouths.’

  We had reached the door to the rubbing room. ‘Now go in there and explain to Toro how Danny is the boss,’ I said. You could almost hear the air rushing from his deflated ego as he went in. He barely nodded to Danny, who joined me in the hall.

  ‘Luis, ¿qué pasa? What happens? Explain to me. I do not understand,’ I could hear Toro saying as the door closed.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  I wanted to walk down to Walker’s, which felt like the home-team dugout, but Danny couldn’t wait five blocks for the first-one-today. So we ducked into the nearest of the gloomy little saloons that tunnel off Eighth Avenue. Danny was one of those fellows who could want a drink so badly that it was an effort for him to make polite conversation until he had the first couple under his belt. When the bartender set it up for him – Jameson’s Irish was his drink – he tossed it off with a quick, nervous motion of his wrist. After the second, he exhaled slowly in a gesture of relaxation. Danny was a thin, taut man who acted as if his nerve-ends were on top of his skin. Everything he did, the way he drank, the way he smoked his cigarettes, the tic-like way he had of suddenly brushing his cheek with the back of his hand, the way he talked, had this nervousness in it.