“You might as well bunk with me, Jerry,” Jack says.
“Oh,” I said, “I’ll sleep down at my brother-in-law’s.”
“I don’t mean for you to pay it,” Jack says. “I just want to get my money’s worth.”
“Will you register, please?” the clerk says. He looked at the names. “Number 238, Mr. Brennan.”
We went up in the elevator. It was a nice big room with two beds and a door opening into a bath-room.
“This is pretty good,” Jack says.
The boy who brought us up pulled up the curtains and brought in our bags. Jack didn’t make any move, so I gave the boy a quarter. We washed up and Jack said we better go out and get something to eat.
We ate a lunch at Jimmy Hanley’s place. Quite a lot of the boys were there. When we were about half through eating, John came in and sat down with us. Jack didn’t talk much.
“How are you on the weight. Jack?” John asked him. Jack was putting away a pretty good lunch.
“I could make it with my clothes on,” Jack said. He never had to worry about taking off weight. He was a natural welterweight and he’d never gotten fat. He’d lost weight out at Hogan’s.
“Well, that’s one thing you never had to worry about,” John said.
“That’s one thing,” Jack says.
We went around to the Garden to weigh in after lunch. The match was made at a hundred forty-seven pounds at three o’clock. Jack stepped on the scales with a towel around him. The bar didn’t move. Walcott had just weighed and was standing with a lot of people around him.
“Let’s see what you weigh, Jack,” Freedman, Walcott’s manager said.
“All right, weigh
“Drop the towel,” Freedman said.
“What do you make it?” Jack asked the fellows who were weighing.
“One hundred and forty-three pounds,” the fat man who was weighing said.
“You’re down fine, Jack,” Freedman says.
“Weigh
Walcott came over. He was a blond with wide shoulders and arms like a heavyweight. He didn’t have much legs. Jack stood about half a head taller than he did.
“Hello, Jack,” he said. His face was plenty marked up.
“Hello,” said Jack. “How you feel?”
“Good,” Walcott says. He dropped the towel from around his waist and stood on the scales. He had the widest shoulders and back you ever saw.
“One hundred and forty-six pounds and twelve ounces.”
Walcott stepped off and grinned at Jack.
“Well,” John says to him, “Jack’s spotting you about four pounds.”
“More than that when I come in, kid,” Walcott says. “I’m going to go and eat now.”
We went back and Jack got dressed. “He’s a pretty tough-looking boy,” Jack says to me.
“He looks as though he’d been hit plenty of times.”
“Oh, yes,” Jack says. “He ain’t hard to hit.”
“Where are you going?” John asked when Jack was dressed.
“Back to the hotel,” Jack says. “You looked after everything?”
“Yes,” John says. “It’s all looked after.”
“I’m going to lie down a while,” Jack says.
“I’ll come around for you about a quarter to seven and we’ll go and eat.”
“All right.”
Up at the hotel Jack took off his shoes and his coat and lay down for a while. I wrote a letter. I looked over a couple of times and Jack wasn’t sleeping. He was lying perfectly still but every once in a while his eyes would open. Finally he sits up.
“Want to play some cribbage, Jerry?” he says.
“Sure,” I said.
He went over to his suitcase and got out the cards and the cribbage board. We played cribbage and he won three dollars off me. John knocked at the door and came in.
“Want to play some cribbage, John?” Jack asked him.
John put his hat down on the table. It was all wet. His coat was wet too.
“Is it raining?” Jack asks.
“It’s pouring,” John says. “The taxi I had got tied up in the traffic and I got out and walked.”
“Come on, play some cribbage,” Jack says.
“You ought to go and eat.”
“No,” says Jack. “I don’t want to eat yet.”
So they played cribbage for about half an hour and Jack won a dollar and a half off him.
“Well, I suppose we got to go eat,” Jack says. He went to the window and looked out.
“Is it still raining?”
“Yes.”
“Let’s eat in the hotel,” John says.
“All right,” Jack says, “I’ll play you once more to see who pays for the meal.”
After a little while Jack gets up and says, “You buy the meal, John,” and we went downstairs and ate in the big dining-room.
After we ate we went upstairs and Jack played cribbage with John again and won two dollars and a half off him. Jack was feeling pretty good. John had a bag with him with all his stuff in it. Jack took off his shirt and collar and put on a jersey and a sweater, so he wouldn’t catch cold when he came out, and put his ring clothes and his bathrobe in a bag.
“You all ready?” John asks him. “I’ll call up and have them get a taxi.”
Pretty soon the telephone rang and they said the taxi was waiting.
We rode down in the elevator and went out through the lobby, and got in a taxi and rode around to the Garden. It was raining hard but there was a lot of people outside on the streets. The Garden was sold out. As we came in on our way to the dressing-room I saw how full it was. It looked like half a mile down to the ring. It was all dark. Just the lights over the ring.
“It’s a good thing, with this rain, they didn’t try and pull this fight in the ball park,” John said.
“They got a good crowd,” Jack says.
“This is a fight that would draw a lot more than the Garden could hold.”
“You can’t tell about the weather,” Jack says.
John came to the door of the dressing-room and poked his head in. Jack was sitting there with his bathrobe on, he had his arms folded and was looking at the floor. John had a couple of handlers with him. They looked over his shoulder. Jack looked up.
“Is he in?” he asked.
“He’s just gone down,” John said.
We started down. Walcott was just getting into the ring. The crowd gave him a big hand. He climbed through between the ropes and put his two fists together and smiled, and shook them at the crowd, first at one side of the ring, then at the other, and then sat down. Jack got a good hand coming down through the crowd. Jack is Irish and the Irish always get a pretty good hand. An Irishman don’t draw in New York like a Jew or an Italian but they always get a good hand. Jack climbed up and bent down to go through the ropes and Walcott came over from his corner and pushed the rope down for Jack to go through. The crowd thought that was wonderful. Walcott put his hand on Jack’s shoulder and they stood there just for a second.
“So you’re going to be one of these popular champions,” Jack says to him. “Take your goddam hand off my shoulder.”
“Be yourself,” Walcott says.
This is all great for the crowd. How gentlemanly the boys are before the fight. How they wish each other luck.
Solly Freedman came over to our comer while Jack is bandaging his hands and John is over in Walcott’s corner. Jack puts his thumb through the slit in the bandage and then wrapped his hand nice and smooth. I taped it
