“Well,” I said, “they’s only three more weeks of it. And think of the dough and the glory!”
“The dough part’s all right,” he says. “Whatever’s left of it I can use. But glory! That’s a laugh. You don’t kid me with that line of talk. I’ve got the low-down on the whole works. Here I am, an American that’s supposed to be fighting to keep the title in this country, and I doubt if they’s a dozen Americans that ain’t pulling for me to get knocked for a corpse. Sometimes I almost feel like I ought to let myself get licked. It would be doing everybody such a big favor and make them all happy. But how could I go about it? If the guy was big and had a real haymaker I could take one and flop. But I can’t play dead from a kiss.”
“You’ll be surprised,” I said, “if he nails you in the chin and drops you.”
“Surprised ain’t the word!” said Dugan. “I mean, if he drops me. I expect to get hit; on the chin too. Because I ain’t no defensive fighter. I go in there to get my man and in order to get him I’m willing to take what he’s got. And listen: I’ve been hit on the chin before, and not by children, neither. But I hardly ever lay down unless it’s bedtime.”
I asked him how long he expected the fight to go.
“Don’t call it a fight,” he says, “not when you and I are alone. Whatever it is will go a round or two rounds or three rounds, depending on how he behaves himself. If he wants to tear in and get it over quick, I’m willing. But no matter how long it goes—whether he lays himself wide open so as I can knock him in a round, or whether he keeps away for four or five—you can mark my words that they won’t be no glory for me in winning. He’s a great fighter now! A cave man! But after I’ve knocked him he’ll be a bum. Because anybody I can lick can’t be no good.”
“You’re brooding too much,” I said.
“Let’s play cards and forget it,” he says. “Though it does me good to talk once in a w’ile. When I don’t talk I worry.”
“What about?” I asked him.
“Oh, the ‘big fight,’ ” he says.
“But what’s they about that to worry you?” I asked.
“Well, for one thing,” he said, “I’m scared they won’t put enough padding in the floor. I’ve read of cases where a guy got knocked and hit his bean on the floor and passed out entirely. And the guy that knocked him was held for murder. And another thing: I’m scared it may not come off after all. He may get sick.”
“What would make him sick?” I says.
“Well,” said Dugan, “he may read what the girl reporters has been writing about him.”
VIII
You know what Barnum said. Well, he didn’t go far enough. They like to be bunked, but what they like most of all is to bunk themselves.
Set round some night amongst the boys when they’re easing their way through a bottle of near Johnny Walker at eighteen fish the copy. Pretty soon you’ll hear this:
“Well, fellas, in another year we’ll be leaning up against the old mahogany again, tipping over regular highballs or real beer.”
And this:
“If they’d ever leave prohibition to a vote of the people! But they don’t dast!”
Well, I was in New York for three days prior to the “big fight,” and four or five days afterwards, and anybody that was there had to take a course in human nature. I didn’t learn much that I hadn’t suspected before, but whatever doubts I may of had was removed once and for all.
The plain facts was this: A good big man was going to fight a little man that nobody knew if he was good or not, and the good big man was bound to win and win easy unless he had a sunstroke.
But the little man was a war hero, which the big man certainly wasn’t. And the little man was romantic, besides being one of the most likable guys you’d want to meet—even if he did have a Greek profile and long eyelashes.
So they was only one logical answer, namely that Goulet, the little man, would just about kill Dugan, the big man, maybe by a sudden display of superhuman stren’th which he had been holding back all his life for this one fight, but more likely by some mysterious trick which no other fighter had ever thought of before, because in order to think of it you had to have a French brain and long eyelashes. If Goulet wasn’t going to win, what did him and his manager mean by smiling so much and looking so happy? Of course the two hundred thousand fish had nothing to do with it.
They’s two reasons why I didn’t talk back to them. One was that I haven’t no breath to waste, and the other was that I don’t like to make enemies, which you’re bound to do that whenever you tell somebody something they don’t want to believe. A lot of the fight reporters found this out. Contrary to the general belief, they’s a good many American fight writers that knows more about fights and fighters than even Bernard Shaw. Pretty near all of them come right out in print and said Goulet didn’t have a chance. In return for which they got a hat full of letters calling them every name that could get through the mails.
You seen the fight yourself. Personally, I haven’t made up my mind whether Dugan done it as quick as he could, or whether he held back a w’ile to make it look like the guy was something more than a
