The Professional

by W. c. Heinz

  “Why?”

  “Because once, when he was young, he was going to show the world with that big bat. He was going to walk up there and keep hitting that ball and the world would know he was a great hitter. He’s done it for all these years, and finally, when the world still boos him, he can think of nothing except to display to them his contempt.”

  “You think that’s why he did it?”

  “I know it’s why. So they boo him all the more. You mustn’t insult the amateurs.”

  “Amateurs. How many people in that park tonight could read what my kid was doing out there?”

  “I don’t know. Very few.”

  “Two? Three?”

  “Possibly.”

  “Isn’t that dreadful?”

  “But it doesn’t really make any difference.”

  “That’s what I used to say. I used to say: ‘I’m Doc Carroll, and this is the way you do it.’ The hell with the rest of them, I used to think. I’ll put it right up there, and they can see it. I’ll walk right through them, and where the hell am I?”

  “You’re in Pittsburgh right now.”

  “I’m fifty-eight years old in Pittsburgh with another green fighter. That’s where I am.”

  “Oh, come off it. The amateurs have always crowded the highways to everywhere, so it’s never been easy for the pros to get through. Now you’ve got a real good-looking kid who looked fine tonight. If I was a fight manager I’d wish I had him.”

  “You liked him, hey?”

  “I think he’s got a hell of a chance.”

  It seemed to pick him up.

  “He’s got a chance, all right,” he said.

  “A hell of a one. You’re just afraid to let yourself enthuse.”

  “I’ve had so goddamn many disappointments.”

  “Who hasn’t? This is a new deal.”

  “He likes to fight, too. You know?”

  “I could see that.”

  “He got that guy hurt, he wanted to kill him.”

  “I saw it. So you bawl him out, telling him excitement is for amateurs.”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “Sure I know.”

  “A fighter’s got to feel excitement, or he’s nothing.”

  “Sure. He’d just be a guy going through the motions.”

  “But he’s got to learn to control it, and let it go in the right place.”

  “Certainly.”

  “I wanted him to put that excitement into one good shot in the belly.”

  “I know.”

  “That’s the hardest thing in the world to do. People don’t know that. It’s the hardest thing in the world to teach a fighter to control that excitement without killing it.”

  “It’s the secret of everything, from painting to, hell, selling.”

  “It’s the hardest thing in the world to teach.”

  “Or to do.”

  “Do? Hell, if I can teach it, he can do it.”

  “Yes.”

  “This kid might, too. This kid’s a learner. I abuse hell out of him, but he’s a good kid.”

  “I can see that.”

  “You have to abuse them. You can’t let them think it’s easy. This kid has never had an easy fight, and he never will. I won’t let him. I get him guys he can lick, but guys who look to knock his block off. I get him guys like that one tonight, that he can learn on, but no cousins. This is the toughest business in the world, and one easy fight could ruin him.”

  “You worry too much. You wouldn’t let it ruin him. You’d find a way to bring him back to size.”

  “You can’t always do that. Guys in this business, they worry about bringing a kid back if he gets licked. Hell, that’s no problem. You match him right and he gets licked in a tough fight, so he either comes back or he doesn’t. If he don’t, he’s not enough fighter and you can forget it.”

  “I suppose so.”

  “It’s the other ones. I’ve lost fighters the other way. You’ve seen it.”

  “I have.”

  “You put a kid in with a guy figures to be tough and something happens. Maybe your guy gets lucky or the other guy is off his feed and takes a couple of good punches and resigns. You look at your kid, and you can see it in his face. ‘Oh, boy!’ he’s saying. ‘This is for me.’”

  He was room-walking now, his glass in his hand, and he stopped at the foot of my bed and looked down at me sitting there and watching him.

  “He’s gone,” he said. “You’re looking at a fighter that just left. Gone.”

  I know, I was thinking. I’ve seen it happen to fighters and to ballplayers, too. I could tell you about some writers.

  “I lie awake nights over this kid. Every fight I take for him I worry. Half the time I’m in the corner there rooting for the other guy to belt him a couple. Isn’t that dreadful?”

  “It’s the way it should be.”

  “It’s hard as hell to make matches for a kid like this.”

  “It’s like Granny Rice said about horse racing. There’s a slight element of chance involved.”

  “Can you imagine?”

  “What?”

  “He wants to get married.”

  “They usually do.”

  “Kids. They can’t understand. They got one chance. They got ten years. They make it in ten years, or they don’t. So they want to get married.”

  He had finished his drink and he stood up and walked over to the bureau and put the glass down on it.

  “Doc, you’re going against the laws of nature and civilization. It’s quite normal for a normal human being to want to get married.”

  “Fighters aren’t normal human beings,” he said, staring down at me through those rimless glasses, and raising his voice at me. “Get that out of your head. You should know that. A fighter is a freak. He’s got ten years in the toughest business in the world, a business that calls for every ounce of his strength and every second of his life. There isn’t a goddamn thing he does that doesn’t affect his business. He’s not a paper hanger, a lawyer, a writer. He can’t spread it over thirty, forty years. He’s got to give it all now, or never.”

  You have always asked too much, I was thinking. There have been many of us who have asked that of ourselves or others at one time or another, but we have deserted you in compromise and now you are the only one I know who, after all this time, still carries on that lonesome crusade against reality.

  “Goddamn dames,” he said. “What do they want?”

  “They only want what everyone else wants. They’re bound by the same laws, too.”

  “What does she want with a fighter?”

  “Maybe she doesn’t want anything with a fighter. Maybe she just wants a nice young guy named Eddie Brown, who happens to be a fighter.”

  “Not this one. I met her.”

  “And didn’t like her.”

  “Of course not. She’s a good-looking kid, with big brown eyes and a nice figure. I can read her.”

  “I suppose so.”

  “She wants Eddie Brown, the fighter. He’s the best grab she knows. He’s a fighter. It’s glamorous. He’s starting to get his name in the paper. He might even become a champion. ‘There’s Eddie Brown’s wife,’ people will say. She’ll have a mink coat. They’ll go to nightclubs. The head waiter’ll know them. It’ll be a ball. The hell it will.”

  “You’re imagining all this.”

  “The hell I am. I met her. She’s got a head of her own. That’s the trouble. If she was some cow-eyed little thing I’d say maybe this’ll work, as long as she keeps looking up at him that way. Not this one. This one has a mind, but she don’t know she’s marrying a freak.

  “What can it be? Hell, he’ll be home two weeks and gone for three. What kind of a marriage can that be? He’s a long shot to make it at best, right? Now let’s say he doesn’t make it. Twenty years from now he’s still trying to figure out why. There he sits some night, a working stiff just trying to meet expenses, his dreams gone and hers, too. He looks over a
t her. She’s put on twenty pounds, and she’s sitting there in some old house dress and he says to himself: ‘Maybe if I didn’t marry her I’d have made it.’ They do that, you know. The ones that don’t make it are always grabbing at something. Won’t that be a beautiful marriage?”

  He picked up the bottle. There was still some Scotch in it.

  “I’ll leave it here,” he said. “You can finish it.”

  “I’m not a lonesome drinker, either.”

  “The hell with it.”

  “When you leaving?” he said as I walked him to the door and we shook hands.

  “Oh, I may be here two or three more days.”

  “We’re flying back at eleven.”

  “I’ll see you back in town.”

  He walked out into the hall and turned back to me.

  “Can you imagine that?” he said.

  “What?”

  “That guy says: ‘Well, you were lucky tonight.’ Can you imagine? Amateurs.”

  I watched him start down the hall, and then I closed the door.

  11

  Somewhere seven years had gone, somewhere between a night in Pittsburgh and an afternoon in the small dressing room at Girot’s. What the years take from the old they give to the young, and so in seventy fights in seven years Eddie Brown had become many fighters I had known.

  There is a ritual about any form of art, and I had seen this one so many times. It is the way a man, preoccupied, prepares his paints with his palette knife or inserts two sheets of blank paper into a typewriter or strips out of his street clothes and puts his body into the things of the ring. For another this would be an awkward act, embarrassing in its fraudulence, but for this man it has become one of the most natural of rites.

  Eddie had hung his jacket over the back of the chair, and then he sat down and took off his loafers and his socks. Jay handed him a clean pair of white woolen socks and he put those on and then put on his ring shoes. Resting first one foot and then the other against the edge of the rubbing table he laced the shoes in silence, and now he stood up and pulled his white T-shirt over his head and tossed it on the chair and he started to get out of his gray flannel slacks.

  “Where you supposed to hang things around here?” Jay said, looking at the array of hooks with clothes draped on them.

  He had been mothering his bandages and jars at one end of the bench. At the other end Vince DeCorso had got into his ring clothes and wrapped his hands in gray-soiled gym bandages and taped them. Now he was just sitting on the bench and waiting.

  “Where you put your stuff?” Jay said to him.

  “Me?” DeCorso said. “Here.”

  He reached over and put his hand on his slacks and shorts and T-shirt and sweater hanging from one of the hooks.

  “You want me to take them off?” he said.

  “No,” Eddie said, looking over. “Leave them there.”

  “The sparring partner got a place to hang his clothes,” Jay said. “The fighter got nothing.”

  DeCorso looked at me and shrugged his shoulders.

  “Forget it,” Eddie said. He was folding his slacks and placing them over the top of the jacket on the back of the chair.

  “Somebody’s got to take charge around here,” Jay said. “I bet that Girot never comes out here. What kind of a place is he runnin’? Who’s fightin’ for the title here, anyway? You’re the most important guy he’s got here.”

  “Hand me the gauze, will you, Jay?” Eddie said.

  Jay handed Eddie the first roll and I watched him bandage the right hand, around the wrist and then down and around over the body of the hand, between the fingers and back over the body, flexing the hand now and then, the white bandage building like a cast. Jay handed him a strip of the wide tape and he wrapped it over the bandage at the wrist. Then Jay handed him, one at a time, the narrow strips, and he took each one and pinched it in the middle, then stuck it to the back of the hand, brought it over between the two fingers and stuck the other end to the gauze covering the palm.

  “You always bandage your own hands?” I said, when he had started on the left hand.

  “Always,” he said, wrapping the tape.

  “Since he first come around,” Jay said, standing there and watching, waiting with a small strip. “Not for fights, though. Doc always bandages him for fights, but Doc and me, we taught him to do his own hands soon as he come around. While he’s doin’ it, a fighter can tell himself how it feels. You know?”

  “No matter how often I watch fighters do it,” I said to Eddie, “I still marvel at the sureness and neatness of it.”

  “Hands are a fighter’s tools,” Jay said. “He’s got to take care of his tools. A fighter busts his hands and he’s nothin’. I see many a good fighter have to tap out with bad hands. You remember Danny Bartfield?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  Jay was talking about Danny Bartfield and I was watching Eddie. He was not even hearing the conversation, and I know that kind and I never press them at such a time. Often the newspapermen will descend upon them in a pack at a moment like this and flush them out, but it really isn’t any good.

  “First he couldn’t do the right hand so good,” Jay was saying, talking about Eddie again now. “You know what I mean, tryin’ to work with the left hand? So we told him always do that hand first. Now he does one about as good as the other. Right, Eddie?”

  “Right,” Eddie said, taking the tape from Jay.

  When he had finished the hand he pulled on a pair of brief, tight, white woolen trunks and a white T-shirt and picked up the use-darkened brown leather harness of his cup. Jay collected the jar with Eddie’s mouthpiece in it and a jar of Vaseline and a towel, and with Vince DeCorso following us and carrying his own mouthpiece jar and towel and protective cup we walked out.

  It is the fighter’s place. The dressing room and the gym and the ring are the fighter’s kingdom and in them the good fighter is supreme. He breathes and walks and talks in many places, but this is where he belongs, formed so right for this that he himself is not aware of it, and will never be until years after it is over and then it will come to disturb him that something has gone out of his life forever, not just the fights but something. The something is all of it.

  Eddie walked through the gym, a part of all the other fighters and yet apart from them, as they were one with, yet apart from, him. In the ring Schaeffer was mauling with a young heavyweight who came up from Jersey each afternoon with two other fighters and Charley Keener, who managed them and managed Cardone, and Charley’s kid, who helped train them. At the big bag Booker Boyd was shouldering it and then throwing hooks and short right hands into it, and at the speed bag Cardone stood, blank-faced and sweating, rhythm-clubbing the bag over his head, louder and then louder, first one knee and then the other coming up, the two like pistons and in perfect cadence. Near the corner formed by the dressing room and the outside wall, Keener’s two other fighters, a middleweight and a welterweight, did sit-ups on the mat, their hands locked behind their heads, and in the open space near the bar only Penna was alone, rope-skipping in place, sweating, too, and the only one un-watched.

  On the ring apron Polo leaned on the top rope, watching Schaeffer and shouting to him. Ten feet from him, Keener’s kid leaned, watching the other heavyweight. Near the big bag Barnum, his face unchanging, watched Boyd. Keener stood between the speed bag and the mat, talking with Doc, but watching Cardone, the current hope of the stable, but at the same time lending his presence to the two others on the mat.

  When Eddie walked through this, with Jay and DeCorso following him, he moved to the open floor by the bar. Penna stopped the rope to say something to him, and then he went back to skipping and Eddie moved around, rotating his arms and shoulders, stopping to bend over, feet spread, to touch his toes, stopping again to do a deep knee bend, coming up and walking again, rotating his arms and shoulders, with Jay leaning on the bar and watching him and DeCorso moving around and doing the same but always with an eye on Eddie and alwa
ys keeping out of his way.

  “Hey, Frank!”

  It was Keener, and I walked over to where he and Doc were standing, and we shook hands. Keener stabled in New Jersey, because he lived there, but he worked out of New York and was regarded as one of the most successful of all of them and looked it. He was a semi-short, pink-faced, immaculate man who bought his clothes at Martin’s, next to Lindy’s, and ate his steaks in Gallagher’s and worked both sides of the street. I have seen him bellied up to a West Side bar with a known hood and the next night I have not been surprised to see him pick up the tab at Leone’s for an assistant DA. Without even trying I can recall a couple of occasions when he explained to me, for no particular reason, how important it is that a man have friends.

  “Doc tells me you’re writing a story about Eddie,” he said. He had to raise his voice to be heard above the noise of the speed bag.

  I nodded in the noise, and he turned and walked a couple of steps and put his hand on Cardone’s shoulder. Cardone stopped the bag with one hand and turned.

  “That’s enough,” Keener said. “Cool out and take your shower.”

  Cardone nodded and, without saying anything, walked over to the ring, pulling off his bag-punching gloves. He picked his towel up from the ring apron and wiped his face and neck.

  “You can both go in now, too,” Keener said to the two on the mat.

  He was in his fifties and had been at it for thirty years and was one of the great merchandisers. He was often referred to by the boxing writers as an astute student of styles and abilities, but his business really was buying and selling. One of his best fighters had been built by old Barnum, another had been self-made, and the truth was that Keener knew no more about fighters than the best of race-track clockers knows about the horses that flash before his eyes and live only in the sweep second hand of his watch. What our world mistook for genius was merely a handicapper’s knack.

  “Eddie’s a good boy,” he said.

  “I like him, but I can’t stand his manager,” I said.

  I was trying to bring Doc into it. In the presence of success I was trying to let both of them know that my man was still Doc.