drove to the body again. A four-punch combination scored, and I knew I had him hurt. I went to the head with a right cross and a left uppercut that didn’t have a lot on it. His head snapped back anyway. He was dazed. I clinched again, and this time it was my turn for some trash talk.
“Think you’re gonna be the champ? MacGregor’s gonna eat you alive, kid. Your defense is awful. You’re soft in the gut—” I backed off and went to the body two more times, and then clinched again. “—and the head.” I cuffed him hard on the ear and watched his knees buckle.
The bell sounded and I went back to my stool. He staggered to the wrong corner. His seconds had to lead him back to his seat.
“Blackjack, you sure you know what you’re doing?” Sally Ray asked me while the cut man worked on the laceration on my cheek. Sally Ray knew about the thirty K. Hell, he’s the one who set it up. “You don’t wanna piss this kid off. He’s hitting you a lot.”
He gave me some water to rinse. I spit it out into a big plastic bucket. “Fuck him,” I said around my mouthpiece. My face was swollen, and I knew it would hurt the next day. It always did. “You hear him in there? He wants a goddamn war.”
Sally Ray wouldn’t look me in the eye. “Don’t do it. You want to fight smart with this one.”
Translation: We’ve got a lot of money riding on this. Don’t blow it.
“He don’t want it,” I said. I wished I could spit my mouthpiece out. But that’s usually a bad idea in the middle of a fight. Sally Ray shook his head, showing me he understood that the Jet didn’t want me to throw the fight.
“I don’t care what this motherfucker wants,” he said. “You fight smart. You do not go to war. You understand me? Fight smart.”
Translation: Stick with the game plan. Drop in the sixth round, just like we talked about. Goddamn it.
“I can take him,” I said. “He can’t defend for shit.”
“Watch the overhand right.” Translation: Let him hit you with his big punch.
The buzzer sounded and my cornermen scrambled outta the ring. I went back out into the middle of the canvas and let Johnny the Jet McDaniel beat the hell out of me some more. Fixing a fight is easy. There’s a million ways to do it. But the easiest is this: A fight promoter approaches your manager and says “My fighter is looking for someone who can give him a good workout.” Your manager, if he’s smart, might answer “I got a guy could give your boy five or six rounds.” The promoter will say “Six sounds good.”
And from there on out, all they have to negotiate is price. The other fighter might not ever know the fight was fixed. Happens all the time. In fact, I can tell you that the Jet didn’t know until I took it easy on his gut after that first hard shot. After that, he was pissed off. The way the Jet was going at me, I had to defend myself. He was landing some hard shots, but I’m a hard-headed Irishman who doesn’t have the sense to know when he’s been hurt. So he kept pouring it on, and I kept doing just enough to keep the scorecards close.
I wanted it to be respectable before I took the dive. There were other fights out there to lose. He threw another hook and followed it with his elbow again, the dirty bastard, and this time he caught my nose with it. The bone crunched easily, just as it had done the other four times it got broken. But now I was the one that was pissed off. He was already beating me. He didn’t have to play dirty. Ah well, as Sally Ray used to tell me when I was on the way up, what’s good for the goose is good for the gander.
I took the Jet’s lead left on the shoulder and bulled in close. I managed to step down hard on his instep. Instead of moving my foot away, though, I kept it planted on top of his boot. There was nowhere to go. A tall, rangy kid like the Johnny the Jet liked to keep his opponents on the outside. Trouble was, the higher you get up the card, the harder it is to dictate where the fight stays. And the kid wasn’t good enough to keep me off of him. Somebody once called the art of infighting “like fighting in a phone booth.” They don’t have many phone booths anymore, but the principle is this sound. Every movement takes place within an eighteen-inch radius.
My punches were short, sharp, and vicious. He hated being hit in the body, so I unloaded there. When his hands came down, I went left hook and right cross to his head. The cross split his eyebrow, and the sight of the Jet’s blood cascading down his face made me kick things into overdrive. I didn’t plan it. It was just instinct.
Back to the body, back to the head. I could see the kid’s hands drop, so I teed off. I didn’t hear the bell. Didn’t know the round was over until the ref and my cornermen dragged me away from the Jet. Sally Ray was in my ear the whole time I sat on the stool.
“Whaddaya doing?” He said. “Ten-round fight. You’re gonna punch yourself out. It’s only the fourth round. You’re on the wrong side a thirty to be doing that shit.”
Translation: You dumbass. You better come out tired in the next round. Dance around. Let the kid jab you a few times.
“I can take him out,” I said. Or that’s what I think I said. My jaw was sore and my nose was laid flat against my cheekbone. It’s a miracle Sally Ray could understand me. I could see the fight doctor—the guy hired by the athletic commission to make sure the fighters could safely ply their trade—talking to the Jet and examining the gash I’d put in his eyebrow.
His corner was working feverishly to stop the bleeding while the Jet was talking to the doc, trying to keep him from stopping the fight. Eventually I was the doctor nod to the jet and climb out of the ring. I blew out a deep breath. I didn’t realize I’d been holding it in. We were going to be allowed to continue.
“I don’t care what you think,” Sally Ray was saying to me. “Remember your camp. Remember, goddamn it. We trained for ten rounds, and you’re gonna punch yourself out by six. What the fuck is wrong with you? You don’t chase a guy younger than you. Let him come to you.”
Translation: Remember the deal. You’re going down in six, no matter whether you can beat the chump or not. Let the Jet dictate the action in the upcoming round.
The only problem was now the Johnny the Jet McDaniel was scared. He knew what I knew. He knew what I’d showed him. He might be the better boxer, but I was the better fighter, and he didn’t want anything else to do with me.
He wouldn’t come at me, and when I came to him, he circled away. With a minute gone in the fifth round, neither one of us had landed a blow, and the crowd was getting restless. I had no choice. If I was gonna let the kid win this round, I had to walk him down.
Walking a guy down in the ring is sometimes difficult. It’s cutting off the ring gradually, backing an evasive fighter into a corner where you can unload on him. I didn’t plan to unload on the Jet. Just the opposite, really. I was gonna give him his confidence back, only he didn’t know it yet. Sally Ray didn’t know it either. He was shouting from my corner, but I didn’t pay him any attention. I flicked lazy jabs designed to do no more than back the Jet into a corner.
Like any good fighter, he had ring instincts. He could sense when he was getting near the ropes. He thought I was coming to finish him, and it was fight or get knocked out.
To Johnny’s credit, he fought. He caught me solid in the ribs, and I bent forward just a little so that the uppercut that followed caught me in the chest rather than the chin. I wobbled backward, and he came with an overhand right that landed on my forehead. Good enough. There are places you’d rather take a hard shot, and the forehead is one of them. The arch of your skull is probably the strongest bone in your body, designed that way by God or whomever to keep precious brain matter from leaking out. But I could’ve won an Oscar. I went down to one knee, then slowly rolled onto my side.
I had to beat the ten-count, but that was easy. Or it would’ve been if the Jet had kept his composure. The ref pointed him to a neutral corner and then turned back to me. I was on my hands and knees, ready to lunge to my feet at six or seven, ready to take the standing eight count. The Jet wasn’t having any of that. Quick as his namesake, he flashed around the referee and launched
a boot right into my side.
I felt the ribs give way and tumbled over onto my back, trying to get my breath. The Jet was on top of me before I could do that, though, hammering hard shots to my face. He straddled me and rained punches down on my unprotected head until someone—his corner, I think—pulled him off of me. Thank God someone did. They saved my life.
My corner got me to my feet and somehow maneuvered me to my stool. I don’t know how they did it. I wasn’t any help. The ref followed us to the corner, which is never a good sign.
“I’m stopping it,” he said. “Disqualifying McDaniel. You got a problem with that?”
Sally Ray is a lot of things, mostly a sonofabitch, but he’s also a quick thinker.
“Hell yes I got a problem with that,” he said. “My guy’s kicking his ass. The Jet wants the fight thrown out. He don’t want to get knocked the fuck out. We’re here to fight, goddamn it.”
The ref wasn’t having it. “Your guy’s hurt. He can’t even fucking breathe. How’s he supposed to fight? I’m stopping it. He goes down in the record books as the winner.”
Sally Ray shook his head. “You get the doc over here,” he said. “If he clears Blackjack, let ‘em continue. I want to see that asshole flat on his back.”
The ref looked more than a little dubious, but finally