THE BROOKLYN RAIL

The Line on the Fight
by R.J. DeRose
November 2003

Photo by Amelia Hennighausen.

Small drops of water were falling. There was a breeze too, visible in the stray hairs of the other people in the street, especially the women. Ponti was thirty-two and bald. He only felt the wind on his face. Blisters of water were beginning to gather on his glasses.

Up in the open spaces left between the tops of the skyscrapers, the grays were darkening. The light changed as the clouds moved.

He held his glasses up to see if they were clean. At arms length the faces he saw through them were more damaged than they had been by the raindrops. Ponti wondered if he looked twisted, like the people on the street looked now. He thought about that a lot, more and more as his hair had fallen out.

A large raindrop landed on the sidewalk next to him. Ponti felt it graze his shoulder, then another land on his head. The skies were opening, so he climbed the steps and ducked through the door into the Garden. Davis was fighting Green, and Ponti had bet Davis.

It was early and quiet. There were no people in the corridors under the seats, so Ponti found a phone and called home. He hoped to talk with his wife before she left for Bingo. No one picked up. The receiver rang in his ear; he hung it back up.

She went out more and more often with her lady friends. She gave up the job she took when he was out of work, but now she played bridge and canasta and was part of a garden society and a church group and went to plays and museums. She even started to give him some of her bingo winnings. She paid for his ticket tonight so he wouldn’t have to sit home by himself. She tried to give him extra so he could have a beer and get a hot dog or two. Ponti drew the line he had tried to draw when she gave him the ticket in the first place here.

Ponti got into the arena as the bell rang to end a round. It was still early in the undercard, so the place was empty. This was the best part of fight night for Ponti. He liked to see the fighters before the public really got the chance. He liked to see who had a good jab or a weak chin. He liked the undercards best because he could learn about the fighters. It felt good to know all about the fighters, it felt like an edge. It let him bet the smart way. The betting had been going on for the better part of a year; that was the first time she tried to buy him a ticket. He took that money, bet it and won. Every time since then, since his wife started bringing him the actual ticket home, he bet part of the previous winnings.

The round Ponti came in on was the third of four. It was a slow fight, lightweights who looked like they were afraid of each other. He knew as soon as he sat down that neither of these guys were going to end up being worth anything.

But he sat and watched the fight finish anyway. He sat through the next one and the next two after that. He saw a middleweight he had been watching for a year or so knock his guy out with an uppercut. A new punch for him, Ponti noted. He saw a light-heavy he had only heard about and seen on TV get stopped in the fifth and decided that he was all right as long as he wasn’t fighting a taller fighter.

The seats were beginning to fill up. Ponti’s section, which had been empty when he came in, had people sitting in it now. Some were in his row. They were too far away for him to start talking to, though. He was waiting for somebody to sit close enough to him for there to be a conversation. An older man, because usually they knew the most about boxing, or a younger man, because they would be interested in the fights; a man would be best. Ponti didn’t want a woman to sit next to him or girl, because they would be with a boyfriend or husband probably, and couples never want to talk. Besides most of the women Ponti knew didn’t know much about boxing.

The conversation was the part of the night Ponti looked forward to. Somebody was going to witness the way he could call a fight. Some guy coming to see the fights was going to sit down next to him and be impressed by how much he knew about boxing. Ponti was going to show off his brains. He thought about it a second and figured it wouldn’t be too bad if a couple sat down next to him, as long as the man sat closest to him.

An usher was coming up the aisle trailing a young man and woman. Ponti sat straight up in his seat, preening almost, but the usher led the couple past him. Ponti turned and watched them walk higher into the rafters. They wouldn’t have been the right people he decided.

When he turned back around to watch the fighters for the third to last fight enter the ring, there were two men waiting for Ponti to get up so they could get to their seats. He stood to let them in.

One man was taller than the other, who was the same size as Ponti. They both had dark hair. The tall man wore a Yankees jacket; the short man an army field coat. There were beers in their hands.

Ponti gathered from their conversation and the way they looked at the numbers on the seats that they had the tickets for the two seats next to him. He was inwardly glad. That gladness disappeared when the shorter man said there was nobody in the row so they should stretch out and leave a seat between themselves and Ponti. They sat a space away from him, but next to each other. Ponti wondered about this for half a split-second.

The announcer announced the principals while Ponti watched the ring. He had thought about betting on this fight, but he wasn’t completely sure he knew the fighters. Also, it was hard to find bookies who’d take action on the fights. It wasn’t that hard for a big fight, but for undercards it was.

The fight was a slow one, it dragged on and on, it had rounds that seemed to last ten minutes a piece. Ponti made it longer for himself by trying to overhear what the guys next to him were talking about; if they knew what was what. He was also listening for a way into their conversation, the joke he could laugh at or the argument he could take a side in. They were speaking quietly enough for most of what they said to get lost in the crowd noise. Ponti did notice, however, that they had a program. First he would get up and go to the bathroom, then he’d wait for the introduction of the last undercard before he asked to see it.

When he came back from the john, the ref was beginning a count over the boxer Ponti would have bet on. He noticed that the air was clear, that the cigarette smoke didn’t hang in clouds over the ring. He missed that. He missed when there was smoke in the air and the days that went with it. Ponti stood in the aisle and looked at the fighter taking the count. He was on his knees at eight. Ponti watched the fighter closely and could tell by the way he held his head, down between his shoulders, that he wasn’t getting up. Ponti’s superstitions came out. He believed, on average, that every card held one surprise; he was glad this evening’s surprise was out of the way. You could never tell about a fighter’s heart; it disappeared sometimes. That was one of the things that made picking the winners important.

Ponti took his seat. That the air was clear reminded him of the old days, and the way the cigar smoke stayed in his hair. He would be able to smell it on the subway ride home. His hair had been thick and dark. His wife would run her fingers through it and the skin on his neck would pucker with pleasure. On the subways together, she would lean herself against him so she didn’t have to hold onto the straps and he could feel the curve of her back against him. They were fine times.

His throat was beginning to tighten, so Ponti put this out of his head. He didn’t want the night to be ruined. He’d been waiting for it since the card had been scheduled, three weeks.

The men were still sitting in the same seats they took when they came in. The cups the beer had been in were empty at their feet.

"Hey," Ponti said to the one sitting closest to him, the shorter one. There was no response.

"Excuse me," Ponti said a little louder. The taller man looked over and then the shorter one.

"Can I see that program?"

"Sure," the shorter man said and handed it over. Ponti didn’t like the look of the taller man, mostly because he looked like somebody Ponti didn’t like.

Ponti leafed through the booklet. It was the usual, an article about Frazier-Ali II because its twenty-fifth anniversary was coming up, then pages and pages on Davis and Green. Most of this was about the way Green was a student of the game, how he studied the old fighters: Homicide Hank Armstrong, the Rock, Ray Robinson, Tony Zale, Liston, Frazier, Ali of course, Graziano, Louis, Wilfredo Benitez, Pep, Sadler, everybody. Davis, on the other hand, was in it for the cash; he said so, at least. The program played on this heavily. It also played the way they grew up: Green easy, Davis hard. The rest was about the fighters’ records. Then a couple paragraphs about the fighters in the second to last card. Then a paragraph about each of the fighters on the undercard. These were full of mistakes, one fighter had no wins, no losses and twelve knockouts. Ponti knew that if he had been a fighter he would be one of those guys, if that much, probably one of the twelve phantom KO’s; he wanted to be one of the guys with a whole page to himself. Ponti flipped a couple of more pages and found the page set aside for scoring the fights.