The room was about a hundred feet square and neon lit because the grimy, cob-webbed windows let in practically no light. A bank of lockers stood along one wall and a partitioned-off section contained a changing room, a toilet block and Trueman’s office. The ring was in the middle of the room on a metre-high platform. The canvas was stained with sweat and blood. Incongruously the ropes were new, bright yellow, and the padding over the hooks and post tops was pillar-box red. In one corner a battered heavy bag hung from a hook in the ceiling and a punching ball on a stand stood a little to the left. The light bag in the opposite corner was red and shiny like a tropical fruit.
A big man, thick in the waist and shoulders, with a neck like a bull and frizzy white hair on his head and arms, came out of the changing room, plodded up to the bag and began pounding it. He danced a heavy one-two, one-two on the thin canvas mat. The noise was like a tattoo on a snare drum played a bit slow. Sweat started to roll down his pink shoulders and seemed to trigger off all the latent odours in the place. A stink of liniment, resin and cigarette smoke blended in the air, asserted itself and then faded to become an atmospheric background. A dark-skinned youth limped out, took a rope off a peg and started skipping; he had one slightly withered leg and he was clumsy on every second swing.
Sammy Trueman had been a useful lightweight in the years after the war when that division was in the doldrums. He held the Australian title for a short time and lost it to someone whose name I forget. It doesn’t matter because Jack Hassen came along soon after and cleaned them all up. Sammy kept enough of his dough to get a long lease on the gym. He kept the equipment in reasonable shape and he’d trained a few boys who did alright without ever making headlines.
He came shuffling towards us as we came through the door into the gym. He was wearing shoes, old grey trousers and a V-necked sweater the same colour. The top of a mat of grizzled chest hair showed over the V. Below that the sweater ballooned out like a yacht’s spinnaker in a high wind. Sammy was hog-fat, as the old-time fight writers used to say. He looked nearly twenty stone, double his old fighting weight. But then it had been a quarter of a century since Sammy had been in the ring and since then he’d spent more time with the bottle than the heavy bag.
“Harry – Cliff boy,” he wheezed. “Good to see youse. Come to look over the new Dave Sands.”
I shook his hand. “I guess so. I saw the last three.”
Sammy’s wheezing changed to a note that suggested he might be laughing. He thumped Tickener on the arm. “No way to talk is it Harry? This boy’s the goods, eh?”
“Could be Sammy, could be. I hope so anyway, the fight game’s in the shits at the moment.”
“You never said a truer word,” Trueman said sadly. He didn’t add that it was mis-match merchants and dive-dealers like him who’d helped it to get that way.
“It’s wet enough outside, Sammy,” I grunted. “Don’t get your sawdust damp. Let’s have a look at your boy.”
“You’re a hard man Cliff, but OK, stick around, you’ll really see something.” He turned around ponderously and waddled off to the changing room. A tall thin young man came out of the door before he got there and Trueman grabbed his arm.
“Get your gear on, Sandy,” Trueman spluttered, “you’re going three with Jacko.”
The youth nodded but darted a few looks around him as if he was looking for a place to hide. He walked across to a locker, pulled out tape, gloves and protective devices for above and below the belt, and went through the door after Trueman.
Tickener and I walked across and sat down in canvas chairs with steel frames in a row often lined up beside the ring. As we did so two men came into the gym. They were both dark, Mediterranean-looking, with the same cut to their clothes. They shook water off their hats, peeled off their coats and sat down in the chairs at the other end of the row. One of them, more burly and swarthy than the other, shot six inches of gleaming white shirt cuff and looked at his watch. Tickener pulled out his Camels and started one without offering the pack to me – he knew what I thought of them.
“Fuckin’ depressing place,” he said.
“Always was. Think this boy’ll make a difference?”
“He just might. Here he comes, take a look.”
Trueman came out along with a young Aborigine who had to lean down from his six feet to hear what the fat trainer was saying. He was wearing old boxing boots, baggy shorts and a torn singlet – not a gymnasium cowboy then. Trueman broke off when he noticed the Latins in the chairs. He gave them a quick nod and muttered something to his fighter. The boy put his sparring helmet on over a thick crop of bushy hair. With the hair covered he looked a bit like Dave Sands whom I’d seen once – the night he’d knocked Chubb Keith out cold in the fourteenth round. Four months later Sands was dead, his chest crushed in a truck smash. This kid had the same neat, handsome head, massive shoulders and those spindly Aboriginal legs that never seem to give out. Trueman led him across to where Tickener and I were sitting.
“Jacko Moody,” he belched through the words. “Scuse me. Jacko, this is Cliff Hardy and Harry Tickener.”
“Gidday,” he said, “pleased to meet you.” His voice was young but gruff. He looked about seventeen or eighteen, a hundred and sixty pounds or so and as tough as teak. We shook hands. Moody did a little jig. He was raring to go and made me conscious of my beery breath, tobacco-stained fingers and short wind. Still, I didn’t have to be that fit. Taking and handing out beatings was only incidental to my work.
The thin lad called Sandy had togged up and was standing about lackadaisically in the ring. Moody climbed through the ropes and leaned back against one of the supports while Trueman taped and gloved his hands. The trainer squeezed a dirty towel out in a bucket of grimy water and hung it over the lower strand of rope near Moody’s corner. No-one was attending Sandy but he was probably better off.
“Orright Jacko, Sandy, let’s see what youse can do. I want a lot of punches, not too much steam in ‘em, but mix it a bit if you feels like it. Bit of a show for the gentlemen, eh?”
Trueman hit the gong mounted at the base of the ring support and the boys moved forward towards the centre of the canvas square. I knew Moody was something special when I missed seeing his first punch. He put a hard straight left into Sandy’s face and a right rip into his ribs before the white boy got set, and that was the pattern of the round. Sandy wasn’t unskilled and he wasn’t slow, Moody was just immeasurably better in all departments and he hit clean and often and tied Sandy up in knots. They broke out of a clinch of Sandy’s making at the end of the round; Sandy’s chest was heaving but the Aborigine hadn’t raised a sweat.
It was much the same in the second session except that Moody stepped up the pace a little and made Sandy look worse. But he still hadn’t thrown or taken a really hard punch and if they can’t do that they can’t do anything. The fighters took their rest, shaped up again and Trueman suddenly yelled at Sandy to have a go. He bullocked forward and got a good short right up under the Aborigine’s guard onto his chin. Moody moved his head back a fraction to take some of the force out of it and to bring Sandy in, then he stopped him short with a straight left and brought over a right hook. The fair boy’s arms flopped to his sides, his knees buckled and he went down, disintegrating like a demolished chimney tower. Moody stepped back, instinctively seeking the neutral corner then he moved towards Sandy.
“Leave him, Jacko,” Trueman roared. “Don’t spoil a good punch. Go and have a shower.”