The Telephone Booth Indian by Abbott Joseph Liebling

moves beautifully Boxers do not consider such a transfer of allegiance unethical. You hire a sparring partner, and he does his best for you while you pay him. He may be in the enemy's camp for your next fight. Braddock hired Nicholson again before the Tommy Farr fight.
    The worst sparring partner in all history was a young giant named James J. Jeffries, who joined Jim Corbett's camp when Corbett was training for his bout with Bob Fitzsimmons in Carson City, Nevada, fortyone years ago. Jeffries knocked Corbett out the first time they put on the gloves, which had an evil effect on Corbett's morale. He lost to Fitzsimmons. Later the exsparring partner knocked Fitzsimmons out and became champion of the world. Nicholson has never come near knocking out Braddock or Louis or even Primo Carnera, whom he trained for one of his last fights, but sometimes he is engaged to box with young heavyweights whom he must treat tenderly. A beginner can learn much from a good sparring partner, but if the partner knocks his brains out, as the boys say, the novice loses his nerve. George's most delicate client was a former college football player with the face of a Hollywood star and the shoulders of a Hercules, who was being merchandised by a smart manager. The manager had interested three Wall Street men in his dazzling heavyweight “prospect,” assuring them that he was potentially the greatest fighter since Dempsey. The Wall Streeters actually put the boxer and the manager on salary and bought the youngster an automobile. This was before the boy had had even one fight. The manager, in order to prevent his backers from hearing any skeptical reports, arranged to have the football player train in a private gymnasium frequented only by fat businessmen. He then hired Nicholson to spar with him, and each afternoon the Wall Streeters and their friends visited the gymnasium andwatched their hopeful knock George about. George got five dollars a workout. They were much astonished subsequently when, after supporting their coming champion for a year and a half, he was knocked out in a fourround bout they got him with another novice.
    George says there was nothing wrong about his conduct. “That manager hired me to box with that boy,” he says. “He didn't hire me to hurt him.”
    There isn't much money in the sparring business, George concedes, but there doesn't seem to be much in anything else, either. The prospect of injury doesn't bother him, because he seldom takes a punch solidly. He “gets on it” before it develops power, or else he takes it on his forearms or shoulders, or at worst “rolls away” from it as it lands. “I like the old word for boxing,” he once said. “The manly art of defense. And I don't fear no man. Now, that Joe, he really can punch. He can really punch. What I mean, he can punch, really. Yet he ain't never no more'n shook me. And when I feel myself getting punchdrunk I'm going to quit. I'm going to look me up a profitable business somewhere that's a profit in it.”
    Nicholson was in his chair at Pompton Lakes when he made this declaration. The chairs at his left and right were occupied by Jim Howell and another large colored man named Elza Thompson. Each of the three had his left leg crossed over his right knee. After a long interval they recrossed their legs in unison, this time with the right on top. There was no spoken word to suggest the shift, just telepathy. Undisturbed by the musical sigh of Nicholson's voice, Howell and Thompson were apparently asleep. Yet the triple movement was perfectly synchronized, like something the Rockettes might do, but in slow time.
    At the phrase “punchdrunk” Howell had opened one eye.
    “How you going to know you punchdrunk, George?” heinquired. “A man punchdrunk, he don't know he punchdrunk. That the sign he punchdrunk.”
    Nicholson thought this over in deep gloom for a while.
    Then he said, “Sometime when I boxing with a fellow that hit me right on the button, and I