A Writer's Life Read Free Page A

dialogue, and a close identity with my chosen characters and their conflicts.
    And so while I sat in the back of the sports department one afternoon interviewing a glamorous visitor named Frank Gifford, the star halfback of the New York Giants, I was thinking about “The Eighty-Yard Run”; and when I was at Yankee Stadium trying to communicate with the unglamorous Roger Maris, a home-run king on a team led by the beloved Mickey Mantle, I was as empathetic as I usually am with those who are designated second-best; and after I had befriended an up-and-coming pugilist named José Torres, I shortened my sentences, like Hemingway, and wrote:
    At 22, the prize fighter has sad, dark eyes. He has jagged, small facial scars and a flattened nose that has been hit by obscure amateurs he has already forgotten.
    He has had six professional fights as a middleweight. Nobody has beaten him. In the closet of his $11-a-week furnished room at 340 Union Street, Brooklyn, he has eight suits, a dozen silk shirts and fourteen pair of shoes. He also has a girl named Ramona. Both were born in Puerto Rico.
    Each week Ramona, who is also 22, and her mother come to clean the fighter’s room. The mother complains that it is always dirty, that he never picks up his socks, that he has too many shoes. Soon, he says, he will marry Ramona and will move to Manhattan, close to Stillman’s Gymnasium, far from the mother.
    Although baseball as played by the Yankees would continue to command my emotions as a fan, it was the realm of professional prizefighting—as personified by boxers who were inevitably disappointed, who were often ignored in defeat, and who just as often contemplated comebacks—that I tried hardest to ennoble in the sports pages of the
Times
, being joined in this quest by a nearby novelist or two who were regulars at ringside. It was fortunate for me that during the late 1950s into the 1960s the heavyweight ranks included a remarkably candid and articulate champion named Floyd Patterson, whom I got to know so well that I often thought of him as my literary property. I wrote more than thirty articles about Patterson during my nine years as a
Times
reporter (from 1956 through 1965); and although I left sports in 1958 in order to have access to the more varied subject matter available in general news, I nonetheless continued to volunteer constantly for sports assignments—particularly if it was a World Series game involving the Yankees, or a heavyweight fight in which Patterson was a contestant.
    On the late afternoons of fight nights I would sometimes spend an hour or more talking to him near his bed in a hotel suite, surrounded by his trainers and sparring partners, who were either playing cards on the dining room table or snoozing on one of the sofas. Later, as fight time approached, and I squeezed into the limousine that would transport him and his invited guests to the arena, I could feel my sweat rising as I anticipated what might be inflicted upon the body and face of this amiable, well-mannered man who sat silently in the back, glancing out at the sidewalk with seeming nonchalance, indistinguishable in his conservatively tailored suit and subdued silk tie from an average black executive who might be employed by IBM. Soon he will be standing nearly naked in the ring, I kept thinking, along with other thoughts that might seem simplistic and melodramatically banal except at times like this, when I feared that he was a few hours away from becoming seriously hurt, battered and knocked senseless because he was not really vicious and talented enough, and because he was also very light for a heavyweight, perhaps twenty pounds lighter and with a much shorter reach than his primary contenders—the menacing Sonny Liston and the arrogantly confident Muhammad Ali, both of whom would eventually annihilate him.
    But even after they did, leaving him puffy-eyed behind dark glasses and with his ribs so sore that he winced