Events & Discoveries

PLANNING SESSION

The blue runway lights of Idle-wild burned under the rain as the Cadillac bearing Cus D'Amato, manager of the heavyweight champion of the world, rolled through the dark before morning, back to New York. D'Amato had gone to the airport to meet Harry (The Hoarse) Levene, the independent British fight promoter, only to discover that Levene's plane had arrived ahead of schedule and that he had already left for the city.

"I am teed off," said Cus D'Amato sourly. "I don't know why I love this business. It's like a girl friend you have. You love her but you don't know why. Maybe it's the motion. Prehistoric man, you know, was always on the move; hunting and fishing. He had to in order to eat. When he learned to preserve food, his eyes became less keen, his nose couldn't smell as good. He didn't have to move so much any more. When you stop moving, is when you start to die."

D'Amato slouched down in his seat and looked at the rain. "Maybe there is no Levene," he said. "Everything exists in your own mind. If we have not perceived him, perhaps he does not exist. I am teed off."

But there was a Harry Levene. He came later to D'Amato's Broadway apartment, as Cus slept on his day bed with a Reader's Digest as a pillow: an ebullient man of 58, with an assertive jaw, no lips to speak of, a great curved nose and skin the high color and sheen of a wax apple. He wore a blue suit with a stripe in it, a white shirt ribbed with more white and carried an envelope with the seating plans of London's Wembley Stadium in it.

Levene had flown in from London to talk with D'Amato about a title defense for Floyd Patterson there this summer. He said he hoped that Patterson's opponent would be Joe Erskine, the British Empire champion.

"He's a good boy," Levene told D'Amato, "just under 14 stone, a 6-footer, very fast but not a puncher, you know. A very strong boy. He's a Welshman. Comes from Cardiff, you know. Oh, I can just picture those excursion trains coming in from Wales; all those miners. You don't know how Welshmen are, especially when they sing Land of My Fathers. Oh, what a spectacle it will be!"

The major cloud that could befog Levene's spectacle is that Erskine, who has been defeated only by Nino Valdes in a one-round knockout last February ("Ahem. I would rather not discuss that," ahemmed Harry The Hoarse), is scheduled to meet Ingemar Johansson, the European champion, in his native Sweden this month. If Erskine is defeated, which is quite likely, Levene hopes to import an American contender for Patterson. This will surely mean that he will never be able to achieve the million-dollar gate he is dreaming of. "The biggest," as Levene grandly said, "in European boxing history."

If D'Amato was dismayed by this prospect, he did not admit it. "I am a man of some imagination," he announced. "They think things happen by accident, but they don't. I intend to box in Europe."

D'Amato's apartment quickly filled with those who were to accompany Levene to Patterson's camp at Greenwood Lake, N.Y. Pete Rademacher, Floyd's last opponent, was there, and his business associate Lucky Mc Daniel, the eminent shooting teacher (SI, Aug. 19), and a dozen others.