The Youthful Plimpton Vs. The Wily Moore

During lunch I kept wondering what Archie Moore was up to. I knew that he was in town, not far away. I thought of him coming closer all the time, physically moving toward our confrontation, perhaps a quarter of a mile away at the moment, in some restaurant, ordering a big steak with honey on it for energy. Everybody in the place would be craning around to stare at him, and smiling a lot because a month before Moore had won an extraordinary fight against Yvon Durelle, a strong French Canadian, in which he pulled himself up off the canvas four times. Applause would ripple up from the tables as he left the restaurant and he would stroll along feeling good about things, people nodding to him on the avenues, and smiling, and then he might duck into a Fifth Avenue shop to buy a hat, and afterward perhaps he'd wander by the Plaza and into the park where he might take a look at the yak in the zoo. Then he'd glance at his watch. That might get him upset. It disturbed the equanimity of the day. Who was this guy? The nerve! This creep who had written him a letter. So the distance would be shortened; he was coming crosstown now, then up the stairs of Stillman's Gym, just yards away from me in the labyrinthine gloom of the lockers, and then finally in the ring, just a few feet away, seeing me for the first time, looking at me speculatively; and then when he put a fist in my stomach, there wouldn't be any distance between us at all!

Later I discovered what he had been thinking. Moore had had lunch with Peter Maas, a journalist friend of mine. Over dessert, he asked Peter who I was—this fellow he had agreed to go three rounds with. Maas, who knew about the arrangements—I had invited him to Stillman's—could not resist it: he found himself, somewhat to his surprise, describing me to Moore as an "intercollegiate boxing champion."

Once Peter had got that out, he began to warm to his subject. "He's a gawky sort of guy," he said, "but don't let that fool you, Arch. He's got a left jab that sticks, he's fast, and he's got a left hook that he can really throw. He's a barnburner of a fighter, and the big thing about him is that he wants to be the light-heavyweight champion of the world. Very ambitious. And confident. He doesn't see why he should work his way up through all the preliminaries in the tank towns. He reckons he's ready now."

Moore raised his eyebrows at this.

"He's invited all his friends," Maas went on gaily, "and a few members of the press. In front of all these people he's going to waltz into the ring and take you. What he's done is to sucker you into the ring."

Maas told me all of this later. He said he had not suspected that he had such satanic capacities; the story came out quite easily.

Moore finally had a comment to offer. "If that guy lays a hand on me I'm going to pole-ax him." He cracked his knuckles alarmingly.

At this, Maas realized that not unlike Dr. Frankenstein he had created a monster, and after a somewhat hollow laugh, he tried to undo matters. "Oh, Arch," he said, "he's a friend of mine." He tried to say that he had been carrying on in jest. But this served to make Moore even more suspicious—the notion that Maas and the mysterious stranger with the devastating left hook were in cahoots of some sort.

At the time, of course, I knew none of this. I dawdled away the afternoon and arrived early at Stillman's. George Brown was with me, carrying a little leather case with the gloves and some "equipment" he felt he might have to use if things got "difficult" for me in the ring.

We went up the steps of the building on Eighth Avenue, through the turnstile, and Lou Stillman led us through the back area of his place into an arrangement of gloomy dressing cubicles as helter-skelter as a Tangier slum. George Brown sat me down in a corner and, snapping open his kit bag, got ready to tape my hands. I worried aloud that Moore might not show up, and both George and I laughed at the concern in my voice; I sounded like a condemned prisoner fretting that the fellow in charge of the dawn proceedings might have overslept. We heard people arriving, the hum of voices beginning to rise. I had let a number of people know; the word of the strange cocktail-hour exhibition had spread.