"Dressing room No. 26 in the rear of New York's Madison Square Garden is a windowless pit that holds heat like a thermos. Behind its heavy steel door, Room 26 contains nothing but the basic needs for a fighter in training—two low benches pressed against the grim, peeling walls, a small tiled shower, an archaic bronze-colored scale that has lost too many decisions to oxidation, a rubbing table only recently oiled and repadded to disguise its oblique past. Every day for six weeks prior to meeting Joe Giardello for the world middleweight championship, Dick Tiger, the courtly 36-year-old Nigerian challenger, would come to this room and sit on a bench in the 90 degree heat.

......

Right from the first round, Tiger flicked jab after jab at Giardello. From a far corner there even came the sound of an apesi, a Nigerian drum. Played by a friend of Tiger's, it beat constantly, and its message was "keep punchin'." In turn, Giardello's fans from Philadelphia started chanting "Hey, hey, take it away," in the ninth round when Joey seemed to rally, but there was very little that Giardello could do to take anything away. As the fight moved toward the 15th round, his combinations had totally disappeared, his legs looked stiff and Tiger's jab was keeping him from ever getting a chance to throw the big right hand that would knock Tiger out. Giardello was courageous, as he always has been, and he was thoroughly beaten, as he hadn't often been.

......

In his dressing room after the fight Tiger looked like a woodcut print of a boxer, while Giardello, sitting on a table across the arena, lifted his mashed profile and announced, rather proudly, his retirement."

(William Leggett)





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