The Fight

Patrick Fitzgerald stood on the corner of Toano and Fourth Street on the morning of July fourth, 1910, in a clean uniform that had been laundered the day before, with a wooden baton on his belt and a folded square of newsprint in his breast pocket on which his sergeant had written, in pencil, the names of the eight men under his charge and the eight locations along the south fence of the arena where each of them was to stand for the duration of the afternoon.

He was thirty. He had been five years on the Reno police force. He had grown up in his mother Bridget’s rooming house on Lake Street where she had cooked for boarders since 1874, and he had taken the police examination in 1905 the week after his father had died of pneumonia. He was not a tall man and he was not a fighting man. He was a thoughtful man who carried his baton in the manner of a man who did not enjoy carrying it.

The arena had not existed three weeks before. He had watched it go up from across the street while standing his ordinary beat, and the speed of it had impressed him. Tex Rickard had brought a crew of two hundred carpenters up from San Francisco at the end of June. They had laid out the octagonal ring under canvas on June twenty-eighth and had nailed the last bench into place on the second of July. The structure was a wooden bowl, open to the sky, seating twenty thousand men and a handful of women, built on a vacant lot four blocks east of Virginia Street that had been a hayfield the month before. The smell of new pine and the smell of horseshit from the cab yard next door were the two smells he had been breathing since five that morning.

The fight had been scheduled for San Francisco. Governor James Gillett of California had cancelled it three weeks earlier under pressure from temperance societies and the church and from the eastern press, and Rickard had brought it to Reno on a hand-shake with the Nevada governor and with the mayor and with the chief of police, who that morning had been at Patrick’s station house at six and had personally walked the perimeter with each of his sergeants. The mayor had argued, and the chief had argued with him, that the city would be on the front page of every paper in the country by Tuesday morning. The chief had said that this was the part that worried him.

By eleven the crowd began to arrive. They came on the trains. The Southern Pacific had run six special trains overnight from San Francisco and four from Salt Lake and two from Los Angeles, and they had come on the Virginia and Truckee from Carson and Virginia City, and they had come in by horse and by automobile from the ranch country west and south. The men got off the cars with cardboard suitcases and straw hats and folded fight programs that had been printed and sold along the platform. They were white men in shirtsleeves and white men in suits and a smaller number of Black men in their Sunday clothes who had come for the fight and who had been told, in tones that varied from polite to not, where they would be seated.

Patrick watched them come.

His own line of eight men was assigned to the south fence, which faced the train station and which would carry the heaviest pedestrian load. He walked the line at eleven thirty and again at noon and again at twelve thirty. Two of his men were new to the force. He spoke to them briefly. He said to keep the line moving. He said to call him if anyone produced a bottle. He said not to draw a baton unless the sergeant said to draw a baton. The new men nodded.

At one o’clock the gates opened. The crowd moved through the wooden chutes in the orderly, watchful way that crowds move through chutes, and a thin sound that was made of twenty thousand small conversations rose out of the bowl as the seats filled. From his post Patrick could see the empty ring and the empty corners and the empty stools and the men in dark suits and shirtsleeves at the press tables, sharpening pencils.

Tex Rickard came past him on the way in. Patrick had seen him three times that morning. Rickard was a thick-shouldered man in a pale linen suit and a Panama hat, in his early forties, with the unhurried walk of a man who had spent six weeks attending to a list and who had at this point gotten to the bottom of the list. He looked at Patrick’s line as he passed. He looked at the chutes. He looked at the south gate. He went on.

At two ten the fighters came out of their dressing rooms and walked across the open yard to the ring. They walked separately, two minutes apart, each in a long robe, each with a small entourage. Patrick stood at his post on the south fence and saw them only as movement at a distance, dark robes against the pale wood of the arena. The crowd noise inside the bowl rose and broke and rose again.

He heard the bell.

He could not see the ring. He could hear the sound of the crowd, which was the sound he listened to for the next hour and five minutes, and the sound told him what was happening better than a telegraph would have. The sound built and broke and built again. There were rounds when the sound stayed flat, the way it stays flat when a crowd is watching something it had not paid to watch, and there were rounds when the sound rose into something that was not a cheer but was a kind of held breath. By the tenth round the held breath had gone out of the crowd on the side of the bowl that Patrick was facing. The cheers were coming from one side only and the silence was coming from the other.

In the fifteenth round the silence broke entirely. Patrick heard a single roar that came up out of the bowl as one sound from the men who had come to see Johnson win, and a held silence that came at the same instant from the men who had come to see Jeffries win, and then he heard the announcement, which came through the speaking trumpets and was repeated down through the crowd in the slow ripple by which news travels through twenty thousand men.

Jeffries had not come out for the sixteenth.

Johnson had won.

Patrick stood at his post.

He understood, before the chief did, before the mayor did, before any of the men at the press tables did, what the next hour was going to be like in his city and in the country. He had read the eastern papers for three weeks and he had read the southern papers for three weeks and he had listened to the men in his mother’s rooming house at supper, and he knew what was coming.

He turned to the new man at his left. He spoke quietly.

“Hold your line,” he said. “Whatever you hear, hold the line.”

The new man nodded.

The gates opened. The crowd began to come out.

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