Books & Rough Business

I

91 Tullio Pironti I A grown man, maybe, but I still suffered from the breakup. The Nationals came as a relief. The win over Troianovich, especially since it showed off the technique Camerlingo had drilled into me, had just the outcome my coach had predicted. The Slav never got his rematch, and I was selected as one of the twenty best amateurs in Italy. We were all to get together for further training—followed by the eliminations—up in Porto Recanati. To me Recanati could’ve been the North Pole. It lay up in region known as The Marches, as close to Venice as to Rome, and over on the Adriatic. But I was glad for the far voyaging, really. I was proud of myself, the young unknown among these top fighters, and the only man from the South. And what better way to confirm the changes I’d been through? The training lasted two months, a long time to spend in such a distant spot. It brought together a pair of contestants for the final in each weight class, and the selection was up to a committee from Nationals Federation. These were boxing men whose names even I had heard, and in fact nearly all the fighters with me up in Porto Recanati had met at least a couple of the committee members. Many of the boxers knew each other, as well, or knew each other’s trainers. And everyone knew Nino Benvenuti, the most promising middleweight in the country—and the most punishing. Benvenuti was from Trieste, about as far north as you can go in my country. Yet he took the Neapolitan under his wing, within a matter of days. Somehow he understood how it felt to be the outsider. He insisted on having me as his running partner. Indeed, as Nino and I took off up into the hills above the Adriatic, day after day, I believe I got my first clear indication that boxing wasn’t to be my whole life. I could see that I was lithe 92 Books and Rough Business and quick, compared to my partner; I was the whippet who’d run all over Capodimonte. Yet the heavier man beside me kept up, his face clenched, his focus unshakeable. Dedication like that, I realized there amid the foreign breezes, would be forever beyond me. I’d taken up the sport for a lack of alternatives, and because I’d fallen in with the right crowd; I’d never share Nino’s commitment. Not that I wasn’t going to try my level best against the rival in my weight class. This was another Northerner, from Livorno, over on the Riviera side of the peninsula. Funny I don’t remember his first name; to me he’s always Pucci, just Pucci, that single word up on the lists beside Pironti. And he was always attacking. The man I needed to defeat came on almost as unstoppably as that poor punch-drunk sparring partner that Camerlingo had found for me before the match with Troianovich. You would swear Pucci counterpunched with his face. He appeared to shake off the blows to his head and then unload a blistering up-and-down attack of his own. He would go straight into his comeback, as if untouched, hardly a tick of the clock after his adversary let up. I saw it with my own eyes, troubled but trying to learn, as I sat in the gallery above the sparring. The only way to work this Pucci, so far as I could tell, was to give him a dose of the same. I had to attack and go on attacking, for the entire three minutes of all three rounds. I had pick up yet another new set of tactics, in other words.The windup toy, stick and move, wouldn’t work here in Porto Recanati. The sweet science demanded something else, and so “nine minutes” became a kind of mantra for me, as I ran the hills alongside Benvenuti, and as I worked through my own sparring. Nine minutes at full throttle, that’s all I needed. I was whispering it even as I climbed into the ring for the showdown with Pucci. I tried for the kind of concentration Benvenuti had shown.The best I could, I put the journalists at ringside out of my mind. The same for the Federation members, in their usual section. The fight in Capua meant more to me, but...