Chapter 547 Lust & Found:>35

• I soon developed a reputation as a snappy counter-puncher, with a tight, close guard, a solid chin, a smoking short right jab and a blurring left hook that caught many opponents completely unawares. When not training, the good Father would tell me blow-by-blow stories about the fights at Madison Square Garden he'd watched, seeing undercard boxers eventually go on to become world champions; he told me about hitching to Philadelphia to watch Jersey Joe Walcott and Rocky Marciano, and 'the hardest punch ever thrown', ditching school to watch Floyd Patterson fight Archie Moore, and Ingemar Johansson, Sweden's first heavyweight world champion and take back the title, and blowing off his studies at the seminary to see Patterson's punishing matches against the immortal Cassius Clay, now known as Muhammad Ali, and the notoriously brutal Mob puppet Sonny Liston, and as a boy way back in 1951, slipping into the Polo Ground, New York, to share in the magic of 'Sugar' Ray Robinson's famous fight against the English boxer Randy Turpin to regain the world Middleweight title. I knew all those names, I'd been an avid reader of 'Ring' magazine ever since I discovered the sport, and to be trained by a man who'd actually been there and watched those legends fight was an enthralling experience for me.
• I was inspired by his stories, and I promised myself one day I'd be a champion at whatever weight I found myself when my chance came. In the meantime, I trained, I worked the bags and the weight-bench, and I sparred endlessly. Mom and dad were concerned at my lack of interest and mediocre progress in school, but they were also encouraging and supportive that I'd found something I liked and could do well, and that kept me out of the trouble all my friends seemed to find so easily.
• Oddly enough, my biggest fan was Caitlin, or Kat, as everyone called her, although, with hindsight, maybe not so odd. Also, as a side benefit, almost no-one picked on me or my sister at school; when word got around that I was the real thing, all the school bullies and wannabe tough-guys avoided me, which was gratifying, but also disappointing; if only one of them had tried something with me, just once...