Four Fires (61 page)

Thomas is on top and manages to land a hard straight right into Bozo's face. In fact, Bozo seems to walk into the punch and his nose starts to show a fair bit of claret.

The bell goes and Thomas is well ahead, he's outboxed Bozo and is giving him a lesson.

Mrs Rika Ray is beside herself. She is accustomed to Bozo winning the first round and getting on top of his opponent and she's never seen him outboxed like this. Even Morrie, who knows nothing about boxing, is looking worried and wants to know whether he should go up and see if Bozo's nose is okay.

Thomas is sitting in his corner and his second is yelling out stuff but you can see he isn't listening.

He's drumming both feet on the canvas and looking towards Bozo's corner, he wants to get going, certain after such a good round that he's got Bozo's measure. Old Bozo has his eyes closed while Big Jack stems the blood from his nose, Kevin Flanagan is talking to him softly because he never yells, and Bozo is nodding. With the bell about to go, Thomas stands up and so does Bozo.

The bell sounds and Thomas comes out of his corner like he's got a rocket up his bum and it's a repeat of the opening round, they're slugging it out in the centre of the ring. Thomas hasn't changed all that much, he's still a headhunter and Bozo is still a body-finder. Bozo always says,

'Why would you hit the smallest and hardest object when there's a bigger one just as vulnerable right in front of you?' Bozo hits Thomas with a nice left and right. They're scoring shots but they're taken on Thomas's biceps, rips that dig deep but it's hard to see if they do any damage.

Thomas backs off and into the ropes. Bozo hooks him with a left to the jaw and Thomas's hands go up. Bozo territory! Bozo's right uppercut slams in under Thomas's heart and he follows it with a left and another right and then with a left hook. The punches are so fast you can hardly see them coming. Mrs Rika Ray is screaming with excitement, 'Bozo, Bozo, kill him!'which I must say isn't very yoga-like.

Thomas comes off the ropes, he's been hurt but he doesn't do like Bozo's done in the first round, moved away, stayed out of harm's way, until he's regained his strength. Instead, he seems to lose it and comes tearing in, angry. Bozo backpedals, keeping him off with a left jab, then he suddenly moves laterally, plants his feet firmly and throws a swinging right hand that catches Thomas on the side of the jaw, which makes the audience gasp and yell as Thomas hits the deck at almost the same moment the bell goes.

The ref starts the compulsory ten count but at seven Thomas is back on his feet. The ref shows him four fingers and asks him how many and Thomas must have said there were four, to prove he wasn't concussed. But then Thomas's trainer and his assistant are in the ring, saying Bozo hit Thomas after the bell and he should be disqualified. The ref says that's not the case and so does the crowd, but Thomas's trainer is still shouting and waving his arms and the ref tells him to get back to his corner or he'll stop the fight and award it to Bozo. So the trainer goes back, but still protesting, and the ref asks Thomas if he wants to go on and he says yes. The ref walks over to
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Thomas's corner and asks the trainer who must have said yes because he's nodding his head but you can see he's still bloody angry. We couldn't really hear all this because the crowd is booing Thomas's trainer. It was clear as daylight that Bozo's punch had landed before the bell went.

Bozo said afterwards that's what happened. So now the time out between rounds is almost four minutes and John Thomas has had plenty of time to recover. Thomas's trainer took a chance challenging the referee like that but he's given his boxer an extra two minutes to recover and Thomas is right as rain when he comes into the final round.

People who were there would talk about the last round for years. The classic battle between the boxer who was Bozo and the fighter who was Thomas. The two boxers just stand toe to toe in the middle of the ring and slug it out. Thomas the headhunter looks to be throwing better punches because Bozo's getting hit lots and his left eye has closed. But Bozo hasn't forgotten his craft, and the rips to the body, under the heart and into the rib cage, are landing time and time again and when Bozo isn't down below, he hits Thomas's upper arms.

I'm getting scared that the ref and the three judges will see all the head shots Thomas is landing and not the body damage Bozo's doing, which means Thomas won the first round and Bozo the second, but Thomas could be given the last round. There's less than thirty seconds to go when Bozo rips a tremendous right under Thomas's heart and the other boxer buckles up and backs into the ropes, bringing his gloves up to cover his face and tucking his arms in to protect his heart and stomach. Bozo follows with a left and then another hard right to Thomas's upper arms and Thomas grabs him in a clinch. The ref tells

them to break and Thomas comes off the ropes but suddenly he can't raise his arms; they're hanging by his side, and Bozo smacks him with a tremendous left hook to the jaw, following with a straight right to the side of his opponent's head with Thomas already going backwards. I reckon he was out before he hit the canvas. Timber!' Mrs Rika Ray shouts. She's out of her seat, dancing with her arms in the air, and we all feel a bit embarrassed, but it's okay because the crowd is cheering and whistling.

So there's the old law proved again, when the body goes, the head must surely follow. The ref's count reaches ten before Thomas starts to move up onto his hands and knees, shaking his head, trying to clear it. He'd fought a damn good fight and, whatever you may think of him as a person, he has to be given credit for that. Bozo comes over and helps Thomas to his feet and half-carries him to his corner. But as he reaches Thomas's corner, the trainer, who's a big bloke with a fat gut, pulls Thomas to his chest and with his free hand pushes Bozo away so that he nearly loses his balance. The crowd boo him again. Later, Big Jack says the trainer is a cop nicknamed 'Banjo', though his real name is Nick Patterson and he's a mug lair and a bully.

Mrs Rika Ray fixes up Bozo's eye so that by the following morning the eye is bright as the other with only a little patch of purple in the corner of the lower eyelid. Morrie examines his nose and swabs out a bit of blood with cotton wool on a small stick and says there's nothing broken, Bozo's going to keep his nice straight nose.

Meanwhile, there's a bit of a conniption going on in the championships when everyone getting into the final night was expecting to fight their three fights in three days. The officials, as usual, screw things up and the boxers are told if they get through their preliminary fight and into the semifinal they're going to have to fight twice on the same day, once in the morning or up until two o'clock in the afternoon, and then the winners will have to fight again that night for the title.

Kevin Flanagan is disgusted but says it's a typical cock-up, that the Amateur Boxing Association couldn't run a chook raffle in a hungry pub. There's even worse to come. When it's time for the doctor to examine every boxer fighting in the semis, there's no doctor, someone's forgotten to book him. So the boxers have to jump into taxis and are told they have to pay their own fares to the Brisbane General Hospital. Well, the hospital's got a fair bit of work on and the boxers don't get priority treatment and it's 1.45 p.m. by the time they get back to Festival Hall.

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The lunchtime crowd is pretty aggro because they've missed seeing any fights and they demand their two shillings entrance fee back. So now Bozo and the others have to fight in the afternoon and then again that night. Bozo's fight takes place at 4.30 p.m. and if he wins he's on again at seven.

Fortunately Bozo easily wins the semifinal without having to expend too much energy and that night is introduced on the microphone as Bozo Maloney, the welterweight champion of Victoria.

It's a one-sided fight which Bozo wins again on a t.k.o. in the second round and so, in a bit of an anticlimax, he wins the national title. Everyone says the final should really have been between him and Thomas because the other two fighters couldn't hold a candle to either of them. The ring announcer then says into the microphone, 'The winner is Bozo Maloney, the welterweight champion of Victoria and now the national title holder in the welterweight division.' He also announces that Bozo has been selected for the Olympic trials to be held in Melbourne in March during the Moomba Festival.

There's not much point going through the Olympic trials because Thomas has broken his hand and can't fight in the trials and there isn't too much competition left because no dark horse has come through since the Nationals the previous year. Bozo gets his Olympic blazer and Yankalillee has its first Olympian and, guess what, it's a Maloney!

Nancy is completely over the moon, not because of Bozo's selection though that too of course but because the Gazette calls for a civic reception and Philip Templeton is the shire president and so nothing is done. Then Toby Forbes runs a piece in the Gazette which says it's a disgrace and if people will write in or phone to say they think there should be a civic reception for Yankalillee's first Olympian, hell print their names in the paper. He also says if they object, they can send in their names and he'll print them as well. In the next edition there's hundreds of names, not only from Yankalillee but from as far as

Wodonga and Wangaratta and all districts in between. There's not one name printed as an objection, which doesn't mean there aren't some since there always are, the Templetons for a start and their mob on the council, but because they were scared they'd be seen for what they were, bloody-minded and mean-spirited.

The council issues a statement to the Gazette to say that they were conscious of the honour of having an Olympian from the town but that a civic reception in sport is only held when something is won, like the footy competition or a medal. They don't even mention Bozo's name in the statement. It's all utter bullshit of course and Toby Forbes loses no time saying so, pointing to various precedents. He's called three towns in the bush that have someone going to the Rome Olympics and all three have held a civic reception to honour their athlete. Toby writes a blistering editorial pointing out that the people of Yankalillee clearly want to do the right thing and the council just as clearly doesn't. Toby later tells us that several of the council members threaten to stop advertising in the Gazette if he doesn't let up. Toby's a pretty fearless sort of bloke and he keeps the war raging and certainly Philip Templeton's Holden dealership advertisements stop appearing. The council stands firm. Tommy comes home and says the blokes in the pub are pretty pissed off about it and there's no other conversation going on except how Bozo's been treated.

Then Nancy says at tea one night, 'Bozo, you better go win us a medal so I can stick it, ribbon and all, up Philip Templeton's fat bum at the civic reception he'll be forced to have!' Not that she has any right to comment on someone's fat bum, but we all laugh anyway. Bozo says thank gawd it's happened because he'd feel a real drongo standing in the back of a ute waving to the crowd. Without knowing it, Philip Templeton has done him a big favour.

This is true when you think about it, because them not doing it, like refusing to have the reception, has made people much more interested and aware of Bozo's achievement than any silly parade down King Street, where Bozo would only have got another bottoms-wiping
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certificate on the town-hall steps like the one I got for the rescue that I didn't really do of Mrs Rika Ray.

By the time of the Rome Olympics, there was television in Melbourne and Sydney but not too many places else and certainly not in Yankalillee. So we all went down to Melbourne and stayed at the Carlton terrace and Morrie got permission from the shop steward at the Age to invite us to see it on the workers' set at the newspaper. They couldn't send the pictures as far as Australia and so the opening of the Olympics and all the events were taped and put on a Qantas plane and were shown on TV two nights later. We also went to the movies and saw some of it on the Movietone News.

We're watching the opening ceremony at the Age with about two hundred other people, the workers and their families. They've got the set high up on a special stand so we can all see. When the Australians came marching into the main Olympic stadium, we cheer like mad and then, suddenly, out of the blue, they do a close-up. There's Bozo with a row of marchers, waving into the camera and walking beside Murray Rose and Dawn Fraser, both of whom won gold medals in the swimming and went on to be all-time champions. Bozo's waving and looking the full part, proud as anything. Nancy's bawling and stuffing her gloves in her mouth and little Colleen's screaming out and I'm a bit choked up meself and I think something in my chest is going to burst I'm that proud. I look over at Tommy and the tears are running silently down his cheeks. It's a moment I don't suppose our family will ever forget.

When a thing like that happens in your family, it makes you think not only how hard Bozo's worked, but also how other people have given up a lot to help him. Big Jack Donovan and Kevin Flanagan and Mrs Rika Ray and even Mrs Barrington-Stone, who's flown Bozo to Melbourne on lots of occasions for a fight, using the excuse that she's going to see her daughter but then flies him back the next day so he can get a decent sleep before doing garbage of a Monday. The blokes at the abattoir, who don't know that Bozo's on a practically meatless diet, set aside a couple of big, juicy steaks twice a week so he'll have only the best. They've been doing it for the past two years and I've practically forgotten what offal tastes like. Even Bobby Devlin, who started Bozo off in the fight game, sends Bozo a postal order for twenty pounds with a letter that said:

Dear Bozo,

I'm not much of a hand at letter writing. I don't think I've wrote more than two in my life. Once to the army to say I had flat feet, but they didn't believe it and I had to go to Egypt. Stinkin'hole!

Then the other when my mate was kill'd and I wrote to his mum and said how sorry and all that, what a good bloke he was.