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SHOWMAN
"The first to enter, the last to leave, you know— the first to enter, the last to leave !"
It was only fair at that. Sullivan had scared so many opponents half to death in his day that he had it coming to him. Besides, I'd been having my moments of uneasiness and I needed to reassure myself by acting as cocky as the traffic would bear. The atmosphere of New Orleans was anything but reassuring. If Corbett really could whip Sullivan, as he and I believed, he and I were the only sane people in the country. The rest of the world had no more doubt of Sullivan's impregnability than they doubted the sun's rising the next morning. No champion since has had quite such a reputation, not even Jack Dempsey, who was the finest natural fighter I ever saw. The more I saw of the crowd that had assembled to see the fight, the more I began to wonder if we had bitten off more than we could chew. Corbett had no doubts about it. When I dropped in to take up some details with him the afternoon before the fight, he just laughed at my worried countenance.
"Bill," he said, "forget it. I can lick him without mussing my hair." No doubt he was thinking back to the evening in San Francisco when he'd stepped round Sullivan the way a weasel would step around a woodchuck. But I hadn't seen that with my own eyes— and what's more, it wasn't unlikely that Sullivan pulling his punches in an exhibition before ladies was a different pair of sleeves from Sullivan, goaded into fury
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