Walcott
The younger, heavier-hitting fighter Jack Brennan defends his welterweight title against in 'Fifty Grand'.
The title. Brennan's reading of him is that he wants it badly enough that the fight will be an honest one, and says so when the narrator suggests something might happen.
The book
At a glance
- Challenger for Jack Brennan's welterweight title
- Blond, the widest shoulders and back you ever saw, arms like a heavyweight, little in the legs
- One hundred and forty-six pounds and twelve ounces
- Solly Freedman
- Jimmy, once, by his own corner
Who they are in the book
Spoiler-freeWalcott is the challenger in 'Fifty Grand', one of the fourteen stories in Men Without Women, the 1927 collection by the American writer Ernest Hemingway. He is younger than the champion, Jack Brennan, hits far harder, and is expected by everyone in the story to win.
He is blond, with the widest shoulders and back the narrator has ever seen and arms like a heavyweight, and not much in the way of legs. Brennan stands about half a head taller. His face is already badly marked up. Nobody in the story is sure what he is: his manager says he is some sort of a Dane, and the boy who brings the gloves says he is a Bohemian.
How the book draws them
- At the weigh-inThe match was made at a hundred and forty-seven pounds. Brennan weighs a hundred and forty-three; Walcott weighs a hundred and forty-six and three-quarters, drops the towel, steps off the scales and grins at him. Told he is being spotted about four pounds, he says it will be more than that by the time he comes in.
- How he fightsA hooker who comes forward all the time with his chin on his chest and his hands low. He is covered everywhere it hurts and does not care about a left hand in his face. What he does to Brennan's body can be heard outside in the street, and by the fifth round there are two big red patches under the champion's ribs.
- The gesture at the ropesAs Brennan climbs up, Walcott comes over from his corner and pushes the rope down for him to get through, then puts a hand on his shoulder for a second. The crowd thinks it is wonderful. Brennan tells him to take his hand off his shoulder, and Walcott says: “Be yourself.” It is his answer to everything Brennan says to him.
- What his corner calls himHis manager, Solly Freedman, yells “Watch yourself, Jimmy” across the ring in the eleventh round. It is the only time anyone uses his first name.
- The insults he takes without answeringBrennan needles him from the first handshake: about being a popular champion, about his nationality, and about the name he fights under, which Brennan follows with a racial slur about the man he took it from. Walcott says almost nothing back. By the fifth round, the narrator says, he hated Brennan's guts.
In the eleventh round Walcott hits Brennan about five inches below the belt. A foul that low awards the fight to Brennan and destroys the fifty thousand dollars he has bet on Walcott, which is what the two gamblers who came out to the training camp arranged. Whether Walcott was told what the foul was for, the story does not say. It says only that he never thought Brennan could have stood it.
Brennan refuses to take the foul and fights on, then swings twice into Walcott's groin. Walcott goes down and rolls around holding himself, and the announcer gives him the fight on a foul. He is still too sick to speak when Brennan comes over to apologise, and to tell him he hopes he gets a hell of a lot of fun out of being champion.