Page:Fighting blood (IA fightingblood00witw).pdf/49

 "Roughly is right!" grins the hard-faced Shapiro. "Roughly is the way I want you to act in your first fight—not bout. But toss you into a ring inside of a week? Be yourself! It'll take you a dozen weeks to learn the first rule of boxin'."

"What's the first rule?" I says.

"Always keep your shoulder blades off the canvas!" says Shapiro. "Don't laugh. Forgettin' 'at rule some day will beat Dempsey!"

"Well, how long before I would fight, then?" I says.

"About six months," says Shapiro—at's if you show some stuff!" He comes over to the bed where I have sit down, or rather sunk down, when I hear the "six months!" I'd figured that in six months I'd either be whipped out of boxing or the biggest thing in it. "Don't take it so hard," goes on Shapiro, patting my arm; "I could let you step next week with some tenth-rater, he'd paste you silly, break your heart, cure you of ever liftin' your hands again to even protect yourself and I'd lose a possible champ. Believe me, buddy, I ain't in this box-fight game for the laughs in it. I'm thinkin' of Nate Shapiro first, last, and all the time! It wouldn't hurt my nose if you got yours broke, but it would hurt my bank roll, and 'at's one place I can't take a punch! I know how all you kids feels when you've knocked somebody stiff for the first time. Take you, for instance—you think because you flattened K. O. Kelly with a lucky punch 'at you're the cat's whiskers, now don't you?"

"Well, I—eh—" I begin, the bit bashful.

"Sure!" butts in Shapiro. "Well, don't think too