The story of a New Jersey bartender's one night of glory

It would be an absurd understatement to suggest that Tony Galento didn't look as if he belonged in the ring with Joe Louis.

"Two Ton" Tony, who earned his nickname hauling huge blocks of ice, trained on beer and cigars. One contemporary reporter wrote that the challenger's belly resembled "a tidal wave of mud." According to Joseph Monninger , when Galento stepped through the ropes on June 28, 1939, to challenge the champion, he looked "like a guy fifty different men in the arena could knock out." And though Galento had been famously saying of the Louis bout that he would "moida da bum," he'd also been known to refer to himself as "the American white dope."

As it turned out, several factors rescued the fight from dismissal as a slaughter of which everyone involved should have been ashamed. Most important, Galento won the first round, surprising Louis with what Monninger calls "a left hook that had half his life behind it." And then, in Round 3, he knocked the champion down. Louis was never unconscious. He regained his feet quickly. But for the couple of seconds during which Galento stood over one of the most accomplished athletes of his or any time, the fat bartender from Orange, N.J., "felt what it would be like to be the Heavyweight Champion of the World."

Or so Monninger imagines, which is important, because the strength of this exceptional book is in the thoughts the author is brave or foolhardy enough to attribute to the fighters who were involved in that unlikely bout, and to the crowd that witnessed it, and to the much larger crowd that listened to the fight on the radio.

Of the Italians in the last group, and more specifically the Italians who knew Galento as the guy who did his own bartending at the tavern he owned in their neighborhood, Monninger writes that they listened to the bout tasting hope seasoned liberally with fear and resignation: "If Tony Galento could be champion, then they might also be more than they thought, and that was the hardest thing to believe. They listened, but their stomachs had accepted defeat long ago."

If that assertion seems a stretch, the philosophical connections Monninger attributes to Arthur Donovan, the referee against whom Tony Galento slumped in quasi-consciousness at the end of the fight, are downright fantastic. Working off a famous photograph taken moments before Donovan stopped the bout on a technical knockout, Monninger writes that the referee's "face, stern, his attention elsewhere, exhibits pity and sadness not for Galento alone, but for effort and loss in human endeavor."

There will be readers who dismiss that sort of speculation as unsupported, if not preposterous. But they will be readers who miss a terrific ride. Anybody could have written a book about what turned out to be a predictably one-sided fight, the end of which found the loser reduced to "a mash of blood, drool, and water." It takes a writer with flair and courage to extract from the shocking knockdown early in that fight the unstated reason so many people passionately paid attention to the event. "A large portion of the nation pulled for Galento," Monninger writes, "for an underdog it understood somewhere in its gut, for a clown and a man who made them laugh, who might, with superb luck, redeem their own foolish lives by giving everything in one sublime moment."

For all his imaginative leaping, Monninger doesn't romanticize Galento. The author acknowledges that this particular underdog was no Rocky Balboa. Not only did Galento gouge the eyes of his opponents with his thumbs, he insulted Louis and his family in a series of vile midnight phone calls. Monninger also recognizes that whatever he (and we) might imagine that Galento's triumphant few seconds in the ring on that night in 1939 might have signified, when Donovan had finally called a halt to the mismatch, Galento's corner men were unable to revive him for five frightening minutes. At the end of "Two Ton," Monninger gives us "the pale truth of the situation: a beaten man, his brain a kettle of bees, [walking] withassistance through abandoned chairs, past vendors pausing to look, pastthe scattered imprint of fans turning to leave."

The rest would be silence, and ugly silence at that, except for the echo of what initially attracted Monninger to the story of Galento's night in the ring with Louis: the promise, however brief and fragile, of a crazy surprise that changes everything. Of the shocking moments following the left hook with which the bartender put the champion on the floor, Monninger writes: "His chance would not come again, but that it had come once, in the end, amazed even him."

Two Ton: One Fight, One Night — Tony Galento v. Joe Louis, By Joseph Monninger, Steerforth, 208 pp., $19.95