Sparring With Hemingway: And Other Legends of the Fight Game Read online

  Sparring with Hemingway

  And Other Legends of the Fight Game

  Budd Schulberg

  Contents

  Preface

  Sparring with Hemingway

  White, Black, and Other Hopes

  The Great Benny Leonard

  Stillman’s Gym

  Hollywood Hokum

  The Heavyweight Championship

  Where Have You Gone, Holly Mims?

  No Room for the Groom

  Marciano and England’s Cockell

  A Champion Proves His Greatness

  The Comeback: Sugar Ray Robinson

  Boxing’s Dirty Business Must Be Cleaned Up Now

  The Death of Boxing?

  The Chinese Boxes of Muhammad Ali

  In Defense of Boxing

  Journey to Zaire

  Leonard-Duran

  Ali-Holmes

  The Welterweights: Sugar Ray and “Hitman” Hearns Walk with Legends

  The Gerry Cooney Story

  The Eight-Minute War: Hagler-Hearns

  Sugar’s Sweet, Marvin’s Sour

  Historic Night in the Ring: Holmes-Spinks

  They Fall Harder When They’re Old: Tyson-Holmes

  Spinks’s Magic Act Is Not Enough

  The Second Coming of George Foreman

  Foreman-Holyfield: The Bigger They Are, the Harder They Don’t Fall

  Tyson vs. Tyson

  The Mystery of the Heavyweight Mystique

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  Index

  A Biography of Budd Schulberg

  FOR FIDEL LABARBA and “Golden Boy” Art Aragon, best men at my wedding thirty years ago, and to Muhammad Ali, José Torres, Roger Donoghue, and Archie McBride, my own top-ten heavy in the 1950s, sensitive and articulate men in their brutal chess game of a sport, world champions, contenders—and lifelong friends.

  And for the late world-class hustler Hal Conrad, a major player in Ali’s triumphant return from exile, with whom I go all the way back to the Joe Louis days and those after-hours’ seminars.

  For the memory of Jerry “Blackie” Lisker, my boss at the New York Post, who leaned over my shoulder in the press room after how many title fights: “Budd, gimme your best stuff—just don’t miss the first edition!” Hardest work and most fun I ever had. Thanks, Blackie.

  To my old man, B.P., who took me to the fights from age ten and made me feel that visits to our Hollywood home by world champs Tony Canzoneri and Mushy Callahan (not to mention Jack Dempsey) made a more serious contribution to our cultural development than visits by Maurice Chevalier and Jeanette MacDonald. And finally to B.P.’s namesake, his grandson Benn, my fifteen-year-old, born the year Ali retired with his record third world heavyweight championship—my ringside companion at title fights from the Garden to Vegas, continuing a family tradition in the closing years of the twentieth century that began in the great Benny Leonard days at the other end of the centennial era.

  And for my twelve-year-old daughter Jessica, who tapes the fights for me in my absence and, while writing her poetry, composing on the piano, or swatting a tennis ball for her Westhampton team, is patiently awaiting her turn.

  Preface

  WHY ARE WRITERS so drawn to championship prizefights that they will cross continents and fly across oceans to be present at these spectacles?

  I was pondering this again some years ago as Norman Mailer and I met at the bar of the Montreal headquarters of Sugar Ray Leonard, counting down the hours to the crucial welterweight title fight with the stone-fisted Panamanian, Roberto Duran. Norman and I traded observations, speculations, breathless predictions as we have been doing ever since a long night in Miami when we dissected until dawn Cassius Clay’s curious dethroning of the curiously misnamed Sonny Liston.

  Sonny had been the centerpiece of a highly charged gathering in Chicago where he had destroyed the brave rabbit Floyd Patterson in a single round, in a fight scene that could have doubled as a summer writers’ conference. In addition to Mailer, who was at his most provocative that week, one could sit in on literary seminars attended by Jimmy Baldwin, Ben Hecht, William Saroyan, and George Plimpton, where Pulitzer Prize judges and ring officials could be denounced with equal intensity.

  This marriage of literateurs and hard-core fanciers of the Sweet Science started long before Jack London, Ring Lardner, and Ernest Hemingway. It goes back at least three thousand years, all the way to Homer, who covered the Greek Games where boxing was respected to the point of worship as a liberal art. In 1184 B.C., in the last year of the siege of Troy, Homer was writing a blow-by-blow of the epic battle between Epeus and Euryalus, the Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier of their day.

  Amid the circle now each champion stands,

  And poises high in air his iron hands:

  With clashing gauntlets now they fiercely close.

  Their crackling jaws reecho to the blows …

  Three thousand years later poets were still setting down their quills to see and often report a stirring boxing match. In the bareknuckle days of English glory, when prizefights were officially forbidden but stoutly supported by The Fancy, Lord Byron would eagerly push away from an epic poem, hop into a barouche-and-four, and urge his coachman on until they reached the tavern some sixty miles from London where the next great fight for the belt was about to take place. Byron was there, cheering his favorite on, when Gentleman John Jackson relieved Daniel Mendoza of his unprecedented crown by swinging “The Jew Champion” around by his long, thick hair. With Jackson as his boxing instructor and close companion, Byron was at ringside for John Gully’s savage sixty-four-round battle with Pierce the Game Chicken. Indeed, Byron hung out at the Horse and Dolphin, the Toots Shor’s of its day, where the suave, educated black American fighter Bill Richmond held sway. He was there when the match was made between the British idol Tom Cribb and Richmond’s protégé, the formidable ex-slave from Virginia, Tom Molineaux. When the rematch in Leicester drew an unruly crowd of 25,000, Lord Byron was one of the first to reach the grounds. He pasted clippings of the fight on his famous screen.

  For a vivid description of a big fight, British nineteenth-century style, there is William Hazlitt’s essay on Thomas (the Gasman) Hickman’s contest with Bill Neate, “like Ajax, with Atlantean shoulders fit to bear the pugilistic reputation of all Bristol.” The Gasman, in turn, in Hazlitt’s celebrated prose, was compared to Diomed, “light, vigorous, elastic, his back glistening in the sun as he moved about like a panther’s hide.”

  From Homer to Hazlitt, Arthur Conan Doyle, and George Bernard Shaw, from London and Lardner to Hemingway, from A. J. Liebling and Nelson Algren to Norman Mailer, Pete Hamill, and Joyce Carol Oates, from Athens to Zaire (where even Dr. Hunter Thompson found his way), we seem irresistibly drawn to these ceremonial combats.

  We find ourselves at one with John Milton, that most unexpected of fight fans, who wrote in Samson Agonistes:

  I sorrowed at his captive state,

  but minded

  Not to be absent at that

  spectacle.

  Let’s get it on! the old master seems to be saying if we translate him into twentieth-century vernacular. I’ll be looking for him, along with the ghosts of Homer and Lord Byron, at the next writers’ conference at Caesar’s Palace, or MGM Grand, or wherever the next epic encounter captures the imagination of the writers who see The Fight as a microcosm, an intensification of the life forces we struggle to understand.

  Sparring with Hemingway

  I HAD JUST PUBLISHED my novel on the fight game, The Harder They Fall—having managed somehow, after the
unforeseen success of What Makes Sammy Run?, to hurdle that old second-novel bugaboo. When the new book made the Times best-seller list and sold to the movies for Humphrey Bogart, the fact that my two young sons and their mother were suffering from familiar Bucks County winter complaints suggested that a warm-weather vacation was in order. I picked the southernmost spot in the United States: Key West.

  Key West had come to mind because my taste in resorts ran to isolated places with deep-sea fishing—the Hemingway kind of place it was. Yes, I had read of Hemingway’s connection with Key West, how he had moved there and built there in the early ’30s. And of course I had read his Depression novel To Have and Have Not, with its haunting, dirgeful opening and its evocation of the violence of wasted lives and the desperation of a tough old salt fighting his losing battle for survival.

  There were no poets in Key West then, no overpopulation of literary types, no gay bars and shoppes and quaint tours of local landmarks, including the Hemingway House. The place on Whitehead Street was just a nice, comfortable, sprawling house where the writer had lived before moving on to Cuba with No. 4 wife, Mary—while No. 2, nee Pauline Pfeiffer, still spent her winters in what was simply her house and not “The Hemingway House.”

  On the one little public beach on the island (the navy seeming to have gobbled up all the rest) we had met what turned out to be the best possible couple to know in Key West, Betty and Toby Bruce, whose children were of an age with ours. Betty was tiny, funny, tomboy-tough, and feisty, and Toby was her perfect running mate, a skinny little beak who looked as if he had just hopped right out of a comic strip. And comic he was, with a twinkle in his eye and a quip on his tongue, bubbling over with ribald innocence. Betty, we discovered, was that rarity, a true Conch, born on the island of Barbados of parents who had pioneered Key West in the 1880s. Toby had met her when he came down from Piggott, Arkansas, with Pauline after she married Ernest. Toby had practically built the Hemingway House, putting up the brick wall with his own small, work-toughened hands, installing the pool and serving as general overseer. In fact, Toby had become indispensable to Hemingway, as his Man Friday running interference against celebrity-seekers, and able to double as boat pilot, hunting and fishing guide, secretary—you name it, and Toby could do it with a flourish. “Hey, mon, what you know bad?” was his trademark greeting. He was such fun to be with while doing everything so neatly nice, including making the best bloodies I ever drank.

  I thought of the Bruces as two adorable little people who lived with two adorable little children—right out of a folksy nursery rhyme. It was comical, too, because the Morenos, Betty’s mother and father, lived just across the driveway—in a quiet, gracious, and spacious Key West house built in the grand Bahama style. Mrs. Rosina Moreno was a genteel Southern lady, very proper in her ways, while Betty rebelled by dressing and acting like a rough ’n’ ready hoyden, her little house as delightful a mess as Mrs. Moreno’s was pin-perfect.

  One bright morning in old Key West brought ripples of excitement. The news was, “Papa’s coming to town!” Yes, the Great One, Mr. Key West himself, coming back for a visit to the island outpost he had virtually put on the map. Toby hurried over to our digs, “the southernmost house,” the Casa Cayo Jueso, with the announcement: He and Betty and Pauline were throwing an impromptu cocktail party for Papa and Mary in the Bruces’ little patio. “Good,” I thought, a chance to meet the walking legend. We would talk about the work I had admired from college days and the subjects we had in common: Scott Fitzgerald, tarpon fishing, boxing …

  Browsing through his marvelous Fifth Column and the First Forty-nine Stories to bone up for my adventure, I sipped a little Metusalem, a rum taste I had acquired from “Papa” via Toby, who seemed to enjoy a steady supply from Cuba. Then, high on expectation, I went forth to meet the self-styled and generally acknowledged “champion of American letters.”

  It was one of those sun-bright late afternoons of Key West winter, when an unblemished canopy of blue sky stretched to the far horizon. But there was one small, totally unexpected dark cloud: As I came into the patio, looking forward to a good time talking and drinking, Toby brought me a no-nonsense Metusalem, saying, “I hope it goes all right. Papa’s on the warpath. Been lookin’ for you since he got in.”

  “Me?” I know the Bruces had told him that I was their new friend and that we were planning a cruise through the Keys and the nearby Ten Thousand Islands together. But warpath!

  As Toby moved off to his other guests, I leaned back against the back wall of the patio to ponder the mystery. But not for long.

  A bull-chested, ruddy-faced man of fifty—barefoot, wearing shorts that looked as if they had been ripped violently from worn blue jeans and a fishing shirt open almost to the navel—shouldered through the crowd and set himself in front of me, feet spread in a fighter’s stance, head thrust forward until our faces were not more than a foot apart. He hadn’t been stinting on the Metusalem.

  The first words out of his mouth were short, sharp jabs. “So you’re Schulberg? The book writer?”

  “I’ve written a few books.”

  Now the hard right: “What do you know about prizefighting—for Christ’s sweet sake?”

  I retreated to a characteristic I don’t admire but often find myself adopting when under attack: apparent humility with a nasty edge. “Maybe I don’t know too much about boxing. I’ve just followed it all my life.”

  His bare chest pushing against me forced a backward step. Then he looked me in the eye and spat out a name, punctuating it with a little shove. “Billy Papke?”

  I stared at him. How do you answer that one? In anger or passivity? Choose the latter. My answer came in robot-mono-tone:

  “Billy Papke was the only middleweight who ever knocked out Stanley Ketchel. That gave him the middleweight championship. Then Ketchel knocked him out. When they fought again, Ketchel won in twenty rounds. After Ketchel was murdered, Papke was champion again. I think he killed himself in California about ten years ago.” Monotone, monotone, I cautioned myself. “Papke was famous.”

  There was absolutely no reaction. Not a flicker. Just “Leo Houck?” and the little shove for punctuation.

  “Same weight division. Same period. Fought everybody. Papke, Harry Greb, Gene Tunney. For years he’s been the boxing coach at Penn State.” That I happened to know because my screenwriting friends, the Epstein twins, had been on his team.

  Still no reaction. Nothing. The fistic catechism went on. I could feel my back almost brushing against the wall now. I felt like a fighter bulled into a corner, taking punches. I wondered how long I could take it, or should.

  “Pinkey Mitchell?”

  Pinkey Mitchell! Did I know Pinkey Mitchell? Now he was moving into my generation. “Pinkey Mitchell was the brother of Richie Mitchell, who fought Benny Leonard for the lightweight title. My father took me to the Garden but they wouldn’t let me in. I was only seven. Five years later I saw Mushy Callahan, our local favorite in L.A., take the junior welterweight championship from Pinkey. I saw Pinkey Mitchell. When he came out to fight Mushy, he was a big fighter from the East. He was famous. In fact, when Mushy won he gave me the gloves from the fight. I hung them in a place of honor on the wall above my bed.”

  No reaction. It had settled into a kind of war of attrition. I wasn’t going to lose my temper if I could help it—and “Papa” wasn’t about to quit.

  “Pete Latzo?” This shove took me right to the wall. I could feel my shoulders against it. I was being bulled out of the patio. The famous bare chest was pressed against mine, pushing me back.

  Pete Latzo? A little like asking Alfred Kazin if he had ever heard of Jack London. But I took a deep breath and began:

  “Pete Latzo took the welterweight championship from Mickey Walker. The great Mickey Walker, Ernest [I knew he hated that name but I couldn’t get my mouth around “Papa” and so never knew what to call him]. You’re asking me famous fighters. Pete Latzo is famous. Anybody who knows anything about boxing know
s Pete Latzo.” And then, finally, in exasperation, I threw a combination of my own:

  “Pete Latzo comes from Scranton, Pennsylvania. And, if you’d like to get in touch with him, he’s still there. He’s an organizer for the Teamsters Union.”

  And I gave him a little shove. I despise physical fighting—“Leave it to the pros,” I’ve always said—but it seemed as if our “moment of truth” had come.

  I set my feet, braced for attack or to throw a punch, fantasizing a surprise left hook to the somewhat rum-swollen gut. At the same time, there was ambivalence: a flash replay of Ernest’s tangle with radical writer Max Eastman in the office of their editor, Max Perkins, at Scribner’s. A messy contribution to the public image of “Papa” that he claimed to resent but too often managed to encourage.

  Suddenly, as if reading my mind, he wheeled and lurched back through the gathering to the bar and the kitchen behind it. I leaned back against the wall, seething. I was relieved that we hadn’t come to blows, yet I had an impulse to follow him, spin him around, punch the arrogant bully face. Then I thought of getting out, heading for Sloppy Joe’s. Or would he corner me there? “Joe is my friend. Joe’s is my place. What do you know about Sloppy Joe’s, for Christ’s sweet sake?”

  I was still leaning against the wall when Toby came back with a refill of the Metusalem.

  “Papa’s in the kitchen. He says he likes you.”

  I tried to swallow back the rage and keep my voice steady. Having “Papa” here and a lot of old Key West friends to see him was a big thing for the Bruces, and they didn’t deserve a mess.

  “Tell ‘Papa’ I admire him. But from now on I plan to admire him from afar.” I took a deep breath. “As far away as I can get.”

  Toby felt bad. We were both his friends and friendship was Toby’s thing.

  “Papa’s had a bug up his ass all day. A lot of pressure. Pauline being here—and Mary. But he’s good people. He wants you to come in and have a drink with him.”