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

  Molineaux won instant celebrity. In the more honest inner lining of their hearts, Englishmen seemed to know he was right and had won. While Molineaux went on an extended exhibition tour disposing of brave plowboys, willing barmaids, and deep tankards of ale, Cribb retired. Having whipped the best the Island had to offer, Black Tom claimed the title. The Pugilistic Club went into shock. And panic seized the Fancy. The press cried to the British heavens (were there any other?) for Cribb to come back and redeem the race. “By boxing we will raise our fame ’bove any other nation …”

  The first of the Great White Hopes, Cribb tuned himself to his national responsibility. A darling of the blades, he had gone to fat, but now he ran, fasted, and sparred, stripped off the bloat and prepared himself for the next Fight of the Century. It was the talk of England. It was the lightning rod, drawing to it all the crackling pride, prejudice, and passion of a white racist island-society ready to prove its right to rule the world.

  And so the allegory was played again, this time before 25,000 mad-dog Englishmen, a crowd as large for its time as the 1.5 million Americans glomming on to Ali reeling from the heavy left-hand hooks of Smokin’ Joe Frazier, but rallying with spirit. The Cribb-Molineaux rematch, like so many replays of The Fight that were to follow, was anticlimax, at least for the hapless ex-slave who trained on ale and whole chickens, egged on by accommodating ladies and good-time Tommies who afflict the ignorant and the unprotected in their first shower of success.

  Again the American black, an early nineteenth-century version of Frazier in physique if not training habits, hurled his muscular two hundred pounds at the English hero and seemed once more on his way to the victory every good Englishman dreaded. To read the apocalyptic editorials that clouded this classic is to anticipate some of the dire things our officials seemed to think would befall our republic if Muhammad Ali were permitted to retain his title after he refused to step forward and be drafted in 1967. Yes, boxing is not the cause but the lightning rod for all the bolts of destruction ripping up the skies of paranoid nations. Just as Hollywood is a speeded-up and exaggerated version of American profiteering and exhibitionism, so the business of fistfighting makes more vivid the clash of positives and negatives besetting the societies that tolerate or encourage it.

  Molineaux was brought down when Cribb’s fists collided with his overindulged belly, causing acute stomach disorder. When he fell, the British magnanimously extended the thirty-second rest period so he could be dragged to scratch and felled again. Again and again until his jaw was smashed: when England could see that black was beautiful no longer, the gentry rose to sing “God Save the King” in a paroxysm of patriotic fervor.

  For rabble-rousing, for allegory written in blood, there was to be nothing its equal for a hundred years.

  Ring the bell for the twentieth century: the world championship belongs to America, which, according to the Schulberg-cum-Toynbee law, was as it should be. It was America that was feeling its muscles now, charging up that hill with Teddy Roosevelt and declaring its manifest destiny. It was the pushy potato eaters from Ireland who produced the Paddy Ryans, the John L. Sullivans, and a brace of James J’s—Corbett and Jeffries. First it was “No Irish Allowed,” and the Micks were treated hardly better than the Niggers and the Yids. Then they became policemen and politicians, and, of course, pugilists who liked to declaim their ability to “lick any man in the house.” The donkey Irish, the harps despised in the hunger days, battled and bribed their way up the ladder until by 1910 they had become a feisty middle-class establishment, looked down on by the white Protestants of the Four Hundred, and in turn looking down on the motley immigrants who came after them and the nonvoluntary migration of blacks that had preceded them.

  So the stage is set for the first Fight of the Century of motor-cars, movies, and flying machines. It was Cribb and Molineaux in a new land as full of energy and hatred as the old. Even more energy and deeper hatreds because the land was larger and more populated. A pot described as “melting” but that was actually roiled with racial rivalry.

  The Fight always invokes a special, rabid, and self-delusive magic. Listen:

  So far as the boxing game is concerned the contest next Monday is well named “the fight of the century.” These two men, in a class by themselves so far as other fighters go, yet so radically different from each other as to have practically no salient characteristics in common, will fight a battle in a setting like unto nothing the ring has ever displayed. For the first time, two undefeated heavy-weight champions battle, and each goes up against the most dangerous and formidable man he has ever tackled. …

  From the standpoint of the sporting world, there has never been so amazing a gathering. Almost every champion and ex-champion of every class will be at the ringside. There will be the famous trainers and conditioners of athletes … Every figure of sportdom … will all be on the ground.

  And they will watch these two strangely diverse heavy-weights battle, beside whom all other heavies look like middle-weights. … The fighting boxer will go up against the boxing fighter. Both are cool, both are experienced, both are terrible. It will not be a short fight. It will be a great fight.

  And so I say again to all you men who love the game, have the price, and are within striking distance, come. It is the fight of fights, the crowning fight of the whole ring, and perhaps the last great fight that will ever be held.

  Are you reading your favorite sports columnist on the eve of Frazier-Ali? Look again: it is Jack London filing for the New York Herald—reporting the lull before the storm of Johnson vs. Jeffries. The God of Boxing knew more about casting than Merrick or Zanuck. You who have seen The Great White Hope know hardly the half of it. How can you romanticize romance or mythicize myth? For make no mistake about it. Smilin’ Jack Johnson, the Ace of Spades as he was revered and denigrated in Reno, vs. grim Jim Jeffries, the King of Hearts to the twenty thousand sporting chauvinists who poured into the desert casino town—did such a black-white match-up really exist? Or was it, as it seemed in London’s breathless prose building to the fight, a confrontation of gods, one sired by Homer, the other by Fanon? Tex Rickard was both promoter and referee, but the overall boss of this classic was Packy Prejudice. In our age the wires of prejudice run mostly underground, a potent undercurrent, but eighty years ago they were strung boldly overground from pole to pole from little Old New York to sleepy Hollywood. An Othello had carried off the championship, and the white Iago was determined to wreak vengeance on him for bedding Desdemona. It may be difficult to conjure in these semi-enlightened times the virulence with which white America viewed the blacking of the championship. Jack London, forerunner of Papa Hemingway both in life and literary style, had looked on in dismay as the dark Galveston Giant towered over and toyed with little Tommy Burns. Burns had won his last nine heavyweight title defenses by knockouts while Johnson had been chasing him around the world demanding that the taboo be broken and the black man given his chance. When he finally caught up with Burns in Sydney, Australia (with London egging on his pigmentation pal—“He is a white man and so am I. Naturally I want the white man to win”), Johnson laughingly mouth-fought the mismatched champion all the way, using an exaggerated English accent to taunt him. “Hit me here, Tahmy,” exposing his lean right flank. Tommy’s punch would land, smack! and Jack would turn on the crowd his superior grin: “Is that the best he can do? Poor little Tahmy!” And so the smiling torture of black cat-white mouse went on until the fourteenth round when the sensibility of the police could bear it no longer. Australian bobbies stormed the ring to save their champion from the final humiliation of being knocked out by a nigger.

  At ringside Jack London pounded away on the white keys of his portable: “But one thing remains. Jeffries must emerge from his alfalfa farm and remove that smile from Johnson’s face. Jeff, it’s up to you!”

  But this progenitor of Muhammad Ali, as apt with his mouth as he was with his mitts, wasn’t in the least intimidated by fifteen thousand Jack Londo
ns urging on the white champion with “It’s up to you!” From the racial rooting section he drew new inspiration just as his descendant Ali had assured his detractors that he thrived on their slurs, and that when the press picked against him or the bigots ranted against him, it was fuel for the inner fire always burning in him, even when he was playing the clown. Ali saw himself as Johnson reincarnated, a bigger, faster, even more controversial Johnson, a world figure where Johnson was merely the world’s bête noire. In his hide-away cottage in Atlanta on the eve of his comeback fight with Jerry Quarry, Ali was running old Johnson movies, constantly jumping up from the couch to spar in front of the screen, giving cronies and visiting firemen a double image of Johnson as Ali, the black champion deprived of his title by a white ruling class which, if black heavyweight kings were to be thrust on it, insisted that they at least be self-effacing and compliant.

  The parallels between Johnson and Ali were far from exact, not nearly as neat as Ali portrayed them when he saw The Great White Hope and cried “That’s me! That’s the story of Muhammad Ali!” There was nothing overtly political about Johnson’s defiance in 1910. He did not, like Ali, challenge the federal government per se, although on a flimsy charge the Feds did challenge him. In the Jeffries fight the real encounter was not between glowering Jim and smiling Jack at all. That part of it, the physical part, Johnson easily took care of, giving the slow-moving white champ a boxing lesson that stirred the huge partisan crowd to an eloquent silence. It was not a fight but a primitive dialogue on race relations between all the white champions who had rallied to Jeffries’s corner, Corbett and Fitzsimmons, Sullivan and the rest of them versus the black shylock who came to collect his pound of flesh. Johnson parried every racist remark from “Gentleman” Jim Corbett, the cheerleader in this department, with witticisms and running commentary on the ability of Jeffries and his white allies that suggested Ali and Howard Cosell as a single two-headed man doing the fighting and the ringside commentary simultaneously.

  Johnson’s singular defiance reflected a time when there was no Negro or black movement to relate to, no group of white sympathizers, no national encouragement, no community support. No clenched fist symbolizing black power. No voices calling, “Brother, right on!” All alone, Jack Johnson chose to talk back to Whitey, laughing at him, thumbing his nose, flaunting the high life, fast cars, white women, and imported champagne. Not exactly the saint who grinned and suffered through “The Great White Hope,” still he dared to be his own man in a day when Jack London would choose for his lead on the results of The Fight: “Once again has Johnson sent down to defeat the chosen representative of the white race. …”

  We have a theory about the heavyweight championship, that somehow each of the great figures to hold the title manages to sum up the spirit of his time. All the great ones are not merely the best pugs of their day but demigods larger than life. It may all be accidental, but the main currents of their period either shape their personalities or their personalities seem wondrously to reflect their times.

  Jeffries was the simple white boilermaker of 1905 and Johnson was the upstart “bad nigger of 1910.” Jack Dempsey slugged his way up out of the hobo jungles of the Jack London West, setting up the first million-dollar gate in the postwar boom—his fight with Georges Carpentier: the handsome French war hero against the draft-dodger (they called them slackers then) with the two-day growth. Ladies of the luxury-liner set, grandmothers of the jet-set swingers, the flapper celebrities and premature go-go girls of the early twenties decorated the ringside. Forever onward the Fancy would include a fashion show of lovely ladies from Broadway stars to high society to low society dressed for the ball. Tex Rickard, the architect of the naked race war disguised as an athletic contest (Jeffries-Johnson), introduced ballyhoo to boxing and made a conscious play to the liberated ladies of the Jazz Age. It was no accident that the first Gorgeous George was billed as “The Orchid Man.” Flapper hearts went a-flutter when the French war hero rapped the slacker on his granitelike chin. But this was straining the morality play; Carpentier was really little more than a blown-up middleweight, ludicrously mismatched against a lean and still hungry Dempsey.

  The war was forgotten, prosperity was on every corner, the market was a game you played for fun and profit, and in this carefree swinging atmosphere, Jack Dempsey came into his own, came to be loved, starring in Hollywood, squiring movie stars, marrying sultry Estelle Taylor, building a great white elephant of a hotel-casino on the sunny shores of Lower California—easy come, easy go. And if Dempsey was the twenties of vigorous flamboyance, his successor Gene Tunney was the perfect face for the other side of the coin. He was the Gatsby who got his Daisy behind the orgiastic green light across the sound. The poor, hard-drinking Irish of New York’s Lower West Side might never forgive him (longshoremen on the North River mutter about him to this day), but the suave marine was a self-made man who won and kept his cool million from the Dempsey rematch of “the long count,” married an heiress, went into big business, and became a dignified member of the Affluency, just as his walking companion Bernard Shaw had unconsciously predicted in that granddaddy of boxing novels, Cashel Byron’s Profession.

  If Jack Dempsey (with his piratical rogue manager Jack Kearns) was the ebullient champion of the Harding Days, Gene Tunney boxed with a careful left and a straight right, coolly handling bullish and bearish situations, in and out of the ring. If he was not a champ for all seasons, he was certainly the right man for the right time. It was Coolidge-and-Hoover time, the economy was fundamentally sound, there was a chicken in every pot—two chickens if you put your shoulder to the wheel or had a hot tip in the market.

  And when it all came down, when the rich cut back on their servants and the middle class found itself pushed down into the working class and the working class could find no work and started selling apples and muttering about stealing bread before they’d let their loved ones starve, why then we had FDR and the alphabet soup of social revolution. The face of America was forever changed; a society that had reared itself on rugged individualism became a welfare state. Naturally we needed a new breed of heavyweight champion and lo, he materialized like the ancient kings of the Hebrews.

  His name was Joe Louis and he was black and he was simply the greatest heavyweight fighter who ever lived. He could defend like Johnson and jab harder than Tunney and punch like Dempsey at Toledo. Maybe the New Deal and hard times had turned our minds around, but all of a sudden it seemed good to have a black champion of the world—what could those know-nothings have been thinking a generation earlier when they had begrudged the great Jack Johnson his hard-earned crown? There had been black fighters before the incomparable Joe L., condescendingly described as “a credit to their race,” but sportswriter Jimmy Cannon said it for all of us when he wrote of Louis, “He’s a credit to his race—the human race.”

  If there is no God, man needs to invent him, and so it would seem with our champions and their antagonists. The God of Boxing is a Machiavelli of social balance. In the thirties, with radicals chanting, “Black and white, unite and fight!” who could better champion our hopes and our needs than the Brown Bomber? Gone was the vicious cheer of Caucasian for Caucasian. Our Bomber quickly changed all that. We were there when our white cousins were rooting him on to topple Primo Carnera and Maxie Baer and Max Schmeling. And what a blow to our democratic hopes when Schmeling, Adolf s darling and Goebbels’s calling card, found the flaw in our young hero’s armor—or call it an Achilles jaw, knocked Louis down in an early round and down for the count in twelve.

  Who in hell pulls these celestial strings? Who decides that just as Der Führer and his self-styled Supermen are bullying their way into the Rhineland, a German knight should return to our shores and smite down our black-white hope?

  For the next twelve months our heavyweight championship moved out of the squared circle into the political arena of global power. Old Jim Braddock had lifted the title from a playful Baer. Suddenly Braddock’s little manager Joe Gou
ld found himself playing international chess. As the conqueror of Louis, Schmeling had credentials as the No. 1 challenger, and the Garden wanted the match. But crustaceous Mike Jacobs, who played his chess with ringside tickets, had an exclusive on Joe Louis and wanted Braddock and that title for his man. Whoever controlled the heavyweight title controlled the multi-million-dollar business of boxing. But there were even higher stakes and bigger players. This act of the drama comes from Joe Gould himself, reliving his glory days. “I’m just sittin’ down t’ supper when the phone rings and it’s Max Schmeling callin’ from Berlin. He asks me if I signed for Louis yet and I sez No, but we’re gettin’ closer. He wants t’ know how much I’m askin’ and I say three hunnert t’ousand against 50 percent of the gross. Max says if we come to Berlin and fight him instead we c’n do even better. I sez for a Jew to bring his champion to Germany and face all them anti-Semites they gotta do a lot better. He sez wait a minute I’m makin’ this call from the private residence of Reich Minister Goebbels—I’m goin’ to put him on the phone—the German Government is ready to underwrite the fight. Just tell ’im what you want—.

  “So there I am, a little Yiddle who didn’t have a dime until I got the brainstorm of scraping the washed-up Braddock off the Jersey docks an’ bringin’ him back from retirement—Joe Gould talkin’ long distance to the Number Two Man in Nazi Germany. Goebbels is very polite. He says the Germans are great sports fans and we will be treated like royalty when we come to Germany. He says he would like to bring us to Berchtesgaden to meet Der Führer himself. I can see him and Max all smiles on the other end of that phone. ‘Now would you like to tell me your terms,’ he sez.