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

  “Well for openers I want three hunnert t’ousand in dollars here in the Chase National Bank before we get on the boat,’ I sez. ‘Ya, you haf it’—sez Goebbels. ‘An’ another hunnert thou when we get to Berlin.’ ‘Ya, you haf it,’ he sez. ‘An’ first-class travel and hotel accommodations for six people.’ ‘Ya, you haf it,’ he sez. ‘An twenny-five t’ousand trainin’ expenses.’ ‘Ya, ya, you will haf that also. If you come to Berlin right away we will sign the contract.’

  “Then I take a big breath,” Joe Gould went on, “an’ I sez, ‘Only one more clause, Mister Goebbels. Before we enter the ring we want every Jew let out of your concentration camps.’ ”

  According to Gould, who gave us this for the book he hoped we’d write, the phone went dead. There was to be no demonstration of Nazi Superman over decadent America in the Sports Palast. The coveted title that would have become the property of the neo-vandals of the Third Reich remained in America. Eventually Gould did sign for a fight with Schmeling, but in New York. Wheeling and dealing, he also signed for his resurrected champion to meet Joe Louis in Chicago. Under the table was a deal for Gould and his fading tiger to enjoy 10 percent of Louis’s subsequent winnings. (It was arrangements like this, plus 40 percent tax-free to his first wife, plus shares to his Detroit sponsors, to Mike Jacobs, to his gambling “buddies,” and to the Treasury Department, that turned Joe Louis into a million-dollar pauper.) While Max Schmeling showed up for his phantom fight with the sought-after Braddock, Gould’s Cinderella Man was gallantly submitting to the quick hard hands of a lithe colored boy, Joe Louis Barrow, born into a large family of hungry mouths in a ramshackle cabin in the cotton country of Alabama.

  So the next Fight of the Century was moving into the center ring, clenched fists across the sea. When Max Schmeling returned to America to challenge Joe Louis for the championship of the world, the Wehrmacht was goose-stepping across the Austrian border. Neville Chamberlain was buying time with other people’s land and lives. There was a Berlin-Rome-Tokyo Axis. The concentration camps that an eccentric fight manager in his moment of kidding-on-the-level had asked to open were now filling up with victims of bureaucratic madmen tooling for war and drooling for conquest. Nobody on either side of the Atlantic viewed Louis and Schmeling II as anything less than the personification of Good vs. Evil. If Schmeling won, the shadow of the swastika would darken our land. If Louis triumphed, Negroes, Jews, anti-Nazis, pacifists, and everyone who yearned for an order of decency without violence would feel recharged and reassured.

  Everyone from That Man in the White House to the Raggedy Anns in the street had a stake in the victory of Joe Louis that long-ago night in Yankee Stadium. The Bomber acknowledged it by leaping from his corner at the bell like War Admiral, another champion of that day, leaving the starting gate. Louis was two hundred pounds of dark and dedicated avenging angel that night, and in the first minute he had hit Goebbels’s boy so many terrible lefts and rights that the invader was wishing he had stood in Berchtesgaden. At the end of two minutes Schmeling instinctively turned away to avoid the punishment and Louis, for once uncool, pistoned a left and followed up with the convincer, a bone-crushing right that seemed to turn the German’s head around on its socket. Men of the ring are expected to fight like bulls, in stoic silence, but this time Schmeling let out the kind of a scream one hears from the victim of the mugger’s knife.

  That night we attended a democratic carnival in Harlem. Behind a coffin draped with a Nazi flag, tens of thousands bigappled and cakewalked. It was a spontaneous political demonstration. Joe Louis had gone forth to do battle for all of us and everyone was rejoicing, from Wendell Willkie to the black numbers runner who pulled out a roll and set up drinks for the house at a corner bar we wandered into on Amsterdam Avenue. I told my new friends I had been at ringside and could hear the blow that almost removed the German’s head. Everybody laughed and we hugged each other and the closest thing to it I would ever know was V-E night in London. The two victory street operas overlap in my memory—marking the beginning and the end of the long war against gas chambers and Gauleiters. When Herr Schmeling cried out in surrender we were ready psychologically to take on the Luftwaffe and the Waffen-SS. Yes, the God of Boxing and the God of War saw eye to eye that mythological June night in Yankee Stadium. Five years later, at Nuremberg, we learned that Goering had wept when he heard the unnerving news of his champion’s humiliation. But at another headquarters, the magnetic Hotel Teresa in Harlem where the Brown Bomber held court, the bright music and the vicarious laughter of the underdog winner mounted into the dawn. Fifteen months after that night of metaphor triumphant there would be blitzkrieg, all of Europe would go under; there would be seven years of blood and death before Der Führer was to turn his head and scream surrender like Max Schmeling after 124 seconds under the bombs of the first black champion of the world to be embraced by white America.

  The Great Benny Leonard

  IN 1920, WHEN MY father B.P. was organizing one of the pioneer film companies and setting up shop at the (L. B.) Mayer-Schulberg Studio in downtown Los Angeles, he was a passionate fight fan. An habitué of the old Garden on Madison Square—before our western migration—his favorite fighter had been the Jewish lightweight Benjamin Leiner who fought under the nom-de-boxe of Benny Leonard. On the eve of my seventh birthday, my hero was neither the new cowboy star Tom Mix nor the acrobatic Doug Fairbanks. I didn’t trade face cards of the current baseball stars like the other kids on Riverside Drive. Babe Ruth could hit fifty-four homers that year (when no one else had ever hit more than sixteen in the history of the league) and I really didn’t care. The legendary Ty Cobb could break a batting record almost every time he came to the plate but no chill came to my skin at the mention of his name. That sensation was reserved for Benny Leonard.

  He was doing with his fists what the Adolph Zukors and William Foxes, and soon the L. B. Mayers and the B. P. Schulbergs, were doing in their studios and their theaters, proving the advantage of brain over brawn, fighting the united efforts of the goyim establishment to keep them in their ghettos.

  Jewish boys on their way to schule on the Sabbath had tasted the fists and felt the shoe-leather of the righteous Irish and Italian Christian children who crowded them, shouted “You killed our Christ!” and avenged their gentle Savior with blows and kicks. But sometimes the young victim surprised his enemies by fighting back, like Abe Attell, who won the featherweight championship of the world at the turn of the century, or Abe Goldstein, who beat up a small army of Irish contenders on his way to the bantamweight title. But our superhero was Benny Leonard. “The Great Benny Leonard.” That’s how he was always referred to in our household. There was The Great Houdini. The Great Caruso. And The Great Benny Leonard.

  My father gave me a scrapbook, with a picture of Benny in a fighting stance on the cover, and I recognized his face and could spell out his name even before I was able to read. In 1920 he was only twenty-four years old, just four years younger than my hero-worshiping old man, but he had been undefeated lightweight champion of the world ever since he knocked out the former champion, Freddie Welsh, in the Madison Square Garden.

  B.P. knew Benny Leonard personally. All up-and-coming young Jews in New York knew Benny Leonard personally. They would take time off from their lunch hour or their afternoon activities to watch him train. They bet hundreds and often thousands of dollars on him in stirring contests against Rocky Kansas, Ever Hammer, Willie Ritchie, Johnny Dundee, Pal Moran, Joe Welling. … He was only five-foot-six, and his best fighting weight was a few pounds over 130, but he was one of those picture-book fighters who come along once or twice in a generation, a master boxer with a knockout punch, a poised technician who came into the ring with his hair plastered down and combed back with a part in the middle, in the approved style of the day, and whose boast was that no matter whom he fought, “I never even get my hair mussed!” After his hand was raised in victory, he would run his hand back over his sleek black hair, and my father, and Al Kaufman, an
d Al Lichtman, and the rest of the triumphant Jewish rooting section would roar in delight, as half a century later Ali’s fans would raise the decibel level at the sight of the Ali Shuffle. To share in his invincibility. To see him climb into the ring sporting the six-pointed Jewish star on his fighting trunks was to anticipate sweet revenge for all the bloody noses, split lips, and mocking laughter at pale little Jewish boys who had run the neighborhood gauntlet.

  One of my old man’s pals practically cornered the market on the early motion-picture insurance business. But all through his life he would be singled out as the unique amateur boxer who not only had sparred with Benny Leonard but had actually knocked Great Benny down! Every time Artie Stebbins came to our house, my father prefaced his arrival by describing that historic event. Artie Stebbins had a slightly flattened nose and looked like a fighter. He would have gone on to a brilliant professional career—B.P. had convinced himself—except for an unfortunate accident in which his opponent had died in the ring. No matter how modestly he dismissed the legendary knockdown of Benny Leonard—“I think Benny slipped …” or “I just happened to tag him right”—that knockdown remained with him as a badge of honor. My father would say with a note of awe, “He might have been another Benny Leonard!”

  But when I was going on seven, there was only one Benny Leonard; my scrapbook fattened on his victories. In those days fighters fought three or four times in a single month. Benny had been an undernourished fifteen-year-old when he first climbed into the professional ring, getting himself knocked out by one Mickey Finnegan in three rounds. A year later he was knocked out again by the veteran Joe Shugrue. But from the time he reached the seasoned age of eighteen, he had gone on to win more than 150 fights, in an era in which the lightweight division was known for its class. The Great Benny Leonard had gone to the post twenty-six times in 1919 alone, and almost every one of his opponents was a name known to the cognoscenti. As for me, I had only one ambition, to become a world champion like The Great Benny Leonard. Or rather, two ambitions, for the second was to see The Great Benny in action.

  When I asked my father if he could take me to the Joe Welling fight, he said he thought I was a little young to stay up so late. Instead he promised to tell me all about it when he came home. That night I waited for Father to bring news of the victory. In what round had our Star of the Ghetto vanquished the dangerous Joe Welling? How I wished I were in Madison Square Garden—old enough to smoke big cigars and go to the fights like my father!

  I have no idea what time Daddy got home that night. Probably three or four in the morning. Where had he gone with his pals after the fight? The Screen Club? The Astor? “21”? A dozen other speaks? The apartment of a friendly young extra girl who hoped to become a Preferred feature player? When my father finally gave me the blow-by-blow next evening, he admitted that our hero had underestimated Welling’s appetite for punishment. B.P. and the rest of the young Jewish fancy had bet that Welling would fall in ten, as Leonard had predicted. But Welling was nobody’s pushover, and he had even fought the referee who finally stopped the fight. B.P. was out five hundred smackers. He and his pals had gone back to the dressing room to see the triumphant Benny, and the fistic Star of David, still proud of his hair-comb, apologized for leading his rooters astray. B.P. told Benny about my scrapbook, and the Great B.L. promised to autograph it for me. Then the boys went out on the town to celebrate Jewish power.

  When Father told me about the Joe Welling fight and helped me paste the clippings into my bulging scrapbook, I begged him to take me with him to the next Great Benny Leonard fight. “When you’re a little older,” he promised.

  In the early weeks of 1921, he brought me the news. Great Benny had just signed to defend his title against Richie Mitchell in the Garden! Now Richie Mitchell was no ordinary contender. He was a better boxer than Joe Welling, and a harder puncher. He was three inches taller than Benny Leonard, in the prime of his youth, strength, and ability at twenty-five, and had more than held his own against all the good ones and some of the great ones: Wolgast, Kilbane, Tendler, Dundee, Charlie White, Joe Rivers. … Only once in his impressive nine-year career had Richie Mitchell been knocked out. The Great Benny Leonard had turned the trick when I was three years old. My old man had taken the train to Milwaukee to see it, and had come back flushed with victory and victory’s rewards.

  Now it was time for the rematch, and Richie Mitchell had come to New York confident of reversing the only loss on his record. The day of the fight I boasted to my classmates, “I’m g-g-going to M-M-Madison Square Garden tonight t-to s-see the G-G-Great B-B-Benny Leonard!” Even if they had been able to understand me, I don’t think the other kids would have known what I was talking about. When it came to boxing they were illiterates. They simply had no idea that the Rematch between the Great Benny Leonard and the Number One Contender Richie Mitchell was more of an earth-shaker than the election of a new president, the arrival of Prohibition, or the publication of This Side of Paradise.

  When the moment arrived, Mother helped me dress for my mid-January adventure. I was wearing long white stockings and a blue velvet suit with fur-lined coat and hat. All that was lacking was one of my father’s big Cuban cigars. But it didn’t matter. I would smoke it vicariously as I sat beside him in the front ringside seats near our idol’s corner that B.P. always got from the Great Benny Leonard.

  “Well, Buddy,” my father said as we got out of the cab near the crowded entrance to the Garden, “I kept my promise. Your mother thought you were still too young. I wanted you to see the Great Benny Leonard in his prime. It’s something you’ll remember the rest of your life.”

  There were thousands and thousands of big people, a lot of them wearing derbies, a lot of them puffing on big cigars, a lot of them red-faced from winter wind and the forbidden but ever plentiful alcohol, bellying and elbowing their way toward the entrance to the Garden.

  As we reached the turnstile, my father urged me ahead of him and held out a pair of tickets. A giant of a guard in uniform glanced at him, then looked in vain for the holder of the other ticket. When he saw where Father was pointing, his voice came down to me in a terrible pronouncement: “What are ya, nuts or somethin’? You can’t take that little kid in here; ya gotta be sixteen years old!”

  My father argued. He bargained and bribed. But in a city known for its Jimmy Walker-like corruption, we had come upon that rare bird, an honest guardian of the law.

  By this time Father was telling me to For Christ sake, stop crying! He was frantic. The preliminaries had already started, and in those days before television and radio, there were no extra bouts standing by to hold the audience until the preannounced time for the star bout. If there were early knockouts in the prelims, B.P. ran the risk of missing The Great Benny. And we were all the way down on East 23rd Street, miles from home on Riverside Drive near 100th Street. If traffic was heavy he might miss the event of a lifetime. But there was nothing for it but to hail a cab, tell the cabbie to speed across town and up the West Side, wait for him to dispose of his sobbing and expendable baggage, and race back to the Garden. Delivered to my mother, awash with tears, I stammered out my tale of injustice. I would have to wait ten long years to be admitted to the Garden, and by that time our champion would be retired from the ring. Now I would never see him, I cried, never in my whole life!

  Mother tried everything in her repertoire of child psychology to console me. But it was too late. For me life simply had come to an end at that turnstile into Madison Square Garden.

  To ease the tragedy, I was allowed to wait up until Father came home. And this time, sensitive to the crisis, he did not linger with his cronies over highballs at a friendly speakeasy. He came directly from the Garden, his fine white skin flushed with the excitement of what had happened.

  B.P. had given the taxi driver an extra five-spot to disregard the speed limits and get him back to the Garden on a magic carpet. As he rushed through the turnstile and looked for the aisle to his seat, he heard a roar
from the crowd that was like the howl of a jungle full of wild beasts. Everybody was standing up and screaming, blocking his view. A frantic glance at the second clock told him it was the middle of round three. When he got closer to his seat and was able to see the ring, the spectacle that presented itself was the Unthinkable. There on the canvas was The Great Benny Leonard. And not only was his hair mussed, his eyes were dimmed as he tried to shake his head back to consciousness. The count went on, “Six … seven … eight …” Thousands of young Jews like my father were shouting “Get up! Get up, Benny! Get up!” And another multitude of Irish and anti-Semitic rooters for Mitchell, “You got ’im, Richie! You got that little mockie sonuvabitch!” But just before the count of 10 The Great Benny Leonard managed to stagger to his feet.

  No, I wasn’t there, but my father had caught the lightning in a bottle and had brought it home for me. I sat there watching the fight as clearly as if home television had been installed thirty years ahead of time. Our Benny was on his feet but the quick brain that usually directed the series of rapid jabs and classic right crosses was full of cobwebs. Billy Mitchell was leaning through the ropes and cupping his old fighter’s hands to urge his son to “move in, move in Richie, finish ’im!” And Richie was trying, oh how he was trying, only a split second from being Lightweight Champion of the World, one more left hook, one more punishing right hand. … But Benny covered up, rolled with punches, slipped a haymaker by an instinctive fraction of an inch, and managed to survive until the bell brought Leonard’s handlers into the ring with smelling salts, ice, and the other traditional restoratives.

  In the next round Richie Mitchell sprang from his corner full of fight, running across the ring to keep the pressure on Leonard and land his bruising combinations while he still held the upper hand. Everybody in the Garden was on his feet.