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

  Everybody was screaming. There had never been such a fight in all of Father’s ringside nights, all the way back to 1912 when he had first started going to the fights with Adolph Zukor and the Famous Players crowd. Benny was retreating, boxing cautiously, gradually beginning to focus on Mitchell’s combative eyes. “On his bicycle,” they called it, dodging and running and slipping off the ropes, using all the defensive tactics he had learned in his street fights on the Lower East Side and in those 150 battles inside the ropes. And as he retreated he was talking to Mitchell (shades of Ali half a century later!), “Is that the best you can do? I thought you hit harder than that? Look, I’ll put my hands down, what do you wanna bet you can’t hit me? Come on, if you think you’ve got me hurt, why don’t you fight? You look awful slow to me, Richie, looks like you’re getting tired. …”

  That round had been more of a debate than a boxing match, with Benny winning the verbal battle and Richie swinging wildly and futilely as he tried to chop Benny down. At the end of the round the ferocious Richie Mitchell did look tired and a little discouraged. The drumfire of backtalk from Leonard had disconcerted him. He had let Benny get his goat, exactly what the champion wanted. Some remorseless clock in his head was telling him that he was blowing the chance of a lifetime. In the next round Benny was The Great Benny again. His head clearing, his body weathering the storm, he was ready to take charge. Back on his toes, he was beginning to move around the slower Mitchell, keeping him off balance with jabs and rocking his head back with that straight right hand. Near the end of the round Mitchell went to his knees.

  How many times Father refought Round 6 for me over the years. Benny Leonard’s hair was combed straight back again. There was no more talking to distract the near-victorious opponent. Benny was all business. Lefts and rights found Mitchell’s now unprotected face. Both eyes were cut and blood dripped from his nose. Caught in a buzzsaw of fast hard punches that seemed to tear his face apart, the brave Irish brawler went down. But he took his count and rose again to face more of the same. Now it was not boxing but slaughterhouse seven and the more humane among the crowd, including the Benny Leonard fans who had bet a bundle it would be over in eight, were imploring the referee to “Stop it! Stop it!” For Mitchell was down again, and he seemed to be looking directly into his own corner, but there was so much blood running down into his eyes that he was unseeing.

  “I was watching his father, Billy Mitchell,” my father told me. “I could see the whole thing being fought out in Billy Mitchell’s face. He was holding a bloody towel, the towel with which he had just wiped the face of his son. His own blood was on that towel. His son Richie got up again. God almighty he was game. He would look at Benny as if to say, “You’re going to have to kill me to stop me.’ And Benny, he told us this a lot of times, he loved to win but he doesn’t like to punish them once he knows he has them licked. He was hoping the referee would stop the fight. But the ref waved him on. Maybe he was betting on Mitchell. Maybe he figured anyone with the punch of a Richie Mitchell deserved that one extra round to see if he could land a lucky or a desperate punch. Now it seemed as if the entire Garden was chanting together ‘Stop it! Stop it! For God’s sake, STOP IT!’ And then as the slaughter went on, as The Great Benny Leonard went on ripping Richie Mitchell’s face to bloody shreds, finally Billy Mitchell, that tough Mick, couldn’t stand it any longer. He raised the bloody towel and tossed it over the top rope into the ring. And then, while Richie’s kid brother Pinkey and another handler climbed into the ring to revive their battered contender, Pop Mitchell lowered his head into his arms on the apron of the ring and cried like a baby.”

  In the early twenties, Benny Leonard was enjoying the sweet fruits of summer, his harvest season of success. On the New Year’s Eve of bountiful 1925 he had saved enough money to announce his retirement as undefeated lightweight champion of the world. Still only twenty-nine, he could look forward to a life of ease as a coupon clipper who could keep one eye on his investments and the other on his physical fitness as he played golf and handball and traveled south for the winter. He was enjoying the autumn of his life, but winter set in prematurely with the Crash of 1929. Leonard saw his ring savings shrink, dwindle, and finally disappear.

  In 1931, at the age of thirty-five, he announced his comeback to the ring. After beating a string of nobodies he was matched with Jimmy McLarnin. Back home in Los Angeles I had watched “Baby Face” Jimmy fight his way to the top of his profession, from bantamweight to welter, against top fighters like Fidel LaBarba, Bud Taylor, and Joey Sangor. He seemed to specialize in destroying illustrious Jewish lightweights: Jackie Fields, Sid Terris, Al Singer, Ruby Goldstein. …

  From Dartmouth College, where I was then a freshman, I phoned my father in Hollywood for an extra fifty dollars to go to New York to see The Great Benny Leonard, at last, against our hometown sensation, the still baby-faced twenty-four-year-old hailed by Western sportswriters as a coming champion. With excitement building in me as on the day of the Leonard-Mitchell debacle, I promised to phone B.P. at the studio after the fight.

  But when I got back to my hotel from that chill October fight night I didn’t have the heart to place the call. I felt like getting in my Chevy and driving the long winding miles back to New Hampshire. The Great Benny Leonard, when I finally caught up with him ten years too late, was a rather paunchy over-the-hill lightweight with thinning hair, a tentative jab, and uncertain footwork, no match for the fast, young and lethal Jimmy McLarnin who toyed with him before knocking him out in six of the saddest rounds I ever saw.

  Our Great Benny Leonard never should have been in there with a gifted young champion like Jimmy McLarnin. In the fall of ’32 old Benny was the Ghost of Chanukah Past. Fifteen years later, after serving as a lieutenant commander supervising boxing in the navy, Benny Leonard would be in the ring refereeing a fight in the wonderfully decrepit St. Nicholas Arena when he received a knockout blow more deadly than anything Richie Mitchell or Jimmy McLarnin could inflict. Felled by a heart attack, he died there in the ring he had dominated throughout my childhood. To this day I can still hear that guardian of the turnstiles who stopped me from seeing The Great Benny Leonard in his glory years.

  [May 1980]

  Stillman’s Gym

  STILLMAN’S GYM, NOW defunct, was once the important hangout for fight promoters, managers, trainers, seconds, and—oh, yes—the fighters themselves. A grubby, seedy place, it seemed an aberration of the society at large. But was it? This recall suggests otherwise.

  AMERICANS ARE STILL an independent and rebellious people—at least in their reaction to signs. Stillman’s gym, up the street from the Garden, offers no exception to our national habit of shrugging off small prohibitions. Hung prominently on the grey, nondescript walls facing the two training rings a poster reads: “No rubbish or spitting on the floor, under penalty of the law.” If you want to see how the boys handle this one, stick around until everybody has left the joint and see what’s left for the janitor to do. The floor is strewn with cigarettes smoked down to their stained ends, cigar butts chewed to soggy pulp, dried spittle, empty match cases, thumbed and trampled copies of the News, Mirror, and Journal, open to the latest crime of passion or the race results, wadded gum, stubs of last night’s fight at St. Nick’s (manager’s comps), a torn-off cover of an Eighth Avenue restaurant menu with the name of a new matchmaker in Cleveland scrawled next to a girl’s phone number. Here on the dirty grey floor of Stillman’s is the telltale debris of a world as sufficient unto itself as a walled city of the Middle Ages.

  You enter this walled city by means of a dark, grimy stairway that carries you straight up off Eighth Avenue into a large, stuffy, smoke-filled, hopeful, cynical, glistening-bodied world. The smells of this world are sour and pungent, a stale gamy odor blended of sweat and liniment, worn fight gear, cheap cigars, and too many bodies, clothed and unclothed, packed into a room with no noticeable means of ventilation. The sounds of this world are multiple and varied, but the longer you liste
n, the more definitely they work themselves into a pattern, a rhythm that begins to play in your head like a musical score: The trap-drum beating of the light bag, counterpointing other light bags; the slow thud of punches into heavy bags, the tap-dance tempo of the rope-skippers; the three-minute bell; the footwork of the boys working in the ring, slow, open-gloved, taking it easy; the muffled sound of the flat, high-laced shoes on the canvas as the big name in next week’s show at the Garden takes a sign from his manager and goes to work, crowding his sparring partner into a corner and shaking him up with body punches; the hard breathing of the boxers, the rush of air through the fighter’s fractured nose, in a staccato timed to his movements; the confidential tones the managers use on the matchmakers from the smaller clubs spotting new talent, Irving, let me assure you my boy loves to fight. He wants none of them easy ones. Sure, he looked lousy Thursday night. It’s a question of styles. You know that Ferrara’s style was all wrong for him. Put ’em in with a boy who likes to mix it an’ see the difference; the deals, the arguments, the angles, the appraisals, the muted Greek chorus, muttering out of the corner of its mouth with a nervous cigar between its teeth; the noise from the telephones; the booths “For Outgoing Calls Only,” Listen, Joe, I just been talking to Sam and he says okay for two hundred for the semifinal at … the endless ringing of the “Incoming Calls Only”; a guy in dirty slacks and a cheap yellow sport shirt, cupping his hairy hands together and lifting his voice above the incessant sounds of the place: Whitey Bimstein, call for Whitey Bimstein, anybody seen Whitey … ; the garbage-disposal voice of Stillman himself, a big, authoritative, angry-looking man, growling out the names of the next pair of fighters to enter the ring, loudly but always unrecognizably, like a fierce, adult baby talk; then the bell again, the footwork sounds, the thudding of gloves against hard bodies, the routine fury.

  The atmosphere of this world is intense, determined, dedicated. The place swarms with athletes, young men with hard, lithe, quick bodies under white, yellow, brown, and blackish skins and serious, concentrated faces, for this is serious business, not just for blood but for money.

  I was sitting in the third row of the spectators’ seats, waiting for Toro to come out. Danny McKeogh was going to have him work a couple of rounds with George Blount, the old Harlem trial horse. George spent most of his career in the ring as one of those fellows who’s good enough to be worth beating, but just not good enough to be up with the contenders. Tough but not too tough, soft but not too soft—that’s a trial horse. Old George wasn’t a trial horse anymore, just a sparring partner, putting his big, shiny-black porpoise body and his battered, good-natured face up there to be battered some more for five dollars a round. There were sparring partners you could get for less, but George was what Danny called an honest workman; he could take a good stiff belt without quitting. To the best of his ring-wise but limited ability he obliged the managers with whatever style of fighting they asked for. He went in; he lay back; he boxed from an orthodox stand-up stance, keeping his man at a distance with his left; he fought from out of a crouch and shuffled into a clinch, tying his man up with his club-like arms and giving him a busy time with the infighting. Good Old George, with the gold teeth, the easy smile, and the old-time politeness, calling everybody mister, black and white alike, humming his slow blues as he climbed through the ropes, letting himself get beaten to his knees, climbing out through the ropes again and picking up the song right where he had left it on the apron of the ring. That was George, a kind of Old Man River of the ring, a John Henry with scar tissue, a human punching bag, who accepted his role with philosophical detachment.

  In front of me, sparring in the rings and behind the rings, limbering up, were the fighters, and behind me, the nonbelligerent echelons, the managers, trainers, matchmakers, gamblers, minor mobsters, kibitzers, with here and there a sportswriter or a shameless tub-thumper like myself. Some of us fall into the trap of generalizing about races: the Jews are this, the Negroes are that, the Irish something else again. But in this place the only true division seemed to be between the flat-bellied, slenderwaisted, lively muscled young men and the men with the paunches, bad postures, fleshy faces, and knavish dispositions who fed on the young men, promoted them, matched them, bought and sold them, used them, and discarded them. The boxers were of all races, all nationalities, all faiths, though predominantly Negro, Italian, Jewish, Latin-American, Irish. So were the managers. Only those with a bigot’s astigmatism would claim that it was typical for the Irish to fight and Jews to run the business, or vice versa, for each fighting group had its parasitic counterpart. Boxers and managers—those are the two predominant races of Stillman’s world.

  I have an old-fashioned theory about fighters. I think they should get paid enough to hang up their gloves before they begin talking to themselves. I wouldn’t even give the managers the 33½ percent allowed by the New York Boxing Commission. A fighter has only about six good years and one career. A manager, in terms of the boys he can handle in a lifetime, has several hundred careers. Very few fighters get the consideration of racehorses, which are put out to pasture when they haven’t got it anymore, to grow old in dignity and comfort like Man o’ War. Managers, in the words of my favorite sportswriter, “have been known to cheat blinded fighters at cards, robbing them out of the money they lost their eyesight to get.”

  I still remember what a jolt it was to walk into a foul-smelling men’s room in a crummy little late spot back in Los Angeles and slowly recognize the blind attendant who handed me the towel as Speedy Sencio, the little Filipino who fought his way to the top of the bantamweights in the late twenties. Speedy Sencio, with the beautiful footwork, who went fifteen rounds without slowing down, an artist who could make a fight look like a ballet, dancing in and out, side to side, weaving, feinting, drawing opponents out of position, and shooting short, fast punches that never looked hard, but suddenly stretched them on the canvas, surprised and pale and beyond power to rise. Little Speedy in those beautiful double-breasted suits and the cocky, jaunty, but dignified way he skipped from one corner to the other to shake hands with the participants in a fight to decide his next victim.

  Speedy had Danny McKeogh in his corner in those days. Danny looked after his boys. He knew when Speedy’s timing was beginning to falter, when he began running out of gas around the eighth, and when the legs began to go, especially the legs. He was almost thirty, time to go home for a fighting man. One night the best he could get was a draw with a tough young slugger who had no business in the ring with him when Speedy was right. Speedy got back to his corner, just, and oozed down on his stool. Danny had to give him smelling salts to get him out of the ring. Speedy was the only real moneymaker in Danny’s stable, but Danny said no to all offers. As far as he was concerned, Speedy had had it. Speedy was on Danny all the time, pressing for a fight. Speedy even promised to give up the white girl he was so proud of if Danny would take him back. With Danny it was strike three, you’re out, no arguments. Danny really loved Speedy. As a term of endearment, he called him “that little yellow son-of-a-bitch.” Danny had an old fighter’s respect for a good boy, and although it would make him a little nauseous to use a word like “dignity,” I think that is what he had on his mind when he told Speedy to quit. There are not many things as undignified as seeing an old master chased around the ring, easy to hit, caught flatfooted, old wounds opened, finally belted out. The terrible plunge from dignity is what happened to Speedy Sencio when Danny McKeogh tore up the contract and the jackals and hyenas nosed in to feed on the still-warm corpse.

  Strangely enough, it was Vince Vanneman who managed Speedy out of the top ten into the men’s can. Vince had him fighting three and four times a month around the small clubs from San Diego to Bangor, anyplace where “former bantamweight champion” still sold tickets. Vince chased a dollar with implacable single-mindedness. I caught up with him and Speedy one night several years ago in Newark, when Speedy was fighting a fast little southpaw who knew how to use both hands. He had Sp
eedy’s left eye by the third round and an egg over his right that opened in the fifth. The southpaw was a sharpshooter, and he went for those eyes. He knocked Speedy’s mouthpiece out in the seventh and cut the inside of his mouth with a hard right before he could get it back in place. When the bell ended the round, Speedy was going down, and Vince and a second had to drag him back to his corner. I was sitting near Speedy’s corner, and though I knew what to expect from Vince, I felt I had to make a pitch in the right direction. So I leaned over and said, “For Christ’s sake, Vince, what do you want to have, a murder? Throw in the towel and stop the slaughter, for Christ’s sweet sake.”

  Vince looked down from the ring where he was trying to help the trainer close the cuts over the eyes. “Siddown and min’ your own friggin’ business,” he said while working frantically over Speedy to get him ready to answer the bell.

  In the next round Speedy couldn’t see because of the blood, and he caught an overhand right on the temple and went down and rolled over, reaching desperately for the lowest strand of the rope. Slowly he pulled himself up at 8, standing with his feet wide apart and shaking his head to clear the blood out of his eyes and his brain. All the southpaw had to do was measure him and he was down again, flat on his back, but making a convulsive struggle to rise to his feet. That’s when Vince cupped his beefy hands to his big mouth and shouted through the ropes, “Get up. Get up, you son-of-a-bitch.” And he didn’t mean it like Danny McKeogh. For some reason known only to men with hearts like Speedy Sencio’s, he did get up. He got up and clinched and held on and drew on every memory of defense and trickery he had learned in more than three hundred fights. Somehow, four knockdowns and six interminable minutes later, he was still on his feet at the final bell, making a grotesque effort to smile through his broken mouth as he slumped into the arms of his victorious opponent in the traditional embrace.