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

  On the day of the Marciano-Moore fight I happened to be working with Elia Kazan on a motion picture. Preparing a picture is all-day, all-night work with E.K., and when we met in the morning he said, Let’s see, I guess we’ll have to knock off at six to have time for dinner and the drive up for the fight. No, I said, the way to experience a big fight is to start seeing it from the moment you get up. First we read all the sports pages at breakfast. The wit of Red Smith. The soundness of Jesse Abramson. The tragic muse of Jimmy Cannon. The acerbic Dan Parker. Warmhearted Frank Graham. Marciano by KO in three. Marciano by KO in twelve. Moore by upset decision. And all those conflicting opinions backed up by erudition, emotion, firsthand experience, and Ouija-board intuition. We discuss these analyses. We make our own. Then we go over to the Hampshire House to late breakfast with Jimmy “Tomatoes” Cerniglia, the larger-than-life, self-made tomato tycoon from South Florida who backed Rocky with heart and soul and God-sized wagers when his soft-spoken New England champion was still fighting indoors and knocking out the likes of Rex Layne, Lee Savold, and Harry Matthews. Jimmy Tomatoes, a tough spirit encased in monogrammed silk, Georgia affability, and a flair for the high life, was spreading his money around the country. Betting it big. His faith in the Rock was no less passionate than St. Joan’s in her voices.

  It was D-day and Jimmy was ready with his generous twelve-year-old-scotch highballs. We had enjoyed all-night drinking bouts when Rocky was up there for Ezzard Charles. At 6:30 one morning Rocky had come eagerly down the stairs of his unadorned farmhouse, ready for the road before breakfast, to find us scrambling eggs and fight stories in his kitchen. Oh, you fellers are a big help, Rocky had chided gently and opened the front door to inhale the dawn. There are only a few of us left, Jimmy Tomatoes had boasted, meaning the morning drinkers who can stand up through the night, into the next day, and still make a little sense. Now, in the Hampshire suite, we toasted Rocky. We discussed his condition, his attitude, his feelings about Archie Moore. Rocky, a singularly uncombative man when not engaged in his ring duties, had a genuine liking for Ezzard Charles, almost a reverence for Joe Louis, but had bridled (a rare violence for him) at some of the psychological banderillas the King of Con as well as of Light-Heavyweights had planted in Rocky’s sturdy and yet oddly thin-skinned back. Jimmy said the Rock was more worked up than usual and ready to get it over with early.

  I wasn’t so sure. I went with Moore all the way back to the California days when he was in there with names unknown to the East but very rugged characters: Jack Chase, Shorty Hogue, Eddie Booker. And then that murderer’s row of Negro middleweights carefully avoided by the titleholders—Charley Burley, Bert Lytell, Lloyd Marshall, Holman Williams—and Curtis “Hatchet Man” Sheppard who guided old Arch to his M.A., his degree in Manly Art. He had won from Jimmy Bivins four out of five—three by knockouts—and those of you who saw Bivins will appreciate that statistic. I remember my friend Billy Soose remembering a Bivins hook to the midsection in the early forties. “I could feel that punch inside of me day after day,” Billy had told me. “For two weeks I had trouble getting out of bed.” Like the great dark champions before World War I, Sam Langford, Joe Jeanette, Sam McVey, who had to keep fighting each other because of the color line, Archie Moore had put in almost twenty years fighting the tough ones nobody wanted, from San Diego to Tasmania. He had been jobbed out of a title shot until he was ten years older than the average retirement age. He hadn’t even appeared in Madison Square Garden, the Metropolitan Opera of this art form, until he was in his late thirties, an age when most fighters are tending bar and pointing proudly, if a little sadly, to noble fistic stances when they were twenty-five to fifty pounds better shaped. In other words, Archie was a crafty, hungry, ring-wise veteran of the wars.

  Rocky’s career was a neat contrast. Where Archie had been the eternal outsider, Rocky, after a few hungry years hitchhiking to New York with his pal Allie Columbo, had become the darling of Al Weill, the Garden matchmaker for James D. (Dependent on Carbo) Norris. Al had brought Rocky along with the tender loving care that belied his gravel-voiced, Eighth Avenue impact. He had inched him by Roland LaStarza and then fed him the ghost of Louis Past and the oversold light-heavy Harry Matthews. So the way was cleared for the title shot with Jersey Joe Walcott. Rocky had become a true champion, perhaps another Jim Jeffries, but with his power, his courage, his pride, he was still—in what was to be his forty-ninth and last fight—still relatively green. Behind Archie Moore were more than three times as many fights and nearly three times as many fighting years. I thought Rooky’s strength and the religious regard for his own body would slowly wear down Archie’s high IQ and craftsmanship. Thus, in the Hampshire House, as the gold Swiss watches ticked toward noon, we talked fight, drank fight, and prepared to go down to the weigh-in. We were immersed in the mood of the fight, like Method actors living inside their characterizations à la Stanislavsky and Strasberg, long before they take the stage.

  The weigh-in is a semiclimactic phase of the ritual. I have attended them for decades, in the offices of the boxing commissioners, in the ring of Madison Square Garden, in the ballrooms of fashionable hotels. Whether it be Louis-Conn, Marciano-Moore, or Patterson-Johansson, the social pattern seems as set as for a blue-book coming-out party. The ceremony has been called for twelve noon and the newspapermen and photographers—great clouds of them—gather and begin to grumble, for the stars of the show are invariably late. Those with nervous dispositions consult their watches every forty-five seconds and begin to grumble that once, just once, a Big Fight weigh-in could be run off on time. The philosophical old pros like Frank Graham and Red Smith just smile and shrug and use the time for socializing with the weigh-in acquaintances they see only at these events. I feel that way about it too. I enjoy the chats with Frank and Red and Jesse Abramson and Nat Fleischer, the venerable historian and keeper of the records, and I look around for out-of-town reporters, columnists, sports editors, ex-fighters whom I think of as friends even though we rarely have a chance to meet away from these ceremonies: Shirley Povich from the Washington Post, Vince Flaherty from the Los Angeles Examiner, Al Abrams, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette … Barney Ross, the marvelous welterweight of my youth who came through at least three kinds of wars, Billy Soose who has filled out and prospered as an innkeeper in the Poconos of Pennsylvania, the gallant little Tony Canzoneri before he died, Gentleman Billy Graham, nimble master of self-defense. We exchange notes and reminiscences—have I seen Fidel LaBarba lately? What’s Fritzie Zivic doing? Whatever happened to tough Tommy Bell? We relive the great moments of the great fights—when the inspired light-heavyweight Billy Conn gave away twenty-five pounds to our latter-day nonpareil, Joe Louis, and had Joe outboxed, outfoxed, and trailing on points into the thirteenth round—and how Billy arrogantly or valorously (depending on how you see these things) disregarded cogent corner advice to stick and run and coast into the championship and chose instead to carry the fight to Louis, something you didn’t do with this champion if you were interested in survival. Louis caught bumptious Billy in a flurry as dazzling as a lightweight dandy’s and as lethal as Jack the Ripper’s.

  On the eve of that first Louis-Conn I happened to have been sitting in Shor’s with Jimmy Cannon and Jackie Conn, Billy’s fat-boy, tough, kid brother from the fighting town of Pittsburgh. Every five minutes Jackie was getting up to take the phone and cover another bet on Billy. “You know Billy really feels bad about what he’s going to do to Joe tonight,” Jackie confided with enough confidence to match his girth and his appetite. “Joe is the one fighter in the world Billy really likes and respects. But I’ve never seen Billy in such shape before. I know him when he gets that look in his eye. I swear to God he’s liable to kill Joe tonight.”

  Those are some of the stories we pass around as the time drags on to 12:30 and still no-show from the pair who will decide the championship this evening. And while we wait—let’s say for Rocky Marciano and Ezzard Charles in one of their two great meets in ’54—I tell anot
her tale of the Conn tribe. The Louis-Conn rematch was the Big Fight held over from 1941 to 1946 by World War II. Near the end of that unpleasantness I bumped into Jackie Conn in Paris where, as a most unlikely GI, he was riding a big KO streak over the French gendarmes. His brother’s thirteenth-round caveroo had not discouraged Jackie. He had the next fight all figured out. Joe would be thirty-two and over the hill when they met again. He had been taking on weight. Billy would come in stronger, having grown into a legitimate heavyweight. Joe and Billy were still friends, but, Jackie stoutly averred, next time Billy was going to murder him.

  When the Nazis finally went down for the count, champion and challenger were relieved of their patriotic responsibilities and free to pursue their private war. It was 1946, a June night in Yankee Stadium, a hundred dollars a throw for the ringside, and the biggest gate (shading $2 million) since the second Tunney-Dempsey made Gene a millionaire. Potentially this was the most provocative title defense since the night Joe made Max Schmeling scream like a frightened girl or a stuck pig before breaking Herr Goebbels’s heart by knocking him out of his senses.

  Like that second Louis-Schmeling, or the second Jeffries-Corbett, or, to go back to 1811 and the bareknuckle days of England, the second Tom Cribb-Tom (ex-American slave) Molineaux, the Louis-Conn encore was in the great tradition of natural rematches that turn out to be pale carbons of the originals. Billy Conn never left the dock for his second voyage with the Bomber. He fought as if he had spent those five intervening years in deep freeze. Like an actor who anticipates his cue, he seemed merely to be awaiting the inevitable. It fell as decisively and uncontestedly as a guillotine blade, in the eighth round.

  With my leaning toward losers, I had headed for the Conn headquarters at the Edison after the fight. Four hours earlier it had been a teeming fight-hotel-lobby version of Sodom, Gomorrah, Pittsburgh, and Bedlam. A special train of fanatic Conn-men had come to town with its pungent and motley crew, everybody from the mayor and the city politicos to the mob and their fleshy flashy girls, the fighting Zivic family, a full house in themselves, even a blind, down-and-out pug carried along for reasons of sentiment. Now their champion had come back to the hotel on his shield and was stretched out in one of the rooms upstairs too humiliated to show his face. I went to the bar where a few loyal Pittsburghers were staring into their highballs.

  “See the fight?” the bartender asked meaninglessly to break the gloom.

  “Yeah. Hard to believe it was the same Billy Conn,” I muttered bravely.

  Next to me sat two brooding figures, a lean young man and a lean, formidable older man.

  “But he wasn’t yeller, you’re not saying he’s yeller,” they challenged me, straining forward on their stools. “You saw the fight. You say Billy was yeller?”

  It was a difficult question and I had to consider it. “No, I wouldn’t say yellow. Seems to me he just had too long to think about it. One right move and he’d be the champion of the world. One wrong move and he’d be just another challenger, just another fella Louis took out quicker the second time. All that pressure on him was like a straitjacket he could not fight his way out of.”

  The two men thought about this. “Okay. Just as long as you don’t say he’s yeller.” They paid their bill and took their leave.

  “Brother, you had a close call,” the bartender confided. “That was Billy’s old man and his kid brother. I was afraid you were going to say yella, and they would have belted you.”

  Looking back, I think the Conns were itching to have some innocent come along and charge their Billy with the most unforgivable adjective in the lexicon of pugilistica. They had a load of pent-up frustration to work off that night.

  Remember, we are still at the weigh-in, waiting for the appearance of Marciano and Charles, or Patterson and Johansson. The fighters have finally arrived and are undressing. In the pre-TV days they would strip naked and take their turns on the commission scales, some studiously avoiding each other, some genuinely friendly, some employing do-it-yourself psychology, subtly insulting or belittling the opponent, or training on him a smoldering evil eye. Now a big weigh-in is a dressier affair. The contestants affect trunks in deference to the battery of cameras and to the womenfolk who have begun to decorate these affairs. Marciano-Charles-Patterson-Johansson have finally entered the improvised ring and a hundred sweaty, quick-tempered photogs desperately jockey for position, amidst shouts, curses, and desperate pleas. It is something like a Rugby scrum with every player holding a Graflex in his hand. A little war goes on between the cameramen and the reporters who are being driven back from their vantage points near the ropes. Hangers-on invariably position themselves between the lenses and the fighters. The most unprintable oaths are called down upon them. The fighters bear it all with grim, put-upon stoicism. They assume a make-believe fighter’s stance, facing each other with bare hands, while all sorts of visiting firemen, politicians, commissioners, promoters, etc., horn into the act. At the Marciano-Charles weigh-in I noticed Joe Louis hanging back, somehow lost in the pushing crowd, the only man not trying to get into the picture, and the only man in the uncomfortably crowded room who had the right.

  Watching the old poker-faced king watching his successors, I was reminded of another night at the Edison Hotel. This was a few years back when Ezzard Charles, who had won half-hearted title recognition with a lackluster win over Jersey Joe Walcott, consolidated his claim to the world’s championship by handing a blubbery, sadly overweight Joe Louis a painful licking. Charles hadn’t knocked the old Bomber out, because he wasn’t a take-’em-out puncher like Rocky, but giving away almost thirty-five pounds to our god of the thirties and forties, he had tormented and humiliated the old champion, who staggered and floundered gallantly on to the end of the fifteenth round.

  Back at the Edison, Charles’s headquarters, his managers, Jake Mintz and Tom Tannas, were throwing a victory party. I came in on a scene that might have been a George Bellows version of New Year’s Eve. Again it was strictly guys and dolls à la Pittsburgh, the home of Ez’s oddly contrasted managers. It was Free Loaders’ Night, with hangers-on, relatives, gamblers, happy hoods, and a smattering of sportsminded gentry pouring the free scotch and telling each other what a great fighter and prince among men was Ezzard Charles. “I always knew that Joe Louis was a bum,” quoth lionhearted and overjoyed Jake (“The Mouth”) Mintz. “I tell you, Ez is going to be one of the great heavyweight champions of all time.”

  “Incidentally, where is Ez?” I asked Jake when I could insert a word or two.

  “Upstairs, gowan up if ya wanna,” said the late Jake, a language-fracturer in a class with Joe Jacobs and Mushky Jackson.

  Upstairs I found a tableau of the fight game. Ezzard, who had looked from ringside an easy winner, was stretched out on a bed and Ray Arcel was attending his swellings and lacerations. This was without question the high night of his career, but instead of smiles and festivity the place had a sick-room atmosphere. “He may be five years over the hill and at least fifteen pounds over his best fighting weight, but that Louis jab can still take your head off,” Ray Arcel, the trainer, an old friend of mine, said as he tended the wounds of the victorious fighter. Ez, the new undisputed champion of the world, nodded soberly, as Ray went on tenderly massaging with ice the angry swelling over the new champion’s left eye.

  When I returned to the ballroom, to the drunks and the coarse laughter and the cigar smoke and the blondine consorts of the victory mob, I felt as if I had descended several layers into the Fighters’ Inferno. The room upstairs belonged to Homer and Vergil. But the Ezzard Charles Victory Ball was better adapted to the jaundiced style of Hogarth and Swift.

  Now—years later—Marciano and Charles were approaching the weigh-in scales and the unruly crowd cautioned itself to quiet down. The weights were precious figures that would make screaming late-afternoon headlines. “Marciano—187 ½, Charles—185½.” Boxing writers looked at each other in meaningful surprise. An excited murmur ran through this inside aud
ience. Rocky had come in several pounds over his expected fighting weight. Charles, two years earlier when he had failed narrowly to regain his title from Jersey Joe, had scaled 191½. So now these statistics were charged with significance. What did this mean? Would Marciano be stronger or merely a little slower? Was Ezzard down too fine, possibly even through fear of the bruising Marciano, or was he trying to get back to the speed and sharpness (and actual weight) he had brought to the Louis win four years earlier? Sportswriters debated, ran for telephones, dictated learned analyses. On these few ciphers of avoirdupois, gamblers made their shrewd adjustments and the odds trembled.

  After the weigh-in there was a long wet lunch at Shor’s, a kind of half-public, half-private party with everybody circulating and giving opinions, naturally including that old-style boniface Toots himself, that great tub of sentimentality, affability, generosity, and whiskey-sated, sports-crazed aficionado who has been to the boxing world of the last twenty or twenty-five years what the favorite Publick Houses were to the London prize ring of the early nineteenth century. Then back to Jimmy Tomatoes’s suite at the Hampshire House (Kazan, I think you’re still with us) to put in a ceremonial call to Rocky himself. Rocky (hiding out at a secret hotel near the site of the impending battle) was just fine. He felt just great. He was just lying down taking it easy. And what were we drunken so-and-so’s doing? He’d see us after the fight. The phone call completed, we repeated to each other Rooky’s exact words. His simplest statement seemed to us an indication of his attitude, his state of mind, that intangible on which all sportsmen lay great store. State of mind is important for a team player, adding to or subtracting from the general team morale. But the prizefighter—especially when the prize is the heavyweight championship of the world—can beat himself with his mind, tightening up under pressure like Conn in the second Louis, or gathering himself through pain and punishment like Marciano when he refused to let Walcott knock him out the night Rocky took his title, using his own suffering as a source of inspiration for a final, terrible effort that, almost miraculously, put Walcott down and out of the boxing business.