Sparring With Hemingway: And Other Legends of the Fight Game Page 9

  Marciano combined a fanatical devotion to physical condition with the ideal state of mind for a big-fight competitor. There was a serenity about him that could never be mistaken either for overconfidence or complacency. “I’ve worked nine months to get my body in the best possible shape; if he knocks me down I’m determined to get up; sooner or later I insist on winning.” That’s what his casual “I feel good—look for you after the fight,” always communicated.

  The spirit of festivity, of holiday expectancy of the close fans waiting for the fight almost always provides dramatic contrast with the spartan life of the fighter as he withdraws from worldly pleasures and prepares his mind and body with a monklike asceticism.

  Most of the heavyweight champions—with the exception of the lethal playboy Maxie Baer—have followed rigid training procedures. Marciano, for example, would sweat out as much as nine months in a crude farmhouse above Grossinger’s, often expressing his loneliness for his wife and daughter, but resigned to the hard fact that with the money and the glory went the ordeal. Floyd Patterson, in the same tradition, had slept for months in a room that would hardly satisfy a hired farmhand, hanging his clothes on nails, locked in around the clock with his sparring partners and trainers. It has been an accepted theory through the years that the rough celibate life hardens and toughens a fighter and brings him to the sharp, mean edge necessary to his trial in the ring.

  Only Ingemar Johansson has dared to challenge this rugged and lonely way. Spurning Rocky’s unadorned farmhouse, he chose a millionaire’s ranchhouse closer to the high life of Grossinger’s. Where Patterson’s personal life had been reduced to a weekly long-distance call to his wife, Ingo had his fetching Swedish dumpling by his side almost constantly. His household had the atmosphere of a happy Swedish weekend party, with friend Birgit, mama and papa, brother Rolf and his pinup-type fiancée, and assorted friends from Garboland. Occasionally he showed up on the dance floor at Grossinger’s, and as late as midnight he was seen to wander Liberty’s lox-laden main street in search of delicatessen goodies with his Birgit. Meanwhile Champion Floyd had been safely tucked into his cell since ten o’clock. Ingo not only insisted on leading a normal social life but added another mysterious wrinkle when he refused to practice his one big punch, his right, which he regarded with as much awe as the Aztecs attending their God of War. Despite these aberrations he knocked out Floyd Patterson in Version No. 1, and old fighters were going around telling themselves that their world had fallen apart. “My God, all those years I put in living like a damned convict—my wife was ready to divorce me, my youngest kid didn’t even know me—and you mean all that time I was torturing myself for nothing!”

  Or as a more sophisticated scribe said, “Ingo’s victory has done more for sex than anything since Mae West and Sigmund Freud.”

  But celibacy and self-denial came back into their own in the second Patterson-Johansson when Floyd, who had trained in a drab, abandoned roadhouse in the Connecticut bush for almost a year, knocked out a self-confident Golden Goy from Göteborg in less than five rounds. Ingo lay unconscious for ten minutes while his womenfolk sobbed into their hands, and the many ladies among the paying customers—who responded to Ingo as perhaps to no other pugilist since Gorgeous Georges Carpentier—dripped lovely tears onto their minks.

  I had dropped in on both training camps with Archie McBride, the heavyweight who had begun his career on my farm in Pennsylvania. The local New Hope postmaster and I had nurtured him until he was fighting Bob Satterfield, Nino Valdes, Hurricane Jackson, Alex Miteff, and a lot of others in the top ten. Oddly enough, “our Archie,” as we called him to differentiate from “The Archie” Moore, was the only man in the world who had been in there with both Patterson and Johansson. So we felt we had an inside morning line. Floyd had knocked out our Archie after seven well-fought rounds in the Garden. Archie had gone the distance with Ingo in Göteborg and blew a hometown decision that had even the Göteborgers hooting their hometown boy. Floyd looked hard and crisp in his workouts and he enjoyed some vicious sessions with the big Cuban work horse Julio Mederos. Ingo, the erstwhile champion of the world, pawed through harmless rounds with his little brother, with a nimble Negro middleweight, and with a half-baked light-heavy he had imported from Sweden. The flacks were whipping up a “new look” for Johansson, who was said to be a greatly improved boxer and hitting well with his left as well as the right.

  “That ain’t no new look,” said our Archie. “He just the same as when I box him in Göteborg. He hurt you with the right hand, but he got to throw it from away back. That’s all he has. He jab like a girl. And he don’t like it at all when you’re fightin’ inside. I fought a lot better fighters than him. I think I could beat ’im, here in the States. So Floyd, who’s got too many hands for me, has got to beat ’im four out of five.”

  In his training camp interview Ingo was as personable as if he were doing another turn on the Dinah Shore show. Floyd was edgy and testy, as becomes the gladiator on the eve of his going forth to battle.

  Press: “Had Ingo hurt you in the first fight?”

  Floyd: “Well he knocked me out, didn’t he?”

  Press: “Have you worked out any new strategy for this next fight?”

  Floyd: “If I told you, how long would it be new?”

  Press: “What punch was it that you just hurt Mederos with?”

  Floyd: “You’re the boxing reporter. You were right there. Why don’t you tell me?”

  Back at the press bar an out-of-town sportswriter was complaining, over his free old-fashioned, about Floyd’s lack of the social graces. But I rather liked Floyd’s answers. They were smart and ready, if not quite as mellowed as Joe Louis’s characteristic retort when asked how he would cope with Billy Conn’s speed and boxing ability: “Well, he c’n run, but he can’t hide.”

  Incidentally, I liked Joe’s answer when I asked him at lunch at the Patterson camp how he would have rated himself with Ingo. Never one for boasting, Louis had said quietly: “If I fight Johansson, I don’t think he even bother to get off the boat.”

  Part III of the Patterson-Johansson trilogy, mimed in Miami Beach earlier this year, established veteran Archie McBride as a perceptive critic. “Ingo hurt you with the right hand”: the talented but tender-chinned Patterson was down twice in one round. “Ingo don’t like to get hurt”: pain is one of the occupational hazards of this crude profession and once again Johansson proved himself “mune” to punishment, philosophically accepting the “ten-and-out” count near the end of round six.

  Are Floyd Patterson and Ingo Johansson in a class with Louis and Conn, Dempsey and Tunney, Jeffries and Corbett? Surely not Ingo, who happened to be the right color at the right time. Tough Sonny Liston and Olympic champion Cassius Clay [soon to become the world-famous Muhammad Ali] are the real thing. Meanwhile Patterson, a dragon-killer with a taste for tame or inexperienced dragons, dallies with young Tom McNeeley of Boston, green in more ways than one.

  But when the rightful challenger is in there with the champion, wherever and whenever it happens, I hope to be among those present. As I said when I came in, despite the Carbos, the Blinky Palermos, the Eddie Cocos who have darkened cauliflower alley, the struggle for the heavyweight championship of the world is still epic in form and mythic in content. I minded not to be absent at that spectacle.

  [January 1962]

  Where Have You Gone,

  Holly Mims?

  ON A RECENT SATURDAY afternoon, I settled in front of my television set to watch a fight that happily reminded me of the sudsy old days of twenty years ago when the “Friday Night Fights”—followed by Monday nights and Wednesday nights—were a weekly ritual.

  If you are a reader under thirty years of age, you may think that the sun of pugilism rose—and is now beginning to set—on Muhammad Ali. When you think of television as a medium for boxing, you envision heavyweight extravaganzas staged in faraway places like Africa, the Caribbean, or the Philippines, and brought to you on large screens at
your neighborhood theaters.

  But the fights I’ve been watching on the home tube lately—Irish Mike Quarry vs. Jewish Mike Rossman, “White Hope” Duane Bobick vs. Ken Norton’s stylish sparring partner Young Sanford—are a throwback to the fifties. They’re not multimillion-dollar epics but modest entertainments, the sort of weekly fare that used to rival Uncle Miltie, the early “Lucy” shows, and the “Honeymooners” in those less sophisticated days when television was such a novelty that you invited neighbors in to see the new ten-inch set or went down to the corner saloon where “We’ve got TV!” was advertised in the window.

  Uncle Mike Jacobs, who controlled the fight world from his power base at Madison Square Garden, was a most unlikely Cupid, but the marriage of boxing and television over which he presided was a union made in the Nielsen heavens. The pioneer showmen of television were casting about wildly for suitable material and there, in his Friday-night Garden fights, Uncle Mike had a natural—two men in a confined space trying to knock each other out. Cameras, still too primitive and few in number to follow complicated games like baseball, basketball, or football, were ideally suited for tracking our gloved gladiators in the squared circle.

  It was a case of the right sport at the right time in the right space. For those early television brawls, the high-handed, tightfisted, redoubtable Uncle Mike allowed his “main-go” boys an extra $186.50 for the right to project their contentious shadows on the little screens. And the television fighters enjoyed instant celebrity. People who had never seen a live fight in their lives became overnight aficionados and self-assured experts.

  Fortunately for this new audience of parlor or barroom fight fans, there was a wealth of talent in every division: featherweights like Sandy Saddler and Willie Pep; hard-punching lightweights like Jimmy Carter, Bud Smith, and Joe Brown; flashy welterweights like Johnny Bratton, Kid Gavilan, and the uncrowned champion, Billy Graham; tough ones like Tony DeMarco and the undisputed toughest, Carmen Basilio.

  For free, you had the privilege of seeing Sugar Ray Robinson, probably the greatest fighter in any division ever, overcoming brave bulls like Jake LaMotta and Gene Fullmer, and the ring-wise Bobo Olson and Randy Turpin.

  There was great drama on television in the 1950s, but for sheer suspense, unforgettable character, unexpected setbacks, and superhuman determination to turn a debacle upside down and score a triumph, none of the plays I admired on the tube could compare with the contest in which the forty-five-year-old Archie Moore defended his light-heavyweight crown against the rugged French Canadian Yvon Durelle. I wanted to go to Montreal because I had followed the Old Mongoose since his California fights twenty years earlier. But I had a conflict. A play of mine was opening on Broadway, and I was still rewriting the ending. So I couldn’t jump aboard the Montrealer as I had hoped. If television had not come along, and improved to a point where live events could be telecast from coast to coast and country to country, I think I might have urged postponing our play until the next episode in the Archie Moore story could be revealed. But thanks to the greatest invention since the horseless carriage, I was able to watch the fight from the bar next door to our theater.

  In Round 1 of Archie Moore-Yvon Durelle, the aging pride of San Diego was knocked cold. “There goes the old man,” said the bartender. By the late fifties, bartenders had been watching as many as five fights a week and could out-commentate Don Dunphy. It did look as if the ancient king of the light-heavies had been dethroned. At the count of 5 there was not the slightest sign of life. At 7 the eyes twitched, but the body lay there like a toppled god of stone. At 8 the stone shuddered, and began to move. Just before the stroke of 10, somehow he managed to pull himself to a standing position. How he weathered that round, and the next ten, couldn’t help but make me wonder how the most powerful of TV dramas could compete with this primordial struggle. And when Archie finally triumphed by a knockout in the eleventh, I remember staring at the face of the grizzled old warrior and wondering how the climax of my play—or any theatrical climax in proscenium or magic box—could top the impact of this morality play. I would have given Mr. Archibald Lee (as his Mama called him) the Emmy of Emmys for outstanding performance in a dramatic role.

  Such championship fights were the frosting on our weekly television boxing cake. The weekly fare built up a kind of stock company of dependable performers—like actors fated never to become stars but always to be counted on to give it their professional best. What was important was not to collapse prematurely, because you had to sustain those all-important commercials—fight on for Gillette and Pabst Blue Ribbon—keep moving in and throwing punches, win or lose. One thinks of Ernie Durando and Tough Tony Pellone, Paddy Young, Tiger Jones, Joe Miceli, Gaspar “Indian” Ortega, Chico Vejar, and the Flanagan brothers. They, and a score of other brave ones like them, came to fight, picking up the 4Gs in television money every month or two, happy to spill a little blood to sell a little beer.

  Instead of the handful we have today, there were scores of welters and middleweights who were a delight to watch because they knew their trade. There were some great might-have-beens denied title shots because they weren’t drawing cards.

  My favorite was the late Holly Mims, the dark, artful dodger from Washington, D.C., who could hold his own with the best—Robinson, Dick Tiger, Jimmy Ellis, Emile Griffith. He would take a fight on an hour’s notice. “You think you’ve got ’im, but he’s only giving pieces of himself,” an opponent said, after a battling forty-five minutes with the slippery Holly. When the pickings got tough, he’d even fight under a nom-decombat, picking up half a C-note in the tank towns. Holly Mims will never follow Sugar Ray into the Hall of Fame, but whether it’s acting, writing, or fighting, it’s always a joy to watch someone up there who knows what he’s doing and turns tough knocks into an art form.

  The golden boy of the television circuit was Chuck Davey, the amateur welterweight champion from Michigan State who turned pro just as television was beginning to take over the American living room in the early fifties. Davey was the first matinee idol of the new wave of fight fans once removed—a clean-cut college graduate, as American as apple pie, a southpaw with the quick right jab and nimble feet of a talented amateur. His autobiography might have been titled “Somebody Down Here Likes Me Too,” because the word came down through Cauliflower Alley that Chuck Davey was the “house fighter” of the International Boxing Club and its president Jim Norris.

  It made sense to build a television star of this personable Midwestern kid with fresh appeal for the wives and mothers and sisters, who could share with their men an admiration for this well-mannered boxer—the kind of boy you would bring home for supper. The Rocky Grazianos were perfect for the live fight crowds and the barrooms, but here was God’s and Norris’s gift to the family boxing hour.

  For four straight years the impeccable wonder boy went undefeated, with lots of early-round knockouts, even though there were Eighth Avenue cynics who insisted that “the collitch bum can’t punch his way out of a paper bag.”

  It was known that Jim Norris, despite his family fortune, had a predilection for godfather types, and that he was like family with Frankie Carbo, who was the Mob’s minister without portfolio to the fight game. Fight managers would tell you—if you promised to protect their anonymity—that Frankie Carbo had a very nice relationship with a long string of Davey’s opponents. (Davey knew nothing of the backroom seances that turned tigers into lambs.)

  Fighters I knew couldn’t believe their eyes when Chuck blithely outpointed Rocky Graziano. “Take the handcuffs off an’ Rocky runs ’im outa the ring.”

  And then, still undefeated after forty celebrated fights, the seemingly invincible college boy climbed into the ring against Kid Gavilan for the welterweight championship of the world.

  It was enough to make Davey’s army of true believers cry into their milk. From the opening bell, the message was clear. The national television audience was watching a fight between a man and a boy. Gavilan beat on their hero fo
r ten one-sided rounds and finally delivered the coup de grace at the end of Round 10. For Chuck Davey it was the end of the rainbow. He’s now a respectable boxing commissioner back in Michigan. But for five years, Chuck Davey, as the boxing darling of the TV box, brought a new look to the old fight game, and women who had shunned boxing as a cruel and bloody business took the college champion and his clever, sporty style to their hearts.

  “Television and Chuck Davey brought us a much higher type of clientele,” says Harry Markson, the literate, pipe-smoking promoter-emeritus of the Garden. “In the old days, if we had a questionable decision, we’d get mail calling us ‘lousy thieves’ and ‘dirty rats.’ But with the Davey era, it was more like ‘incorrigible reprobates.’ ”

  By the middle sixties, the home television fight game was on the ropes. The reasons came in bunches. Sophisticated techniques could cover the major sports from every angle, and the armchair fans now had their pick of baseball, basketball, football around the clock. In this new world of slo-mo-and-instant-replay sportsmania, even tennis found a mass audience. And our grand old sponsor, Gillette, followed the crowds. The occasional Ali-Fraziers and Ali-Foremans were too big for our living rooms.

  Now boxing is on the road back to home television. Not even the inevitable scandals seem to discourage a new generation of living-room fans. On ABC, ex-numbers boss and supposedly rehabilitated jailbird Don King’s so-called “United States Boxing Championships” consisted of “house fighters” meeting “opponents” with tricked-up records. A U.S. congressional committee is still looking into it.