Sparring With Hemingway: And Other Legends of the Fight Game (10 page)

Before I lead you into a vale of tears, let us hasten to the epilogue. I am a dressing-room man, long ago discovering that the experience of the fight is not yet total when victor and vanquished leave the ring. This night I followed the robe of silken gold across the infield of the great ball park to the dressing room of the sorely battered loser. For one reason, the dressing room of the triumphant champion would be insufferably crowded. For another, not only the devil but also the drama takes the hindmost. How would you expect to find this man whose hopes as well as his features had been cruelly pounded into submission? Sitting on his rubbing table sobbing into his hands? Lying on his back staring blindly at the ceiling? Cursing his handlers and himself in frustrated rage? Insulting or threatening to attack photographers whose job it was to record his public humiliation? Or hiding in a shower? I have seen all these and more. But I had never seen
this:
Archie Moore,
whose robe and triangle of cropped beard under his lower lip gave him the appearance of a swarthy member of the Old Vic done up for Othello, climbed up upon a table, made it his stage, and, smilingly disregarding his wounds and the blows that had beaten him nearly senseless only a few minutes before, stretched out his arms to his small audience and delivered this speech in his finest Elizabethan manner:

“Welcome, gentlemen. I found this evening most enjoyable. I trust you did likewise. Now if you have any questions, I shall be happy to answer them.”

You see, Moore, the unlettered but instinctive scholar, knew this was not a mere fight between two retrogressed homo sapiens. It had been as ritualistic as a Japanese No play. One cynical fight reporter that evening cynicked out loud that it was an enjoyable evening for old Arch because his purse of more than $240,000 was the biggest pay night of his long, long trail. But I insist on a dash of romance in my heavyweight championships. Three thousand years ago the prizes for which the champions fought were laurel wreaths and oxen with gilded horns; now they are hundreds of millions of dollars which the Treasury Department is happy to share, and magnificent plaques from the Boxing Writers’ Association and a dozen other benevolent societies. So long as the fight is the real thing, the difference is negligible. It is not the money prize but the myth and the mystery that draws those sixty thousand people to the ball park while millions more worshipfully attend theater-TV screens.

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 another 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.