Sparring With Hemingway: And Other Legends of the Fight Game (12 page)

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]

O
N 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 for 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.

High ratings (with Ali-Shavers a recent record-breaker) will keep the networks in the ring. ABC has signed the Olympic gold-medal winner, flashy Sugar Ray Leonard, to a long-term contract. So far he’s been knocking over stiffs in what could be an update of the Jim Norris-Chuck Davey saga. To paraphrase McLuhan, the media becomes the manager. CBS is enriching another Montreal golden boy, Howard Davis, $80,000 per fight, with Davis paying his own opponents as little as he can get them for. Not even Norris made it that obvious.

Picking up the chips dropped by Don King and Hank Schwartz, Top Rank’s Bob Arum is busy signing European champions, promising to match them against America’s best.
Hal Conrad, setting up a Muhammad Ali tournament to establish national championships, is promising “no fixes, no rigging, no house fighters.”

So it should be an interesting season, with all three networks ever deeper into the game we’ve called “show business with blood.” And who knows, maybe these new fights in our living rooms will produce another Sugar Ray Robinson, Bronx Bull LaMotta, or Willie Pep. But the new era also needs bread-and-butter fighters, solid citizens of pugilistica like Tiger Jones and Indian Ortega.

Holly Mims, where are you now that we need you?

[April 1977]

T
WO OF MY HEROES
are Joe Louis and Joe E. Lewis, a couple of champions who know how to set you up and move in and murder you, the former with quicker-than-the-eye combination punches, the latter with smart, jabbing lines, satirical songs, and a mischievous elegance that earns him my vote on the first ballot in the comedians’ hall of fame.

This may seem a roundabout way of getting to the main item on our agenda, the forthcoming Saxton-DeMarco welterweight title fight. But bear with us, for both Joes cast their shadows over the Palermo-Sam Silverman thing that is coming up in Boston, April 1. April 1 is, of course, April Fool’s Day, which just goes to show that Philadelphia’s Blinky and Boston’s Sam have a sense of humor. In this case the joke is on Carmen Basilio, the perennial No. 1 welterweight challenger who lost an eyelash title fight decision to Kid Gavilan a year and a half ago and has been doing a lot of road work ever since, chasing first Gavilan and then his successor, the crowned unchampion, Johnny Saxton. Saxton, you may remember, won the title from Gavilan in Blinky’s hometown last fall in the smelliest fight since a couple of grapplers wrestled in the mud in
You Asked for It.

Joe Louis, unlike Blinky and his eight-armed—forgive the word—champion, never walked away from a challenger. Unlike Johnny and practically every heavyweight champion
including John L. Sullivan, the Bomber took on the best heavyweights alive between 1934 and 1951. Call him a champion and you have to find another word for Saxton. This is some indication of what hoods like Palermo are doing to our cruel and noble sport. A Palermo champion leads you out of the world of sport and into the hair-splitting netherworld of semantics.

As for Joe E. Lewis’s right to a paragraph or two in a boxing column, I submit that he described the Gavilan-to-Saxton-to-DeMarco runaround of Basilio with all the humor of a Red Smith and all the eloquence of a Jimmy Cannon in a certain ballad with which he used to regale the late-show customers at the Copacabana. It concerns the unhappy lot of a prospective husband whose efforts to wed the lady of his choice are hopelessly thwarted by the crowding in of all sorts of visitors from the butcher to the baker to his uncle who plays the horses at Jamaica.