Sparring With Hemingway: And Other Legends of the Fight Game (16 page)

Was Gavilan really jobbed out of his title, as he so tearfully claimed, and was it a Carbo-Palermo double play? Paul John (Frankie) Carbo (not unacquainted with murder and commonly described as the undercover owner of Gavilan and dozens of other high-ranking fighters) had worked with Blinky before. They had been pointed out as the background figures the night Blinky’s Billy Fox “knocked out” Jake LaMotta, said to carry the Carbo colors in the grand stakes. Christenberry, in a survey of boxing that will bear rereading, described Blinky as “next to Carbo the most notorious character in the combine.” Why did Carbo and Palermo have dinner together at Dempsey’s restaurant a few nights before the Gavilan-Saxton? And what was Paul John, alias Frankie, celebrating in a Philadelphia hotel after the Gavilan-Saxton?

These were some of the inevitable, unanswered questions as the song was ended but the aroma lingered on.

The fight itself was not fixed, in the opinion of this trusting soul. I can’t get into the tail-chaser about who won which rounds because after the second I started scoring it with an N for nothin’ happened. Saxton is a nothing-happens fighter who has perpetrated this sort of thing throughout his curious career. Two of his Garden fights were thrown out as no contests, although the Minelli mess somehow went into the record books as a KO for Saxton. Like this most recent fight, and the kazatzky before it with Johnny Bratton, the only beating was the one inflicted on the spectators.

Gavilan was an aging twenty-eight, weakened from weight making, rusty from a six-month layoff, rarely using his injured right hand, and frustrated by a well-conditioned and accomplished spoiler. The Cuban was no longer the flashy Keed who fought in theatrical but effective spurts, incredibly hard to hurt and almost always good to watch. In recent years the spurts were shorter, the coasting periods longer. Came a night when the good fighter couldn’t fight, especially in there with a stiff who wouldn’t fight. Kid couldn’t; Johnny wouldn’t—that’s the story if you only had money enough for a four-word telegram. The fix didn’t have to be in. The fates have put the fix in, helped along by the wiles of Mr. Blinky and the Gavilan piecemen when they conspired to match a no-longer-boring-in Kid with an always-boring Saxton.

If Pantaleo had been a real referee instead of what he was, he would have bounced them both out of the ring after eight rounds and advised the abused paying customers to ask for their money back. Gavilan didn’t earn his 40 Gs and Saxton
didn’t earn his championship of the world. If it had to be judged as a fight I would have called it for Gavilan because 1) you can have more fun in Havana than you can in Philadelphia and 2) Gavilan has been pretty great and deserves better than to blow his title in a hometown sleight-of-hand and 3) the Kid came on to win the last round in something like his old style, shaking Saxton up and providing the only real action in the fight. All the rest of the action was handled by the books, who were swamped with Saxton money throughout the day.

I don’t know about the other ruling bodies, but the Schulberg Boxing Commission, which headquarters in New Hope, Pennsylvania, but has no working agreement with Frank Wiener, refuses to recognize Saxton as champion. It saw with its own eyes such welterweight worthies as Jackie Fields, Young Jack Thompson, Young Corbett III, Jimmy McLarnin, Barney Ross, Henry Armstrong, Fritzie Zivic, Ray Robinson—yes, and Kid Gavilan. In deference to these real champions, we declare the title vacant.

The Gavilan-Saxton turkey trot deserves a thorough airing. In fact, it may be time to ask again, as responsible sportswriters have been asking so long, whether boxing is going to be a legitimate sport or a dirty business? Jim Norris, the personable president of the IBC, as an honorable man and a true fight fan, should welcome an investigation of the dark underside of boxing. It can destroy the sport as the Black Sox conspiracy might have ruined baseball if an effective commission had not been set up to protect our pastime from its inside jobbers. To say this is not to attack boxing but to attack the boxing racket.

The boxing managers have their guild; the IBC is a powerful network of promoters from New York to San Francisco; even the veteran boxers are getting together. Maybe it’s time to launch the Association for the Protection of the Poor Put-upon Fight Fan. The APPPFF. The middle P’s don’t stand for Palermo or Pantaleo. Won’t stand for them, in fact.

[November 1954]

W
AS THERE REALLY A
second
Sonny Liston-Floyd Patterson fight? In the rear of my station wagon lies a poster, already curling and fading with age, heralding that event or fiasco or nightmare miasma for the 22nd of July, 1963, in the sacred city of Las Vegas, mecca for thousands of religious fanatics who come to worship their ritual numbers, that first sweet 7, bountiful 11, and magical 21, and to exorcise the devils, snake-eyes 2, crap-out 7, and there-you-go-again 22.

You heard me, pal. Vegas. Where else but in that razzle-dazzle capital of Suckerland could you fill a large hall for a rematch of the felling of an apprehensive, thoroughly rehabilitated delinquent by a very tough prison-hardened man? With my faded poster five months out of date, I’m no longer sure if I really made the pilgrimage from my home in Mexico City to see that phantom fight. Vaguely I recall buying a seat on a plane destined for Las Vegas, but in retrospect no such geographical complex exists. I do not expect to find it again in the rolling sagebrush desert of the Southwest, but if your friendly gasoline station has added a handy road map of Dante’s Inferno, you might come upon it suddenly on one of the lower levels. In that blistering July, had I been a victim of a Sodom-and-Gomorrah dream as I wandered between the bizarre training camps over which an angry, glowering Liston presided at the Thunderbird Hotel while the pensive,
introspective Patterson showed his talent for speed of hand and melancholy interviews at the Dunes? Like the Sands, the Sahara, the Riviera, and the other sunless pleasure domes spread garishly along the Strip, the gladiators’ headquarters were giant, nonstop gambling casinos that join hipster and square in a fevered fraternity devoted to sex-substitute games of chance played with round-the-clock patience and sublimated desperation.

As had been my avocation and
afición
for decades, I had come early to the fight grounds to study the contending champions as they prepared themselves for the impending conflict that was to decide the fistfighting championship of the world. I had watched the mighty Brown Bomber in poker-faced training at primitive resort camps, the rugged Marciano in his humble farmhouse isolated from the exhausting rounds of recreational activities at Grossinger’s, the silky moves of Ezzard Charles in pastel sweatsuit at Kutscher’s luxurious
Gemütlichkeit
in the Catskills … I thought I had seen the ultimate in exotic grooming for combat when Ingemar Johansson, the Swedish glass-jawed krone pincher, took over a superplush ranchhouse at Grossinger’s and feasted on sumptuous smorgasbord and inept light-heavyweight imports from Stockholm.

But the training for the brief encounter perpetrated in Syndicateville, U.S.A., last summer—well, in the spirit of the wheel, the hole card, and the hard eight I’ll risk a lowly dollar chip to a hundred-dollar blue that Vegas in July housed the goddamnedest training a fight buff ever or rather never hoped to see.

The ring has had its icon smashers, so gifted they were able to flout the physical demands of the sport, sharpening their reflexes and honing their muscles not in rigid training camps but in bistro and brothel. One of the great bareknuckle fighters of the early nineteenth-century London prize ring, Jewish lightweight Dutch Sam, boasted that he trained on gin. His son and worthy heir, Young Dutch Sam, scourge of the little ’uns, ran
with the dandies to an early grave. In our fathers’ day there was Harry Greb, the illustrious noncelibate who defied the taboos against
la dolce vita
on the eve of battle. The gin mills and the boudoirs were the Human Windmill’s gymnasiums. Proximity as well as nature seemed to shape “Two-Ton” Tony Galento until any resemblance to a beer barrel was not coincidental.

Despite these playboys of the Western ring, there remains a traditional preparation for fisticuffing, a rigorous program of self-denial. The ground rules of this strenuous game have demanded over the centuries that the contenders retire to rustic retreats to devote themselves to the hard labor of running and bending and sparring and thinking. During this period of the hair shirt and the liniment rub, the pugilist was not only denied the joy of entering woman, he was rarely even permitted the preliminary joy of girl-watching. The true practitioner was a fastidious ascetic whose physical energies were turned inward, flowing back into himself, like a mighty river that reverses its current and pours upward into its headwaters. Thus, according to the mythodology of this ancient, noble sport, the pugilist does not dissipate his energies. He conditions his muscles, he builds his stamina, and from his self-imposed isolation he draws concentration and pent-up emotion ready to explode at the opening bell. The sex act is sublimated, its art and energies rerouted. The man intact, this reservoir of bone and flesh and nerve and blood, is ready to release full-force its dammed-up excitations.

Old wives’ tale or physiological truth, the school of the abstemious has ruled the prize ring. Trainers of Primo Carnera used to laugh at their practical joke of tying a string around Carnera’s penis while he slept so that an erotic dream would tighten the string, painfully, awakening him before a wasteful release of dammed-up energy. In poor Primo’s case it was a futile precaution. Primo was as ponderous and helpless as a dinosaur. He came into the ring as Samson shorn. He was the champion who sprang full and overgrown from the fertile mind of the mob. The mob giveth and there stood, in all his bogus glory, the innocent champion Carnera. The mob taketh away, and there lay the broken body of the hapless giant. Today Primo is to be found in the happy hunting ground of wrestling, where they need to tie no strings around human appendages, since it is merely a marionette show for slaphappy sadists, with hidden strings and invisible wires operating life-sized muscle dolls.

But glove fighting had its dignity, at least in its finest hours, before descending into the decadence that now threatens to engulf it. One of its many attractions for me, in this impure world, was the monastic dedication. There is much about boxing that is ugly and abhorrent: the exploitation, the finagling and conniving, the shabby grifters ever ready to leech it. But the training period always had something immaculate about it, a tradition of physical discipline that conjured up Sparta and the Greek games. To watch Rocky Marciano rise at dawn brimming with good sleep and vigor, pumping his short, powerful legs over the Upper New York countryside, was an aesthetic pleasure. Similarly, in Vegas we left the crowded casino at four in the morning to drive out into the silent, night-enshrouded desert where Floyd Patterson was idyllically bedded down. The lights of the incredible gambling palaces flickered, but out at Hidden Well Ranch all was oasis serenity.

The sun was still just a promise of morning on the horizon when the gentle, unassuming Floyd strolled from his hideaway cottage, accompanied only by two strapping shepherd dogs. He tossed a red rubber ball down the dirt lane connecting the complex of ranch houses to a deserted desert road and moved with a fighter’s practiced grace after it into the open desert country. He ran on and on, occasionally throwing the ball ahead of him to break the monotony of the long lonely run. Now the sun rose full but not yet hot on the desert-clean horizon and our man was silhouetted against it, jogging on with his black dog and his white dog unconsciously composing themselves into an artist’s conception of how an aesthete of the prize ring should
appear one week before a crucial contest. Driving alongside, slothful in a station wagon, I thought of
The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner.
In that film, like the live drama we were watching, the preparation for the showdown was purity and grace and artfully lonely, and building to a climax that was agony and frustration, neurotic and perverse. To follow Floyd as he ran on into the rolling desert dunes in the softlit purple morning was to catch him in his proudest moment, when he was all concentrated, dedicated grace and energy. How confidently, it seemed, he paused for thirty seconds of piston-fast shadowboxing, ran backward a dozen yards and then forward again, into rising hills where our car could no longer follow, a lone figure of rare health and determination, with the big black dog and the big white dog panting with the joy of the effort and beginning to seem more tired than their poker-faced master.

Poker-faced but not a gambler, Floyd secreted himself at Hidden Well except for the training sessions staged with Vegas hoopla at the Dunes, where a thousand people a day paid their buck to applaud the quiet, modest monk working with humorless conscience to avenge the one-round humiliation he had suffered nine months earlier in Chicago. His body expressed confidence, but his mind seemed cobwebbed with complexities that should not foul the forward gear, the clear, simple thrust a pugilist—perhaps any artist or prime doer—needs to carry out his plan of action. When we asked him, for instance, if he thought Liston would knock him out again, Patterson stared at the floor and launched into a tortured paragraph replete with dependent clauses. He certainly hoped he would not be knocked out again; he would try not to enter the ring expecting to be knocked out again; however, no one can estimate in advance the effect of an opponent’s blow on the brain, and it is always possible that the body wishes to react in one way while the mind, temporarily stunned or confused, reacts in another.

Before he was halfway through this convoluted oratory we
were all staring at the floor in embarrassment, feeling uncomfortably sorry for this bad boy gone good. In this modern world of contradiction and compromise you want your prizefighters strong and direct. You want a Floyd Patterson to say, “Hell no, he won’t knock me out again. I come to fight. I’ll beat his ass off.” When we asked Sonny Liston if he thought Patterson would last longer the second time, he growled, “This time—shorter.” Sonny was four seconds off the target, but they breed humanitarians in Nevada and there is a compulsory eight-second count of protection, even if the fallen fighter scrambles up to his feet before 8 as Floyd did, in his amateur eagerness to precipitate his own slaughter. From John L. Sullivan to Sonny Liston, eighty-one years and twenty-two champions, there never has been one so plagued with doubts and fears, the tentative tangle, as twice-disgraced Floyd Patterson. It is like asking Picasso if he thinks he is going to create any more immortal canvases and hearing him say, “Well, I’d like to, but when one puts his brush to canvas how does he really know whether or not the mind may misdirect it?” Or asking President Kennedy if he thinks the free world will fall and hearing him say, “Well of course we
hope
not, but who can foresee the gulf between desire and achievement?” There is an appealing integrity to self-deprecation, but it doesn’t win ball games or civilizations.