Sparring With Hemingway: And Other Legends of the Fight Game (7 page)

When I asked my father if he could take me to the Joe Welling fight, he said he thought I was a little young to stay up so late. Instead he promised to tell me all about it when he came home. That night I waited for Father to bring news of the victory. In what round had our Star of the Ghetto vanquished the dangerous Joe Welling? How I wished I were in Madison Square Garden—old enough to smoke big cigars and go to the fights like my father!

I have no idea what time Daddy got home that night. Probably three or four in the morning. Where had he gone with his pals after the fight? The Screen Club? The Astor? “21”? A dozen other speaks? The apartment of a friendly young extra girl who hoped to become a Preferred feature player? When my father finally gave me the blow-by-blow next evening, he admitted that our hero had underestimated Welling’s appetite for punishment. B.P. and the rest of the young Jewish fancy had bet that Welling would fall in ten, as Leonard had predicted. But Welling was nobody’s pushover, and he had even fought the referee who finally stopped the fight. B.P. was out five hundred smackers. He and his pals had gone back to the dressing room to see the triumphant Benny, and the fistic Star of David, still proud of his hair-comb, apologized for leading his rooters astray. B.P. told Benny about my scrapbook, and the Great B.L. promised to autograph it for me. Then the boys went out on the town to celebrate Jewish power.

When Father told me about the Joe Welling fight and helped me paste the clippings into my bulging scrapbook, I begged him to take me with him to the next Great Benny Leonard fight. “When you’re a little older,” he promised.

In the early weeks of 1921, he brought me the news. Great Benny had just signed to defend his title against Richie Mitchell in the Garden! Now Richie Mitchell was no ordinary contender. He was a better boxer than Joe Welling, and a harder puncher. He was three inches taller than Benny Leonard, in the prime of his youth, strength, and ability at twenty-five, and had more than held his own against all the
good ones and some of the great ones: Wolgast, Kilbane, Tendler, Dundee, Charlie White, Joe Rivers. … Only once in his impressive nine-year career had Richie Mitchell been knocked out. The Great Benny Leonard had turned the trick when I was three years old. My old man had taken the train to Milwaukee to see it, and had come back flushed with victory and victory’s rewards.

Now it was time for the rematch, and Richie Mitchell had come to New York confident of reversing the only loss on his record. The day of the fight I boasted to my classmates, “I’m g-g-going to M-M-Madison Square Garden tonight t-to s-see the G-G-Great B-B-Benny Leonard!” Even if they had been able to understand me, I don’t think the other kids would have known what I was talking about. When it came to boxing they were illiterates. They simply had no idea that the Rematch between the Great Benny Leonard and the Number One Contender Richie Mitchell was more of an earth-shaker than the election of a new president, the arrival of Prohibition, or the publication of
This Side of Paradise.

When the moment arrived, Mother helped me dress for my mid-January adventure. I was wearing long white stockings and a blue velvet suit with fur-lined coat and hat. All that was lacking was one of my father’s big Cuban cigars. But it didn’t matter. I would smoke it vicariously as I sat beside him in the front ringside seats near our idol’s corner that B.P. always got from the Great Benny Leonard.

“Well, Buddy,” my father said as we got out of the cab near the crowded entrance to the Garden, “I kept my promise. Your mother thought you were still too young. I wanted you to see the Great Benny Leonard in his prime. It’s something you’ll remember the rest of your life.”

There were thousands and thousands of big people, a lot of them wearing derbies, a lot of them puffing on big cigars, a lot of them red-faced from winter wind and the forbidden but ever plentiful alcohol, bellying and elbowing their way toward the entrance to the Garden.

As we reached the turnstile, my father urged me ahead of him and held out a pair of tickets. A giant of a guard in uniform glanced at him, then looked in vain for the holder of the other ticket. When he saw where Father was pointing, his voice came down to me in a terrible pronouncement: “What are ya, nuts or somethin’? You can’t take that little kid in here; ya gotta be sixteen years old!”

My father argued. He bargained and bribed. But in a city known for its Jimmy Walker-like corruption, we had come upon that rare bird, an honest guardian of the law.

By this time Father was telling me to For Christ sake, stop crying! He was frantic. The preliminaries had already started, and in those days before television and radio, there were no extra bouts standing by to hold the audience until the preannounced time for the star bout. If there were early knockouts in the prelims, B.P. ran the risk of missing The Great Benny. And we were all the way down on East 23rd Street, miles from home on Riverside Drive near 100th Street. If traffic was heavy he might miss the event of a lifetime. But there was nothing for it but to hail a cab, tell the cabbie to speed across town and up the West Side, wait for him to dispose of his sobbing and expendable baggage, and race back to the Garden. Delivered to my mother, awash with tears, I stammered out my tale of injustice. I would have to wait ten long years to be admitted to the Garden, and by that time our champion would be retired from the ring. Now I would never see him, I cried, never in my whole life!

Mother tried everything in her repertoire of child psychology to console me. But it was too late. For me life simply had come to an end at that turnstile into Madison Square Garden.

To ease the tragedy, I was allowed to wait up until Father came home. And this time, sensitive to the crisis, he did not linger with his cronies over highballs at a friendly speakeasy. He came directly from the Garden, his fine white skin flushed with the excitement of what had happened.

B.P. had given the taxi driver an extra five-spot to disregard the speed limits and get him back to the Garden on a magic carpet. As he rushed through the turnstile and looked for the aisle to his seat, he heard a roar from the crowd that was like the howl of a jungle full of wild beasts.
Everybody was standing up and screaming, blocking his view. A frantic glance at the second clock told him it was the middle of round three. When he got closer to his seat and was able to see the ring, the spectacle that presented itself was the Unthinkable. There on the canvas was The Great Benny Leonard. And not only was his hair mussed, his eyes were dimmed as he tried to shake his head back to consciousness. The count went on, “Six … seven … eight …” Thousands of young Jews like my father were shouting “Get up! Get up, Benny! Get up!” And another multitude of Irish and anti-Semitic rooters for Mitchell, “You got ’im, Richie! You got that little mockie sonuvabitch!” But just before the count of 10 The Great Benny Leonard managed to stagger to his feet.

No, I wasn’t there, but my father had caught the lightning in a bottle and had brought it home for me. I sat there watching the fight as clearly as if home television had been installed thirty years ahead of time. Our Benny was on his feet but the quick brain that usually directed the series of rapid jabs and classic right crosses was full of cobwebs. Billy Mitchell was leaning through the ropes and cupping his old fighter’s hands to urge his son to “move in, move in Richie, finish ’im!” And Richie was trying, oh how he was trying, only a split second from being Lightweight Champion of the World, one more left hook, one more punishing right hand. … But Benny covered up, rolled with punches, slipped a haymaker by an instinctive fraction of an inch, and managed to survive until the bell brought Leonard’s handlers into the ring with smelling salts, ice, and the other traditional restoratives.

In the next round Richie Mitchell sprang from his corner full of fight, running across the ring to keep the pressure on Leonard and land his bruising combinations while he still held the upper hand. Everybody in the Garden was on his feet.

Everybody was screaming. There had never been such a fight in all of Father’s ringside nights, all the way back to 1912 when he had first started going to the fights with Adolph Zukor and the Famous Players crowd. Benny was retreating, boxing cautiously, gradually beginning to focus on Mitchell’s combative eyes. “On his bicycle,” they called it, dodging and running and slipping off the ropes, using all the defensive tactics he had learned in his street fights on the Lower East Side and in those 150 battles inside the ropes. And as he retreated he was talking to Mitchell (shades of Ali half a century later!), “Is that the best you can do? I thought you hit harder than that? Look, I’ll put my hands down, what do you wanna bet you can’t hit me? Come on, if you think you’ve got me hurt, why don’t you fight? You look awful slow to me, Richie, looks like you’re getting tired. …”

That round had been more of a debate than a boxing match, with Benny winning the verbal battle and Richie swinging wildly and futilely as he tried to chop Benny down. At the end of the round the ferocious Richie Mitchell did look tired and a little discouraged. The drumfire of backtalk from Leonard had disconcerted him. He had let Benny get his goat, exactly what the champion wanted. Some remorseless clock in his head was telling him that he was blowing the chance of a lifetime. In the next round Benny was The Great Benny again. His head clearing, his body weathering the storm, he was ready to take charge. Back on his toes, he was beginning to move around the slower Mitchell, keeping him off balance with jabs and rocking his head back with that straight right hand. Near the end of the round Mitchell went to his knees.

How many times Father refought Round 6 for me over the years. Benny Leonard’s hair was combed straight back again. There was no more talking to distract the near-victorious opponent. Benny was all business. Lefts and rights found Mitchell’s now unprotected face. Both eyes were cut and blood dripped from his nose. Caught in a buzzsaw of fast hard punches that seemed to tear his face apart, the brave Irish
brawler went down. But he took his count and rose again to face more of the same. Now it was not boxing but slaughterhouse seven and the more humane among the crowd, including the Benny Leonard fans who had bet a bundle it would be over in eight, were imploring the referee to “Stop it! Stop it!” For Mitchell was down again, and he seemed to be looking directly into his own corner, but there was so much blood running down into his eyes that he was unseeing.

“I was watching his father, Billy Mitchell,” my father told me. “I could see the whole thing being fought out in Billy Mitchell’s face. He was holding a bloody towel, the towel with which he had just wiped the face of his son. His own blood was on that towel. His son Richie got up again. God almighty he was game. He would look at Benny as if to say, “You’re going to have to kill me to stop me.’ And Benny, he told us this a lot of times, he loved to win but he doesn’t like to punish them once he knows he has them licked. He was hoping the referee would stop the fight. But the ref waved him on. Maybe he was betting on Mitchell. Maybe he figured anyone with the punch of a Richie Mitchell deserved that one extra round to see if he could land a lucky or a desperate punch. Now it seemed as if the entire Garden was chanting together ‘Stop it! Stop it! For God’s sake, STOP IT!’ And then as the slaughter went on, as The Great Benny Leonard went on ripping Richie Mitchell’s face to bloody shreds, finally Billy Mitchell, that tough Mick, couldn’t stand it any longer. He raised the bloody towel and tossed it over the top rope into the ring. And then, while Richie’s kid brother Pinkey and another handler climbed into the ring to revive their battered contender, Pop Mitchell lowered his head into his arms on the apron of the ring and cried like a baby.”

In the early twenties, Benny Leonard was enjoying the sweet fruits of summer, his harvest season of success. On the New Year’s Eve of bountiful 1925 he had saved enough money to announce his retirement as undefeated lightweight champion of the world. Still only twenty-nine, he could look forward to a life of ease as a coupon clipper who could keep one eye on
his investments and the other on his physical fitness as he played golf and handball and traveled south for the winter. He was enjoying the autumn of his life, but winter set in prematurely with the Crash of 1929. Leonard saw his ring savings shrink, dwindle, and finally disappear.

In 1931, at the age of thirty-five, he announced his comeback to the ring. After beating a string of nobodies he was matched with Jimmy McLarnin. Back home in Los Angeles I had watched “Baby Face” Jimmy fight his way to the top of his profession, from bantamweight to welter, against top fighters like Fidel LaBarba, Bud Taylor, and Joey Sangor. He seemed to specialize in destroying illustrious Jewish lightweights: Jackie Fields, Sid Terris, Al Singer, Ruby Goldstein. …

From Dartmouth College, where I was then a freshman, I phoned my father in Hollywood for an extra fifty dollars to go to New York to see The Great Benny Leonard, at last, against our hometown sensation, the still baby-faced twenty-four-year-old hailed by Western sportswriters as a coming champion. With excitement building in me as on the day of the Leonard-Mitchell debacle, I promised to phone B.P. at the studio after the fight.

But when I got back to my hotel from that chill October fight night I didn’t have the heart to place the call. I felt like getting in my Chevy and driving the long winding miles back to New Hampshire. The Great Benny Leonard, when I finally caught up with him ten years too late, was a rather paunchy over-the-hill lightweight with thinning hair, a tentative jab, and uncertain footwork, no match for the fast, young and lethal Jimmy McLarnin who toyed with him before knocking him out in six of the saddest rounds I ever saw.

Our Great Benny Leonard never should have been in there with a gifted young champion like Jimmy McLarnin. In the fall of ’32 old Benny was the Ghost of Chanukah Past. Fifteen years later, after serving as a lieutenant commander supervising boxing in the navy, Benny Leonard would be in the ring refereeing a fight in the wonderfully decrepit St. Nicholas Arena when he received a knockout blow more deadly than anything Richie Mitchell or Jimmy McLarnin could inflict. Felled by a heart attack, he died there in the ring he had dominated throughout my childhood. To this day I can still hear that guardian of the turnstiles who stopped me from seeing The Great Benny Leonard in his glory years.