The Killings of Stanley Ketchel (18 page)

She next played “A Bird in a Gilded Cage” and now they did not so much dance as simply hold each other close and sway in place.
Before the record was finished, they had ceased swaying and held their kiss until the music stopped.

She stepped back and stared at him, her eyes reflecting the firelight. Then unribboned her hair and let it spill in a lustrous cascade over her shoulders.

“Yes,” she said.

His fantasies about her proved meager against the reality of the following hour. Her nakedness in the candlelight, the heat and scent of her skin, her tongue at his own, at his chest, at his loins. His face in the lushness of her hair, mouth at her nipples, in the piquant nest of her sex. Now they were face to face, now he was behind her, above, below. Their panting carried through the apartment, their moans, the slappings of their flesh. He felt armed with a club, was astonished at the magnitude of his appetite, his unflagging crave. After a time she led him from the bed to an armless chair and sat him down and mounted him in reverse. The chair faced a cheval mirror and they watched themselves in their rooted writhing. His face behind hers, his hands at her breasts.

“The front row seat,” she said. “Stanny taught it to me.”

Not until he again spasmed and was done did he realize that she was no longer gasping with pleasure but convulsing with sobs. He thought to ask what was wrong, but then sensed what it was. And knew there was no help for it.

He carried her to the bed and pulled the covers over her, then quickly got dressed. Her face was in a pillow and she was still weeping as he went out the door.

The next day Mizner asked if he’d had a good time, and he said yeah, pretty good.

And neither mentioned her name to the other again.

T
he gym was only a few blocks from the Bartholdi Hotel, where Ketchel and Pete the Goat, who had returned from California, were living. But on days of bad hangover or mid-morning awakenings next to a naked girl, he sometimes didn’t train until late afternoon, if he trained that day at all.

He didn’t show up in the gym for three days after his tryst with Evelyn, and Pete the Goat was unhappy.

“Boozing. Staying out till the cows come home. Humping yourself juiceless. You’re sure enough keeping sharp, ain’t you, champ?”

“I already got a mother, Goat, so lay off.”

“You’re tough as they come, Stevie, but nobody’s so tough he can fight good without training.”

“Cut it out, man. Soon as we get a fight lined up I’ll get ready.
What the hell, I’ve fought with hangovers and still whipped the mugs.”

“I wouldn’t want to fight Frank Klaus with a hangover unless he was the one who had it. He ain’t no mug.”

“Frank Klaus?”

“Next week.”

“When this happen?”

“This morning. Mizner phoned. Good money, he says.”

It was a six-rounder at the Duquesne Gardens in Pittsburgh, Frank Klaus’s hometown. Klaus was an excellent boxer and solid puncher who in two more years would win a share of the middleweight title, and then a year after that win the rest of it from Billy Papke in Paris. He was no mug.

K
ETCHEL’S TIMING WAS
erratic, his footwork clumsy, his punches off target. The crowd booed him. Klaus was cautious through the first two rounds, then grew emboldened by Ketchel’s obvious unreadiness and went on the attack. He dominated the next two rounds, scoring repeatedly with head-snapping jabs and crosses, several times jolting Ketchel with speedy combinations. Not until the last minute of round five did Ketchel at last recover his proper rhythm and find Klaus’s range. He pounded him into the ropes with body punches, rocked him with hooks to the head. In the final round he landed an overhand that wobbled Klaus and brought the crowd to its feet. But Klaus recovered, and at the final gong they were swapping hard punches in mid-ring. Under Pennsylvania’s “no decision” rule, the bout was recorded as “no contest,” and most of the newspaper verdicts called it an even match, but a few gave the decision to Klaus.

The next day the Goat handed Ketchel a newspaper he’d folded to a report of the fight. “You
see
this?” he said.

Ketchel scanned it, saw that it called the verdict for Klaus, and flung the paper away in a flutter. “What the hell’s a hack know?”

“He knows what he saw,” Pete said.

But Ketchel persisted in his cavalier view toward training. He took Jewel Bovine for a weekend at the same Atlantic City hotel they’d patronized before. He caroused into the late nights in Mizner’s company. Mizner told reporters that Ketchel was so naturally tough he didn’t have to train.

The Goat was beside himself with exasperation.

“Goddamnit, Stevie, Mizner knows how to make a good deal for a match but he don’t know shit about boxing or he wouldn’t be saloon-hopping with you, he’d be telling you to get in shape.”

“What the hell, Pete,” Ketchel said, trying to cajole him into a better mood. “Nothing wrong with an evening stein or two. Beer ain’t just for breakfast, you know.”

“Real damn funny,” the Goat said.

F
OLLOWING THE
K
LAUS
bout, Mizner signed Ketchel for a big-money six-rounder in Philadelphia against Sam Langford, the “Boston Tar Baby,” a short but very powerful Negro widely regarded then and now as among the best boxers of the day. The news put the Goat on edge. One of Langford’s losses, he informed Ketchel, had been to none other than Jack Johnson four years earlier.

“Johnson’s half a foot taller and couldn’t put him away, not in fifteen rounds,” the Goat said. “They say Johnson was lucky to get the decision. Do you understand what I’m telling you?”

“Yeah, Johnson ain’t nearly as tough as they say,” Ketchel said, and laughed. The Goat gave him the two-finger horns.

Once again he was outscored in the early rounds and booed for
his slothful performance. Langford was shorter than Ketchel but outweighed him by fifteen pounds, was solid muscle and had almost-freakishly long arms. “Jesus, it’s like fighting an ape that knows how to jab,” Ketchel said between rounds. But he once again caught fire in the latter part of the bout and had Langford on the defensive at the end. It was another “no decision” match, but every reporter on hand gave the bout to Ketchel.

Yet even as the hacks congratulated him in the dressing room, he knew their verdict was influenced less by the way he’d fought than by the color of Langford’s skin. He saw the Goat staring at him from across the room, then turn away and leave.

He stayed under the shower spray for a long while, letting the water beat on his head. He hadn’t fought well and he knew it. And knew the reason was his inattention to training. His footwork, reflexes, hand speed, everything, had been less than it should’ve been.

You’re a fine one, all right, he thought. You are really a fine one. It’s the only thing that really means anything and you damn well know it. The only thing that’s kept your sorry ass off a goddamn farm, out of a goddamn mine. It’s the only thing that’s made you
somebody.
The only thing that ever could. You’re treating it like some cooze you think won’t quit you no matter how much you play around on her. Well, it ain’t like that, pal, and you know that too. Think you’re tough, don’t you? Tell you what, tough guy…let’s see you hang on to it. Let’s see you do
that.
We’ll see how tough you are.

He knew the Goat’s favorite bar was Kelly’s by the river, and he found him there, slumped on a stool and moping over a beer.

The Goat spotted him in the cracked backbar mirror and watched him come up beside him at the counter and order a beer.

“Somebody musta give you the wrong directions, pal,” the Goat said. “There ain’t no models in this joint. There ain’t even no hatcheck girls.”

Ketchel raised his mug to the Goat in a silent toast.

“What’re we drinking to?” the Goat said. “Your lucky stars you didn’t get your stupid Polack brains beat out tonight like you deserved?”

“To the billygoats of the world.”

“One of these days,” the Goat said, “you’re gonna know Wilson Mizner is not the best thing ever happened to you. He ain’t even your friend. He’s just a guy getting fat cuts off you while the getting’s good, which, you’ll pardon me for saying, won’t be much longer, not the way you’re going.”

“Well, oldtimer, you could be right,” Ketchel said. “But as much as I would like to stay here all evening and discuss my sad future with you, as soon as I finish this beer, this
one
small mug of beer, I’ve got to go hit the hay. Some of us are in training, in case you didn’t know.”

The Goat flicked his hand dismissively. “Peddle that bullshit somewhere else. I heard enough of it.”

“No bullshit. You’re right, I been stupid. No more.”

The Goat eyed him narrowly. “On the square? Cause if you ain’t on the square, Stevie, I’d just as soon—”

“On the square, Pete.”

Pete stared at him, reading his face, then smiled widely. “Well hell, like the fella said, I’ll drink to that.”

L
ESS THAN THREE
weeks after the Langford match and in better shape than he’d been in months, he fought Dan Flynn in Boston. In the third round he had Flynn trapped in a corner and
was pounding him with hooks to the head when Flynn’s arms suddenly dropped to his sides. Ketchel stopped punching and stepped back but Flynn didn’t fall. The man was out on his feet, his eyes closed, but his knees had somehow locked so that he remained rigidly upright and propped against the ring post. Ketchel regarded him a moment, then gave him a light shove on the shoulder and Flynn rolled off the post and fell like a chopped tree. The cheers were almost drowned out by the laughter.

T
EN DAYS LATER
in New York he walloped the highly regarded Willie Lewis all over the ring through the first round and knocked him out so soundly at the start of the second that Lewis was out cold for more than five minutes. When he came to, he was sitting on his stool and had no recollection of the fight. Ketchel had already left the ring. “When we gonna get started?” Lewis said. “Where’s that Ketchel sonofabitch? He chicken out? Christ almighty, I’m getting a headache from all this goddamn waiting.”

T
HIRTEEN DAYS LATER
he fought Jim Smith in Manhattan’s National Sporting Club. Smith was a crafty fighter with a strong punch, but Ketchel had his measure early and deliberately prolonged the inevitable in order to exercise some new defensive footwork that adapted a few of his dance steps and made him much harder to hit. The footwork was central to a tactic he had conceived to force open Johnson’s defenses in their next match. Against Smith the new moves were working well. Smith had landed none of his hardest punches and with each miss was dropping his guard. But it was not until the fifth that Ketchel employed the tactic he was planning for Johnson. Midway through the round, he lowered his fists slightly to expose his chin, as if he were
tiring but unaware of it. Seeing such an inviting target, Smith naturally went for it, but his punch hit only air and left him wide open for Ketchel’s counter with the old one-two-three-four-five-six. Smith was out before he hit the floor.

Ketchel was laughing as he left the ring, shaking a fist over his head in answer to the crowd’s booming chants of “Ketchel!…
Ketchel!…KETCHEL!”

O
n the Fourth of July, Jack Johnson and James Jeffries fought for the heavyweight championship of the world under a blazing sun in Reno, Nevada. Hawked as the “Fight of the Century,” never mind that the century was but ten years old, it was the most publicized title fight since the great John L. fought Gentleman Jim, both of which luminaries were present on this occasion, Sullivan at ringside, Corbett in Jeffries’ corner. The match was scheduled for forty-five rounds and drew a paid attendance of twenty thousand. The promoter of the fight and its referee was George “Tex” Rickard, a natural showman who would in the years ahead promote Jack Dempsey’s most memorable and lucrative bouts and make headlines of his own in New York when he was charged with the sexual assault of several underage girls. He’d at
various times been a Texas marshal, a Klondike prospector, a faro dealer, and the owner of a saloon. He’d promoted his first fight four years earlier, also in Nevada, and reaped such a handsome profit he knew he’d found his true calling at last. The original venue for the Johnson-Jeffries fight had been San Francisco, where Rickard anticipated an enormous gate, but the growing fear of racial violence that might attach to the event persuaded the governor to refuse permission for the match in California. So Rickard settled on Reno.

K
ETCHEL’S TRAIN ARRIVED
in the late morning on the day of the fight. The Goat had traveled with him from New York but he did not debark in Reno, preferring to go on to San Francisco to visit with his ladyfriend. Ketchel had just checked in at the desk of the Hotel Golden, the promotion center for the fight, when a handsome stocky man strode up and introduced himself as Jack London. He was thrilled to make Ketchel’s acquaintance, and Ketchel accepted his invitation to a glass of beer in the hotel bar.

London was reporting the fight for the
San Francisco Chronicle.
He was thirty-four years old and appeared in better health than he actually was. Ketchel knew of him, of course, and apologized for not having read any of his stories.

“Oh hell, that’s all right. But come to think of it, I’ve got something here that might snag your interest.” He took a small book out of his briefcase and inscribed the title page, then passed the book to Ketchel. “Here you are, champ. Hope you like it.”

It was a copy of
The Road.
The inscription read:

Ketchel thanked him. He said his mother was a great reader and was surely familiar with his work. “She’s going to be awful proud to know the company I’m keeping.”

London said the book was about his experiences as a young hobo. “I understand you rode the rails yourself.”

“All over the West. Freest days of my life.”

“Weren’t they, though! Let me have that book again.” He turned to the inscription and under his signature added
One Bo to another,
then slid the volume back across the table.

Ketchel read the addition and said, “I was Steelyard Steve. What handle you use?”

“I had lots of different ones, but my favorite was the Frisco Kid.” He produced a flask from his coat and laced his half-finished beer. He raised the flask toward Ketchel and said, “A little bite in those hops?” Ketchel caught the scent of rye and said “Sure,” and London poured a dollop in his glass.

London was an aficionado of the prize ring and spoke on the subject with an enthusiastic expertise. He said he’d learned to box when he was a boy and his love of the sport had never abated. He’d spent a good portion of the previous three years sailing in the Pacific with his wife, Charmian, and he’d kept his boxing skill sharp by sparring with her on deck, never throwing a punch at her, of course, only warding off her best efforts to hit him.

“The hell of it is, she developed a pretty swell left, and one day she caught me good with it and I went over the side. She had to bring the boat about to get me before the sharks did. After that I kept a lifeline around my waist when we sparred. She never knocked me into the salt again, but I suspect she was pulling her punches.”

Ketchel laughed. “Sounds like a tough cookie.”

“You said it.” He extracted a photograph from his wallet and passed it to Ketchel. It showed a pretty woman with bobbed dark hair posing in a bathing suit under a seaside palm. Ketchel thought she had fine legs.

“Lucky man, Jack.”

“Don’t I know it.”

London then related his eyewitness account of Johnson’s fight with Tommy Burns in Australia and said no match he’d ever seen had caused him greater heartache.

“I wish to God I’d seen your go with Johnson,” he said. “I read a dozen different reports of that fight, and every time I got to the part where you knocked him on his rump I thought, ‘He’s got him, by damn, he’s
got
him!’ Even though I already knew how the thing turned out. You damn near did it, champ. Jesus,
two more seconds…”

“Shy by an inch or miss by a mile,” Ketchel said, “it’s still off the mark.”

“Yes, of course. But see, reading all those reports of the fight was like…like reading a classical tragedy for the umpteenth time. I mean, you already know how the story’s going to end, but you can’t help getting caught up in it anyhow. You can’t help feeling that this time,
this
time, it might turn out differently. You know it won’t, but still, you can’t help hoping it will. You can’t help rooting for the doomed. No offense, champ.”

Ketchel flicked a dismissive hand.

“Then again, that’s what makes tragedy so grand, isn’t it?” London said. “It feeds the heart’s rebellion against the tyranny of the inevitable.”

“Yeah, well, if you say so, pal. All I can say is there’s more than one story, ain’t there? Next time there won’t be anything
damn near
about it.”

London’s eyes brightened. “Next time? You mean Johnson? You’re going to fight him again?”

“If I have my way. Only thing is, beating him the next time won’t be much to crow about after Jeff gets done with him today.”

“Oh yes, no question Jeff’ll do for him, but it’ll still be a hell of a feat if…
when
you cool him too. Hell, I was worried the coon wouldn’t go through with it with Jeffries. He’s got a yellow streak, you know. I’m sure we’ll see it today. I say Jeff cools him in less than five.”

“Oh, Jeff’ll cool him, all right,” Ketchel said. “But you can take it from me, bo, Johnson ain’t yellow.”

“Well…We’ll see soon enough, won’t we?”

T
HEY SHARED A
hack to the arena. On their way there, London took the flask from his coat and tucked it down the front of his pants. “Like to see them search me there,” he said. The fight had raised such fear of racial turmoil that police were posted at the entrances to ensure that neither alcohol nor firearms passed through the gates. Ketchel had read the newspaper report about this precaution and left his revolver in the care of the hotel barman. But he’d grown accustomed to carrying the weapon whenever he ventured among strangers and he missed its comforting weight under his coat.

They entered the clamorous arena and shouldered their way through the jammed aisles down to ringside. Looming over one side of the arena was a huge banner, its top line extolling
JAMES E. PEPPER WHISKY
and the lower proclaiming
BORN WITH THE REPUBLIC
. They agreed to meet back at the hotel bar after the fight and take supper together, then London went to his seat in the press row and Ketchel to his reserved seat among a variety of other boxing celebrities, all of whom would be presented in the ring before the start of the match. Among these heroes were Bob Fitzsimmons, Tom Sharkey, Tommy Burns, Tom McCarey, and none other than John L. Sullivan.

Sullivan was in the aisle, talking with ring announcer Billy Jordan when Ketchel walked up, and Jordan introduced them to each other. “Ah yes, Ketchel!” Sullivan boomed as he tucked away the flask he’d been nipping from. “The little Polack powerhouse himself! Say, but didn’t you land a good one on this big buck in your mill with him! Fucking shame it lacked the weight behind it or he wouldn’t be coming out of the woodpile today, now would he!”

Sullivan was nearly six feet tall and carried a belly the size of a sow. Ketchel guessed his weight at above three hundred pounds. Under his golf cap his hair was white, so too his mustaches. His teeth were the color of old dice and his eyes baggy and bloodshot, his bulbous nose netted with veins, his breath fumed with whiskey. Nevertheless, this was the Great John L., champion of champions, and Ketchel was entirely sincere when he put out his hand and said, “I’m honored to meet you, Mr. Sullivan.”

John L. pumped Ketchel’s hand with his enormous own. “Well of course you are, lad, of course you are!”

Shortly afterward, when the famous fighters were all up in the ring and Billy Jordan introduced each in turn, the greatest cheer
ing was for Sullivan, and John L. clasped his hands above his head and grinned like a merry walrus.

The loudest ovation of the day, however, came when James J. Jeffries entered the ring as a combatant for the first time in five years. He wore light purple trunks and his hair was closely cropped and he was a far sight from the corpulent figure he’d presented when Ketchel had last seen him. A year of intense training had burned more than seventy pounds of fat from his frame and re-sculpted the superb physique of his championship days. He weighed 227 and was the betting favorite at two to one. Johnson was already in his corner and said, “Howdy, Mr. Jeff.” At the morning weigh-in Jeffries had told reporters that Johnson had made him work like a dog for almost a year to get in shape for this fight and he intended to give him the licking of his life. Johnson said he hoped Mr. Jeff didn’t mean to lick him for real, as he didn’t like any tongue to touch him but a woman’s. Few of the reporters smiled, and much of what they scribbled in their notebooks could not have been printed in a public newspaper.

Johnson’s arrival at the ring had roused an expected deluge of odium and derision. He smiled his golden smile and bowed to the crowd like a ballroom dancer, the mocking gesture raising the volume of insults and curses. His announced weight was 218 pounds, a dozen more than he’d weighed against Ketchel, but he looked to Ketchel as hard and lean as ever. He wore his usual butternut trunks with a colorful rolled bandanna tied to a belt loop. Ketchel did not see George Little among the seconds in Johnson’s corner. He asked those sitting nearest him if they knew anything of his absence and was told that Johnson had fired Little, though none knew the reason.

And so the fight.

By the end of the third round it was evident to every man in the place that for all his impressive physical appearance the Boilermaker was not the man who’d retired unbeaten five years before. Though he yet had the muscle, a powerful punch called for more than sinew; it entailed a mysterious body mechanic he no longer possessed. Nor did his fists have the quickness of his championship years. He threw scores of punches in the early rounds but few of them struck where they were meant to and those that did seemed not to hurt Johnson at all. Some who saw the fight and many who did not would later insist that in his prime Jeffries would have destroyed Johnson, but Ketchel knew better. He was in awe of Johnson’s art, of the magical way he anticipated Jeffries’ every move, caught body blows on his arms rather than the ribs, deflected punches with his gloves, rolled his head from punches so expertly that Jeffries must’ve felt like he was hitting a hat dangling on a string. Even as the crowd cheered every Jeffries swing, Ketchel knew he was doing no damage, and knew that Jeffries knew it too. In contrast, Johnson’s punches consistently breached Jeffries’ defense to raise another welt or inflict another cut. By the end of the tenth, Jeffries’s aspect was a battered distortion, one eye almost closed and the other fast getting that way, his mouth torn. His ears were crushed plums. Back in his corner, Johnson said to ringsiders, “I sees Mr. Jeff’s plan now. He gonna get me all tired from hitting him and then he just gonna push me over and let Mr. Tex count me out.” The ringsiders roared with invective. Ketchel could see that Johnson was protracting Jeffries’ punishment for his own amusement as well as to torment every white soul in the place. He easily dodged Jeff’s desperate swings and landed ripping counterpunches that sent Jeffries stumbling rearward. Jeffries more and more took to clinching and holding on till Rickard separated
them. Johnson at one point reacted by holding Jeffries as if he were a dance partner and swayed like they were waltzing, prompting the crowd to scream for Jeff to kill him, kill him. With Jeffries clinching him repeatedly in the fourteenth round, Jack Johnson bawled, “Oh, Mr. Jeff, don’t
love
me so!” and rolled his eyes over Jeffries’ shoulder. The crowd’s rage was exceeded only by its swelling pity for Jeffries, who was enduring on sheer will. In the fifteenth Jeffries clinched again, but before referee Rickard could step in, Johnson wrenched free and landed a perfect hook to the jaw that dropped Jim Jeffries to the canvas for the first time in his life. But the man never lacked for courage, and he was back on his feet by the count of nine, swaying like a drunk. Bloody sweat jumped off his head from a Johnson overhand and down he went again, rolling to the edge of the ring. An agonized chorus of voices now pleading with him to stay down, his own cornermen beseeching him. Jeffries strained to rise as Rickard began the count. Johnson stood ready. It seemed Jeffries might make it. Rickard looked to Jeff’s corner even as he counted. And then a bloodstained white towel fluttered out over the ring and fell like failed wings.

S
LUMPED ON HIS
stool with an ice pack being held to his eye when Johnson came over to shake his hand and tell him he’d fought a square fight and no hard feelings, James Jeffries said: “I ought have got you.”