Sparring With Hemingway: And Other Legends of the Fight Game (15 page)

[October 1955]

I
N A PERIOD WHEN THE
art of boxing was sliding into its decadence, Sugar Ray Robinson boxed like a throwback to the brilliant 1910s and ’20s. In those days when you described a man as a great boxer, you didn’t mean that he was merely an elusive footwork artist and rapid but delicate jabber like our Zulueta or Johnny Gonsalves. When you boxed well, you knew not only how to avoid punishment but how to deal it out strategically.

That was the way of Sugar Ray. I first saw him nearly fifteen years ago when he was only a year and a dozen fights out of the amateurs. But he was one of those naturals, like Joe DiMaggio and Ernest Hemingway. He had speed and grace and cleverness and power and endurance and passion. In his second year as a pro he had beaten Sammy Angott, Marty Servo, and Fritzie Zivic. His twenty-seventh fight, nearly fourteen years ago, was a return match with Zivic, and he let the fight game know he was ready for the welterweight title by knocking out the ex-champion.

Sugar Ray was a picture fighter in those early ’40s. He had the long, slender, rippling-muscled legs of a dancer. If you wanted to box, he outboxed you, and if you wanted to fight, he outfought you. There was not a welterweight in the world who
could touch him then; perhaps there never was. They wouldn’t let him fight for the title because, held officially by a vincible champion called Red Cochrane, it was the personal property of the boys in the back room. To get work, Ray moved in on the middleweights. He beat Jake LaMotta in October 1942. Ray had to fight four more years and win thirty-eight more bouts before they finally let him try for the welterweight title. Red Cochrane had ducked him and retired. His successor as “champion,” Marty Servo, had ducked him and retired. Now Tommy Bell, a colored welterweight trial horse, met Sugar in an “elimination” bout for the title. Ray was knocked dizzy in the second round. He looked all in at the end of four. It took him a few more rounds to pull himself together again. By the eleventh he was the Sugar Ray the Garden regulars had learned never to bet against. After five and a half years of dreary run-arounds, the welterweights had a champion who won his fights in the ring. It was a refreshing change.

There was that winter night in Chicago when Ray challenged LaMotta for the middleweight title. The experts had faulted Robinson as one great welterweight who was too frail, too slight, too short on ruggedness, ever to stay up there with the best of the middleweights. But that night in Chicago against the vicious bull of the Bronx he fought beautifully, fiercely, until the thirteenth round, when he hit Jake with enough combinations to drop a dozen middleweights. Jake didn’t drop; he just stood there, a bloody, stubborn heap of flesh waiting for more.

Sugar Ray toured Europe, a golden boy with black skin. He was the darling of Paris. They mobbed his fuchsia Cadillac. It was a wonderful spring and summer in Zurich, Antwerp, Liège, Turin—until Randy Turpin, awkward, hard-hitting, a lesser playboy, took his title way in London.

I saw Ray, with a bloody eye, take the title back from Turpin with a passionate outburst in the tenth round in the New York return match. This was a rich, slipping, aging Ray Robinson. Good enough, though, to take the measure of the fading
Graziano and an up-and-coming Bobo Olson. Good enough to look like a shoo-in to turn the trick no middleweight champion has ever been able to do: win the light-heavyweight crown. After twelve rounds in Yankee Stadium he was so far in front of Joey Maxim that he couldn’t lose unless he were knocked out. But it was 130 degrees under the lights on an airless summer night, and at the end of the thirteenth, with punchless Joey as an innocent bystander, Ray collapsed from the heat.

Retirement. Honor. Money. I’ll know when I’m through, Robinson had boasted. But the big pay nights and the fickle idolaters sing a siren song.

Joe Rindone, who fights as if he were born to suffer, was chosen as victim No. 1 on Ray’s retread hit parade. Joe obliged by getting himself knocked out in the sixth round. The durable, forward-moving, uninspired but unintimidated Tiger Jones was nominated as foil No. 2, but this sturdy second-rate Tiger forgot to read the script. He plain beat the starch out of the disenchanted Sugar Ray. Finally they put Ray in with the leading middleweight contender, the slippery and overcautious Castellani. Ray won on spirit and some two-handed flurries, but his legs were dragging at the end of ten.

And now the stage is set for Act III in the drama of Sugar Ray. In the same ring where he won his title gloriously, he aspires once more to rule the middleweights. It is a fight no fan should miss, if only because it belongs to the history of the ring, to the tragedy of a game that devours even the most gifted and the most canny of its children.

Maybe Robinson, off his timing and slower on his marvelous, dancing legs, can paste together his experience and passion and take the twenty-seven-year-old Bobo Olson out early. But the gamblers, who always went with this phenomenal winner (137 pro battles), are laying 3 to 1 the Sugar has melted away.

The vigorish boys were wrong. Not only did the original Sugar Ray knock out Bobo, first in two, and then in four, he would go on to regain his title, first from Gene Fullmer and
then from Carmen Basilio, at age thirty-eight, when nearly all boxers are (or should be) in their rocking chairs.

Seven years later he was still at it, fighting no less than fifteen times in nine months, a forty-five-year-old losing to second-raters now, finally calling it a night after 202 fights, with only 18 L’s, and all but two of those in his mid-’30s to ’40s when he should have been home counting the money he blew in fuchsia Cadillacs, an entourage that would fill three limos at least, a life style à la Sinatra—only singers can go more rounds than the incomparable Robinson. Sic transit Sugar Ray, our twentieth-century nonpareil.

In Boston last week, however, age once more gave the back of its hand to upstart youth. It was like sitting through the same movie twice as Carmen Basilio and Tony DeMarco met for their title rematch. Carmen took a beating in the early rounds, Tony ran out of gas about the ninth, Carmen clobbered Tony into insensate submission in the twelfth. It was the same script as in Syracuse last June, when Basilio took DeMarco’s spang-new welterweight title from him. It was a good movie, though, nicely cast if you like tough types, with plenty of action, suspense, and excitement. Running time was two seconds longer than the previous showing, but that may have been because the referee seemed a little slow in his counting.

The plot was actually better this time. The boys in the back room had shored it up with prefight talk that unless Carmen could knock out Tony the Boston officials would villainously vote their hometown hero back into the championship. As it turned out, Tony
was
leading on all the official cards (but justifiably so) when Carmen made them suitable only for framing with a succession of hard right smashes to Tony’s head. Tony went down for a count of 8, got up, and wobbled into the arms of the referee. The referee took slow and exceeding care in wiping off Tony’s gloves and then Carmen was on him again, with more rights, and Tony was down and the referee was stopping the fight for a TKO in 1:54 of the twelfth round.

Carmen added a last touch in the fadeout when he reported that he had injured his left hand in an early round. It will be ready, though, he added, when he meets ex-champion Johnny Saxton, probably in February. Saxton had better be ready too.

[December 1955]

J
OHNNY SAXTON MAY BE AN
orphan, but no one can say he lacks for cousins in Philadelphia. Anybody who can clown his way through fifteen listless rounds and still be rewarded with a world’s championship must have a covey of doting relatives in the Friendly City. I am still checking on the lineal connection between the new “champion” and his benefactors, Referee Pete Pantaleo and Judges Jim Mina and Nat Lopinson, all of whom gave the defending champion, Kid Gavilan, the treatment a GOP candidate expects in Mississippi. They voted the straight Saxton-Palermo ticket. The three officials, if not blood relatives of the hitless wonder, have at the very least a touching sentimental attachment for the Riverdale foundling who plays Cinderella to Manager Blinky Palermo’s unshaven Fairy Godmother.

Blinky’s champion “fights,” as they used to say, “out of Philadelphia.” He can’t move far enough out to satisfy the nearly eight thousand fans who suffered through the gruesome, gluesome twosome between him and fading Kid Gavilan in Convention Hall the other evening. Blinky Palermo, a numbers man who traffics in fighters (Ike Williams, Billy Fox, Clarence Henry, Dan Bucceroni, Coley Wallace, etc.), operates out of Philadelphia. One of boxing’s top-ranking ambassadors
of ill will, a field in which there is always stiff competition, Blinky is frequently identified as “The Philadelphia Sportsman.” It has become a sort of private joke, especially suitable to those papers who would rather not spell spade s-p-a-d-e. In 1951 a federal district court found Blinky guilty of contempt for refusing to answer questions before a rackets grand jury. Contempt is also the word for Blinky’s attitude toward boxing fans in foisting Saxton, the human grannyknot, on them as Kid Gavilan’s successor.

Johnny may never have known what it is to have a real brother, but he has certainly found the next best thing in Honest Pete Pantaleo, another Philadelphia sportsman, who handled the fight with such tender concern for Saxton’s welfare that it is difficult for me to understand why there should have been such bitter criticism of him in the press. Extending a helping hand to an orphan boy trying to make something of himself is certainly a praiseworthy gesture. Statues of Pantaleo may yet be found in orphanages throughout America. A fitting inscription, to be engraved at the base of the noble bronze head of Pantaleo, might read as follows:

“For service to one of our own, above and beyond the call of duty, in donating the welterweight championship of the world to Johnny Saxton. Disregarding his own safety and placing himself in the greatest jeopardy by inviting the wrath of 7,909 onlookers and millions of irate TViewers across the nation, Pantaleo nevertheless persevered and proved the courage of his convictions by awarding Saxton even those rounds in which he failed to throw a single punch. Hail Pantaleo, boxing’s Patron Saint of Orphans!”

The cost of this charitable project will surely be underwritten by Blinky himself. It is the least he owes Honest Pete. The debt can never be paid in full.

Not to be forgotten while we hand out these skunk-cabbage bouquets is the role of Commissioner Frank Wiener, who made quite a show of rushing to and fro, exhorting the “fighters” to cease their loving embraces and affectionate staring at each
other. Wiener had already distinguished himself by announcing before the weigh-in that if Gavilan came in over the official weight limit, Saxton could still win the title by winning the fight. If the Kid won, the commissioner went on to explain, the title would be declared vacant. You and I, who aren’t so courant with these things, may wonder why, if Gavilan was to be asked to turn in his title, it should be handed on a silver platter to Blinky’s boy, who ranked fifth in the division, below the logical contender, Carmen Basilio. The only explanation that comes readily to mind is that it was Be Kind to Saxton (and Palermo) Week, and Commissioner Wiener was getting things started early.

Not since the days when Schmeling was winning his heavyweight title while reclining on his back after an alleged low blow from Jack Sharkey, or when Carnera was receiving his crown from the benevolent Sharkey, not since those sleazy days when talking pictures and smelly fights were in flower—well, I guess what I am trying to say is that Saxton can now share with Carnera the booby prize for being the most undeserving and unwelcome champion in modern ring history.

The bloodless and—except for Gavilan’s earnest final round—nearly hitless mazurka was actually a fitting climax to a prolonged shell game that really began over a year ago when Carmen Basilio knocked Gavilan down and came within a lash of depriving him of the title that had made him the assistant Presidente de Cuba. The Kid rallied to win, but the smart boys looked at each other and decided that another good fighter was showing signs of wear and tear, no disgrace after more than a decade of active campaigning against Ike Williams, Ray Robinson, Billy Graham, Johnny Bratton, Tony Janiro, Tommy Bell, Paddy Young—the best of the welterweights and middleweights throughout the forties and early fifties. When your champion begins to have trouble making the weight and his best is a year or two behind him, you look for the fattest money match over the weight. So the Kid made a pass at Bobo Olson’s middleweight title, which not only produced a pleasant pay
night for Gavilan, Manager Angel Lopez & Co., but postponed the agony of paring down to 147 from an aging natural weight of 155. Then, when you can no longer escape the ordeal, you naturally look for the most money combined with the easiest opponent who can pass muster as an approved contender.

Bypassing Carmen Basilio, who had been waiting nearly a year for the rematch he had earned, Angel Lopez, who does the Gavilan business, made a private deal with Blinky Palermo whereby Blinky would guarantee Angel $40,000 if the Kid would put his title up for grabs, and with Saxton how else could you describe it? It seemed strange that there should be no provision for a rematch, a customary protection for champions.

I put this down on the raised-eyebrow page of my little black suspicion book. Was it an omen? Was Gavilan so confident of winning that he disdained the usual return-match clause? Or was he getting ready to abandon the welterweight class? The Pennsylvania Commission explained that it did not permit a return-match guarantee in a title fight. But after the what-shall-we-call-it, when Gavilan flew into a dressing-room rage and cried robbery, Lopez insisted that there had been a return-match guarantee after all. A secret agreement between him and Blinky. Seems as if there were as many secret agreements surrounding this fight as there were around the Treaty of Versailles. But Commissioner Christenberry cracked his whip for Basilio, somewhat belatedly, and said Saxton would have to meet the free-swinging Syracuse No. 1 boy within ninety days if he wanted to be recognized as champion in New York.