Speed Kings (22 page)

Eddie graduated with honors in the summer of 1921 and enrolled at Harvard Law School. He celebrated by taking a tour around Europe with his friends Sam Pryor, Mike O'Brien, and Mace Thompson. The other three could pay their way, but Eddie had to work his passage. He wangled a job as entertainments officer on board the ship. They cruised the fjords of Norway, climbed the Alps in Switzerland, and went to the bullfights in Spain. The place that made the biggest impression on him was Oxford, England. He decided to apply for a Rhodes scholarship so he could study there.

He had an extraordinary interview back in Denver, where he was grilled by a group of old Oxford men.

“What club would you use if you were in golf and 100 yards from the green?”

“Suppose at Oxford some of the students decided to debag you in the college quad, what would you do?”

“Will you drink tea should you go to Oxford?”

Eddie's answers were the right ones.

“That depends on the lie of the ball, but if it's good then take a mashie [wedge].”

“If a group of students tries to pull your trousers down, the obvious thing to do is try and debag as many of them as possible before they succeed in stripping yours off.”

And, yes, of course he would drink tea.

A few days later the
Denver Post
announced of the city's favorite son, Eddie Eagan: “Denver's athletic and scholastic ace and king of the amateur light heavyweight boxers of the world has been awarded Colorado's Rhodes scholarship.”

—

I
f Yale had seemed outlandish to Eddie, Oxford was altogether another world. He enrolled at New College, where he was welcomed by the warden William Spooner, an elderly albino who read Eddie's letters of recommendation with the aid of an oversize magnifying glass. Spooner, of course, was famous for his habit of muddling up his consonants when he spoke.

Eddie's rooms had no heating or plumbing. Everything about the place felt antiquated. He was woken each morning by his elderly, gap-toothed scout, who would bring him a cup of tea and sing him a music hall song. His law tutor had served in the war and was riddled with shrapnel. “At frequent intervals he would be laid up while bits of metal worked their way out of his body.” Eddie was never more a fish out of water than when he was invited to a party held by a group who studied at Christ Church and called themselves the “Oxford Wits.” Their ringleaders were Brian Howard and Harold Acton, who provided the inspiration for the character of Anthony Blanche in Evelyn Waugh's
Brideshead Revisited
. Waugh had been part of the esthetes' set himself, and lampooned them in his 1945 work. Acton, just like Blanche in the book, liked to stand on his balcony and recite T. S. Eliot's
The Waste Land
through a megaphone to people passing below.

Eddie wanted to get to know all “types and classes” of the British, so he had accepted the invitation to visit. As he entered, Acton rushed up to greet him with a flower in his hand.

“Oh, we're so glad you came!” Acton said. “Have a lily.”

Eddie, somewhat embarrassed, was struck dumb for a moment. “What shall I do with it?”

“Oh, nothing,” Acton replied. “Just look at it. Isn't it beautiful?”

Eddie, a little lost among the “artistic” crowd, as he euphemistically referred to them, fell into conversation with a poet, most likely Brian Howard. “He was dressed as I had seen pictures of Byron; a velvet jacket, an open-throated shirt, and he wore his hair long and brushed back.” Howard complimented him on his prowess as a boxer, and Eddie politely replied that his feats were “no more glorious than being the champion poet of Oxford,” and jokingly suggested that the two of them should consider switching hobbies. “You come
out for boxing, and I'll write poetry.” Eddie explained, “There's poetry in any good fight. And if I could write how I've felt about some victories they would be epics.” Howard, an earnest fellow, took him at his word. Eddie was mortified when he saw an article in a London newspaper the next day under the headline “Boxer Becomes Poet,” explaining how Eddie was going to “sing about the thrills of prizefighting in metric cadence and rhyme.” His main worry was that word would spread back to Denver, “where they would blame Oxford for ruining a good boxer.”

In the end, Eddie decided that he was more comfortable in the company of the three fellows from the Oxford boxing club who had come to see him shortly after he arrived. One was Douglas Douglas-Hamilton, the Marquis of Douglas and Clydesdale. Just as it had done at Yale, boxing opened up a new world to Eddie, one that would perhaps have remained unavailable to him if he hadn't been so skilled in the ring. He and the Marquis of Clydesdale—“Douglo,” as Eddie knew him—became sparring partners, and, eventually, firm friends. Eddie taught Douglo to box, and with some success: he won the Scottish amateur middleweight title. Douglo, in turn, took Eddie under his wing, bringing him to his estate in Scotland. Eddie learned that “beneath the veneer of social customs they were the same fine men I've met everywhere in the world.” A little later in his Oxford life, Eddie dined with the Prince of Wales and found him to be “a pleasant, smiling young man” and an enthusiastic fight fan.

The marquis and his two friends had come to ask Eddie to join the varsity team for the match against Cambridge. Eddie's reputation preceded him. He had given little thought to the sport since winning his Olympic title, fighting only twice, but he found himself unable to turn them down. “Boxing is in my blood,” he wrote. “And like an old cavalry horse smelling burned powder, the call of battle was proving irresistible.” He was soon back in the ring, though he struggled to find worthy opposition. Eddie once explained that the kindest thing to do to an inferior fighter was to put him quickly out of his misery. “A knockout,” he wrote, “is the most generous treatment” because “a man with fighting spirit will take punishment so long as he remains conscious.” The alternative, he pointed out, was to “bludgeon an opponent until he is goofy.” He was in an especially charitable mood during Oxford's match against Sandhurst military college, when he fought the team's coach and knocked him out in the first few seconds of the opening round. In the varsity match, Eddie made such short work of his opponents on the Cambridge team that the
Daily Mail
published a series of cartoons showing his adversaries pleading for mercy. “Unlike most
heavyweights Mr. Eagan likes it,” read the caption on one. “He is willing to box the whole of Cambridge or anyone who goes there.”

Eddie's ambitions didn't stop there. The
Mail
's boxing writer, Trevor Wignall, persuaded him to enter the British Amateur Championship in London. Wignall pointed out that while the competition was open to all comers, the title had “never been won by an American.” That was all the incentive Eddie needed. He fought his way through the preliminaries easily enough, in front of a “strange mob” of sailors and navvies who cried out, “Kill the Yank!” when he came into the ring. He was only really tested during a bout against a policeman named Arthur Clifton. Eddie won the crowd over by beating him, the police being even less popular with the crowd than visiting Americans. Clifton would get his revenge a couple of years later.

The finals were held at Alexandra Palace, where the crowd was of a different cut. “Around the ringside were monocled toffs, with high silk hats, broad white shirt fronts, leaning on canes. Flashily clothed gentlemen, bowlers atilt, were sandwiched between the men about town.” Eddie, ever the glutton for punishment, had again entered himself in both the light heavyweight and the heavyweight divisions. He fought twice in the morning, winning both times, and then popped into town to eat a steak at Simpson's on the Strand. Fortified, he returned to the Palace and fought twice more. His battle with Harry Mitchell for the light heavyweight title was, the
Times
said, “the fight of the day.” Eddie came out swinging. “He sailed into his man with a fury that left Mitchell with a cut eye by the end of the first round” and carried on in similar fashion in the second. But he made the mistake of easing up in the third, as he believed himself to be well ahead on points. His opponent “landed some stinging counters and followed them up with a right to the head.” Mitchell won on points, though both Eddie and the
Times
agreed that the decision was something of an injustice. In the heavyweight final he was matched against Henry Hulks, a good boxer “with a long, poking left.” Eddie pulled that old trick of his, the one that foxed Harry Franks in the Olympics, and switched his stance midway through the fight. He sold a feint with his right, and as Hulks moved his hands up to cover his face, socked him in the belly with a left hook that put him flat on the canvas.

Eddie was now the Olympic champion and the British champion, and had been, not so long ago, the US champion too. He could fairly claim to be the greatest amateur heavyweight in the world. Inevitably, he received more offers to turn professional, including an especially tempting one from the promoter Tex Rickard, the Don King of his day. Rickard had arranged the first million-
dollar fight, between Eddie's old pal Jack Dempsey and the handsome Frenchman Georges Carpentier. Rickard licked his lips at the prospect of selling a “Rhodes scholar pug” to the punters at Madison Square Garden. There had been a similar ballyhoo when Eddie had made a couple of casual remarks to a reporter from the
Tribune
about how he would be willing to fight Louis Mbarick Fall, known to all as “Battling Siki,” the Senegalese heavyweight who became champion of the world after he defeated Carpentier in 1922. “Will Rhodes Scholar Go after the Big Money?” asked the
Daily Mail
. Eddie actually helped train Mike McTigue, the Irish heavyweight who took Siki's title, but he never did go for the “Big Money.” Instead he went back to Oxford, and his books.

Douglo did talk Eddie into defending his Olympic title at the 1924 Games in Paris, and Eddie was duly drafted onto the team at late notice. It was a poor decision, and one he regretted. He was out of shape and soon struck down with food poisoning. He lost, on points, in the first round to Arthur Clifton, the very same man he had beaten so easily when he fought him at Hoxton Baths a couple of years earlier. Oddly, Eddie never once successfully defended any of the titles he'd won. He seemed to be too busy looking ahead, for new challenges to conquer, and to find little motivation in the idea of repeating feats he had already accomplished. The defeat in Paris helped Eddie make up his mind. He knew then, at the age of twenty-six, that he never would turn pro. He still dreamed of greater glories, though, of becoming a world champion. He was just going to take a different route to the title.

—

I
n the summer of 1925 Eddie was made an offer he felt was too good to refuse: the Chicago businessman John Pirie asked him to chaperone his two sons, John Jr. and Robert, on a world tour. Eddie decided that his bar exams could wait. He had one more fight before the party left England, an exhibition in Brighton against his old friend Jack Dempsey. When they were done punching, the two of them chewed the fat. Eddie told Jack about his plans. “Ah ha,” Dempsey said, “so you're going to box the compass? I envy you. Here I am, world champion, and I've never been around the world. Keep your eyes open for good scrappers. But don't send 'em to me. You lick 'em, Eddie.”

Of course Eddie planned to pack a few pairs of gloves. Boxing would be just one of the things he would teach the two young men on their travels, and besides, he had an idea he might do a little fighting himself along the way. After all, he wrote, “a man can't live without meat, and a fighter can't live without scraps.”

Which is how Eddie ended up in a jail in Naples. His hot head had gotten the better of him again: he had clobbered an Italian policeman who wanted to question him about a jewelry theft in Rome. Once Eddie was out of that fix, with a little help from the US consul, he and his wards quit Italy and hotfooted it to Africa. Not that his luck got much better. He suffered severe food poisoning in Egypt and lost fifteen pounds while he was laid up in hospital. When he was better, he made his way to Nairobi, where he caught malaria. After that, Eddie headed into Tanganyika, then northern Rhodesia, to do some big-game hunting. He bagged a lion or two and a black sable antelope, whose head was hung up in the grillroom of the Yale Club in New York. But he made a mess of his elephant hunt and ended up being chased across the plains by a stampeding herd, angered by the poorly aimed potshots he had taken at their bull. He escaped only when, in the rush, he tumbled head over heels into a river and the elephants lost his scent.

From Africa it was on to India, where Eddie met up with the Marquis of Clydesdale. The two of them put on a series of boxing exhibitions across the continent, the first as part of a fund-raising evening organized by the governor of Bombay. Eddie fought, and thrashed, the light heavyweight champion from the Indian army. The audience made more of an impression on him than his opponent did. “I had seen many strange fight fan audiences,” Eddie remembered, “but I doubt that ever again I will look out upon such a range of humanity in caste, fortune and races assembled under one roof. The ringside glittered with uniforms of red and gold, the rank of the British Army. Ladies in décolleté were sandwiched between the men. Here and there an opulent, turbaned maharaja sat, bejeweled and immaculate in evening dress. In the background were the olive drab uniforms of Tommies and their native brothers-in-arms. Packed against the walls were Parsees, Hindus, and Muslims in native dress, ranging from loin cloths to tattered rags.” Eddie sent word ahead that he was ready to take on all comers in each city he traveled to. He won fights against the local army champions in Colombo and Bangalore. In Calcutta he beat Milton Kubes, heavyweight champion of India, over four rounds. After that, Eddie struggled to find anyone bold enough to take up his challenge, so he fought a series of exhibitions with Douglo, in Delhi, Kabul, and Jaipur. The Maharaja of Udaipur was so impressed with their display that he offered Eddie a job as a bodyguard.