The Telephone Booth Indian

by A. J. Liebling

  I gathered that because of all the marriages and the absence of a couple of fighters who were on expeditions to the provinces, there are not as many boys as usual stopping at Mrs. Braune's. Goldman mentioned, besides Spider and Dell, a clever welterweight named Al Nettlow, Marty Serve, a coming lightweight, and Tony, the twentyyearold heavyweight who hasn't fought yet. Tony came in while we were talking, and, after Goldman had introduced him to me as “possibly a future heavyweight champion if he's got the stuff in him,” just sat there listening to us. He was bashful, I guessed, because he had not had a fight and so had nothing to talk about. “He is pretty big for a baby, only six feet five inches,” Mrs. Braune said, “but he don't make no trouble at all. I was going to get him a special long bed, but he says no, he would just as soon sleep slanting.” Some fighters are difficult about beds, Mrs. Braune said, and keep asking for new ones until they have tried every bed in the house. They sleep reasonably well in any of them, apparently, but there seem to be gradations in the profundity of a fighter's unconsciousness, caused by differences in bed springs and not explainable to other persons. Mrs. Braune's hands, while she talked to Goldman and me, were busy with a darning egg and a pair of socks undoubtedly belonging to a prize fighter.

  There is a Mr. Braune, but, like most roominghouse husbands, he stays in the background. Until about twenty years ago, he and Mrs. Braune ran a stationery store. Then, she told me, she leased the Fiftysecond Street rooming house which disappeared into Jack and Charlie's. The new business was somewhat in the family tradition, she felt, because one of her maternal uncles in Switzerland had kept a big hotel near Lake Geneva. “I would like to see again the Genfersee,” she said parenthetically. “The Lake of Geneva, you know. But conditions must be pretty hard over there now. I got confidential postcards from the old country that every mountain is full of cannons. Still, what can they do now they got Hitler all around them?” She went on to say that the fighters are always offering her tickets to bouts but she never goes. She's afraid she couldn't stand the sight of blood. She does listen to fights on the radio, though, whenever she has a chance. When Ambers was fighting Henry Armstrong, the great colored boxer, Mrs. Braune prayed between rounds that her lodger would grow stronger. “And he did get stronger in the last,” she said. “He won.”

  “Why don't you go upstairs and see Marty?” Goldman suggested. “I got to make some phone calls, but just say who you are, and he will be glad to see you. Marty is the baby of the house. He's only nineteen. He went up to Van Cortlandt Park Sunday and wanted to show the other boys how good he could play football. So he is laid up with a skinned nose and a sprained ankle.” I climbed to the third floor to see Marty. Over the bed in which the boy lay hung a picture of the late Pius XI and, under the picture, a crucifix. Marty wore a large silver religious medal around his neck. His small, impish face made him look younger than nineteen, but his biceps and forearms were big and brown. He was restless, lying in bed with nobody to talk to, and was glad to see me. He said he had just been looking through an old scrapbook of newspaper clippings about his amateur fights. “I had ninetythree of them,” he said. “I only got three or four dollars a fight. I was the highestpaid amateur in the Hudson Valley.” Marty said his real name was Mario Severino and that he came from Schenectady. (Weill, since he got Ambers, has picked up several fighters from upstate.) “I didn't know anything before I turned professional,” the boy said. “I thought I did, but I didn't. Amateur fighters aren't smart like my roommate, Al Nettlow. Al is a real cutie.” Nettlow, he explained, is seldom around the house until the weather gets very cold because he is a “fishing nut.” He leaves before dawn every morning he can get off training and takes the long subway ride out to Sheepshead Bay, where he boards one of the deepsea boats that take fishermen out all day for two dollars. When he gets back, he tries to make the other fighters eat the fish he has caught, but only Tony, the heavyweight, who almost always uses up his weekly meal ticket in five days, displays any enthusiasm. Nettlow is a very clever fighter and is now of nearchampionship class. I gathered from Goldman that if he wins a title, he will probably want to pose in his publicity pictures with a dead swordfish.

  Marty said that he had had thirtynine professional fights and had won them all. “Mr. Weill gets me guys that I figure to lick,” he said modestly. “He is a great manager. But he gave me hell for playing football. I don't like a sprained ankle. I got to fight once a week or I don't feel good.”

  I went downstairs and said goodby to Mrs. Braune and to Charlie Goldman, who by that time was clipping a newspaper account of the death of a preliminary boy in a Brooklyn prize ring. The boy had died of heart failure. Goldman collects newspaper stories he thinks will be instructive to his wards. “He was a nice kid,” Goldman said to me, “but he never trained right. He relied on his ticker to get him by. He had plenty of moxie, but it is just like I am always saying to my kids. If the flesh is weak, the spirit don't mean a thing.”

  • Turf and Gridiron •

  ne of the pleasantest clubs in town, prior to 1940, was the Turf and Gridiron, which occupied the third and fourth floors of a narrow building at 20 West Fortysixth Street. It cost thirtythree dollars a year to belong to the Turf and Gridiron, and it was not to be confused with the Turf and Field, which has headquarters at Belmont Park and annual dues of a hundred dollars. The Turf and Gridiron was the social club of the New York bookmakers. It was exclusive in only one sense. In the hall on the ground floor—the club being the only tenant of the upper floors—there was an iron gate, such as used to protect speakeasies in the twenties. A colored elevator boy looked at visitors through the bars before admitting them. This precaution was taken because certain persons believed that the clubmen carried large sums of money. Most of the members were held up once or twice, and some of them so often that they became connoisseurs of criminal technique. It was all the result of a misconception. The bookmakers sent their funds direct from the race track to a bank every night in an armored car, and drew their working cash from another car at the track the next day.

  The club came into being in 1934, when the state legislature rescinded criminal penalties for accepting bets at race tracks. Like the repeal of prohibition, a few months earlier, this action of the legislature restored an older order of things. Prior to 1909, when, at the urging of Charles Evans Hughes, then governor, the legislators made the practice of the bookmaking trade a misdemeanor, the bookies of New York formed an honorable and highly respected guild. Moreover, between 1909 and 1934, most of the present Turf and Gridiron clubmen took bets anyway. Their position, like that of bootleggers during the last years of prohibition, was delicate, although not exactly dangerous. The Restoration period was brief, for in 1940 the legislature legalized parimutuel machines and by that act outlawed the bookmakers again.

  Turf and Gridiron members were for the most part substantial, conservativelooking gentlemen of at least middle age. Younger men, it seems, lacked the equanimity the profession requires. The wallpaper in the club lounge on the third floor was a fawnandbrown plaid, like an oldtime bookmaker's vest. There was a big American flag by the fireplace, and over the entrance to the bar a framed picture of a celebrated horse named Master Charlie, which was owned a dozen years ago by Tom Shaw, a prominent member. On a first visit, a casual observer might have thought the Turf and Gridiron a reform organization, for the club bulletin board was perpetually covered with newspaper clippings denouncing racetrack betting. It was always the parimutuel form of betting that was attacked in these clippings, however, under headlines like “MACHINES TAKE WPA WORKERS' PAY” or “MUTUELS GUTTING TEXAS, SAYS GOVERNOR.”

  The guiding spirit of the club was its founder, Timothy James Mara, a large man with babypink cheeks and a square, massive jaw. Mara is a half inch over six feet tall, weighs two hundred and five pounds, and was fiftyfour years old last August at Saratoga, when he gave himself his usual gargantuan, impromptu birthday party by inviting everybody he met during the evening to join his table. One summer,
at the Arrowhead Inn there, he started out with his wife and wound up with a hundred and fifty guests. Mara lives in an eightroom apartment at 975 Park Avenue during most of the year, and he and Mrs. Mara also have a summer home in Luzerne, New York. He is one of eight honorary life members of Lodge No. 1, Benevolent & Protective Order of Elks. (The other seven include Nicholas Murray Butler, Governor Lehman, and former governors Charles S. Whitman and Alfred E. Smith.) In 1925, Mara established the New York Football Giants, the professional eleven which plays at the Polo Grounds. Later he presented the franchise to his two sons, Jack and Wellington, both Fordham alumni. It was because of the Giants that the club on Fortysixth Street was called the Turf and Gridiron, rather than something like the Turf Association or the Odds Club. At various times in the past he has taken flyers in the liquorimporting business, the promotion of prize fights, and stockbrokerage.

  The first dollar Mara bet on a horse started him on his way to all these glories. He was a twelveyearold newsboy on Union Square at the time, and he lost the dollar. He forgets the name of the horse involved, but he remembers that it was ridden by an exnewsboy named Micky Clemens. The experience taught him the irrelevancy of sentiment in horse racing. It also taught him that the bookmakers usually win. From that day on, his ambition was formed. The bookmakers to whom he delivered papers on his news route seemed to him singularly blessed among the people of the East Side. They dressed the best and worked the least.

  His newspaper route ran along Broadway from Wanamaker's store to Seventeenth Street, and included several popular hotels, like the St. Denis and the Union Square. Sometimes hotel guests would ask him where they could place a bet, and he would take their money to the bookmakers he knew. If the bettors lost, the bookies would pay Tim a fivepercent commission. If the bettors won, Tim would deliver the winnings, and often receive a tip. During that period Tim was a pupil in Public School 14, on Twentyseventh Street near Third Avenue. He sold newspapers in the late afternoon, and in the evenings worked as an usher at the Third Avenue Theatre, a temple of melodrama. Tim's father died before Tim was born. In his neighborhood, therefore, he enjoyed the good will that falls to a bright, cheerful Irish boy who is at the same time the son of a poor widow. Among the early friends he made was Mike Cruise, the leader of the Tammany Central Association on East Thirtysecond Street. Tim has been a good Tammany man ever since, and is frequently credited with great political influence, an impression he does nothing to discourage.

  When Tim left public school he was thirteen. His first real job was with a lawbook firm on Nassau Street, delivering rebound volumes to attorneys. This gave him an opportunity to extend his betting business, for some of the lawyers played the races, and on days when they were busy in court they left betting commissions for him to execute. After working for several years for the lawbook dealers, he opened a place of his own, the New York Law Bindery, at 99 Nassau Street. More bookmaking than bookbinding went on there. By then he had established a regular following among bettors, and they telephoned their wagers to him.

  His greatest patron was Thomas W. O'Brien, immortal in reminiscence as one of the few bettors who beat the races. Chicago O'Brien was this phenomenon's nom de course, and he was a retired bricklayer. At the appearance of O'Brien money in the betting ring, odds dropped like a barometer before a typhoon. Chicago therefore bet through agents, who placed thousands of dollars by telephone with poolrooms out of town. The agents were men who had established their credit in the gambling world. Young Tim was already in this class. Sometimes he placed $50,000 on a single race for the O'Brien account. Knowing that O'Brien was generally right, he would put $1000 of his own money on the same horse. If the horse lost, he had a fivepercent commission, $2500, coming to him from the books, so he was certain of a $1500 profit anyway

  As his clientele grew, Tim began to cover the smaller bets himself, instead of passing them on to the bookmakers. The mathematical background he had gained at P.S. 14, although simple, was adequate for his needs. Bookmaking is based on a kind of arithmetical shorthand called “percentage.” An evenmoney horse is said to be 50 per cent; a 2to1 horse, 33 per cent; a 3to1 horse, 25, and a 4to1 horse, 20. If there should be two horses in a race, both at even money, the book would be 100 per cent: if the bookmaker bet $1000 against each, he would break exactly even. If there should be three horses, and he laid $1000 at even money against each, he would stand to win $1000 no matter what happened. This would be a 150percent book. Generally, the makers of the books aim at an arrangement of odds that will work out to about 115 per cent. A typical book on an eighthorse race might be arranged in this manner, if the bookmaker planned to lay $1000 against each entry:

  ENTRY ODDS PERCENTAGE RISK

  Favorite 2-1 33 $1000 to win $500

  Second choice 5-2 28 $1000 to win $400

  Third choice 4-1 20 $1000 to win $250

  Fourth choice 6-1 14 $1000 to win $167

  Long shot A 10-1 9 $1000 to win $100

  Long shot B 10-1 9 $1000 to win $100

  Outsider A 30-1 3 $1000 to win $33

  Outsider B 50-1 2 $1000 to win $20

  118

  If the favorite should win, the book would have to pay out $1000 of the $1070 it took in from the bettors on the other horses. If the second choice should win, the profit would be $100 greater. A victory for the extreme outsider would mean a profit of $550 for the book.

  The bookmaker's troubles come in filling the book. His customers always insist on betting more than he wants to cover on certain horses and on ignoring others, so his system of checks and balances is shattered. The bookmaker lowers the odds against the horses most in demand, but often this expedient does not suffice. He cannot afford to turn away trade, so he tries to place some of the money with other bookmakers. This form of hedging, also prevalent among insurance underwriters, is called laying off. Concomitantly, other bookmakers lay off with him. Bookmakers bet against bookmakers, like the people of the Hebrides who lived by taking in one another's washing. Odds sometimes change so radically in response to the market that by post time the book's percentage has been erased, and the bookmaker has become a bettor on a rather large scale.

  From the beginning, Mara displayed an exceptional flair for this form of mathematical catchascatchcan. In 1921, he made up his mind to abandon city betting and go out to the track. It was like the decision of a stockcompany actor to invade the big time. Tim didn't begin at the bottom, by accepting the twoand fivedollar bets of the ordinary grandstand patrons. Optimistically, he set up business in the enclosure at Belmont, ground usually restricted to bookmakers of long experience. A ticket to the enclosure costs twice as much as one to the grandstand; it is assumed that enclosure patrons bet more heavily.

  A bookmaker's success in the long run depends on the size of his clientele. If a man has a following, bookmakers believe he will eventually cash in on what is called the hidden percentage. Hidden percentage is a thing distinct from ordinary percentage. It is the tendency of bettors to be content with modest gains when they are winning but, when losing, to insist on betting more than they can afford in an effort to recoup. After a day of beaten favorites, Tim has great faith in this psychological ace in the hole.

  A bookmaker on a New York track needed a considerable sum for overhead expenses, as well as his capital for betting. For the privilege of operating, he had to pay a daily fee averaging ninety dollars to the racing association that owns the track. He also paid a few dollars a day to John Cavanagh, a gentleman known as a “racing stationer,” who provided him daily with a few pencils, blank sheets of paper, and cardboard slips bearing the names of all the entries, which were usually tacked up at one side of the bookmaker's slate. Besides selling cardboard, Cavanagh acted as arbiter of the betting ring. All sorts of disputes arise about bets. Cavanagh's decision was final. A bookmaker needed a crew of from five to eight assistants, each of whom drew from ten to twentyfive dollars a day. With him constantly were a sheet writer, who recorded all his bets; a cashier, to handle the
money, and a ticket writer, who kept track of transactions with credit customers. Most bookmakers also employ a bet caller, who receives the money of cash bettors. The caller bawls out the bet and the badge number of the customer, such as “Aneroid, sixty to fifteen, badge 1347.” Tim did not employ a caller, preferring to call the bets himself. He enjoyed the feel of the bills in his palm, and was not opposed to the sound of his own voice. In addition to these employees on fixed post, every bookmaker had two “outside men.” One outside man scouted around the betting ring, noticing what odds other books were laying, and particularly whether the professional betting men were placing large amounts on any of the entries. He reported to his boss at brief intervals. The other outside man bet for the book; his job was laying off. On an average weekday, Mara handled bets amounting to between ten and fifteen thousand dollars; on a Saturday or holiday, as much as thirty thousand dollars.

  In Mara's quality of surface good humor he excelled all his confreres. Unlike most of the Turf and Gridiron members, he managed to look like the popular conception of a sporting man, even without wearing a fancy vest. His big, pink, happy face, with its frame of wavy, gingercolored hair, is that of a man who would give anyone a break. Perched on his high stool in the enclosure betting ring, he met all comers joyfully, with a robust voice and feeble jokes. “Where did you dig that one up?” he would ask a client who bet a long shot. “I'll give you my watch if it wins.” If the bettor was a steady customer, he sometimes gave him an extra point. Ignoring the odds of 17 to 5 marked on his slate, he would magnanimously make it 18. This was usually a sign he was sure the horse would lose. Win or lose, however, Tim maintains his smile. It did not come off even after a filly called Sally's Alley won the Futurity Stakes in 1922. Tim, who had been contemptuous of the filly, dropped sixty thousand dollars on the race. “I been shot at by sharpshooters,” he said afterward. Wise bettors have found him a more difficult target since.