Sparring With Hemingway: And Other Legends of the Fight Game

by Budd Schulberg

  Half an hour later I was having a hamburger across the street when Vince came in and squeezed his broad buttocks into the opposite booth. He ordered a steak sandwich and a bottle of beer. He was with another guy, and they were both feeling all right. From what Vince said, I gathered he had put up five hundred to win two-fifty that Speedy would stay the limit.

  When I paid my check, I turned to Vince’s booth because I felt I had to protest against the violation of the dignity of Speedy Sencio. I said, “Vince, in my book you are a chintzy, turd-eating butcher!”

  That’s a terrible way to talk, and I apologize to anybody who might have been in that short-order house and overheard me. The only thing I can say in my defense is that if you are talking to an Eskimo it is no good to speak Arabic. But what I said didn’t even make Vince lose a beat in the rhythmical chewing of his steak.

  “Aaah, don’t be an old lady,” Vince said. “Speedy’s never been kayoed, so why should I spoil his record?”

  “Sure,” I said, “don’t spoil his record. Just spoil his face, spoil his head, spoil his life for good.”

  “Go away,” Vince said, laughing. “You’ll break my frigging heart.”

  Hollywood Hokum

  WHEN I PROMISED TO fill my old space with a critique (or call it a blast) of The Harder They Fall, I didn’t quite realize what I was letting myself in for. A fairly faithful and certainly forceful motion picture has been adapted by Mark Robson, the director, from my novel, and the film has won kudos from New York to Cannes.

  But there is simply no pleasing some people. Take this columnist emeritus of Sports Illustrated; him there is no pleasing. As taut and fierce and well acted and vivid in detail as the picture is, it is guilty on at least half a dozen counts of presenting an inaccurate and overstated picture of boxing evils as they exist today.

  Let’s start with the ads. The picture promised to expose “the swindle that is big-time boxing.”

  Now I hardly qualify as an apologist for big-time boxing, but to suggest that every fight is fixed, every manager venal, and every fighter a victim is to do a large injustice to hundreds of fine fighters and reliable trainers and managers whose careers ride on the unknown outcome of every big fight. If Sugar Ray wins, the Robinson myth sails on. If Olson loses, he’s out of the big time for good and all. The big fights of recent years have all—or nearly all—been on the level. There is no moment of greater drama and uncertainty in the whole world of sports than the tingling few seconds when the antagonists dance in their corners waiting for the bell to send them out to do or be undone.

  Yes, there have been barneys in boxing—Fox-LaMotta, Graziano-Davey, Paddy Young-Gene Hairston, Art Aragon-Tommy Campbell, Gavilan-Saxton—to name a few. But boxing is not yet a vaudeville. It is a professional sport which too often hides its face from scandal—a sport infected with Carbos and Palermos and their complacent piecemen. And yet—and here The Harder They Fall fell down for me—it’s a sport that has served well and been well served by such heroes as Rocky Marciano, Archie Moore, Ray Robinson, Carmen Basilio, and a dozen other stalwarts.

  Actually, my book was first outlined in 1940-41 as a followup to What Makes Sammy Run? It was put aside after Pearl Harbor when the fight world no longer seemed to demand attention. The cobwebs were wiped away in 1946—but the story remained essentially a portrait of the fight game at its base worst in the early 1930s.

  If I had been making the picture, I would have 1) frankly planned it as a period piece or 2) updated it to a time when rogues still infest the fight biz but when they no longer operate with the crudity of a waterfront mob.

  The opening fix in the movie would never get by today. A second who blinds a fighter he is handling as treated in the film would be caught in the act by any capable referee. And no longer is a handler permitted to throw a towel into the ring to signal the defection of his man. This was outlawed in most places years ago for the precise reason that it led too easily to corruption.

  While I have heard aroused fight crowds cry “yellow” at a fighter who is doing his honest but poor best, I was unable to believe the scene in which Gus Dundee, the damaged ex-champion (truly played by Pat Comiskey) crumples to the canvas and is carried out on a stretcher while the crowd reviles him as a quitter and a coward. It is an immensely theatrical scene but, alas, it rings like a nine-dollar bell. It has been my misfortune to see a number of fighters carried out of the ring on stretchers. I was sitting in Willie Pep’s dressing room last fall in Tampa when Ferman King was thus removed. There was a typical rowdy fight crowd. But nobody threw nothing, nobody said nothing. There was a hush. Death (two days later) was in the air. When a fighter goes down and fails to get up, when he’s down so long as to need a stretcher (Bogey and Mark, listen this time: this is true), even the crassest and cruelest of fans knows something most terrible is wrong. When (in the picture) a fat woman curses the dying ex-champ on his way up the aisle, nobody will ever say that isn’t dramatic. But no one who knows the fight game will say it is true.

  The Harder They Fall is being advertised as a picture that pulls no punches. I agree. But some of the punches are illegal because the gloves are loaded. In the book, for instance, it was enough that the tame giant was being thrown into the ring with the champion sans handcuffs—somewhat as a built-up Davey was thrown to Gavilan, who needed no dramatic gimmick for wanting to demolish him. The Keed was just so much the superior professional fighter that he could not help destroying Davey—even with his inability to hit the long ball. But what do we have in the film The Harder They Fall? A Maxie Baer overplaying Max Baer saying he wants revenge on Toro (my giant) Moreno because Toro’s press agent is taking the credit for killing Old Gus in the ring. It was his, Maxie’s, punches what really put Gus under the daisies, argues Max. And he wants the glory as the true minister of death.

  Birdseed. I have known boxers pretty well over a thirty-year span. I have put in some hours with Fidel LaBarba, Mickey Walker, George Godfrey, Billy Soose, Jackie Fields, Roger Donoghue, Willie Pep, Lee Oma, Abe Simon, Rocky Marciano—all kinds: intelligent, limited, cagey, generous; fighting fools, careful fencers, brilliant, pedestrian—all kinds. Some of them have figured in fatalities or near fatalities. Not one ever voiced any other sentiment but anguish for any permanent damage inflicted on an opponent. Indeed, the men I have known who have suffered the death of an opponent in the ring are obsessed with the tragedy, haunted by the specter of the dead man’s face.

  So in the name of the boxing fraternity that has no idea I am scribbling these words, I accuse The Harder They Fall filmmakers of sensationalism above and beyond the call of dramatic art when they twist a heavyweight champion of the world into a leering psychopath. Maxie Baer, who queens through this incredible part, may have been a tamed tiger but he wasn’t a monster.

  Another point: the unrehearsed candid-camera scene of one Joe Greb, the broken-faced wino, on Skid Row is capsule sociology and lightning theater. A nice touch. But anyone who draws from the frightful scene the conclusion that all old fighters are toothless, penniless punchies should attend the next session of the Veteran Boxers Association. I respect old fighters and I long to see a home for the needy ones, based on the Motion Picture Relief Fund idea. But I know that some of the chief contributors will be veteran boxers themselves who are thriving in a score of enterprises from acting to banking.

  Another fundamental difference between the novel and the film: the book opens with a loving account of classic encounters between Frank Slavin and Peter Jackson, Corbett and Choynski. Toro Moreno’s benighted career is backlighted with tales of fistic courage, of Charlie Goldmanlike devotion. The book is sprinkled with affectionate vignettes from the liniment world of Eighth Avenue. You can only hate truly the things you love. I accuse my talented friend Mark Robson of making his film out of hating for the sake of hating, without taking the trouble, the artistic trouble, the Dostoevskian trouble of first learning to love that which he would destroy.

  It’s a helluva picture, Mark—taut,
tense, terse, tough, tenacious, terrifying. I think people ought to see it. As long as they know enough not to confuse truculence with truth.

  One final nip of the fingers that feed me: in the original film ending, the press agent braved the vengeance of the mob by writing an exposé which began with the flaming phrase: “Boxing must be abolished in America.” I filed a protest, partly because this line was typed under the manuscript title of The Harder They Fall, smudging this writer’s identity with that of Bogart’s press agent. My own belief, not new to these columns, is that boxing can no more be abolished than booze, sex, religion, and other hungers, for good or evil, in the soul and tissue of man. Boxing has been abolished, repeatedly, and each time has sprung up in rampant, bootleg form. The accommodating producers revised the line to read: “The boxing business must rid itself of … evil influence—even if it takes an act of Congress to do so.” It would be churlish even to cite this act of graciousness on the part of Columbia Pictures if so many critics had not based their reviews on press showings before the offending peroration was brought a little closer to my original intention. The result has been a stream of letters asking how I reconcile “abolishment of boxing” with my qualified support for the game in my boxing columns.

  Boxing needs no act of Congress. It simply needs what baseball needed thirty-five years ago—a Landis, a Helfand-type commission in authority to bring boxing into line throughout the land. Plus a front office wise enough to cooperate in the rehabilitation of the juvenile delinquent of American professional sport.

  If The Harder They Fall, with its exaggerated but undeniable dramatic power, calls attention to this need, it may have served its purpose as a haymaking narrative of the worst that can happen.

  [June 1956]

  The Heavyweight

  Championship

  THE INTENSE WHITE LIGHTS focused straight down upon the stage: a ring twenty-four feet square set upon a raised platform for all the sporting world to see. The pressure of sixty thousand fans leaning, leering forward in the darkness. The millions of second-degree fans pretending their closed-circuit TV-theater seats are really in the infield of the great stadium. The two fortunate fistfighters facing each other with trepidation and courage while their handlers tenderly massage the backs of their entries and the self-important managers mutter their anxious, last-minute strategies. The jaunty announcer coming to the center of the ring and reaching up for the microphone. The hush of the crowd, and then those measured and immortal words: “Ladies and gentlemen … for the heavyweight championship of the world …”

  How many times have I flown across the country so as not to miss that moment! Let me confess it now. I’m a sucker for heavyweight championships.

  I’ve done my share of muckraking the fight game and agree with Jimmy Cannon and other ambivalent followers of the sweet but sometimes rancid science who have called professional boxing the slum of sports. But a contest for the heavy weight championship is more than a fight, it is a celebration, a ceremony, a profound rite, as truly a blood ritual as the sacrifice of the fighting bulls. Of course there have been ill-equipped, outclassed, farcical, even pathetic challengers for the heavyweight championship, sacrificial lambs cruelly chopped down in the interest of greed and indifference to human pain. I think of feeding frightened Johnny Paychek to Joe Louis, or the hapless flesh of Brian London and Rademacher, the amateur, into the maw of Floyd Patterson and his medieval archbishop, Cus D’Amato. Such as those disgrace the rite and are a sign of boxing’s decadence. But when the world champion meets his natural challenger, when it’s Dempsey-Tunney, Louis-Schmeling, Louis-Conn, Walcott-Marciano, Marciano vs. Ez Charles or Archie Moore, or even the more recent Patterson-Johansson series, then these primitive two-man wars have magic for me, recalling the myth of man as a simple, indomitable fighting animal, the most ferocious and capable of all such animals on earth, in there alone with only the speed and force of his fisted hands, the durability of his jaw and ribs, belly and skin, the speed and endurance of his legs, plus the decisive intangibles, character, intelligence, spirit, pride—only these for weapons.

  When I leap from my seat to cheer Joe Louis as he storms back against the clever, cocky Billy Conn to save his title in the thirteenth round, when I watch my friend Rocky Marciano force himself up off the floor with his eyes still crossed like funny-paper xxxx’s, to wear down that old man river who rolls on as Archie Moore, or watch the stylish Ezzard Charles, ahead on points until the closing rounds, stagger from corner to corner like a Bowery drunk but somehow accept the brutal punching of Marciano without surrendering, I do not—as squeamish friends suggest I ought to—feel debased, a sadistic spectator to an inhuman, outmoded spectacle. Instead I feel exhilarated, even inspired. I don’t ask: How can you stand the sight of one human being bashing in the head of another? I am reminded, oddly, of Faulkner’s intonation from Stockholm: I decline to accept the end of man. … Man is immortal … and will … endure. …

  Nonsense, you say, if man is to endure, it will be with brain, not brawn. I wonder. Take away the Norris-Carbo-Blinky Palermo axis, take away the fix guys, the wise guys, the undercover guys, and you have contest and conflict in its purest and most basic form. Even in this day of electronic miracles, of H. G. Wellsian mechanical brains, artificial moons, and the specter of genocidal push-button wars, the brute effort of the fight of the heavyweight championship of the planet Earth reminds me that man is still man and needs not only atom smashers and radio telescopes but human guts, quick reflexes, inner-directed defenses, and the ability to think and act alone under terrible pressure; in short, the virtues of the genuine champion.

  To call those battles Homeric is this side of bombast, for Homer was not only the father of poetry but the progenitor of Red Smith, Jimmy Cannon, and Jesse Abramson, the first reporter of the prizefight. Our Greek scholar may quote us a blow-by-blow description of the championship bout between Epeus and Euryalus:

  At length Epeus dealt a weighty blow

  Full on the cheek of his unwary foe;

  Beneath the ponderous arm’s resistless sway,

  Down dropped he nerveless and extended lay.

  In other words, not exactly Homer’s but equally to the point, “Epeus wins it by one-round KO.” Write Marciano for Epeus and Walcott for Euryalus, and you have a Grantland Ricelike verse-report of Rocky’s brief second encounter with Jersey Joe.

  Whether or not the venerable pugilist Archie Moore is truly a god, as he likes to claim, or merely a fine play actor who has a way with Homeric material, I know that the bards of ancient Greece and Rome would have been delighted with him on the night of his ordeal with Marciano. He entered the ring in a flowing regal robe of gold-colored silk, under which he affected another silken robe of saintly white. Aeneas himself could not have borne himself more proudly. His punching and timing in the opening minutes of the battle were worthy of his Olympian forebears, and only Marciano’s rare powers of dedication saved him from a demise as sudden and humiliating as Euryalus’s and Walcott’s. In the later rounds the golden-robed god of the fistic wars was getting the hell beat out of him. The cestuslike fists of Marciano were punishing the old man terribly. In the end he did not fall like a tree but melted down into the canvas like a Winter Carnival ice statue in the spoiling sunshine. Bloodied and bowed, he sat there in great sadness as the referee administered the fight game’s numeric version of the last rites. Archie, in his forties, with a couple of decades of combat behind him, was the oldest fighter in the game; for most of those years he had been deprived of his rightful place where the money and the glory are. Too late, his chance had come. There was tragedy in the way he sprawled there with the fight and the will beaten out of him, a very old man of forty-two, who, some thirty minutes earlier, had been such an astonishing young man of forty-two.

  Before I lead you into a vale of tears, let us hasten to the epilogue. I am a dressing-room man, long ago discovering that the experience of the fight is not yet total when victor and vanquished leave the ring. Th
is night I followed the robe of silken gold across the infield of the great ball park to the dressing room of the sorely battered loser. For one reason, the dressing room of the triumphant champion would be insufferably crowded. For another, not only the devil but also the drama takes the hindmost. How would you expect to find this man whose hopes as well as his features had been cruelly pounded into submission? Sitting on his rubbing table sobbing into his hands? Lying on his back staring blindly at the ceiling? Cursing his handlers and himself in frustrated rage? Insulting or threatening to attack photographers whose job it was to record his public humiliation? Or hiding in a shower? I have seen all these and more. But I had never seen this: Archie Moore, whose robe and triangle of cropped beard under his lower lip gave him the appearance of a swarthy member of the Old Vic done up for Othello, climbed up upon a table, made it his stage, and, smilingly disregarding his wounds and the blows that had beaten him nearly senseless only a few minutes before, stretched out his arms to his small audience and delivered this speech in his finest Elizabethan manner:

  “Welcome, gentlemen. I found this evening most enjoyable. I trust you did likewise. Now if you have any questions, I shall be happy to answer them.”

  You see, Moore, the unlettered but instinctive scholar, knew this was not a mere fight between two retrogressed homo sapiens. It had been as ritualistic as a Japanese No play. One cynical fight reporter that evening cynicked out loud that it was an enjoyable evening for old Arch because his purse of more than $240,000 was the biggest pay night of his long, long trail. But I insist on a dash of romance in my heavyweight championships. Three thousand years ago the prizes for which the champions fought were laurel wreaths and oxen with gilded horns; now they are hundreds of millions of dollars which the Treasury Department is happy to share, and magnificent plaques from the Boxing Writers’ Association and a dozen other benevolent societies. So long as the fight is the real thing, the difference is negligible. It is not the money prize but the myth and the mystery that draws those sixty thousand people to the ball park while millions more worshipfully attend theater-TV screens.