Sparring With Hemingway: And Other Legends of the Fight Game

by Budd Schulberg

  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]

  Boxing’s Dirty Business

  Must Be Cleaned Up Now

  JOHNNY 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.

  Was Gavilan really jobbed out of his title, as he so tearfully claimed, and was it a Carbo-Palermo double play? Paul John (Frankie) Carbo (not unacquainted with murder and commonly described as the undercover owner of Gavilan and dozens of other high-ranking fighters) had worked with Blinky before. They had been pointed out as the background figures the night Blinky’s Billy Fox “knocked out” Jake LaMotta, said to carry the Carbo colors in the grand stakes. Christenberry, in a survey of boxing that will bear rereading, described Blinky as “next to Carbo the most notorious character in the combine.” Why did Carbo and Palermo have dinner together at Dempsey’s restaurant a few nights before the Gavilan-Saxton? And what was Paul John, alias Frankie, celebrating in a Philadelphia hotel after the Gavilan-Saxton?

  These were some of the inevitable, unanswered questions as the song was ended but the aroma lingered on.

  The fight itself was not fixed, in the opinion of this trusting soul. I can’t get into the tail-chaser about who won which rounds because after the second I started scoring it with an N for nothin’ happened. Saxton is a nothing-happens fighter who has perpetrated this sort of thing throughout his curious career. Two of his Garden fights were thrown out as no contests, although the Minelli mess somehow went into the record books as a KO for Saxton. Like this most recent fight, and the kazatzky before it with Johnny Bratton, the only beating was the one inflicted on the spectators.

  Gavilan was an aging twenty-eight, weakened from weight making, rusty from a six-month layoff, rarely using his injured right hand, and frustrated by a well-conditioned and accomplished spoiler. The Cuban was no longer the flashy Keed who fought in theatrical but effective spurts, incredibly hard to hurt and almost always good to watch. In recent years the spurts were shorter, the coasting periods longer. Came a night when the good fighter couldn’t fight, especially in there with a stiff who wouldn’t fight. Kid couldn’t; Johnny wouldn’t—that’s the story if you only had money enough for a four-word telegram. The fix didn’t have to be in. The fates have put the fix in, helped along by the wiles of Mr. Blinky and the Gavilan piecemen when they conspired to match a no-longer-boring-in Kid with an always-boring Saxton.

  If Pantaleo had been a real referee instead of what he was, he would have bounced them both out of the ring after eight rounds and advised the abused paying customers to ask for their money back. Gavilan didn’t earn his 40 Gs and Saxton didn’t earn his championship of the world. If it had to be judged as a fight I would have called it for Gavilan because 1) you can have more fun in Havana than you can in Philadelphia and 2) Gavilan has been pretty great and deserves better than to blow his title in a hometown sleight-of-hand and 3) the Kid came on to win the last round in something like his old style, shaking Saxton up and providing the only real action in the fight. All the rest of the action was handled by the books, who were swamped with Saxton money throughout the day.

  I don’t know about the other ruling bodies, but the Schulberg Boxing Commission, which headquarters in New Hope, Pennsylvania, but has no working agreement with Frank Wiener, refuses to recognize Saxton as champion. It saw with its own eyes such welterweight worthies as Jackie Fields, Young Jack Thompson, Young Corbett III, Jimmy McLarnin, Barney Ross, Henry Armstrong, Fritzie Zivic, Ray Robinson—yes, and Kid Gavilan. In deference to these real champions, we declare the title vacant.

  The Gavilan-Saxton turkey trot deserves a thorough airing. In fact, it may be time to ask again, as responsible sportswriters have been asking so long, whether boxing is going to be a legitimate sport or a dirty business? Jim Norris, the personable president of the IBC, as an honorable man and a true fight fan, should welcome an investigation of the dark underside of boxing. It can destroy the sport as the Black Sox conspiracy might have ruined baseball if an effective commission had not been set up to protect our pastime from its inside jobbers. To say this is not to attack boxing but to attack the boxing racket.

  The boxing managers have their guild; the IBC is a powerful network of promoters from New York to San Francisco; even the veteran boxers are getting together. Maybe it’s time to launch the Association for the Protection of the Poor Put-upon Fight Fan. The APPPFF. The middle P’s don’t stand for Palermo or Pantaleo. Won’t stand for them, in fact.

  [November 1954]

  The Death of Boxing?

  WAS THERE REALLY A second Sonny Liston-Floyd Patterson fight? In the rear of my station wagon lies a poster, already curling and fading with age, heralding that event or fiasco or nightmare miasma for the 22nd of July, 1963, in the sacred city of Las Vegas, mecca for thousands of religious fanatics who come to worship their ritual numbers, that first sweet 7, bountiful 11, and magical 21, and to exorcise the devils, snake-eyes 2, crap-out 7, and there-you-go-again 22.

  You heard me, pal. Vegas. Where else but in that razzle-dazzle capital of Suckerland could you fill a large hall for a rematch of the felling of an apprehensive, thoroughly rehabilitated delinquent by a very tough prison-hardened man? With my faded poster five months out of date, I’m no longer sure if I really made the pilgrimage from my home in Mexico City to see that phantom fight. Vaguely I recall buying a seat on a plane destined for Las Vegas, but in retrospect no such geographical complex exists. I do not expect to find it again in the rolling sagebrush desert of the Southwest, but if your friendly gasoline station has added a handy road map of Dante’s Inferno, you might come upon it suddenly on one of the lower levels. In that blistering July, had I been a victim of a Sodom-and-Gomorrah dream as I wandered between the bizarre training camps over which an angry, glowering Liston presided at the Thunderbird Hotel while the pensive, introspective Patterson showed his talent for speed of hand and melancholy interviews at the Dunes? Like the Sands, the Sahara, the Riviera, and the other sunless pleasure domes spread garishly along the Strip, the gladiators’ headquarters were giant, nonstop gambling casinos that join hipster and square in a fevered fraternity devoted to sex-substitute games of chance played with round-the-clock patience and sublimated desperation.

  As had been my avocation and afición for decades, I had come early to the fight grounds to study the contending champions as they prepared themselves for the impending conflict that was to decide the fistfighting championship of the world. I had watched the mighty Brown Bomber in poker-faced training at primitive resort camps, the rugged Marciano in his humble farmhouse isolated from the exhausting rounds of recreational activities at Grossinger’s, the silky move
s of Ezzard Charles in pastel sweatsuit at Kutscher’s luxurious Gemütlichkeit in the Catskills … I thought I had seen the ultimate in exotic grooming for combat when Ingemar Johansson, the Swedish glass-jawed krone pincher, took over a superplush ranchhouse at Grossinger’s and feasted on sumptuous smorgasbord and inept light-heavyweight imports from Stockholm.

  But the training for the brief encounter perpetrated in Syndicateville, U.S.A., last summer—well, in the spirit of the wheel, the hole card, and the hard eight I’ll risk a lowly dollar chip to a hundred-dollar blue that Vegas in July housed the goddamnedest training a fight buff ever or rather never hoped to see.

  The ring has had its icon smashers, so gifted they were able to flout the physical demands of the sport, sharpening their reflexes and honing their muscles not in rigid training camps but in bistro and brothel. One of the great bareknuckle fighters of the early nineteenth-century London prize ring, Jewish lightweight Dutch Sam, boasted that he trained on gin. His son and worthy heir, Young Dutch Sam, scourge of the little ’uns, ran with the dandies to an early grave. In our fathers’ day there was Harry Greb, the illustrious noncelibate who defied the taboos against la dolce vita on the eve of battle. The gin mills and the boudoirs were the Human Windmill’s gymnasiums. Proximity as well as nature seemed to shape “Two-Ton” Tony Galento until any resemblance to a beer barrel was not coincidental.

  Despite these playboys of the Western ring, there remains a traditional preparation for fisticuffing, a rigorous program of self-denial. The ground rules of this strenuous game have demanded over the centuries that the contenders retire to rustic retreats to devote themselves to the hard labor of running and bending and sparring and thinking. During this period of the hair shirt and the liniment rub, the pugilist was not only denied the joy of entering woman, he was rarely even permitted the preliminary joy of girl-watching. The true practitioner was a fastidious ascetic whose physical energies were turned inward, flowing back into himself, like a mighty river that reverses its current and pours upward into its headwaters. Thus, according to the mythodology of this ancient, noble sport, the pugilist does not dissipate his energies. He conditions his muscles, he builds his stamina, and from his self-imposed isolation he draws concentration and pent-up emotion ready to explode at the opening bell. The sex act is sublimated, its art and energies rerouted. The man intact, this reservoir of bone and flesh and nerve and blood, is ready to release full-force its dammed-up excitations.