Sparring With Hemingway: And Other Legends of the Fight Game

by Budd Schulberg

  Old wives’ tale or physiological truth, the school of the abstemious has ruled the prize ring. Trainers of Primo Carnera used to laugh at their practical joke of tying a string around Carnera’s penis while he slept so that an erotic dream would tighten the string, painfully, awakening him before a wasteful release of dammed-up energy. In poor Primo’s case it was a futile precaution. Primo was as ponderous and helpless as a dinosaur. He came into the ring as Samson shorn. He was the champion who sprang full and overgrown from the fertile mind of the mob. The mob giveth and there stood, in all his bogus glory, the innocent champion Carnera. The mob taketh away, and there lay the broken body of the hapless giant. Today Primo is to be found in the happy hunting ground of wrestling, where they need to tie no strings around human appendages, since it is merely a marionette show for slaphappy sadists, with hidden strings and invisible wires operating life-sized muscle dolls.

  But glove fighting had its dignity, at least in its finest hours, before descending into the decadence that now threatens to engulf it. One of its many attractions for me, in this impure world, was the monastic dedication. There is much about boxing that is ugly and abhorrent: the exploitation, the finagling and conniving, the shabby grifters ever ready to leech it. But the training period always had something immaculate about it, a tradition of physical discipline that conjured up Sparta and the Greek games. To watch Rocky Marciano rise at dawn brimming with good sleep and vigor, pumping his short, powerful legs over the Upper New York countryside, was an aesthetic pleasure. Similarly, in Vegas we left the crowded casino at four in the morning to drive out into the silent, night-enshrouded desert where Floyd Patterson was idyllically bedded down. The lights of the incredible gambling palaces flickered, but out at Hidden Well Ranch all was oasis serenity.

  The sun was still just a promise of morning on the horizon when the gentle, unassuming Floyd strolled from his hideaway cottage, accompanied only by two strapping shepherd dogs. He tossed a red rubber ball down the dirt lane connecting the complex of ranch houses to a deserted desert road and moved with a fighter’s practiced grace after it into the open desert country. He ran on and on, occasionally throwing the ball ahead of him to break the monotony of the long lonely run. Now the sun rose full but not yet hot on the desert-clean horizon and our man was silhouetted against it, jogging on with his black dog and his white dog unconsciously composing themselves into an artist’s conception of how an aesthete of the prize ring should appear one week before a crucial contest. Driving alongside, slothful in a station wagon, I thought of The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner. In that film, like the live drama we were watching, the preparation for the showdown was purity and grace and artfully lonely, and building to a climax that was agony and frustration, neurotic and perverse. To follow Floyd as he ran on into the rolling desert dunes in the softlit purple morning was to catch him in his proudest moment, when he was all concentrated, dedicated grace and energy. How confidently, it seemed, he paused for thirty seconds of piston-fast shadowboxing, ran backward a dozen yards and then forward again, into rising hills where our car could no longer follow, a lone figure of rare health and determination, with the big black dog and the big white dog panting with the joy of the effort and beginning to seem more tired than their poker-faced master.

  Poker-faced but not a gambler, Floyd secreted himself at Hidden Well except for the training sessions staged with Vegas hoopla at the Dunes, where a thousand people a day paid their buck to applaud the quiet, modest monk working with humorless conscience to avenge the one-round humiliation he had suffered nine months earlier in Chicago. His body expressed confidence, but his mind seemed cobwebbed with complexities that should not foul the forward gear, the clear, simple thrust a pugilist—perhaps any artist or prime doer—needs to carry out his plan of action. When we asked him, for instance, if he thought Liston would knock him out again, Patterson stared at the floor and launched into a tortured paragraph replete with dependent clauses. He certainly hoped he would not be knocked out again; he would try not to enter the ring expecting to be knocked out again; however, no one can estimate in advance the effect of an opponent’s blow on the brain, and it is always possible that the body wishes to react in one way while the mind, temporarily stunned or confused, reacts in another.

  Before he was halfway through this convoluted oratory we were all staring at the floor in embarrassment, feeling uncomfortably sorry for this bad boy gone good. In this modern world of contradiction and compromise you want your prizefighters strong and direct. You want a Floyd Patterson to say, “Hell no, he won’t knock me out again. I come to fight. I’ll beat his ass off.” When we asked Sonny Liston if he thought Patterson would last longer the second time, he growled, “This time—shorter.” Sonny was four seconds off the target, but they breed humanitarians in Nevada and there is a compulsory eight-second count of protection, even if the fallen fighter scrambles up to his feet before 8 as Floyd did, in his amateur eagerness to precipitate his own slaughter. From John L. Sullivan to Sonny Liston, eighty-one years and twenty-two champions, there never has been one so plagued with doubts and fears, the tentative tangle, as twice-disgraced Floyd Patterson. It is like asking Picasso if he thinks he is going to create any more immortal canvases and hearing him say, “Well, I’d like to, but when one puts his brush to canvas how does he really know whether or not the mind may misdirect it?” Or asking President Kennedy if he thinks the free world will fall and hearing him say, “Well of course we hope not, but who can foresee the gulf between desire and achievement?” There is an appealing integrity to self-deprecation, but it doesn’t win ball games or civilizations.

  Hemingway, to the point of being obnoxious, insisted on his preeminence as numero uno. He wasn’t, always, but the thinking colored the doing. Patterson approached his Liston ordeal with a false-beard psychology. A man who hides from defeat behind a false beard has fallen, for all his virtues, into a sad state of torpor and confusion. The beard is a symbol of disguise, of trying to be something you are not, and Patterson may be boxing’s first beatnik, a millionaire beatnik who makes a cult of defeatism. In his dressing room after he had again offered himself up with the resigned passivity of a human sacrifice, he sorrowfully announced that he would not retire, although he did not even feel worthy to challenge the loquacious upstart Cassius Marcellus Clay. Patterson should retire and cultivate his garden and his neuroses. He is fortunate that he had an honest manager, Cus D’Amato, whom he despises and whom he cut dead at Vegas. Cus did not job him out of his purses; he overprotected him like an indulgent father. As a result, Floyd is weaker and richer.

  While Floyd was consulting his psyche in his desert retreat, Sonny Liston went through his violent calisthenics and cuffed his sparring partners around as if he was back schlocking recalcitrant Negro cab drivers for his old boss of the St. Louis Teamsters, John Vitale. After his workout, he would blow off a little more steam verbally abusing members of his entourage. He is an inarticulate, primitive, non-card-carrying Muslim, with a fearful suspicion of the white world and a prison-sharp “What’s-in-it-for-Sonny?” philosophy. On the eve of the Vegas massacre, waiting for his call to the ring—a dressing-room companion told me later—he relaxed in contemptuous silence, sullenly clipping his nails. When it was time to move out into the aisle, he rose, stretched, and muttered, “Well, let’s go down and cross the railroad tracks and stop in at the pay station.”

  Evening after evening, when all good fighters should be tucked into their quiet beds, Sonny would be at the crap or blackjack tables. Often Joe Louis, tragically reduced to a camp follower, would be at Sonny’s side, playing for fairly large stakes with Sonny’s bread. For those of us reared on the aesthetic of the ascetic, Sonny’s social pattern was obscene. He is not just a naysayer but a f-u man. Shortly after training he could be seen around the Thunderbird pool ogling the Vegas bikini set. A few hours before the fight he was in the crowded restaurant of the Thunderbird casually dining with his wife. Mrs. Liston and certain small children se
em genuinely fond of him, but he is the meanest and most hated man to hold the heavyweight title since Jack Johnson. He is keen-minded, illiterate, and socially scarred. The combination is apt to produce an authority-hating s.o.b. He is the only man I remember meeting who scares you with a look. There is a Father Murphy who flutters around him and is supposed to be rehabilitating him, but I think Sonny is forever trapped in his own resentment. I doubt if a million dollars will make him more lovable.

  I’ve seen a championship provide a liberal education in social adjustment for antisocial personalities—acceptance, comfort, fame, they do work a difference. But it is sadly possible that it’s too late for Sonny Liston to achieve anything more than the sodden satisfaction of clubbing men insensible with his abnormal-sized fists. In this day when the march of civil rights is raising the sights of Negro and white, Sonny is a throwback. It’s not accidental that he has no connection with Birmingham and doesn’t lock arms with Jackie Robinson and Belafonte and Floyd Patterson in the new civil war. Sonny marches and punches heads to his own drummer. He seems to pull his hatred around him like the toweled robe under which he flexes his massive muscles as he waits for the bell that sends him out to perform mayhem.

  If Sonny Liston is the ex-con, hated, hating, the third point to the morality triangle is gaseous Cassius Clay, who talks better than he fights, a twenty-one-year-old Olympic champion who is everything that Floyd Patterson is not, brash, self-confident, flamboyant, the high-pressure supersalesman. While Sonny is the throwback, Cassius is the throw-forward. There is a great deal of talk about how much Cassius Marcellus Clay is contributing to “the game,” selling out the Garden and doing for fistic glamour what poor butterfly Marilyn Monroe did for sex. The decadence that hung over the Liston-Patterson thing in Vegas pursues Cassius, our new clown prince, in another way. Cassius is tall and handsome and boyish and as articulate as a precocious college debater. He is a phrasemaker and a poetizer. In Chicago last fall he introduced himself to me as the coming champion of the world and pressed a poem into my hand predicting in eighth-grade verse his knockout triumph over Archie Moore “who will fall in four.” The old Mongoose obliged, and in this day of Madison Avenue ploys a flashy near amateur became the ranking contender for Liston’s title. Cassius is as welcome to the fight game as is whipped cream to strawberry shortcake—he dresses and sweetens it up, but you know what happens when you eat too much whipped cream.

  Cassius Clay is, I’m afraid, the fighter who most clearly reflects the flaws of the middle sixties. He is earning a fortune before he has mastered his trade. He may be the first fighter consciously to employ big-time advertising techniques. He is the perpetrator of both the big laugh and the big lie. Last spring in the Garden solid citizen Doug Jones exposed him as a rangy boy fast with his hands but totally ignorant of infighting and highly susceptible to a punch on the jaw. Even Patterson could beat him, and to put him in with Liston too soon may stigmatize the promoters as accessories to legalized murder.

  But the big sell is on. In the days of boxing decadence Liston-Clay, with all these fancy ancillary rights, looms as the greatest spectacle since Elizabeth Taylor’s entrance into Rome. Clay should prove himself against Patterson, or Eddie Machen, who went twelve against Liston with little pain. But boxing isn’t that kind of sport. The fact that Machen was the logical contender catapulted him not to fame but to oblivion. Clay, green and vulnerable, is where the money is. Show business with blood demands his appearance in the arena.

  In Vegas, Cassius Marcellus lay in luxury-hotel splendor at the Dunes, silk-pajamaed, attended by his brother-sparring partner Rudolph Valentino Clay. He ordered from room service like the new king of the new glamour sport of theater television he is. “How many eggs?—just get a great big platter and cover it. Bacon?—we’ll take all you got down there, honey.” He stretched. He laughed. It tickled him to think how quickly all this royal living had come to a poor kid from the back streets of Louisville. He called Liston a big ugly bear. He was laughing, but more about the money in his future than the fight. At ringside of the Vegas charade he climbed up to the apron and grimaced at Liston, then retreated in histrionic fear as Liston glared at him. There was a day when the heavyweight challenger carried himself with dignity. There was some sense of finality or seriousness to the affair. But sportswriters at Vegas were offended. The Louisville Lip, the self-propelled headline grabber, was making a mockery of an event that once was fought in earnest. This hamming at ringside was what the wrestlers tricked up. Next week’s contestants glare and growl and maybe even take an openhanded poke at each other. Boy oh boy oh boy, the announcer licks his chops, these two brutes really hate each other. Fur is really going to fly, not to mention blood ’n’ gore, when these two get a chance to settle their feud a week from tonight. … That’s what Cassius Clay, who couldn’t really lick Doug Jones and almost got knocked out by England’s “Slow-Motion” Henry Cooper, is bringing to boxing. He may be selling a lot of tickets, but Elvis Presley brings a lot of money into the movie theaters and he acts about as well as Cassius Clay fights. Which is not to say that Cassius is a bad fighter. He is simply a promising, inexperienced boy, speedy of hand and foot, blasted off to stardom in an era when propaganda takes precedence over performance. Because boxing is basic and strips man down to his essentials, it has been a simple but effective measuring stick of social progress and retrogression. It has been a barometer of racial status. The Irish, the Jews, the Negroes, the Latin minorities have all dominated the sport in their upward struggle toward social acceptance. Now Cassius Clay beats his big drums and rolls his clever snares, singing songs not his mother but Mad Ave and the sellout wrestling prima donnas taught him. It may be telltale and ironic that the biggest pay night in the history of boxing looms in the same year that sees a mob-shadowed brute pitted against a salesman-boxer who is helping to transform the old game into the sappy circus for cheap-thrill seekers that wrestling has become.

  As I returned last summer from that desert netherworld where Sonny Liston defied the old-fashioned rules of asceticism, and ascetic Floyd Patterson crapped out again, I wondered if boxing, in the hands of incompetents like the Nilons or opportunists like Roy Cohn, could survive. By coincidence my brother Stuart was producing-directing an hour TV special for David Brinkley on this very subject and our paths crossed at Vegas. He had interviewed Governor Brown of California who thought boxing should be abolished, and Norman Mailer who thought boxing should go back to bareknuckle to-a-finish brutality as an outlet for man’s pent-up hostility, and Jersey Joe Walcott who saw boxing as an answer to the hungers of the underprivileged. I agreed and disagreed with all of them, and told my brother:

  I’ve been a boxing fan for forty years. I find in no other sport the human drama, the intense interplay of individual skill, courage, and, yes, intelligence. A good boxing match—this may sound extreme—is not so different from a game of chess, only fists are moved instead of chess pieces, and in lieu of a board the game is played out on the human face, the human body. Man, shucked down to his basic materials, plays this dangerous game in the prize ring for million-dollar stakes.

  But for all the great fighters who have earned millions, or attracted millions of dollars to the box office, how many retired millionaires do we find? Gene Tunney. Maybe with luck Floyd Patterson. A precious favored few. From the other end of the pugilistic telescope we find thousands of boxing’s forgotten men. Some were champions like Beau Jack, a Horatio Alger hero in reverse—from eighteen-year-old shoeshine boy to forty-three-year-old shoeshine boy. Beyond the crown and the glory and the headlines and the all-time box-office record for Madison Square Garden, boxing’s Metropolitan Opera House, lay humiliation and poverty. If Beau Jack were an isolated case, you might say Tough Luck—but this is much more than tough luck. For thousands of fighters, good fighters, winners—in the ring—wind up losers in life. Beau Jack, Johnny Saxton, Billy Fox, Johnny Bratton—no use to call the whole sad roll. They are meaningless ciphers to those who don’t care for fi
ghts—and they are just as meaningless to those who know their names all too well but never gave a damn for their welfare or their future. Look at Benny Paret, the brave illiterate whom Emile Griffith killed in the ring for the welterweight championship. You can make a case for that death as a terrible accident. But try to make a case for the fortune that was stolen from Paret while he was shedding his blood for public amusement. Purses totaling $100,000 should have been coming to Benny during his twenty-fifth and last year on this earth. He should have amassed a small fortune. Like Beau Jack’s millions, where did it go? Beau Jack, back at a shoeshine stand, where he started, would like to know. Mrs. Paret, living in a Harlem tenement with her small sons, is penniless, bitter, bewildered. The Sonny Listons playing the big chips at the Vegas tables, and the Cassius Clays in their fire-engine-red Cadillacs, reach out eager hands for all our materialistic goodies. But for every Liston there’s an overmatched corpse like the late Ernie Knox, and for every Clay who flexes lovely muscles for his mirror and chortles in animal confidence, “I’m beeootiful,” there’s a basket case like the once-beautiful Lavorante, packed home to live out his vegetable years in Mendoza, Argentina, which, oddly, was the home I had chosen for my fictional, ruined giant, Toro Molina, in The Harder They Fall.