My View from the Corner
Page 4
Somewhere along the way he had followed the lead of our oldest brother Joe, who had been a fighter, and turned his talents to training and conditioning fighters. Working with one of the great trainers of the time, Al Lippe, Chris was in the corners of such great Philly fighters as Tommy Loughran and Benny Bass. By the age of twenty-one he had become a manager, guiding Midget Wolgast to the flyweight title and Ken Overlin to the middleweight title. By the time I came aboard, he had gone from Philly to Norfolk and then to New York and had a stable of fourteen fighters, most notably Jackie Cranford, a heavyweight; Georgie Abrams, a middleweight; and Tommy Bell, a welterweight.
Now there were times Chris's left hand didn't know what his right hand was doing. He always seemed to have twenty-eight balls in the air, two of which were his own, and he ran as if he was afraid of dropping the wrong two. It was not unusual to find him working every night of the week. Contemporaries tell of the time he had Eddie Dunne boxing Steve Belloise up at the White Plains County Center and Georgie Abrams facing Ernie Vigh over at the Bronx Coliseum on the same night. How he did it, nobody ever knew, but Chris showed up in both fighters' corners although the arenas were miles apart.
I knew, with all the work Chris did and all the work there was to do, working in Room 711 at the Capitol Hotel would be an exciting and exhausting time. And I dove into it.
Evenings, if all my work was finished, belonged to me. Time to experience that all-new world called New York. No, not the world I could see from the windows of Room 711, but the world surrounding the Capitol Hotel, a world that extended from about Forty-sixth Street up to Fifty-first, along Eighth and Ninth Avenues and over to Broadway, encompassing Madison Square Garden, Stillman's Gym, coffee shops, eateries, bars, and anything a young man in search of New York life could ever need or want. There one could find Jack Dempsey's Restaurant over on Broadway between Forty-ninth and Fiftieth or The Neutral Corner or Ringside Bar over on Eighth, or the Garden Cafeteria just across the street from the hotel, or any number of inexpensive Chinese restaurants over on Ninth. There may have been other worlds out there, like the so-called Great White Way, with its playhouses over on Forty-second featuring shows like Annie Get Your Gun, but the world I would come to know and love was this one, the world Budd Schulberg called "show business with blood," a little twenty-block radius on the island of Manhattan, the world of boxing.
New York could be a terrifying, unforgiving city for some, but to me it was an adventure. Sure, I was a streetwise kid from the streets of South Philly, but any comparison with the streets of New York begins and ends right there. New York could be, as one of the songwriters of the day, Lorenz Hart, called it, "a wondrous toy." And for me it was. Even on seventy-five dollars a week.
I'd wander around, sometimes over to Jack Dempsey's Restaurant, which advertised "Come in, Fellows, here's where you'll meet the writers, the managers, the fighters. Mingle with those you know and who know you," and mingle I did with fight people who knew me as "Chris's kid brother," which was an open sesame. Other times I'd go over to Toots Shor's gin joint just off Sixth Avenue, hoping to find someone who might stake "Chris's kid brother" to a drink or dinner. (There was a time, however, when publicist Irving Rudd invited me to go with him to Toots's and stuck me with the bill.) And then there were times when trainer Charlie Goldman and I would go round to all the cheap joints on Ninth Avenue, especially the inexpensive Chinese restaurants, which suited me just fine, they being Charlie's favorites and I having scratch dinero—nada, nothing, zilch.
One day I would be chatting with legendary trainer Ray Arcel while waiting for Chris's early-morning eye-opening coffee over at The Garden Cafeteria. Another day I'd be standing next to trainer Chickie Ferrara at the back of Stillman's Gym watching the action, or sitting at a table over at The Neutral Corner, just down the block from Stillman's on the southwest corner of Fifty-fifth and Eighth, in the company of some of the greatest trainers of all time. And everywhere I went I was given special entry into the trainers' small fraternity as "Chris's kid brother."
It was at the Neutral, as its regulars called it and where they would gather between 3:00 and 5:00 every afternoon—locked out of Stillman's for two hours because training sessions at the gym were held from noon to 3:00 and 5:00 or 5:30 to 7:00 to accommodate those fighters who held daytime jobs—or at The Garden Cafeteria earlier in the morning, where I was privy to some of the greatest stories of all time, told by some of boxing's greatest storytellers. As they sat at the Neutral sipping their ten-cent beers and chewing on their ten-day-old cigars or at The Garden Cafeteria nursing their coffees, they talked and talked and talked, holding nothing back, their experiences, their advice, and their tall tales all told in a gleeful mangling of the English language with tortured syntax and marvelously invented words—like calling a particularly gangly fighter a "noctopus," or the opposite number in a fight a "nopponent," or their ring "stragedy." Depending upon those in attendance, it matched anything the fabled Algonquin Round Table had to offer with the likes of Ray Arcel, Charlie Goldman, Freddie Brown, Whitey Bimstein, Bill Gore, and others, the Mt. Rushmore of trainers, all swapping stories. I would gladly have paid for the privilege of sitting in their company. That is, if I had anything to pay with.
With boxing going on every night of the week—except God's and boxing's day of rest, Sunday—at New York–area arenas like Eastern Parkway, Sunnyside, St. Nick's, the Garden, Ridgewood Grove, etc., and others out of town or in such "faraway" places as White Plains, almost every conversation around the trainers' table invariably began with a "How'd ya make out last night?" There always seemed to be work for them, whether it was the "fair money" worked for in fights "on top" of the card, or "hard" or "short" or "small" money for fights on the undercard or "underneath," many working four-round fights in the hopes of finding the next big thing.
After a short answer to how "we" or "I" did the previous night or nights—most fighters not even being mentioned in trainerspeak—the talk soon turned to tales brimming with nostalgia, the trainers arranging their stories and memories in a thousand different ways. It mattered not what really happened in their stories—that was beside the point. It was how they told the stories, their half-told or unfinished tales proof of their teller's authenticity.
Memory being what it is, by the third time I had heard the same story I thought I was there. As best I can remember some of them, they usually started with the obligatory out-of-town horror story, Whitey Bimstein or someone complaining about fights where, if his warrior was beating the bejabbers out of the local kid, the rounds were strangely shorter, and vice versa if the local boy was pummeling his kid.
The stories would than veer off, sometimes to past stories, now growing gray with time, other times to new ones that had just been relayed to one of those at the table and were now being recycled for the benefit of the rest of us. One I remember was about Jack Dempsey's Restaurant, where at one time he had hired the man he had defeated, Jess Willard, as a bar-keep. As the story went, Jack was pushing his "Jack Dempsey Special Label, the Whiskey with a Punch." However, Willard refused to serve it, saying when someone ordered it, "That junk?" Soon thereafter, Jack and Jess parted company.
Another trainer, I think it was Whitey, told the story of welterweight Tony Janiro who, after winning an eight-round bout on the Rocky Graziano–Billy Arnold card, passed by the seat of Harry Truman, then the vice president of the United States. After a handshake, a few photo ops, and a "Nice to meetcha," Janiro continued on his way back to the dressing room unaware who it was he had just "meetcha'd." There his proud manager asked him how it felt to shake hands with the vice president. The duly impressed Janiro incredulously asked, "You mean that man is the vice president of Madison Square Garden?" "Naw, ya dope," replied his manager, "he's the vice president of the United States." "Gee," said the open-mouthed Janiro, "I didn't know that."
And no matter where the discussion went, it always came back to stories about Madison Square Garden. About the assortment of wiseacres who
sat somewhere up in the first tier, midway between Eighth and Ninth Avenue on the Forty-ninth Street side of the house, hollering, "Ya got the wind wit' ya ... now throw a punch" or "Waltz him around again, Willie" in slow fights or shouting incitements to murder for their favorite, as in "Moider da bum" or somesuch, many insensitive to the goings-on. But the stories I remember most were those of the fighters and the ring announcer, Harry Balough, a small, foppish man in a tuxedo and slicked-down, brilliantined hair who invested everything he said with a verbal flourish, as when he introduced the fighters and then added, "May the better participant's hand be extended in the token of victory." Another at the table would chime in with the tale of the time, during a bond-drive fight during the war, when a bevy of pretty girls passed among the fans with collection cans, Balough announced, with his usual pomposity, "Ladies and gentlemen, several beautiful volunteers will be going through the crowd tonight shaking their little cans collecting for Navy Relief.... So give till it hurts." And then there was time Balough announced the fact that "Gladys Goodding will now play 'The Star-Spangled Banner,'" and with that a voice from the upper reaches of the balcony could be heard to holler, "Gladys Goodding sucks!" Unfazed, Balough grabbed the microphone again and, with an importance that matched the moment, intoned, "Nevertheless, Miss Goodding will still play the national anthem for you."
But as entertaining as the stories were, it was the experiences of each that made the greatest impact on my still impressionable mind—like those of little Charlie Goldman, one of the most lovable of men, who stood only about five feet one with a derby resting atop his head and a chewed cigar clenched in his mouth. Charlie had befriended me almost from the moment I came to New York—probably something about two short men feeling taller when they hang out with other men their size. But whatever the reason, he took me under his wing and introduced me to several things, not the least important of which were the cheap joints over on Ninth Avenue, which suited me just fine, what with barely two nickels to rub together to my name. Charlie also introduced me to his many "nieces," those lovely young things hanging on his arm, although Charlie had no actual nieces I knew of. But one of the most memorable introductions was one Charlie made on the day he said, "Ang, I want you to see this guy. Not too tall, slightly balding, stiff shoulders, two left feet, and he throws punches from his behind. But, oh, how he can punch." And so it was that Charlie, who always believed that finding a prospect was like "putting a quarter in one pocket and taking a dollar out of the other," took me down to the Twenty-third Street CYO where he had kept this prospect under wraps lest anyone should see him—less because they might steal him out from under Charlie's nose than because they might disparage him to his face. The description was perfect; the boxer he had been describing was a young Rocky Marciano. As I walked into the CYO gym, Charlie was having him do an exercise where he bent his knees completely down, almost touching the floor with his butt, and then came up punching. And this boxer called Rocky would do it and end up with a left hook or a right hand every time. There were tales told that Charlie taught his young protégé balance in the swimming pool or by tying his shoelaces together. I think that was pure bull. But he did sculpt Rocky, changing almost everything but his dynamite right hand, which Charlie called his "Suzi-Q." And, in the process, he was to make Rocky Marciano into one of the greatest fighters of all time.
How could you not love it? Here I was in New York making friends with everyone, from the table waiters at the local restaurants to the fabled trainers. Listening and learning, I was, as the old saying goes, "as happy as a pig in slop."
The center of the boxing world was not, as one would have thought, Madison Square Garden. Instead it was a walk-up gym at 919 Eighth Avenue called Stillman's Gym—or as imaginative writers would have it, "the Mecca of Mayhem," "the Emporium of Sock," or, in the immortal words of A. J. Liebling, "the University of Eighth Avenue."
The gym was run by a crusty, acid-tongued tyrant named Lou Stillman, whose given name was no more Stillman than mine was Dundee, having been named for the gym rather than the other way around. As the story goes, right after World War I two millionaires, wanting to do something to combat juvenile delinquency and give convicted men a chance to put their lives back together, established the Marshall Stillman Movement, named after a dear departed relative. They then sponsored a gym in Harlem as an alternative place for these men to spend time, the gym being named the Marshall Stillman Athletic Club for lack of a better name. Their first step was to hire someone to run the gym that carried their family's name, and the man they hired was thirty-two-year-old Lou Ingber. But almost from the start the inhabitants of the Marshall Stillman A.C. began calling Ingber "Mr. Stillman," and, tired of correcting each and every one of them, Ingber found it easier to change his name.
By the late 1920s the Marshall Stillman Movement and the Marshall Stillman A.C. had gone their separate ways, the movement having decided to get out of the boxing business. And so the A.C. became Stillman's Gym, which was only fair because everyone called it that anyway.
By the time I came to New York the gym, having by now moved from Harlem to Eighth Avenue near the old Madison Square Garden, occupied the top two floors of a three-story building between Fifty-fourth and Fifty-fifth Streets, on the west side of Eighth. The entrance was directly under a sign reading: "World's Leading Boxers Train Here Daily." And in smaller letters, "Boxing Instruction—See Jack Curley." Climbing up a long flight of dark stairs, those seeking admission came upon the gatekeeper of the gym, one Jack Curley, who, with no-nonsense eyes, admitted them into the mother lode of boxing once they plunked a half-dollar into his outstretched palm. Or, if he recognized them as a member of the boxing fraternity, he let them in on sight. It was said that Curley "wouldn't let Jesus Christ in without paying fifty cents" if He wasn't a member of the fraternity.
The gym itself was a sight for sore eyes, possessing all the charm of an unmade bed, which it resembled. It was decorated, if that's the proper word, in early floor-to-ceiling grime, the windows a monument to dirt and grit, never opened and so caked with layer upon layer of filth that even the pigeons had given up trying to look in. And the floor was encrusted with spit, much of it coming from Lou Stillman himself despite the sign hanging over his desk reading "No Spitting." Then there were the smells, the redolent odor—one part sweat, one part liniment, and two parts old jockstraps. To me, they were the most wonderful sights and smells in the world.
An unapologetic Stillman took pride in his gym's appearance, saying, "The golden age of prizefighting was the age of bad food, bad air, bad sanitation, and no sunlight. I keep the place like this for the fighters' own good. If I cleaned it up, they'd catch a cold from the cleanliness." A fight manager once asked Stillman to open the windows, it being at least 90 degrees outside and hotter than hell in. "Look," Stillman hollered at him in his normal dictatorial manner, "don't tell me the place needs air. Take your fighter and get the hell outta here!"
One story had it that Stillman had once cleaned up his gym, even going so far as to remove the dirt and grime caking the walls and painting them. But the fighters, showing their attachment to the old-shoe familiarity of what they considered their second home, preferred it as it was, the filthier and smellier the better. And so it remained, even though Stillman gave a wink to cleanliness by posting a sign that read: "Wash your clothes, by Order of the Athletic Commission," which few fighters did, many even wearing them, including their jockstraps, after their workouts.
A few boxers had escaped to open-air training camps—like Madame Bey's or Dr. Bier's—but most had returned, preferring the stuffy confines and stale air of Stillman's. One who did was former featherweight champ Johnny Dundee, who said, "Us guys been brought up in da slums. From de time we wuz little punks we didn't know what fresh air was. Why that stuff is liable to kill us." Another who had trained outdoors and returned, Tami Mauriello, complained that "the boids singin' drives ya nuts ... there's nothin' to do at night but listen to da lousy crickets."
At the sound of the three-minute bell the participants in the two rings began their workouts, their trainers leaning over the ropes or standing down the stairs below the ring watching. Also watching, or not watching as the case may be, was a gallery of members in good sitting—managers, matchmakers, publicity men, and plain old paying customers, some there to soak up the atmosphere and others just to pass the time of day with newspapers draped over their faces.
And, oh, the characters. One of them, "Sellout Moe" Fleischer, the promoter over at Ridgewood Grove, had his own way of dealing with those unschooled paying customers who got in his way, hitting them over the head with his shoe and saying to the poor souls, "Goddamn ceiling's falling down ... better move over, pal." And then there was Izzy Grove, better known as "Yussel," who had perfected the talent of spitting BBs through his teeth, unerringly at that, at unsuspecting targets who hadn't the foggiest notion of what it was that just stung them nor where it came from. He drove everyone nuts with those damned BBs.