The Killings of Stanley Ketchel

by James Carlos Blake

  “Scared of me? What…what’re you talking about?”

  “That gun…I had no idea…And you just…oh, God.”

  “Hey now, darling, it was a damn good thing I had it. Come on, sweetheart, open up.”

  She said nothing more nor undid the lock. He asked her to let him in so they could discuss it in private. “I can explain,” he said, although he did not see what there was to explain.

  He was smacking the door with his palm, beginning to lose his patience and entertaining thoughts of shouldering his way in, when a boisterous quartet of drunks came up the stairway. They grinned at the sight of him leaning on the door, and as they passed by him one said, “Good luck, chum. I been in that doghouse a time or two meself.”

  Ketchel was the only one who didn’t laugh. He watched them go reeling down the hall and had an impulse to run after them and knock them all on their asses. Then pictured himself as they saw him and felt like a dope.

  The hell with this, he thought, and repaired to the hotel bar downstairs.

  He woke to a gentle shaking of his shoulder by the early-shift bartender. He was seated with his painful head on his arms at a table next to a window glaring with morning light. He went up to the room and found she had packed her clothes and gone. She left a note saying she was taking an earlier train back to Butte and asked that he please not seek her out.

  HE DID SEEK her out, of course. First at the café, where she disappeared into the back room when she saw him come in, and later at her house, where she stood behind her locked front door and said that if he did not leave her alone she would ask the police to intervene. The mention of police did the trick. It obliged him to consider the chilly prospect of discussing with them the cause of her estrangement and the incident of New Year’s Eve. There was nothing for it but to let her be.

  He never returned to her house, did not again set foot in the Silver Hill Café. As far as he would ever know, she told no one in Butte, maybe told nobody anywhere, what happened to bring their brief association to an end.

  A little over three months later, all the news was of the apocalyptic quake and fire that razed San Francisco. When he saw in a newspaper photograph the smoldering remains of the very hotel where he and Molly had stayed during their visit, he could not help but feel that he was looking at the wreckage of more than a building.

  HIS MOTHER WROTE that the petition for divorce had been submitted. All she could do now was wait for it to make its slow way through the legal system and meanwhile hope to heaven that Kaicel did not show up before it was granted.

  Ketchel didn’t say so, but he was sure they had all seen the last of Thomas Kaicel. In a recent dream he’d seen himself fighting with him in a boxcar of a rumbling freight, throttling him, pitching his lifeless body into the passing night. Wherever Kaicel might be, Ketchel knew in his bones the man was dead. And had a strong sense that he had died badly.

  HE APPLIED HIMSELF with renewed zeal to achieving greater proficiency at his trade, and by autumn had won another seven matches, all of them against opponents larger than himself. He had now won thirty-five fights and every one by knockout. His only losses remained the two decisions to Reece Thompson. He was twenty years old and a solid 150 pounds, and there was no worthy opponent in the region left for him to fight, not even among the heavyweights.

  But in those days before radio he remained unknown to the world beyond Montana. O’Connor and the Goat agreed that he was ready to climb the ladder. It was time to move to California, the center of big-time boxing. They agreed to make the move at the end of the year.

  Among the enduring topics of national interest at this time was the shooting murder of the famous architect Stanford White in New York City a few months before. The crime had occurred at the roof theater of the Madison Square Garden. The killer was Harry Kendall Thaw, a rich young man of dubious sanity whose motive was reported to be outrage over White’s “ruination” of a woman now Thaw’s wife, never mind that the alleged ruination had occurred five years earlier and that she had become Thaw’s wife only a year ago.

  The woman in the scandalous triangle was Evelyn Nesbit. She was twenty-one years old on the occasion of the killing. She had been a showgirl, a model for photographers, for painters and illustrators. Even before the infamous crime, her face if not her name had been renowned as the subject of Charles Dana Gibson’s immensely popular illustration, The Eternal Question, in which her exquisite profile was framed within a question mark shaped by the lush fall of her hair.

  Ketchel thought Evelyn Nesbit was as beautiful in the newspaper photographs as in Gibson’s drawing. He saw in her face an abused innocence that inflamed his imagination. As she was for countless other American males from blushing boys to palsied old men, she was the object of his most passionate sexual fantasies, and he readily understood why a man would kill for her. Sitting at supper in Montana, beholding a picture of her taken in New York and printed in a Denver newspaper, he was thickly heartsick with desire.

  SHORTLY BEFORE KETCHEL made his move to California with O’Connor and the Goat, middleweight champion Tommy Ryan announced his retirement. There was immediate and wide debate about who should be recognized as the division’s new champ. In point of fact, the matter had been in dispute since the year before, when Hugo Kelly of Chicago claimed the championship on the basis that Ryan refused to fight him. It was not much of an argument, in that Ryan had refused to fight anybody since 1904. Still, a number of sportswriters supported Kelly’s claim to the title. Others, however, insisted on Jack (Twin) Sullivan as the middleweight champ, and some argued for Joe Thomas, a hard hitter in San Francisco who had only recently turned pro and in his third fight kayoed the welterweight champ.

  “The division’s a hell of a mess,” Joe O’Connor said, tossing aside The Sporting News.

  “Don’t fret about it, boss,” the Goat said, “Stevie’s gonna sort it out all nice and clear for everybody, ain’t you, kid?”

  “Bet your ass,” Ketchel said. “I’ll whip them all. The sooner the better. Then we’ll go for Burns.”

  It was his first mention to them of an ambition he’d confided to no one but the late Kate Morgan. To be the heavyweight champion. Until recently that meant having to beat Jim Jeffries, which Ketchel hadn’t believed he could do till Kate persuaded him otherwise. But now Jeff had hung up his gloves, and the new champ was Tommy Burns. Tommy Burns, for Christ’s sake. A man no taller than Ketchel himself and but fifteen pounds heavier. Ketchel knew he could dismantle Tommy Burns, could make a red smear of him, he had not the slightest doubt of it. But he also knew he’d never get a match against him without first winning the middleweight title. A fight between champions would be too profitable for Burns to turn down.

  At the mention of Burns, Pete the Goat beamed and winked at Ketchel, but O’Connor was quick to invoke caution. “Whoa now, laddie,” he said, “let’s keep our shirts on. You’re a natural middle and the best of them, no question, and you’ll soon enough prove it. But the heavies…well…the heavies are another matter. Let’s don’t try to shoot down the moon, hey?”

  Ketchel was about to say “Why not?” but didn’t. It wasn’t something he was going to argue about. Not now nor when the time came.

  Under the Bear Flag

  They departed Butte on a frozen gray morning, and late the following afternoon arrived in sun-bright San Francisco. They set up their training camp in Colma, a mile or so south of the Frisco city limit, and they wasted no time issuing a challenge to Joe Thomas.

  Thomas was amenable to a match, but he was already contracted for two bouts. The earliest he could fight Ketchel was the Fourth of July. Ketchel chafed at the delay. He was afraid Thomas might lose one or both of the fights before their own. Only if he was the first to beat him would Ketchel be in prime contention for the title.

  Thomas wouldn’t lose either bout. The first would be a draw and the second would be scrubbed after his opponent broke a hand in a saloon fray three days before the fight.

&nb
sp; In the meantime, Ketchel kept busy. He trained diligently. He rose early six mornings a week to do roadwork. Then calisthenics and chopping wood. Then hitting the heavy bag, the speed bag. Sparring. He ate well and went to bed early and slept free of disturbing dreams. In the span of two months in spring he had his first three California fights and won them all by knockout.

  He and the Goat occasionally went into San Francisco for a vaudeville show and to view nickelodeons, to treat themselves to seafood. On his first visit to Frisco since he’d been there with Molly Yates, he was astounded by its degree of recovery from the smoky rubble in the newspaper pictures some nine months before. The resurrected city still showed dark scars and it had a much altered aspect, but its charm was indestructible. He grew to love all of central California, its splendid weather, its picturesque countryside. He thought the state flag beautiful and bought one and tacked it on the wall above his bed.

  HE HAD WRITTEN to his mother and told her of his move to California, and she had written back to say she was glad he’d left the wilderness, as she referred to Montana, but chided him for moving in the wrong direction and placing himself even farther from her. She saved the happy news for the end of the letter, where she told him the divorce decree had been granted. She wrote, “I feel so freeeeee!!!!” And added in a post script that she had very proudly changed her name to Ketchel. John had petitioned the court to do the same.

  MIDWAY INTO 1907 the question of who should rightly be recognized as middleweight champion was still unsettled. Within two months of retiring, Tommy Ryan changed his mind. But after boxing Hugo Kelly to a draw and then losing a decision to a featherweight opponent—a featherweight!—he clearly read the handwriting on the wall and again called it quits, this time for good. As for Kelly, following his draw with Ryan he fought a draw with Jack (Twin) Sullivan, and both he and Sullivan continued to lay claim to the title.

  To further complicate the matter, a young middleweight named Billy Papke was making a name for himself in Illinois. Since turning pro the year before, he had won all fourteen of his fights, ten of them by knockout. He fought in Peoria but often trained in Chicago, and hence had attracted much national attention. A number of sportswriters around the country thought he was destined to be the middleweight champion. He had been quoted as saying he could lick any middleweight in the world and would prove it just as quick as he was given the chance.

  THE FIGHT WITH Joe Thomas was in Marysville, some forty miles north of Sacramento and just below Yuba City. The day before the match, Ketchel, O’Connor, and the Goat took the train to Yuba and checked into a hotel. At dinner that evening they were waited on by a striking brunette, Sandra by name, who smiled at Ketchel’s jests and boldly returned his flirtations. By the end of the meal she had agreed to meet him for coffee at a café down the block when she got off duty.

  O’Connor and the Goat argued against the impromptu date, urging Ketchel to rest up for the next day’s fight. Ketchel told them not to fret, he was only going to have coffee with the girl and try to arrange a date with her for another time. He laughed and patted Joe on the shoulder. “Go on to bed, mother. I’ll be back before you’ve counted a hundred sheep.”

  O’Connor could have counted thousands of sheep before he next saw him, which wasn’t until after eight o’clock the next morning. Joe was sitting with his head in his hands, the Goat slumped in a chair and staring glumly at the wall, when Ketchel came through the door, saying, “God almighty, boys, what a night! She wrung me like a dishrag, I’m telling you!”

  He had lipstick smears on his face and was missing the collar of his shirt. He smelled of booze and sex and perfume.

  “Sweet Jesus, you’re boiled as an owl!” O’Connor said.

  “Nah,” Ketchel said. “I was boiled, but now I’m only about parboiled.” He cackled like a schoolboy sharing a joke.

  O’Connor berated him for a goddamned fool as they hustled out to the street and hired a cab. Pete the Goat slipped the driver an extra dollar and said they were in a hurry and the man snapped the reins on the team to move them into a lope.

  On the ride to Marysville the Goat wiped the lipstick off Ketchel’s face and neck with a spit-wet handkerchief like a mother tending an unkempt child. O’Connor spoke of trying to postpone the fight but Ketchel wouldn’t hear of it.

  “I’m fine, Joe,” he insisted. “I’ll take him apart.”

  They made it to Marysville in time for the weigh-in, four hours before the fight. Ketchel’s debauched night had robbed him of a few pounds and he tipped the scales at 146. Joe Thomas weighed in at an even 150. Thomas wore his hair thick and curly on his crown and razored to the skin several inches above his ears, a style he believed evocative of menace. His face looked made of pocked concrete. Like everyone else in the room except O’Connor and the Goat, he was amused by Ketchel’s disheveled appearance, his bloodshot eyes, the reek emanating from him, even more pronounced when he stripped for the scales.

  “Good Christ, man,” Thomas said, “you smell like you just come from Sadie’s whorehouse.”

  “I did,” Ketchel said. “Sadie said to give you her best and tell you she still ain’t found anybody to clean the chamber pots as good as you did.”

  The crack got a laugh from the sportswriters on hand, but Thomas wasn’t amused. “You’ll be laughing out the other side of your face when I’m done with you, farmboy.”

  Like Ketchel, Thomas had been a saloon bouncer before putting on the gloves, and right from the start their match was rough as a bar fight. They butted heads, used elbows at close quarters, beat at each other’s kidneys in the clinches, scraped at each other’s cuts with the laces of their gloves. The ref warned them twice and then said, “All right, you boys have it your way.” At the end of eighteen rounds Ketchel was tired and it showed as he slumped onto the stool to be swabbed and watered by the Goat. O’Connor continued to berate him for his dissipation of the night before. “It’s guys like you give Polacks the reputation for stupidity,” he said. Ketchel spat into the bucket and said, “Say now, I didn’t come here to be insulted.” The Goat completed the old vaudeville dialogue with, “Oh, where you usually go?” and they both laughed. O’Connor shook his head and muttered, “Clowns, I’m working with goddamn clowns.” Ketchel and Thomas knocked each other down five times in the course of the twenty rounds but were both on their feet at the final gong. The ref raised a hand of each man and declared a draw. The arena resounded with the chant of “Rematch! rematch!”

  Both boxers favored another fight as much as the fans, and the sooner the better. Within a week the contracts were signed for a Labor Day rematch at Sunny Jim Coffroth’s Mission Street Arena in Colma. They both preferred a fight to the finish but California law would not permit it. It did, however, allow for a match of forty-five rounds, virtually the same thing, since it was a rare occasion in which one boxer did not do in the other or quit from exhaustion before the forty-fifth round.

  Ketchel trained more assiduously than ever. During his free hours he comported himself like a monk. Thomas trained with equal discipline. The accounts of their previous match drew sportswriters from all over the country for this one, many of them eager for their first look at these two contenders for the middleweight title.

  The fight lasted more than two hours under a warm midafternoon sun, and for most of it they were slugging toe-to-toe. In the seventh round Thomas scored the first knockdowns, twice flooring Ketchel for a count of six. In the eleventh, he gashed Ketchel’s eyebrow with a headbutt. Ketchel returned the foul in the twelfth, and now both men’s faces were streaked with blood. The referee might as well have been warning a pair of pit dogs for all the heed they gave him. Ketchel went down again early in the fifteenth, but thirty seconds later unloosed a terrific flurry that sent Thomas’s mouthpiece lofting over the ropes and dropped him for a count of eight. After twenty-five rounds both of them were still hitting hard enough to spray sweat and blood off each other’s heads. In round thirty Ketchel would not remember getting kn
ocked down nor even the first six seconds of the ref ’s count, would recall nothing of the time between missing Thomas with a punch and then being on one knee and hearing the ref shout “Seven!” The brief loss of consciousness was like an absent portion of a spliced film in which everything in the picture is abruptly repositioned by the sudden forward jump in time. At “Nine!” he was up and swinging, and half-a-minute later drove Thomas through the ropes and into the laps of sportswriters who heaved him back up to the apron so he could re-enter the ring, his broken nose streaming blood. And now Thomas at last began to flag. At the gong for round thirty-two Ketchel almost ran across the ring to tear into him with an astounding ferocity for this late stage of the bout. Thomas went down three times and could not beat the count after the third.

  No reporter present had ever seen a rougher fight, and yet, despite the cuts over his eyes and a pair of fat lips, Ketchel seemed improbably fresh when the hacks were admitted to his dressing room. Thomas by contrast looked as if he’d been thrown off a cliff. He nevertheless wanted to fight Ketchel again. He was sure he could beat him in a twenty-rounder. He hoped Ketchel would be sport enough to give him a rematch. Sure thing, Ketchel said.

  The handful of sportswriters who had argued for Thomas as the middleweight champ now began calling for Ketchel’s recognition as king of the division. Asked if he considered himself the champ, Ketchel said, “That’s not for me to decide. All I’ll say is, I sure don’t think of anybody else as champ.”

  He celebrated for three days and nights with Sandra at her place in Yuba City. When he finally got back to the Colma camp he was nearly limping in cheerful exhaustion. He slept most of the next day, getting up only to eat or make use of the outhouse. The day after that he went into San Francisco and opened his first bank account. That second fight with Thomas was his biggest payday yet, and forever more he would always carry large sums of cash in his pockets. He bought some spiffy new suits and ties and several pairs of shoes. A week after the fight, he boarded a train for Michigan.