HE HADN’T TOLD the family he was coming. His mother shrieked on opening the front door to see him standing there with his arms open wide. They had not seen each other in more than three years, and she flung herself on him and wept. He returned John’s bear hug and back slaps and then was introduced to Rebeka, who proved even prettier than his mother had said. Julie Bug, now almost two years old, stole his heart at first sight. They talked and joked through supper, and afterward John showed him the scrapbook in which he’d pasted newspaper reports of his two matches with Joe Thomas. As word of his visit spread through town over the next few days, neighbors and other local well-wishers stopped by to introduce themselves and say how proud they were of him.
His mother could not stop beaming. He remarked that she seemed somehow younger than when he’d last seen her. She said it was the joy of seeing him again, and of Kaicel’s blessed disappearance from their lives. Perhaps so, but it was something more, too, as he perceived when they were joined for Sunday dinner by a well-tailored man whom his mother introduced as her dear friend Mr. Barzoomian. She herself addressed him as Rudy. He was reserved but polite, well spoken with a slight accent, impeccably barbered, his nails manicured. His single incompatible feature was a thin crinkled scar that curved from the hair above his ear to the tip of his moustache. He told Ketchel his people had come from Armenia. In addition to a store that sold the finest furniture in Grand Rapids, he owned a number of rental properties, including the offices of the legal firm that had handled his mother’s divorce, and which was where they had met. He was a childless widower and lived in an apartment above his store. Ketchel liked him, and soon felt comfortable enough to ask where he’d got that honey of a scar. A Turk, Barzoomian said, as though it explained everything.
Ketchel stayed for two weeks and grew nostalgic for the country of his boyhood. Even before he boarded the train back to California, he had already determined to buy himself a homestead not far from his mother’s.
HIS THIRD FIGHT against Joe Thomas was in mid-December. This one under electric lights in Recreation Park in San Francisco. It was another thriller. To add to the drama, most of the bout was in a thunderstorm that shorted out a measure of the electrical power and cast the ring in a sort of eerie twilight. Ketchel almost ended it in the first round when he dropped Thomas with a head-snapping left, but by the end of the round Thomas was trading him blow for blow. Despite being drenched the crowd stayed put. Squinting against the blowing rain, the fighters ripped at each other from round to round without another knockdown until the thirteenth, when Ketchel dropped Thomas again. And then again in the fifteenth. But then in the eighteenth Thomas connected with a left that sent Ketchel sprawling. He scrambled up and charged into Thomas and they clinched and stumbled and fell down in a cursing, splashing tangle. The referee added some cursing of his own as he warned the fighters against such barroom style. In the nineteenth round Ketchel dropped Thomas twice. And when the gong sounded at the end of the twentieth, he was pounding Thomas on the ropes and kept at it until the ref yelled in his ear that the fight was over. By then the rain was coming down so hard and the lighting was so poor that the announcer had to crawl into the ring to see which man’s hand the ref was holding up before he could announce Ketchel’s name to the spectators.
THE WAY JOE O’Connor saw it, because Hugo Kelly and Jack (Twin) Sullivan were both persisting in their claim to the middleweight championship after having fought each other to a draw, whoever beat either of them could rightly claim the title for himself. The sportswriters concurred. Since Kelly was already contracted to a match with Papke at the end of December, Ketchel challenged Sullivan.
Jack Sullivan, however, was not eager to get in the ring with Ketchel, not after what he had done to Joe Thomas. But Jack’s twin brother, Mike, who was the welterweight champ of California, was avid to fight Ketchel. He was absolutely sure he could beat him, because a fighter of finesse, which Mike Sullivan considered himself to be, could always outscore a slugger. Maybe Jack thought so, too, or maybe he was only stalling for time, but, whatever the case, he said he would fight Ketchel only if Ketchel could first beat brother Mike.
O’Connor sighed at the condition but agreed. Ketchel said, “What the hell, whatever it takes. Just line them up and let me at them.”
HE CELEBRATED THE arrival of 1908 with a pair of slim-hipped sisters named Ruby and Rose he met at a party in San Francisco. They claimed to be full-blood Arapaho Indians and they looked it, with sharp cheekbones and quick black eyes and raven hair that hung to their high round bottoms. Whatever their surname, he didn’t catch it and didn’t care. To him they were simply the Arapaho Sisters. He danced with both of them at the same time. The other people on the floor applauded their bohemian abandon and three-way grace.
As the midnight hour was greeted with fireworks and howls and bellowed song in the streets beyond the sisters’ apartment window, Ketchel and the girls, all three of them drunk and their faces streaked with war paint of lipstick and shoe polish, were nakedly abed and deciding on the next sexual configuration they might compose.
MIKE SULLIVAN ANNOUNCED to the assembly at the morning weigh-in that he was going to give young Ketchel a major boxing lesson. Like his twin brother Jack, Mike was bald on the crown but had thick dark hair on the back and sides of his head. Ketchel stared at the bald spot and snickered. Sullivan asked him what was funny, but Ketchel only shook his head.
“Loss for words, eh, boy?” Mike Sullivan said. He winked at the reporters. “I suppose the lad’s gone simple. A few too many to the head, eh? Damned shame in one so young.”
Four hours later the bell rang to begin the bout and Mike Sullivan strolled out of his corner as casually as if he were about to ask Ketchel for a light. They touched gloves and Sullivan jabbed Ketchel twice and threw a right that missed and Ketchel countered with a hook to the belly they heard in the back rows of the arena. Mike Sullivan doubled over like he’d been gored, his hands at his midsection and his mouthpiece falling from his mouth in a string of saliva. Ketchel punched him in the jaw like he was throwing a sidearm fastball. A tooth shot from Sullivan’s mouth in a streak of red spit and he spun with his legs in a twist and fell on his ear and lay unmoving but for a shuddering right heel as he was counted out.
Jack Sullivan was in his brother’s corner as chief second and brought him around with smelling salts. Mike’s eyes looked like fogged pink glass. “Jesus, Jackie,” he said, his breath whistling through the new gap in his teeth, “if I ever had a worse idea than to fight this fella I can’t remember what it was.”
Jack Sullivan patted him on the shoulder. “Oh hell, Mikey, you were out of your class fighting a middleweight, that’s all.” But his doleful aspect was owing chiefly to the thought that he had to fight Ketchel next.
As it turned out, Jack fared better than Mike, at least in the sense that he made a longer fight of it, lasting almost twenty rounds. It could also be argued, of course, that he fared worse, in the sense that the longer he lasted the more severely he was abused. After nineteen rounds Ketchel had knocked him down four times and Jack’s resemblance to his twin had turned vague. His nose was offset and bloody, his brows were puffed, his ears like raw beef. And yet he had for the most part succeeded in keeping his distance from Ketchel’s strongest punching range. As the last round got underway he thought he would at least be able to say he was on his feet at the final bell. He tried to stave Ketchel with the jab, tried to keep out of knockout range, but then the ring abruptly tipped backward and his next awareness was of Mike helping him up and back to his stool. In the opposite corner Ketchel was posing with ready fists for the photographers, then raising his hands high at the cheering that only now began to penetrate the persistent ringing in Jack Sullivan’s ears.
“He got you with a right,” Mike said. “Christ almighty, Jackie, it was about the fastest, hardest punch I ever seen.”
Hardly in the mood to share his brother’s admiration of Ketchel’s might, Jack Sullivan responded with th
e uncharitable observation: “I guess so, since you never saw the one he hit you with.”
In his dressing room Ketchel told reporters that as far as he was concerned he was now the middleweight champion, seeing how Hugo Kelly and Billy Papke had fought to a draw in December and Papke then defeated Kelly in a rematch in March.
But what about Papke, the newshounds wanted to know. Didn’t the Illinois Thunderbolt, as he called himself, have a claim to the title after beating Hugo Kelly?
Oh hell, no, Ketchel said. Papke hadn’t fought anybody but bums and has-beens. “But I know you fellas won’t be satisfied till I take care of that squarehead, so we got some news for you.” He turned to O’Connor. “Tell them, Joe.”
O’Connor announced that he and Papke’s manager had come to terms for a match between their fighters. In less than a month, the sixth of June, to be exact, they would meet in a ten-rounder at the Hippodrome Arena in Milwaukee.
“We wanted twenty rounds but they would only go for ten,” O’Connor said. He gave a shrug of theatrical dimension. “Guess they’re afraid their man ain’t got the juice to keep up with Steve.”
A reporter asked Ketchel for his assessment of Papke, and Ketchel said he had never seen him fight. “I know he’s got a big mouth, always yakking about he’s the best there is and so on. Mouth that big will make a good target. Say, I hear he fights with no pants on, is that true?”
Several reporters affirmed it was, that Papke wore only a jockstrap in the ring.
“Ignorant squarehead probably can’t figure out how to put on a pair of trunks,” Ketchel said.
When his remark was conveyed to Papke at his training camp in Chicago, he wanted to know where the Polack got the nerve to call anybody else ignorant. “I hear he wears cowboy boots. I bet it’s because he’s too goddamn stupid to tie a shoelace.”
By the time they met at the weigh-in for the first of four fights they would have against each other in the span of only thirteen months, there was a sizable enmity between them, these two young men whose mercurial natures were remarkably similar. Who had been born within the same week. Who had both grown up in the Midwest and known harsh circumstance. Who would both come to tragic ends.
The Illinois Thunderbolt
They each tipped the scale at 154, then took questions from reporters. One of them asked Papke why he didn’t wear shorts in the ring.
“Because I move around better without them,” Papke said. “Sure hope it don’t make any of you boys blush.”
Ketchel said the problem with Papke not wearing shorts was that his ass and his face looked so much alike you’d have to see if his toes were pointing up or down in order to know if he was on his back or his belly while he was getting counted out.
Only Papke and his crew did not laugh. Papke said he had thought about wearing shorts for this fight but wanted to make it easier for Ketchel to kiss his ass.
Ketchel put a hand to his ear and said, “How’s that, mein Herr? To kick your ass? Much obliged.”
At match time the Hippodrome was standing room only. The odds favored Ketchel, eight to ten, but most of the Milwaukee crowd was pulling for Papke. He had beaten Hugo Kelly in this arena three months earlier, and as an Illinoisan he was practically a local boy. As the ref gave them his instructions, Papke glowered and Ketchel grinned.
At the bell’s first clang they hustled out to the center of the ring and Papke reached out his right hand to touch gloves, and all in one smooth move Ketchel tapped Papke’s glove with his left hand and hit him with a right cross to the forehead that sat him down hard in an explosive uproar from the crowd. Papke was up at the count of three in a cursing rage and they pounded at each other without pause for the full duration of the round. It was that kind of fight all the way. By the start of the fifth, Ketchel had knocked him down for a second time and both of Papke’s eyes were cut. But the Thunderbolt was as tough as his reputation held and in the fifth he connected with a roundhouse that dropped Ketchel to one knee for a seven count. In the sixth Ketchel had Papke’s hair jumping with head punches and almost drove him through the ropes at the end of the round. In the seventh he trapped him in a corner and knocked him down again. But Papke rebounded in the eighth, scoring with several jarring combinations. In the last fifteen seconds of the ninth Ketchel loosed a demonic flurry that drove Papke across the ring and nearly dropped him, but Papke hunkered against the ropes with his arms helmeting his head and lasted the round. They fought in a frenzy through the tenth and were still trading blows like berserkers when the final gong sounded. They ignored the bell and kept on swinging and the ref pushed between them and caught a punch in the face and went down. Then the seconds were pulling the fighters apart amid vehement cursing and brandished fists and the cops clambered into the ring just in time to prevent a donnybrook. The referee was helped up and took a moment to regain his senses and feel of his bruised cheek, then raised Ketchel’s hand.
None of the sportswriters in attendance disagreed with the decision or that Stanley Ketchel was now the undisputed middleweight champion of the world.
Papke’s manager, Tom Jones, went to Ketchel’s dressing room and shoved past the reporters to congratulate him and then ask for a rematch. A twenty-rounder next time.
“This is the same mug who wanted no more than ten rounds this time,” Ketchel said to the hacks, and the reporters laughed and scribbled in their notebooks.
Jones said maybe Ketchel was scared of going a long one against Billy.
Ketchel said he’d love to go twenty rounds with him. He’d love it if they got back in the ring right that minute and fought to the finish so there’d be no chance at all of Papke being saved from a knockout. “A dummkopf like him, his head’s solid rock. It takes a little time to make gravel out of it.”
The reporters scribbled faster.
“Illinois Thunderbolt,” Ketchel said. “Illinois Beer Fart’s more like it.”
The reporters guffawed.
It had been a lucrative fight, however, and both parties knew a rematch would rake in even higher profits. Within a month they would come to terms for a twenty-five-rounder in Los Angeles in September.
MILWAUKEE BEING SO close to home, he had promised his mother he would pay her a visit before returning west. The morning after the fight, he took a ferry across the lake. John met him at the dock with a wagon, and though he’d already learned the outcome of the match, he couldn’t get enough of hearing about it. He made Ketchel recount it in every detail.
Barzoomian was visiting at the farm too, and that evening after supper he told Ketchel he had asked Julia to be his wife and she had accepted. They had not yet announced their engagement, however, because they wished first to receive his blessing. “I wanted to ask you man to man,” Barzoomian said.
Ketchel was impressed with the man’s gallantry and pleased by his formal recognition of him as head of the family. He gave the Armenian an affectionate tap on the arm and said of course they had his blessing. Then whirled his happily crying mother all around the room. They promised to let him know as soon as they had set a date.
WHEN HE RETURNED to California he bought a motorcar, a costly Locomobile of ninety horsepower, touted by its manufacturer as “the best built car in America.” It was also one of the fastest. He loved its name and repeatedly joked that it meant “crazy car” in Spanish and was so called because it was made by lunatic engineers in a Mexican madhouse.
He was still in a mood to celebrate and thought it would be great fun to do it in the company of the Arapaho Sisters. His cap pulled low and tight, his duster buttoned to the neck and his eyes bright behind his goggles, he drove up to San Francisco with both the top and the windscreen down, rocking over the dirt road and raising rooster tails of dust behind him.
He stored the car in a livery just off Market Street and started off on foot for the girls’ apartment a few blocks away. As he was waiting to cross a busy intersection, a streetcar went clanging past and he glanced up at it just as a young blonde woman in a
window seat turned and looked out at him. She was hatless, her hair in a loose braid over her shoulder, and of only standard prettiness, but her smile seized his breath. The moment was made electric by the guileless cast of that smile and the frank attraction in her stare. Then the trolley was around the corner and out of sight. Not until the traffic policeman finally gave Ketchel’s side of the street the signal to cross did it occur to him to try to catch up to the car, board it, and introduce himself. Too late for that. When he dashed around to the next block, jostling other pedestrians and begging pardons, he saw that the street was acrawl with trolleys and who could say which one she was aboard or even if she were still on it? He caught sight of his reflection in a store window and thought, Well now, ain’t you a silly son of a bitch? But his skewed smile was no match for his rue. For the rest of his life he would have sporadic dreams of this girl he’d glimpsed but for a moment.
THE ARAPAHO GIRLS were excited to see him and happily broke the news of their engagement to a pair of rich brothers, owners of a merchant shipping line. The double wedding would take place the following month.
He tried not to show his disappointment, thinking it wasn’t his day. He congratulated them on their good fortune and said their fiancés were a couple of lucky stiffs.
“Yeah they are,” the Ruby one said. She exchanged a look with her sister, and then said: “But you know what? The lucky stiffs are in Boston on business.”
The Killings of Stanley Ketchel Page 10
