The Killings of Stanley Ketchel

by James Carlos Blake

  “Waaaay off in Boston,” the Rose one said.

  “Till late next week,” the Ruby one said.

  “So why the long face, baby?” the Rose one said.

  Their brightly mischievous grins incited his own.

  Their spree lasted five days. They played various games of their own invention, including Rape the Redskin and Turn the Snake Purple and Make the Paleface Prisoner Do It, the last of which entailed one of the girls holding Ketchel’s unloaded revolver to his head and threatening to shoot him if he didn’t strictly obey her sister’s demands regarding a variety of sexual pleasures, all of them contrary to conventional morality and several in violation of the California penal code.

  On the final night of their frolic, they drunkenly ventured into the foggy evening to replenish their whiskey supply and happened upon a tattoo parlor. The girls exhorted him to get one on his buttock. A red heart with an arrow through it, SQUAW inscribed directly above the arrow and LOVER just below it. The idea seemed perfectly swell to him at the time.

  He’d been back at the Colma camp for more than a week before Pete the Goat finally noticed the artwork one day when Ketchel came out of the shower. The Goat’s laughter drew O’Connor’s attention, and Joe caught a glimpse of the tattoo just before Ketchel yanked up his shorts.

  “Oh Christ, what was that?” O’Connor said.

  “I ain’t sure I want to hear about it,” the Goat said.

  “Good,” Ketchel said, “because neither of you mugs is going to.”

  They never did.

  HE HAD TWO fights before the rematch with Papke. The first in San Francisco against Hugo Kelly, who had been born in Italy and whose true name was Micheli. He now made his home in Chicago and thought the name Kelly more befitting to a Yankee pugilist. This was a time of vast European immigration, and Hugo was not the only boxer in the U. S. who’d been born with a surname ending in “-elli” or “-ski,” “-cek” or “-witz,” or any of a thousand other “foreign” names before switching to a moniker that sounded American, and by this point in the republic’s history an Irish name met the requirement. An excellent boxer, Kelly predicted he would take the title from Ketchel by means of superior style and finesse. His confidence was misplaced. In round three Ketchel knocked him so utterly insensible that one reporter wrote that you could almost see the stars twinkling over the supine Kelly’s head.

  The other fight was with Joe Thomas, their fourth and final match. In order to get it, Thomas had to let Ketchel have 75 percent of the purse, a dear price to pay for a public trouncing and humiliation. Through the first round Ketchel buffeted him from one end of the ring to the other, knocking him down four times. Thomas went to his corner as much forlorn as battered. His cornermen remonstrated with him to quit. He couldn’t. Not after only one round. Less than half a minute after the bell for round two the smelling salts were at his nose.

  For all the ease of his victory on this occasion, Ketchel’s first three fights with Thomas would remain among the most grueling of his career. To say they were tough on Thomas is to understate the matter. Ketchel had pummeled him into palookahood. Joe Thomas would fight fourteen times more and win only once.

  THE SECOND KETCHEL-PAPKE fight took place on Labor Day at Jim Jeffries’ Athletic Club in Los Angeles, and the great Jeffries himself served as the referee. He was in shirtsleeves and vest and wore a straw boater with a black band. In his four years of retirement he had been farming alfalfa and managing his boxing club. He had gained more than fifty pounds, most of it in a sizable paunch. Yet he remained an impressive specimen, the bulge and play of heavy muscles evident under his clothes, and he was as widely revered as ever. It was one of the thrills of Ketchel’s life to shake Jeffries’ hand when they were introduced at his club a few days prior to the fight. They’d had their picture taken together, Jeffries in a smartly tailored suit and his usual boater, Ketchel in a motorcar duster and a railroad engineer’s cap he had lately come to favor.

  On this Labor Day of perfect Southern California weather they were the subjects of cameras again, this time in the ring and in the company of Billy Papke. With Jeffries standing between them, Ketchel and Papke struck a pose of squaring off, Ketchel in baggy gray trunks, Papke in but a black jockstrap. As the cameras clattered around them Ketchel said he hoped Papke wouldn’t chafe his ass when he hit the canvas. Jeffries chuckled. Papke glowered and spat at Ketchel’s feet. Ketchel laughed.

  Then the picture-taking was done and Jeffries gave the fighters the usual admonishments against illegal punches, asked if there were any questions, and sent them to their opposite corners. Each man ground the soles of his shoes in the resin box in his corner to gain better purchase. They bounced on their toes and rolled their heads to loosen their neck muscles and regarded each other across the ring. The bookmakers favored Ketchel at three to one.

  At the gong, Ketchel trotted to mid-ring and put out his right hand for the shake. Without giving the extended hand a glance Papke walloped him on the jaw, catching him flatfooted. Ketchel felt himself falling, felt the back of his head strike the canvas under the sudden blue sky. Addled and only vaguely aware of the riotous outcry, driven by instinctive imperative to get up fast and by alarm that he might be too slow about it, he scrambled up before Jeffries had even begun the count. And stood directly into a Papke overhand that dropped him back down. And once more got up too quickly and was knocked down again. Now feeling as if he were deep under water, his limbs encumbered with heavy clothes. But up at the count of eight and driven against the ropes, feeling his head jarring but stunned beyond pain. And then sitting on the canvas and slumped on the bottom rope, faintly hearing Jeffries’ count through the mad din, seeing his chest streaked red and not comprehending it as blood from his broken nose. His mouth tasted of rust. Up at nine and his head instantly jolting. Then down again. The arena rolling halfway over and then slowly righting itself like a ship in a bad sea. He pushed up onto a hand and knee like a sickly runner at his mark, saw the Goat and O’Connor in momentary focus at the corner apron, eyes huge and mouths moving, but could not hear them. Jeffries bellowed “Eight!” into his ear and he rose at nine into another onslaught and went tumbling still again. Of all the shocks of that opening round, none surpassed the fact that he got through it. O’Connor and the Goat helped him to his stool and the Goat set grimly to stemming the blood. “Oh Jesus,” O’Connor said. “That lowdown son of a bitch. Oh Christ.” Some of the ringside reporters already composing their diatribes against Papke’s treacherous gambit and never mind that there was no official rule about shaking hands. A flagrant violation of sportsmanship if not of the regulations. Other of the hacks would remind readers of Ketchel’s batting aside Papke’s hand at the beginning of their first match. The minute of rest between rounds was woefully insufficient to unstun Ketchel’s reflexes. His eyes so mauled by the end of the fifth round Jeffries had to steer him to the corner. The Goat lanced the bloated lids to restore a degree of red-hazed vision. Ketchel reeling through the rounds, missing punches by a foot. Clinching as much to keep from falling as to keep from being knocked down. At the end of the tenth Jeffries said at his ear it’d be no disgrace to toss the towel. “Go to hell,” Ketchel said. It remains one of boxing’s great stories of endurance that he lasted as long as he did. By the twelfth round there was argument among the ringsiders about the exact number of times he’d gone down, and early in the round he was floored again. Papke glared down at him like he wanted to kick him, wanted to grab up a stool and club him with it. Ketchel up at nine, swaying, nearly blind. Papke snarled and hit him as if trying to drive his fist through a wall. Ketchel was on all fours, bloody snot and spit webbing from his face, struggling to rise, when Jeffries counted ten.

  In the dressing room forty-five minutes later Ketchel’s disfigured eyes were concealed behind dark glasses, but the raw distended cheeks and gross purple lips and lumpy swollen ears were in full evidence to the assembled reporters. When one of them asked about Papke’s “sneak punch” at th
e start of the fight, he said he wouldn’t call it that. “I should’ve been ready.” His nose so clotted with blood his voice seemed to come from a well.

  Did he want another go at the Thunderbolt? Of course he did. Sooner the better. Joe O’Connor would be in contact with Tom Jones, Papke’s manager, every day from now until the rematch was a deal.

  “He needed twelve rounds to finish a blind man,” Ketchel said, his voice so low the reporters at the back of the pack had to ask those in front what he’d said.

  Papke of course crowed. He told the reporters he’d always known he was the better man and he guessed everybody else now knew it, too. He bristled at the mention of a sneak punch. “There wasn’t nothing sneak about it. If that bohunk’s saying so, he’s a damn crybaby. When the bell rings, the fight’s on and you better guard your ass. You seen how he did last time when I went to shake his hand. Ain’t my fault he wasn’t set. Wouldn’ta mattered if he was. He was lucky in the first fight and I proved it.”

  Would he give Ketchel a rematch? Before Papke could answer, Tom Jones said sure they would, but Ketchel would have to wait his turn, just like he made Billy wait after the first fight. “I told Hugo Kelly we’d give him first crack after Billy won the title.”

  But shortly thereafter the deal to fight Kelly foundered, and Papke agreed to a third match with Ketchel, on Thanksgiving Day in Colma.

  “YOU’LL KILL THE kraut next time,” his brother, John, told him in a letter. “They’ll need a mop and pail to collect him for the morgue.”

  His mother expressed equal certainty, albeit in less graphic terms, that he would regain the championship. She did not tell him she prayed daily that he would give up boxing and take up a less anguishing trade. Nor that, although John had hidden from her all photographs of this fight, she sensed he had been badly hurt, sensed it as a mother can, and had cried for him in the privacy of her bedroom.

  The crux of her letter was to inform him that she and Rudy had decided they preferred a quiet civil ceremony rather than a church wedding with friends and family in attendance, and so had eloped. They had been married four days at the time she wrote the letter. She hoped he would not be cross with her for not telling him until after the fact, but neither had they told anyone else. John and Rebeka had been vexed when they found out, but had since forgiven her and joined in her happiness. She wanted him to know, too, that she had asked to retain the Ketchel name and Rudy had no objections. They planned to buy a house in Grand Rapids. John and his family would remain on the farm. She enclosed a small photograph of herself and Barzoomian on their wedding day, and one of Julie Bug playing with a handsome gray kitten she had named Stanley in honor of her uncle.

  Ketchel wired his best wishes.

  And prepared for Papke.

  THE ELEVEN WEEKS and three days between their second fight and their third was the longest wait of his life. He did not leave the camp property during those three months. His cuts and bruises healed with their usual uncanny quickness, and he trained like a Spartan every day except Sunday, when the Goat limited him to calisthenics and shadowboxing. After supper he would play a few hands of nickel-ante poker with his crew and read the newspapers before going to bed at eight o’clock sharp. He read of Henry Ford’s new motorcar called the Model T and its ingenious assembly-line method of production, read of Orville Wright’s airplane accident in Virginia that injured Wright and killed his passenger, the first recorded air crash fatality. He read about William Howard Taft’s election over William Jennings Bryan to become the twenty-seventh president of the United States and was sorry his revered Teddy had chosen not to run. He was astounded to learn that Taft weighed over three hundred pounds, and thought it funny when he heard somebody call him the Great White Whale of the White House.

  He was at his roadwork before sunrise. After breakfast he made a rattling blur of the light bag for thirty minutes, then beat the heavy bag for an hour. He threw boulders. He climbed trees. He napped in the afternoons with a brine-soaked towel on his face to toughen the skin, and, because Pete the Goat said John L. himself had done it to harden his knuckles, with his hands hanging down either side of the narrow cot into buckets of horse piss. “Just don’t get them mixed up,” he told Pete.

  During those long eleven weeks he did not permit himself even a glass of beer, a single puff of a cigar. He shuttered his mind against so much as a passing fancy about women. In the last two weeks before the bout, he berated his sparring partners for not applying pressure on him, then flattened them when they did, sometimes knocking them out despite the oversized training gloves he wore. Neither O’Connor nor the Goat made an effort to restrain him. He was honing a fine fury and they would do nothing to distract him from it. Onlookers were in awe of his single-mindedness.

  When a reporter told him of the devastation Ketchel was wreaking on sparring partners, Billy Papke sneered. “Christ, anybody can kayo the guy he spars with. He’s just putting on a cheap show for you guys.”

  THEY FOUGHT FOR the third time in less than six months on a cool and bright Thanksgiving Day. Papke was the bookies’ pick at four to five, but Colma was Ketchel’s home ground and he stood in heavy favor with the crowd. Ketchel in his customary black trunks posed for the prefight pictures in his usual stance, bent slightly forward with his left arm extended and his right hand drawn back and ready. Papke wore a white jock and faced Ketchel with his fists up, his aspect bordering on smirk. A towering flagpole loomed over the ring and a California bear flag fluttered overhead. Referee Jack Welch, Sunny Jim Coffroth’s top referee, then gave them the usual instructions. They ignored his direction to shake hands before going to their corners for the opening gong.

  The first round was so fierce it brought the spectators to their feet and not a man of them sat down again till the clang of the bell. Papke fought gallantly and well, but Ketchel was a fiend unchained. He floored Papke near the end of the first and for an instant looked as if he would spit at him. He knocked him down again in the third, and again in the fifth. By the ninth round the Ketchel crowd was howling like a massive wolf pack at the smell of blood. In a clinch near the end of the tenth, Ketchel told Papke the next round would be it. Papke told him to eat shit. Ketchel broke the clinch and clubbed him with a left that spun him halfway around and into the ropes just as the gong sounded. In the eleventh a Ketchel uppercut found Papke’s chin, and dropped him onto his bare bottom. Papke was up at eight but stumbling like a rummy, the crowd roaring with a sense that the end was near. Ketchel whaled at his ribs with lefts and rights to bring his hands down, then hooked him to the jaw and sent him sprawling with his feet slinging high. The tumult was deafening. Referee Welch’s right arm rose and fell as he shouted a count that could barely be heard by the ringsiders. Papke started to rise, fell over, made it to all fours at the count of six. To one knee at seven. He later insisted that he misheard Welch’s count. He told the reporters he was waiting for “nine” before he got up, but he never heard Welch say it. He heard “Eight!” and then “Ten!” and it was over. The news guys nodded sympathetically as they made their notes. And among themselves agreed that even if Papke had beaten that count he wouldn’t have beaten the next one. It had been Ketchel’s fight from start to finish.

  Ketchel told the reporters he believed Papke’s story about the count. “It’s hard to hear real good with all those birdies singing in your head.”

  Papke wanted another match, of course. But after having defeated him so decisively, Ketchel felt no need for a fourth fight any time soon. As the first champion ever to lose the title and win it back, he was now the best known middleweight of all time, and he had large ambitions. More than seven months would pass before his final meeting with the Thunderbolt.

  NEW YORK WAS the place for them now, he told O’Connor.

  “Maybe the place for you,” O’Connor said, “and you can have it. I was in New York once for four days and it felt like goddamn forty.”

  Ketchel called him a rube and said he shouldn’t think so small. New
York was where the big money was. New York was where he could really make a name for himself.

  O’Connor said that Ketchel had already made a name for himself and it often enough appeared in the papers all over the country, which last he’d heard included New York. And the last time he’d looked, a dollar in California was the same size as a dollar in New York.

  Maybe so, Ketchel said, but there were a lot more dollars to be had in New York and a lot more things to spend them on.

  Round and round they went. After a couple of weeks, what began as a difference of opinion had grown into an argument. He decided to go see his family for Christmas and visit with them for a time, and he told O’Connor to think things over while he was away.

  O’Connor said there was nothing to think over. “You do what you want, kid, but I ain’t going to New York and that’s final.”

  As Pete the Goat drove him to the depot in the Locomobile, Ketchel told him he should think things over too.

  “I ain’t got to think nothing over, either,” the Goat said. “I like New York. I’m with you.”

  “You been to New York?”

  “More than once.”

  “I didn’t know that.”

  “There’s lots you don’t know,” the Goat said. “Tell me, where am I from?”

  Ketchel stared at him.

  “I ever been married? I been to war? I ever done time?”

  Ketchel shrugged. Then said: “You were a bareknuckler, I know that. A good one, too, so they say.”

  “Yeah, kid. So they say.”

  The Colonel

  His mother’s new home was large and bright and comfortably furnished. Draped across the parlor wall was a white banner with red letters proclaiming WELCOME HOME, CHAMP!