He had never seen his mother so happy. When he hugged Barzoomian in greeting and said, “Good to see you, too, Dad,” the man blushed through his smile.
On Christmas Eve the whole family, including John and Rebeka and Julie Bug, attended a dinner party at the home of Rollin P. Dickerson, whom Barzoomian described as a man of various and highly successful enterprises. His house was at Pine Lake, a few miles north of Grand Rapids. He had bought the place the year before and furnished it through Barzoomian. Mr. Dickerson was also an avid sportsman and very eager to meet the middleweight champion.
Barzoomian drove them there in his spanking new Model T touring car. They drove across the river and followed the Belmont road to Dickerson’s estate, passing through a wide front gate onto a property dense with pines and bare maples. A wind-rippled lake, dark green and cold-looking, was visible through the trees. The lane ended at a circular drive in front of a long, two-story house of red brick and black ironwork. John gave a low whistle and said, “Posh.”
Ketchel thought it was a beautiful place.
He was surprised when his mother rather than Barzoomian made the introductions. It turned out that Dickerson, whom she called Pete, had been raised in Grand Rapids and they had known each other since they were children. He was a short, portly man of around forty, with recessed thinning hair and the look of a former athlete gone to fat. His stickpin and ring were fitted with small diamonds. He told Ketchel he’d been following his career with interest and had been to two of his fights, the one with Thomas under the lights and in a rainstorm in San Francisco, where he happened to be visiting on business, “the only fight I ever been to where there was a chance of drowning,” and the one with Papke in Milwaukee. He said Ketchel was the greatest fighter he’d ever seen and would no doubt be champion for a long time. “You’ve made your mother awfully proud,” he said.
He ushered Ketchel about the room and introduced him to the other guests. The men all expressed admiration and some tried to convey their own manliness through the force of their handshake. One fellow put so much into it Ketchel felt obliged to respond in kind, and the man’s face twitched and paled before Ketchel unhanded him.
The women all greeted him warmly, and some let their hand linger in his.
Everyone addressed Dickerson as “Colonel,” and Ketchel asked him if he had been in the army.
“Only for as long as it took to settle the Spaniards’ hash,” Dickerson said. He’d shipped to Cuba with the Rough Riders. “Teddy was the colonel, I was a lowly private. But when I got back home my pals took to calling me colonel as a joke and the damn thing simply stuck.”
As an avid admirer of Theodore Roosevelt, Ketchel was impressed. “You kill any Spaniards?”
“I did. Three, to be exact.”
“With a rifle?”
“Trusty .30–40 Krag, a real humdinger. Show it to you after supper.”
“The army let you keep it?”
“I wouldn’t exactly say let me, but…I have my methods.”
After dinner the colonel conducted him to the den for a private brandy and cigar. The superb cigars were regularly shipped from a master roller in Tampa, where Dickerson had first savored them while training for Cuba. There were various rifles on wall mounts and the colonel took down the Krag-Jörgensen and handed it to Ketchel so he could work its action and dry-fire it.
“A well-made firearm’s a work of art,” the colonel said. “Back home, I’ve got a hundred guns, pistols and long arms both, all kinds. Muzzleloaders, cap-and-balls, the latest Winchester. Got a Mauser machine pistol, by damn.”
“Back home?” Ketchel said.
The Pine Lake house was actually a vacation place, the colonel told him. His real home was in a region of Missouri called the Ozarks, where he had lived now for more than twenty years. He had a house in Springfield, where his timber business was headquartered and where he owned a mortgage bank and a jewelry store, but his main residence was on a ranch of more than eight hundred acres some forty miles from town. Just for fun he raised corn and a little wheat, and there were several tenant houses on the property for the farmers who worked his fields. He said Ketchel must come and visit him there sometime. Ketchel said it would be his pleasure.
Dickerson was curious to know how much he liked living in California. Ketchel said he liked it fine, but what he’d really like was to have a home not far from his mother.
“Would you be content with a house like this one?” Dickerson asked.
Ketchel said such a place would be perfect. Did the colonel know of one like it for sale?
“No need of one like it,” Dickerson said, “you can buy this one.” He said he had recently decided to sell the place and would gladly let Ketchel have it for less than its market value.
Ketchel thought he was joking, but Dickerson assured him he was not. He had grown up in this region and had always loved the proximity of the forest and Lake Michigan, and for many years now he had been making one or two annual trips back here to hunt and fish. He had a cabin up in the woods and kept a boat stored in a lakeside yard in Grand Haven. During these visits he always spent a few days in town, as well, hobnobbing with old chums. After all those years of staying in Grand Rapids hotels he’d finally bought this house. But even though he’d made use of the place twice in the past year, he had decided such brief visits did not warrant the year-round expense, and he had anyway come to realize he actually preferred putting up in hotels whenever he went to town.
“The place is yours if you want it, Mr. Ketchel. We can get the deedwork started tomorrow.”
“Call me Steve,” Ketchel said.
Two days later the house was his, and Dickerson was now the guest in it. The colonel observed that the property’s only lack for Ketchel was a training facility. The following week there came a delivery of two wagonloads of boxing apparatus and equipment, including a regulation ring, together with a hired crew to set it up in the rear of the house.
Ketchel was flabbergasted by the gift. Dickerson said it was his pleasure to be of some small assistance to such a great world champion.
He trained in his backyard camp every day, damn the mild hangover he might be carrying from a late night with the colonel. He did roadwork in the morning before the sun came up, his breath billowing on the damply cold air. Then did calisthenics and worked with the heavy and the light bags. One afternoon he deigned to spar with several thrilled members of the Michigan State University boxing team who had stopped by to pay their respects. Despite his best effort to pull his punches, he hit some of them harder than he meant to and made them see stars. No matter. A bruised eye from the fist of Stanley Ketchel was to them a black-and-blue badge of honor.
THEN CAME THE report from Australia of Tommy Burns’s humiliating loss of the world heavyweight championship to Jack Johnson, the first Negro to win the title.
The news made the colonel both angry and forlorn. “A nigger champ! Jesus! Who’da believed things could come to such a pretty pass?”
The vast majority of America shared his sentiment. Jim Jeffries was being implored from all sides to put on the gloves again and cool the Texas coon.
Ketchel’s main reaction to the news was to rue his missed chance to take the title from Burns, whom he knew he could have beaten handily. Unlike Burns, Johnson was a genuine heavyweight. But although they called him the Galveston Giant he wasn’t as big as Jeffries.
“Tell you one thing,” he said to the colonel. “It wouldn’ta taken me fourteen rounds to put Burns away. Hell, the boogie didn’t even knock him out.”
IN THE FIRST days of the new year they went to Dickerson’s hunting cabin on Big Blue Lake in the Manistee Forest and each bagged a buck, the colonel’s an eight-point, Ketchel’s a ten. Dickerson sent the heads to be mounted by a Grand Rapids taxidermist and both would go on the wall over Ketchel’s fireplace.
The colonel gave him two of his rifles as gifts, a .44–40 Winchester that had once belonged to an army cavalry scout who reputedly killed a
score of Apaches with it, and a.22 Remington bolt-action with a shoulder sling. The colonel called the .22 “ideal for popping varmints.” Ketchel showed him his frontier Colt and demonstrated his proficiency with it by shooting the head off a squirrel at a range of about twenty feet.
Some days after that, they drove to Grand Haven in Dickerson’s motorcar and then went fishing in his boat. They buffered themselves against the freezing lake wind with mufflers and fur caps and parkas, plus a couple of bottles of rye. They returned to the docks in the redness of late afternoon, half frozen but happily crocked, with more than a dozen muskies and pike.
When the colonel asked about his plans, Ketchel said he wanted to have some fights in the East because of the better publicity, but it meant he would have to cut ties with Joe O’Connor. Dickerson said he was pals with a few fight managers who would be overjoyed to handle the middleweight champ. The cleverest of them was probably Willus Britt, whose main fighter was his own brother, Jimmy, who just a few years earlier had been lightweight champ for a while. Willus was a Californian, and most of his brother’s fights had taken place on the West Coast, but he was also familiar with New York and its sporting crowd and he had been wanting to set up a camp in New York for some time. In fact, Dickerson said, the Britt brothers were in New York at that moment, preparing to go to England for a match.
“Suppose I wire Willus in the morning and see if he’s interested in handling the one and only Michigan Assassin?”
Ketchel said that would be just fine. Then added: “Tell me something. Is there anything you can’t take care of?”
The colonel laughed and said he was sure there was, he just hadn’t run into it yet.
The following day, after trading several telegrams with Willus Britt in New York, they had things all worked out and closed the deal on the telephone. Britt said Ketchel was doing the smart thing, coming to him, that they would do well together. He was eager to get acquainted but was about to leave for London, where his brother Jimmy would be fighting. He would return to New York in the first week of March. He gave the name of a hotel where they should meet and promised he would have a big-name match set up for him by then. “See you in New York, champ,” he said, and rang off.
“The man works fast,” Ketchel said.
The colonel said that was a fact. “They call him Whirlwind Willie.”
Ketchel then sent a wire to Pete the Goat: SELL CAR PACK MY STUFF STOP BE NYC 3 MARCH BARTHOLDI HOTEL 23 AND BROADWAY STOP STEVE.
Then dispatched one to Joe O’Connor: OFF TO NYC NEW MANAGER STOP GOOD LUCK STOP SK.
O’Connor wired back: NO SURPRISE.
IN JANUARY HE agreed to a three-round exhibition match in the Grand Rapids armory for the benefit of his hometown fans and simply to stay sharp. “You rest, you rust,” Pete the Goat always said.
His opponent was an itinerant boxer named Tony Caponi, who happened to be in town. The first time he heard the name, Ketchel said, “Tony Caponi? Sounds like some kinda wop candy.”
For most of the exhibition, and by agreement between themselves, they made it look good by popping jabs into each other’s shielding gloves and throwing smacking hooks into each other’s arms that sounded harder than they actually were. But with less than twenty seconds to go in the bout, Caponi suddenly sprang at Ketchel and landed a stunning cross to the jaw, igniting a blast of cheers at this best punch of the match. Caponi’s smile made clear the punch had been no accident, and Ketchel was outraged at his violation of their deal. His retaliatory effort to knock out Caponi had everyone on his feet and yowling for the final fifteen seconds. Caponi reeled under the assault, wincing at body blows and head-bobbling hooks, and was barely saved by the bell. The armory rang with ovation.
The announcer thanked both boxers for an exciting match and said he was sure everyone agreed it was a draw. Ketchel forced a smile. Caponi had recovered sufficiently to grin through bloated lips and shake his fists over his head as though he’d won a title fight.
Over drinks with Dickerson that night, Ketchel made light of the whole thing, but the colonel said he shouldn’t shrug it off, that it should be a lesson never to underestimate an opponent, even when the contest is of little import and we know the other fellow’s our inferior. That we should be at our wariest against our inferiors.
“More than once I’ve seen the better fellow get the worst of it for not taking the proper caution against somebody he didn’t think was worth it,” the colonel said. “The minute he turned his back, the other one got him from behind with a bottle or stuck him in the short ribs with a knife. You were a saloon bouncer, you know what I’m talking about. It happens that way if a man isn’t careful. I know you know it already, Stevie, but the trick is not to forget it for even a minute.”
AT THE END of February he said goodbye to his family and Dickerson drove him to the depot to catch the morning run to Chicago, where he would change trains for New York. Barzoomian’s nephew, Aram, who worked for him at the furniture store and had been living in the apartment upstairs, had agreed to live in the rear quarters of Ketchel’s house and take care of the place in his absence.
The colonel carried his bags into the coach. They shook hands and each made a clumsy move to hug the other and they bumped heads and laughed, then embraced warmly and patted each other on the back.
“If you need anything,” the colonel said. He gestured ambiguously. “You know…”
Ketchel nodded and patted his shoulder. The colonel got off the coach and they waved at each other through the window. The conductor took up the stepstool and hollered “Boooarrrd!” and the train hissed and steamed and jerked forward with a shuddering clash and began to chug away.
“Remember what I said!” the colonel called after him. “Whatever you need, son!”
Ketchel shook a fist in the window and nodded.
DICKERSON’S ADDRESS OF Ketchel as “son” derived from a paternal regard that went beyond the figurative. Ketchel himself had reached that realization during their hunting trip. They were in the lake cabin, sitting in ladderback chairs close to the coal oil stove, drinking whiskey from tin cups, and Dickerson was telling a joke about a whore with a wooden leg. Ketchel was sniggering at the joke’s setup when the word father suddenly sounded in his mind.
He told himself it was only a stupid, drunken notion. And then knew, simply knew, it was true. The colonel was his daddy. He was no less stunned by the insight than by his failure to have arrived at it earlier.
Dickerson saw the expression on Ketchel’s face and knew the cat was out of the bag. He let the joke fall away and said, “What’s on your mind, son?”
They talked for the rest of the night, though it was of course incumbent upon the colonel to do most of the talking. He told Ketchel everything. Told of his earliest memories of skinny Julia Oblinski and of the beauty she turned into at fourteen. Told with a careful delicacy of their meetings in the barn. Told with no small degree of heat of the fight with Kaicel on the last night he saw her for twenty-two years. He had already told him of the move to Missouri at age seventeen and his success as a young entrepreneur staked by his father, proving himself Captain Jerry’s equal at making money with every venture he put a hand to.
He’d never married. However foolish it might sound, he said, it wasn’t till he’d known dozens of women that he came to understand how much he loved Julia Oblinski. As so often happens, it was an understanding come to roost too late. Through a hired investigator he learned she’d married Kaicel and borne him children. He couldn’t help but believe she’d made the best of a bad bargain and what was done was done.
Yet he never stopped thinking of her. She especially came to mind whenever he paid a visit to his boyhood country to hunt and fish and spend a few days at a poker table with old friends. Each time he came to Grand Rapids he thought of looking her up, seeing how she was. But to do so, he felt, would be folly. She was married and a mother. To intrude on her life would have served only to complicate matters, perhaps open old wounds. He
could not even ask his friends about her, as none of them had known of their involvement, and he would not risk staining her reputation even at this late date through a misplaced confidence in a poker pal.
And then a little over a year ago he was visiting Grand Rapids and playing cards with some cronies when the subject turned to boxing and somebody told him if he’d been in town a month earlier he could’ve met Stanley Ketchel, who’d been there visiting his mother. By way of an interview in a local newspaper, the people of Grand Rapids learned that Ketchel had been born among them, that his real name was Kaicel, that his mother lived on a little dairy outside of town. He was the greatest excitement to hit town since the Great John L. staged his last fight there more than three years earlier, and a number of the locals immediately claimed, some even truthfully, that they remembered him as a boy. Some of them, including two of Dickerson’s friends, had gone out to his mother’s farm to introduce themselves and shake his hand and say how proud he’d made them. He was a polite kid, the colonel’s pals said, and awful damn handsome for a boxer with a slug-it-out reputation.
“Everybody was saying how wonderful it was you’re from Grand Rapids and how proud you’d make the town if you got to be champ,” Dickerson said. “But the minute I heard you were Julia’s first kid, something started eating at me. After the game broke up I went back to the hotel, but I couldn’t get to sleep. I told myself there was no reason to be thinking what I was thinking and to quit being a fool, but by morning it was all I had on my mind.”
Ketchel was absorbed by the tale. The colonel paused to light a cigar and peered at him over the flame as if trying to gauge his reaction. “Then what?” Ketchel said.
“I went to the Grand Rapids public records office and looked up your birth date,” the colonel said.
And found it was eight months after Julia’s marriage and almost exactly nine months after the last time he had seen her. Dickerson thought and thought about it on the trip back to Missouri, then went to the Springfield library with the only photograph he had of himself and dug through issues of various sporting papers and found a clear, close-up photo of Ketchel’s face. It was taken just prior to the second fight with Joe Thomas, not quite a month after his twenty-second birthday. Next to it the colonel placed his own picture, taken when he was thirty-five years old. He studied them for some time, looking from one to the other, but could reach no conclusion. When he’d owned a full head of hair the resemblance might have been easier to judge. Was there a true similarity in the shape of the mouth, in the set of the eyes? He couldn’t tell.
The Killings of Stanley Ketchel Page 12
