I told my father what Meyer Lansky had said. His face stiffened. He didn’t say anything, which I thought was strange.
The thing I liked about Brown’s was that Brown himself liked to throw everyone into the ring. Hemingway enjoyed that, too, because that was his only form of exercise up there and he liked to check out the unlikely-looking-clientele and see how they handled themselves with the gloves on, if, indeed, Brown could get them to give it a try. Hemingway also enjoyed creating odd boxing scenarios. Boxing with Ezra Pound when they were young writers in Paris was something he always liked telling.
“He was a tall, skinny guy; it was like fighting Ichabod Crane,” Hemingway said. It’s a very vivid memory. He was sitting on a rubbing table, encased in those rubber wraps people used to wear in those days to make them perspire, with a sweatsuit on top of it. It was his favorite place to relax, and his favorite garb. He’d even box with that stuff on, which made body punching a waste of time.
“You didn’t want to hit Ezra too hard because he’d quit. But just tap him hard enough to get him mad. Then he’d start flailing, and the real fun would begin.”
For Brown the formula was simple. As a renowned trainer, boxing was the best form of exercise he knew, and with the big, 16-ounce pillows he had for gloves, it was tough really to get hurt. So he encouraged everyone to box. Once, when I had started writing sports and covering boxing, I asked Cus D’Amato, Mike Tyson’s first manager, if he knew Brown. Cus paused for emphasis, as he used to do before he delivered one of his lectures about sport, and said, “One of the great purists of the ring.”
Tall and aristocratic looking with thinning hair and an aquiline profile, Brown was rumored to have been the oldest enlisted man in the service during World War II. No one ever really knew his age. He looked like mid-50s. Occasionally he’d step into the ring to demonstrate some teaching point, and everyone would stop to watch. He was graceful for a big man; he’d glide. You weren’t aware of him actually taking steps. His prime emphasis was the avoidance of getting hit; he liked fighters whose faces resembled the ones with which they began their career. The sluggers, the take-two-to-land-one guys, disgusted him. When he was in the ring himself, it was rare when anyone snuck a punch in on him. His attitude toward the sport was surprising, since the most famous fighter he ever trained, middleweight champ Harry Greb, was a nonstop brawler.
George Plimpton once quoted Hemingway, talking about Brown’s own ring days: “He could have been champion if he had been able to accept the idea that he was going to be hit once in a while.”
I mentioned to Cus D’Amato that I had been there on a few afternoons when he brought his young protege, Floyd Patterson, up to Brown’s to work with the master. He nodded.
“Brown was a purist as far as defensive fighting was concerned. That’s what I wanted Floyd to understand before he started facing the big boys.”
The implication was obvious. When you have a fighter with a glass jaw, you try to keep him from getting hit. Most of the time it worked for the future heavyweight champ.
Not all of Brown’s clients, especially the celebrity variety, would climb in the ring. I never saw Quentin Reynolds, a big-name journalist and author in those days, put the gloves on. Nobody ever wanted to see Champ Segal in the ring or get in there with him personally. Champ was one of those legendary Broadway characters everyone seemed to know. He was probably in his early 50s … big, bigger than me, and brawly with a coarse haw-haw-haw laugh and a habit of shouting when he talked. Once, on the four-wall racquetball, which we called paddleball, court, I was playing some doctor from Long Island, and he cut me off and set up a block and I ran him over, getting to the ball. He hollered, “You young son of a bitch,” and came at me, slashing with the paddle. I backed up and tried to fend him off.
From the little spectator perch next to the court, I heard this big guffaw where Champ had been watching the match, and then he was on the court. “You guys don’t wanna FIGHT!” he yelled between heehaws and then held us apart, firmly, one hand on each of us. I couldn’t move. I mean, the guy was strong.
He’d had few professional bouts in his youth, but mostly he’d been a street brawler. When he stripped down in the locker room, I could see two neat white bullet scars on his belly. There had been at least one book written about him, They Called Him Champ, and when I knew him, he was the owner of a bar and restaurant on Broadway, House of Champs. At Brown’s one of the favorite stories they told was about the time two young gunmen tried to stick up Champ, while he was behind the bar. He reached across and flattened the first one. The second one fired wildly and ran out onto the street. Champ followed him out and shot him dead. No, the patrons at Brown’s weren’t sad that Champ wasn’t inclined to step into the ring.
The Gimbel boys, who were on the boxing team at Yale, always would drop in when they were in town. One afternoon I saw Dan Bucceroni, a light heavyweight main-eventer, working out. Another time the big Swedish heavy, Olle Tandberg, was there. Normal customers who attended strictly for the workout usually would be matched against Norm Barth, the equipment man, a short, chunky weightlifter, and later Jimmy Devlin, who had just come over from Ireland and eventually would become a leading New York-area referee. Jimmy had been a promising lightweight in the old country and he’d merely run them through some speedwork, but anyone foolish enough to get him annoyed would get smacked.
One afternoon, as I was dressing, I heard this whap-whap-whap from the ring and I rushed out to see what had happened. A concert violinist named Kovacs, whose action mainly centered on Carnegie Hall catty-corner across the street (Brown’s was at 225 W. 57th St., 11th floor) had been trading whacks with Norm Barth and he’d gotten the worst of it. He was sitting on a training table, next to the one on which Hemingway was trying to take a post-steam room nap, rubbing his nose, looking very red in the face.
“What’s up, Mr. Kovacs?” I asked him. “Ees not fair,” he said. “Ees a sport, not where you keel each other. He hit me the keeser and the smeller.” I could see Hemingway shaking with laughter. Later he enjoyed relating incident. “Oh, that was good,” he said. “In the keesaire and smellaire. Perfect.”
Boxing with Hemingway tested your brute strength. It was literally push comes to shove. Very few lethal punches were exchanged. Brown’s final word, before I stepped into the ring, always was the same. “No right hands.” He didn’t want some wild-assed 16-year-old getting all caught up in the magic of the moment and trying to chase away his most famous customer. It put me at a disadvantage, naturally, but in a strange way it accomplished an interesting thing. In time, I developed a better left hand than right, although I’m normally right-handed. Hemingway wasn’t comfortable sparring at long range, and neither was I. God had burdened me with 220 pounds at age 16, even 15, for a reason, and that wasn’t about to escape my notice. It seemed that Hemingway might have felt the same way because he liked to jack you up in the clinches and muscle you into the ropes and punish you in close. If you allowed yourself to relax, you could get bumped up a bit, so you didn’t relax, especially when his punches would go south and come dangerously near your groin. You had to stay alert.
But it was fun. I enjoyed it immensely, bulldogging and grappling with one of the great authors of our time. I can’t remember anyone ever getting hurt. Tired yes, extremely so. I didn’t tell anyone about it. For one thing, no one would have believed me. For another, it would have sounded like bragging. I remember reading on a few occasions what an accomplished boxer Hemingway was. I don’t think the people who wrote that ever saw him in the ring. He was a big, burly guy who could rough you up a bit, but a skilled boxer? Naah, sorry. I heard people quoted about Hemingway’s supposed mean streak, that he could be nasty when he was drunk, that he’d started his share of fights. Perhaps it was true, but at Brown’s we never saw that side. He was relaxed and happy in that atmosphere, a friendly guy who liked to tell stories, who liked to laugh.
In reading
other accounts of Hemingway’s life, I realized this wasn’t a good period for him. For Whom the Bell Tolls had been a success, both artistically and financially, but that was almost a decade before I knew him up at Brown’s. Since then he had marked time with magazine work and non-fiction pieces, and every once in a while, there would be something in the paper asking when he was going to get it together for a major novel. Someone told me he was drinking a lot in those days, then coming up to Brown’s to sweat out the alcohol. I must admit that, up to that point, I had not ready any of his novels, although I had seen the movie, For Whom the Bell Tolls, with Gary Cooper and Ingrid Bergman and Akim Tamiroff. But I was well aware of his short stories even before we studied them in my senior year at HM.
I was often tempted to tell him how much I loved his boxing stories, especially “Fifty Grand” and “The Battler” and then “My Old Man,” about the crooked jockey and his adoring son. That was me, Joe Butler, watching his dad work the horses out in the early morning, on the misty tracks around Paris. I could feel the dampness coming through the sweater that I’d pulled up around my neck. And I wanted to tell him my favorite story was one they never mentioned in school, The Light of the World, about two whores, each of whom claimed they had known Stanley Ketchel, the middleweight champ. But I couldn’t do it; it just wasn’t something you wanted to talk about in the loose, relaxed atmosphere of Brown’s, where Hemingway felt so much at ease, talking about things such as what was best for sweating out a hangover or whether or not the rubber wraps could really burn the weight off. It was a place where people could kid him interminably about his weight … his nickname was “Broadsides” up at Brown’s … but instinctively I knew that it would be poor form to introduce anything that had a literary smell to it. Wasn’t it the hunter-guide, Wilson, who had told Macomber in Hemingway’s story, “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber,” that you could talk something out if you talked about it too much? And now, looking back on the period, it might not have been the right note to strike, praising him about things he had written a quarter of a century before then.
Maybe I was wrong, or perhaps just shy, but I felt that even an honest admission of how much his stories had moved me would somehow be off-line … in that atmosphere, near one of those rubbing tables next to the window, under Hemingway’s inscribed picture to Brown. It was almost 60 years ago that I saw that picture, Hemingway in some sort of winter hunting outfit, holding a brace of pheasants or partridges in his hands, with his inscription, “To George Brown and his two educated hands.” And then his inverted triangle, signaling the left out word, “good,” before “educated.” I often wondered why he had gone back and added that word. More than 50 years later, the picture came up at a Sotheby’s sale, probably from Brown’s heirs. Brown had been with Hemingway in his home in Ketchum, Idaho, when he had killed himself. He had been a pallbearer at his funeral.
At Brown’s, Hemingway would get great pleasure from scanning the sports pages, stopping at any reference to boxing to let you know what idiots covered the sport. One magazine piece in particular drew a huge laugh from him.
“You’ve got to listen to this,” he said to whomever was within hearing distance. “Here’s this guy writing that Joe Louis was the greatest fighter of all time. He says that Louis had such great reflexes and punching power that he could probably even fight a wild animal and win.”
Now he was a radio announcer, broadcasting the regular Madison Square Garden Friday Night Fights from Gillette.
“We’re bringing you, direct from ringside, Joe Louis vs the bear. The bell … Don Dunphy …” and now Hemingway’s voice took on the slightly nasal twang of the famous radio announcer of the ’40s: “Louis jabs, the bear backs off. Louis jabs, the bear backs off. They move into a clinch … And we cut to the next scene.”
4. Journalism
The first time I read Tom Wolfe proclaiming that the New Journalism and Personal Journalism were something of a modern phenomenon, I felt like asking him, “Did you ever hear of Rudyard Kipling?” When I read, not too long ago, about the revolution in sportswriting that introduced the freshness of penetrating, iconoclastic observations and in-depth quotes and probing interviews, my only reaction was that the people who actually believed this stuff didn’t understand much about the history of the profession.
There were real phrasemakers in the old days, and when I was a kid, I used to cut out their snappers and one-liners and keep them in a big notebook. There was paunchiness and wit and sparkle that we don’t see too often nowadays. Not that the old-time sportswriters were that much better, day in, day out, but when one of them connected on something, it went out of the park.
Have you ever heard of Frank Graham? Columnist for The New York Sun. Nobody ever put it better, referring to the athlete on the verge of retirement who all of a sudden feels the need to talk to you about “an exciting new project I’m involved in.”
“They learn to say hello,” Graham wrote, “just when they should be saying goodbye.”
I grew up with this kind of stuff. It was my English Lit seminar, my exploration into the classics.
Graham, again, covering the Max Baer-Tony Galento fight in Jersey City in 1940, and I would have to call this my favorite lead:
“They rolled the clock back last night and two cuckoos jumped out.”
I can quote you parts of that story. The fight ended when Galento couldn’t come out of his corner for the eighth round.
“I can’t breed,” was Graham’s quote for Two Ton Tony.
And post-fight, Baer, who was known as The Clown Prince, did a little waltz around the ring with a dwarf who was part of his ringside entourage.
“Three cuckoos,” was Graham’s closing line.
The lead columnist on the paper for whom I worked, the New York World-Telegram & Sun, was Joe Williams. I never met him. He was a remote figure, imperious, often quoted. One of his one-liners I never forgot was, “Fame is as fleeting as a ferryboat shine,” Anyone who ever had ridden the Staten Island ferry knew what that meant. A shoeshine cost a nickel. The kid would run a rag across your shoes, and when you took five steps or so after you got off the boat, they were just as dusty as they’d been before the rag. As fleeting as a ferryboat shine.
My own career? Well, I wish I could put a definite beginning on it, and tell you, yes, this is where my 51-year run as a sportswriter got its definite start and paint one of those misty, moody pictures for you — racehorses in the early dawn, the slap and crack of pads during a miserable, sweaty scrimmage, the piercing shouts of high school kids during a local wrestling tournament. But no, it began with a series of catch-can assignments for The Sacramento Bee, the high schools, naturally … you always began a career with high school sports in those days … but there was also the hustle of carving a beat out for myself when one didn’t exist, a local hockey league played on an undersized rink among teams with names like the Rexalls; junior tennis, watching a pair of stern-faced 12-year-olds staring each other down. Mostly, though it started with 64 personal letters and a 1957 Volkswagen making its way down the West Coast from town to town as I searched for a job.
I talk to kids two years out of school nowadays, who tell me they’re desperate to write sports, and then they lay out their agenda; well, the NFL would be nice, and of course, Major League Baseball, and if they have to cover the fights, well, they’ll do it as an accommodation. A few times when I’ve offered advice about a certain word called humility, I’ve been told, “I’m sure it was easier when you broke in.”
Easier, yeah. A few weeks short of graduation from journalism school, the chilling realization struck me that no one wanted to hire me, despite the fact that the Columbia J-School was supposed to be my ticket anywhere. I found a copy of Editor & Publisher and looked up newspaper addresses. Then I wrote 64 individual letters to sports editors around the country explaining why I was especially suited to cover sports in his area. Eventually I got four repl
ies, no, there’s nothing available. Sixty stiffs. Then I visited every newspaper office in the New York area, seeking an audience with the sports editor. Two saw me, a guy named Zellner at Newsday in Long Island, and Bob Stewart at the New York World-Telegram & Sun. Actually he remembered me as a football player, at Columbia, and he pulled out a five-year-old squad picture that I was on. He told me to keep him posted.
Then I packed up my ’57 VW that I’d bought in the army in Germany, drove out to Seattle, where I had a friend to stay with for a few days, and headed down the coast, town by town, coming in cold asking for work. I made it as far as Sacramento and The Bee. Someone had quit the day before I showed up.
“How’d you find out so quickly?” Bill Collins, the sports editor, asked me.
“The Columbia Journalism School keeps us informed,” I told him. I think that’s what swung the job for me, the lurking suspicion that I was backed by some kind of mysterious information network. Things seem to come in streaks. A month later Bob Stewart wrote me to come back to New York and cover schoolboy sports for the World-Telegram, the Telly. This was a tough one. The Bee had hired me when no one else would. I felt that I owed them at least a year. That’s what I wrote Stewart; under the hanging dread that in so doing I had banished myself for all eternity to greater Metropolitan Sacramento and the northern wilds called SupCal, Superior California. Actually I made it back to NYC and the Telly after 14 months, and that leads us to an interesting story of payback for all those rejection slips.
It’s five years later after I started with The Bee. I’m covering the 1964 Summer Olympics in Tokyo. We’ve been given assigned seats in the press room, where we write our stories. The reporter sitting next to me is not totally tuned in. He keeps asking me questions such as, “Was it the heats or the quarters that Bob Hayes ran today?” Basic stuff. Finally came the moment I was waiting for. He stared hard at me and asked, “Didn’t I meet you somewhere?”
Dr. Z Page 6
