Picture cards bearing his effigy were printed, anthems and ballads were written in his honour. That summer, as usual, the Court visited San Sebastián, and King Alfonso XIII, accompanied by Princes Juan and Gonzalo and many other important people, visited the champion’s birthplace. In their patent leather shoes they trod the fields and paths strewn with cow and ox dung, and paid tribute to the woman who had been “capable of giving birth to a fighter as strong as Paulino”. She thanked them for the visit and, since she could not speak Spanish and could only express herself in Basque, her son translated her words. She declared herself to be both happy and sad. Happy for her son’s success and sad because her husband was not there, for he had died two years earlier and so never knew that his blood ran in the veins not just of the champion of Guipúzcoa, but of Europe too.
One of the ballads written in Paulino Uzcudun’s honour said: “Kontrariyorik emen ez eta zuaz Amerik’aldera; kanpeon zaude Europa’n eta, ekatzu hango bandera.” (“With no more rivals left to beat, America awaits; you’re European Champion now, bring us another trophy or two.”) And that is precisely what happened. Before the end of 1926, the promoter Tex Rickard, “the emperor of boxing”, invited Paulino Uzcudun to fight in the United States. After a stopover in Havana, Uzcudun made his first appearance in Madison Square Garden, beating Knute Hansen and Tom Heeney.
Months later, Tex Rickard suggested he fight Harry Wills, the Black Panther:
“Not even Jack Dempsey is willing to take him on. He doesn’t want to risk losing to a negro. If you beat Wills, you’ll be right up there with the great champions, among the best in the world.”
Uzcudun accepted the challenge, and on the day of the fight, July 13, 1927, he demolished his opponent in the fourth round. Harry Wills, the Black Panther, fell backwards onto the canvas, his head almost out of the ring. Paulino Uzcudun accompanied him back to his corner like a solicitous nurse. Then he returned to the centre of the ring, lay down, and started performing gymnastics before flipping effortlessly back onto his feet, as nimble as a wild cat. Dozens of hats were thrown into the ring.
The newspaper reports of the fight stressed his solid punches, his agility, as well as his gentlemanly behaviour. Later on, both in America and in Europe, he would become known as “the Basque Woodchopper”, an alias that would soon overtake previous nicknames: the Lion of the Pyrenees, the Spanish Bull, the Basque Colossus and so on. Gradually, his image became more fixed, one of the two sides of his emblem.
He became more and more famous. On June 27, 1929, he met Max Schmeling in the Yankee Stadium, and the following day, the New York Times sold 180,000 extra copies. The purse he received for each fight grew and grew. $18,000, $24,000, $30,000. Enough to buy twenty houses in the Basque Country.
The years passed, and his image acquired new adornments. Now people spoke of his courage and toughness. No boxer had yet succeeded in giving him the K.O. He had a jaw of steel, or, rather, wood, the jaw of a woodchopper, a direct descendant of Cro-Magnon man. As Emilio Fornet wrote in an ode: “Let no man deliver you a knockout blow, electric in the romantic storm, O neolithic skull emerging from the Basque cave!” The same idea inspired the sculptor Jorge Oteiza, who made a bust of him, giving him suitably primitive features.
He acquired a still more useful adornment. He was a victim. He had been treated unfairly, for, either because of their involvement in the betting industry or out of American patriotism, the fight organisers always managed to hand to other boxers victories that should, by rights, have been his. The gold teeth in his Cro-Magnon jaw were proof of this: they were replacing the teeth that a dirty boxer called Homer Smith had knocked out with a head butt. Even worse was what happened in the fight against Jack Delaney, who emerged from it as a new candidate for the world title. The referee disqualified Uzcudun when he looked set for an easy win. “American boxing is full of scandals,” wrote a Herald Tribune reporter at the time, “but I can recall nothing worse or more scandalous, incredible and cynical than the referee’s behavior in yesterday’s fight between Uzcudun and Delaney …”
It happened again and again, and Uzcudun asked rather loftily: “What do I have to do to win a fight in the United States? Kill my opponent?” The Spanish press repeated the facts and revealed the reason behind such injustice. The promoter Tex Rickard had offered Uzcudun his support, as well as the opportunity to compete for the World Championship, but on one condition: he had to become an American citizen. According to the Madrid press, Uzcudun’s response was blunt and to the point: “Nothing in the world would make me give up my Spanish citizenship.” The news spread rapidly, and when haranguing their troops, military commanders held him up as an example to them all.
In 1931, when Jack Dempsey decided to become a promoter and put on a big fight in Reno, he immediately thought of Uzcudun and Max Baer. It was a great opportunity. Dempsey himself had promised that the fight would be clean, with no pre-fight fixes. Everyone was agreed on this, including the casino owners. “This is my first event as promoter, and I want it to be a great fight. That’s why I’m going to referee it myself, and that’s why it’s going to be twenty rounds,” Dempsey told Uzcudun, who accepted the challenge. He left New York and travelled to Steamboat Springs.
The fight took place on July 4, in temperatures of over thirty-eight degrees, and more than fifteen thousand people attended, from California, Utah, Oregon, Idaho and Nevada itself. One of the largest groups was made up of Basque emigrants to the American West. In the front rows sat the owners of casinos and various Hollywood actors and actresses, among them, the stars of the moment: Edward G. Robinson, Buster Keaton and the Marx Brothers.
The resin on the pine planks in the arena began melting in the heat, sticking to trousers and shoes. Meanwhile, in the ring, Max Baer and Paulino Uzcudun were doing all they could to get the fight over with as quickly as possible, afraid they wouldn’t survive twenty rounds. “The boxers fought like wild cats,” wrote the reporter from the Nevada State Journal. “They ignored all the rules of the ring in their eagerness to send their opponent sprawling onto the scalding-hot canvas.”
In the sixth round, Uzcudun very nearly knocked Baer out; in the eighth, Baer cornered Uzcudun. From then on, the fight became very evenly balanced. Before they began the twentieth round, it was announced over the loudspeakers that the boxer who gained most points in the final round would be declared the winner. When the final bell sounded, Dempsey raised Uzcudun’s arm. The spectators stood up and applauded the superhuman efforts of both boxers.
It was well-known that Max Baer had a bigger punch than any other boxer, and that even Max Schmeling had to be rescued from those pounding fists to avoid being killed. It was taken for granted, too, that he would be the next world champion, as happened in 1934, after his fight with Primo Carnera. If this is true, then what Uzcudun said over and over must also be true: he was on a par with the very best heavyweight boxers.
“The Basque Woodchopper, one of the best,” was the headline in the newspapers the day after the fight in Reno. Uzcudun’s emblem shone brighter than ever, and he tried to make this last by dictating a book, a kind of autobiography (Mi Vida (My Life), Espasa-Calpe, Madrid, 1934), in which he spoke about how he had been made a victim, about the fights that had been stolen from him, and he talked, too, about Al Capone, who had invited him to his house several times: “Capone lives the life of a king in Florida. He’s a millionaire king, though, not one of those operetta kings who never have a penny. He liked me a lot, because he said I had balls, and because he had earned a lot from betting on my fights.”
These two narratives did not quite fit. How could he be the victim of the Mafia who manipulated the fights and, at the same time, a friend of the most powerful Mafia boss? He seemed oblivious to such contradictions. All his failures were the product of dirty dealings on the part of his opponents; all his successes, on the other hand – beginning with Alfonso XIII’s visit to his birthplace and ending with his friendship with Al Capone – were simply his God-given ri
ght.
In 1935, when he was thirty-six, he fought his last fight in America against Joe Louis, the Brown Bomber, fourteen years his junior. For the first time in his life, he was knocked out. He got on a boat and left the United States for ever.
Paulino Uzcudun died in Madrid on July 4, 1985. The journalist who wrote his obituary (Julio César Iglesias, El País, July 7, 1985) recalled that fight with Joe Louis, saying that a man is never the same once he’s been knocked down. “Paulino Uzcudun did not die last Thursday in Torrelaguna. He died on December 13, 1935, fifty years ago, in Madison Square Garden in New York.” The journalist perceptively described the change that took place in Paulino Uzcudun: the man who had been as strong as an oak had ended up becoming the felled tree.
He continued to inhabit the Olympus of champions, and his emblem remained untarnished. What did it matter if he was the felled oak or the woodchopper cutting it down! In both cases, he was still a woodlander: a prelapsarian man, brave and simple on the one hand, and, on the other, at worst, a King Kong, a primitive being who still bore traces of Cro-Magnon man and who, like the Great Ape, had never knowingly done any harm.
There were, however, the places Uzcudun frequented and which had little to do with oak trees and woods. The proof of this were the summer society columns published in the 1930s by El Pueblo Vasco and other newspapers: “Paulino Uzcudun and the heir of the Zuloaga family arrived yesterday in San Sebastián in a red sports car.” “A large delegation from the Court attended yesterday’s bullfight. They were accompanied by Spain’s most famous boxer.” The places he frequented, the friendships he cultivated, his neglect of the village where he was born, all indicated his detachment from the woods and forests that had shaped him; it was as if he were another person, as if Alfonso XIII and the two princes had carried off his woodchopper’s soul.
The people who had known him since he won the European Championship noticed this change and their fondness for him cooled. They stopped singing anthems and ballads praising his name, and there were no more acts of homage. Some journalists attacked him. “Lately, we have often seen Paulino Uzcudun strolling in Alderdi-eder Park or along by La Concha beach,” wrote one journalist, who signed himself “Azti”. “That’s all very well, but someone really ought to tell him that it’s ridiculous to go skipping along, trying to imitate the aristocrats.”
You might think that, in their innocence, children would like him, but they didn’t. Not even those who had lived nearby and known him personally harboured fond memories of him. “We were always heaping him with compliments, organising receptions and parties, but he never brought us anything, not so much as a bag of sweets,” wrote Inazio Maria Atxukarro in her book of memoirs Irriparrezko printzak (Smiling Splinters). “He was quite abrupt, both with children and with grown-ups. It just didn’t occur to him to bring us any of those little things that give such pleasure to children. That’s not so very strange, I suppose. Having come from nothing, he was interested only in greatness and the great.”
When, on July 18, 1936, General Franco rose up against the Republic, thus triggering the Spanish Civil War, Paulino Uzcudun enthusiastically embraced his cause. Up until then, he had sought out the company of aristocrats and the bourgeoisie; from then on, his companions would be the military and, above all, the paramilitary, the Falangists who drew their inspiration from the doctrines of Hitler and Mussolini.
He soon found a prominent role in the new space created by the war. José Antonio Primo de Rivera, the founder of the Spanish Falangist Party, was in prison in Alicante, accused of conspiring against the Republic, and so, with General Franco’s consent, the Falangists formed a commando unit of a hundred militants in order to free Primo de Rivera. Paulino Uzcudun wanted to be part of that unit and his comrades came to view him as a “champion of anti-communism”.
The war continued. The fascist press often published photographs of Uzcudun. In one of them he is seen firing a machine gun. In full-face portraits, he is always wearing that orang-utan grin.
He started taking part in exhibition matches for the soldiers. On one occasion, in an encampment in León, fighting a much weaker opponent – who he kept poking fun at – an unexpected blow caused him to bite his tongue with his gold teeth. “Stitch it up! Stitch it up!” he told the nurse, when his mouth filled up with blood. As soon as the nurse had given him a couple of stitches, he went back into the ring and won by a knockout.
Rumours began to spread: that he volunteered to participate in firing squads, that he trained in prisons, using prisoners as sparring partners … The rumours reached the ears of children, and, in their fear – the same fear that had engendered various other bogeymen in the past – they created and drew in their notebooks a new image: a sack full of bones and skulls hanging from the ceiling, and, punching it, a boxer with the face of an orang-utan.
The drawing became Paulino Uzcudun’s second emblem, and ever since then, it has stuck fast by the first one – that of the woodchopper – as surely as the shade sticks close to the tree. Inevitably, for ever, ad aeternitatem.
VIRGINIA CITY
MINING TOWN
Our Ford Sedan laboured up the hills to Virginia City, and the hostility of that bleak mining landscape awoke a voice inside my head:
“The human species does not know fear,” the voice said, “and as with all the other animals, even insects, it is always moving forward, driven by a basic idea: I want to live and to endure! I want to stay in the world! Hosea and Ethan Grosh must have known fear – they were the brothers who discovered the vast silver deposits in Virginia City in 1857. Hosea would have known it when a wound became infected and he realised he had the symptoms of septicaemia, and Ethan when he was crossing the mortally cold Sierra Nevada; the miners working in the Yellow Jacket mine must have known fear when the fire from an explosion started to spread through the galleries, or Pierre Haran, the young man from Aldudes in Lower Navarre, when he went into a saloon to have breakfast and found a drunken gunman about to shoot him dead. But the species does not absorb these individual frailties, and new miners rush to take the place of the fallen, like zebras jostling for position on the banks of the river.”
The voice was inside my head, and yet it seemed to belong to someone else, as if some magnetic force in the mountains around Virginia City had split my self in two, the half that spoke and the half that listened. I felt as if I were in a dream, and by the time I came round and returned to reality, Ángela was driving our car through the centre of town. It was an odd image: a vehicle from the year 2000 driving down a street flanked by wooden arcades. And yet the street looked more modern than the stereotypical towns in Westerns. Some of the houses were brick-built and rather elegant; others were whitewashed and had balconies and were genuine mansions. This was only to be expected: we weren’t at the O.K. Corral or in Shinbone, but in Virginia City, which, in the nineteenth century, had been the richest place on earth.
There was no-one to be seen in Street C, the main street, although the car park nearby was almost full. We started walking, visiting the various places that were open, but they were all empty, devoid of life. Where was everyone? I didn’t know what to think, and was hoping that the voice in my head might give me an explanation, as it had on our drive up Highway 341. The only sign I received was a kind of dull pain. I felt cold, even though the thermometer in the Visitors Centre said forty-nine degrees Fahrenheit, nearly ten degrees Centigrade.
THE SILVER QUEEN HOTEL
The hotel foyer was so plunged in gloom that, at first, we didn’t even notice the person at the reception desk, a woman in her seventies wearing a long grey skirt and a black shawl. She came over to us and gave us a leaflet, which, among other things, described the hotel’s chapel, ideal for weddings, and “the ghost tour” that the newly-weds could go on after their wedding party. Guaranteed thrills: night after night, the voices and evil spirits of the ghosts who haunted the peaceful bedrooms and corridors.
“I don’t believe in ghosts,” Izaskun told the w
oman.
“Neither do I, but you have to earn a living somehow.”
Well, the woman didn’t actually say those words, but her expression said it all.
“Our most famous ghost is a young woman,” she explained. “She became pregnant and came to the hotel to meet her lover. He never appeared, and the girl killed herself. She’s been haunting this house ever since. A lot of people have heard her weeping and moaning.”
I remembered a song by Doc Watson about a girl who fell pregnant: “Oh, listen to my story, I’ll tell you no lies, How John Lewis did murder poor little Omie Wise. Go with me, little Omie, and away we will go. We’ll go and get married and no-one will know. She climbed up behind him and away they did go, but off to the river where deep waters flow. John Lewis, John Lewis, will you tell me your mind? Do you intend to marry me or leave me behind? Little Omie, little Omie, I’ll tell you my mind. My mind is to drown you and leave you behind.”
My mind would not rest. The Doc Watson song was followed by a childhood memory. I was walking with my father through a rural area called Upazan, and among the grass, I saw a deep hole, a chasm. My father said: “Listen.” At the bottom of the chasm, more than sixty feet below, I could hear the sound of flowing water. A subterranean river. “Now look,” my father said. “You see that house?” It was a white house with a red roof that blended perfectly with the green landscape. It was less than a mile away. “A girl who lived there fell pregnant. One night, she made supper for her parents and her siblings, carefully folded up her apron and said, ‘I’ll be right back.’ But she never did come back. She threw herself into this chasm.” I peered down and felt the cool air coming up from the deep earth and, again, heard the sound of the river. “She did it out of fear, because of the priests and the friars, who deliberately misled people. At the time, becoming pregnant out of wedlock was considered more shameful than the very worst of crimes. Ridiculous! We were so backward in this part of the country then.”
Nevada Days Page 12
