Cinderella Man

by Marc Cerasini

  Gould rubbed the back of his neck. Letting an injured fighter climb into the ring was strictly illegal. Braddock had pushed the envelope in Pennsylvania and Missouri, but now that they were back in New York, Gould was worried. Jimmy Johnston was in the audience tonight, along with two other state boxing commissioners. Anything went wrong in the ring, it could finish them both.

  “Can’t get any shifts,” Jim finally admitted. “We owe everybody.”

  The weak, desperate voice Gould heard wasn’t Braddock’s—not the one he knew anyway. With a sigh, Gould considered the state of his friend’s patched-up street clothes and ratty shoes, thought of Mae and the kids.

  “Screw it,” said Gould. “I’ll tape it double.”

  Double taping was just as illegal. Gould knew it. He kept wrapping.

  “So, this extraordinary opponent of yours who my grandma could beat with her breath, you keep your left in his face and when his head pops up like a little bunny rabbit…boom! One shot. Make it good. Finish early, I’ll buy you an egg cream.”

  As Gould wrapped, Braddock considered the idea of winning. His record hadn’t been all bad since the night he’d KO’d Tuffy Griffiths at the Garden and everyone had started ranking him a world title contender. On the other hand, the very next fight after Tuffy had been a helluva disappointment.

  Just two months after Griffiths, Braddock had climbed into Madison Square Garden’s ring again, this time to fight Leo Lomski. In the very first round, Jim had walloped Lomski with a dizzying right. But instead of finishing him off, Jim had shuffled around and hesitated, squandering his opportunities long enough to give Lomski time to recover.

  After that, Lomski never let Braddock get close again. With Lomski constantly standing off and jabbing, Braddock couldn’t get enough leverage to use his right cross. He’d swung and swung his right all night, but Lomski’s left had dominated and Braddock had lost on decision.

  It wasn’t over for Jim that night, however, not by a long shot. One month later, in February of 1929, he’d KO’d George Gemas in one round at the Newark Armory. A month after that, he’d taken on Jimmy Slattery, the “Buffalo Adonis,” in Madison Square Garden. An eight to five favorite, Slattery was a brilliant boxer—a flickering, flitting, dancing ghost whose opponents found impossible to tag. Amazing his fans and astonishing his critics, Braddock’s terrific right hand had caught and smashed the ghost by the end of the eighth round. By the ninth, Jim had KO’d him.

  Now, as Braddock prepared to face Feldman, he tried to keep that ninth-round Slattery KO in mind. Anything was better than remembering his disastrous match against Tommy Loughran.

  July 18, 1929, one year after Braddock had defeated Griffiths—and three months before the stock market sent the country’s economy from the canvas to the morgue—promoters had finally consented to let Braddock take a shot at the world light heavyweight title by fighting the champ. In fifteen harrowing rounds in Yankee Stadium, Tommy Loughran, one of the best boxers in the history of the game, had crushed Jim’s hopes for a world title.

  Braddock should have learned a lot from that humiliating match against Loughran, it just wasn’t a memory he was keen on recalling before he had to step into the ring one more time…

  “Let’s go,” said Gould.

  He’d finished double-taping Braddock’s bum right and lacing on his gloves. Now it was time for the stout little manager to lead his six-three boxer down the main aisle of the Mount Vernon Armory, past the wooden bleachers and into the ring.

  The crowd was an anemic crew compared to Jim’s Madison Square Garden days—and not just in volume. Leaner in face and shabbier in attire, there was a desperate look about them, as if the bets they’d made tonight were going to pay the grocery bills tomorrow. They sat murmuring beyond the ring’s hot lights, a sea of fedoras and caps sending up clouds of smoke.

  Closer to the action sat a small cadre of flashy gamblers with glossy-lipped companions. A long ringside table held tonight’s three official judges, the sports reporters leaning on their black typewriters, a few photographers with flashbulbs ready to pop, and a single radio commentator prattling into a heavy steel microphone—

  “Jim Braddock, just five years ago, was considered first in line for the world championship. But in the last year, he’s lost ten fights and hasn’t managed a single KO.”

  Tell me something I don’t know, Jim muttered to himself as he climbed through the ropes and began to shadowbox in his corner. Gould massaged his shoulders, told him to relax.

  The hall’s low buzz began to rise, swelling into yelling and whistling. Braddock turned to see Abe Feldman making his way down the crowded aisle with a vigorous gait and high-spirited punches.

  “Now Braddock faces Abe Feldman,” the radio man continued, “an up-and-comer with seventeen wins, one draw, and one loss. In less than two years he has recorded nine KOs.”

  Jim froze. This was the “bum” Joe’s grandma could beat?

  Under his hands, Gould felt Jim’s shoulders go completely rigid. “Who whipped Latzo?” Gould barked to his boxer.

  “I did.” Jim’s voice was barely there.

  “Who KO’d Slattery in the ninth when everybody said he didn’t have a rainmaker’s chance in hell?!”

  “I did.”

  “That’s right. But we should pucker our assholes over Feldman?”

  “No.”

  The spectators clapped and whistled as Feldman climbed into the ring. Abe was the crowd favorite, young and golden like Braddock used to be with an untouched nose and two pretty ears. Jim felt his gloves begin to sink.

  “Jimmy, Jimmy, look at me!” Gould grabbed Jim’s gloves, brought them back up. “Is there someplace else you’d rather be?”

  “No.”

  “Good. So what are you going to do?”

  Braddock closed his eyes. Everything went away: the crowd’s hoots, the locker room stench, Mae’s weary sighs, Ben’s pulled gun, Jay’s silent tears, all the mistakes and missteps of the last four years. He reminded himself the “underdog” crown was no new hat. Then he opened his eyes.

  “I’m gonna get an egg cream.”

  “There you go. That’s the spirit!”

  The punch was a leather hammer to Braddock’s face. Jim moved for the counter, but Feldman blocked his drive.

  “C’mon Jimmy, let’s put on a show!”

  From the corner, Gould was sweating nearly as much as Braddock as he jabbed the air, mimicking every move his fighter made.

  “Let’s open him up for the folks!”

  Gould’s bulldog voice hadn’t yet gone hoarse from all the yelling, but it made no difference. The only things getting through to Braddock were the booming bursts of pain inflicted by Feldman’s targeted blows.

  Every boxer’s hits were different. Some felt like rata-tat tommy-gun bullets, others like beer bottles breaking over your face, cutting your nose and lips. Feldman’s jabs felt like he’d picked up a butcher’s cleaver—the strikes weren’t big, but they were solid and hard and hit squarely with practiced aim.

  The first round had been spent in feeling each other out, but by the second, the young comer had rushed Braddock, layering him with jabs, hooks, uppercuts, forcing him to eat leather. Jim tried to counter, but he just couldn’t get a break. Everywhere Feldman threw, Jim was. Everywhere Braddock threw, Feldman wasn’t.

  Jim looked slow and awkward compared to his young opponent, who lightly danced around him on the canvas, pivoting and punching like some gangland ballerina. Suddenly, Feldman saw an opening, laid into Braddock’s ribs with a combination that sent Jimmy back into the ropes.

  The crowd began to boo, their jeers rising with the smoke through the armory’s musty air. In the corner, Gould bobbed and weaved, willing his fighter to break out, counter, find an opening—do anything but stand there and let himself get pounded into dog food.

  “You got to be first, Jimmy! Don’t let him get set!”

  Jim saw a break in Feldman’s guard and threw a hard cross. He smash
ed Feldman’s jaw and sent him reeling. Jim pivoted in fast, cocked again for the finish, but Feldman lowered his head as Jim let go. Braddock’s lethal right connected with the top of Feldman’s skull. Abe’s helmet of a cranium refused to give, but Jimmy’s half-healed, double-taped hand did—

  Jim grimaced as the horrible crack of bone against bone echoed in his cauliflower ear. Knife-sharp blades of agony sliced through Jim’s fingers, and he fell into a clinch with Feldman. The bell ended the round but not the clinch, because Feldman was hurting too. The Ref stepped in to break it up, sending both fighters back to their corners.

  While the cutman toweled the sweat and blood from Braddock’s face, Gould unlaced his glove. Even beneath the heavy tape job, the manager could see that Jim’s knuckles were out of alignment, and his fingers had swelled into purple sausages. Gould’s lightest touch made Jim shudder. His boxer could no longer hide the pain.

  “It’s broken proper, Jimmy. I’m calling it.”

  Jim swallowed and thought of the purse, Mae, and the kids, the empty milk bottles. Mama, I want to eat too.

  “I can use my left.”

  Rounds were three minutes long. Breaks between them only one.

  “Stay inside.” Joe quickly replaced the glove, laced it back up. “Don’t let him crowd you. Do what you can with the left.”

  The bell clanged and Jim was up and into the ring. Gould shook his head. “I wish he could find his goddamned left,” he muttered to the cutman, then the manager lifted his voice to the rafters. “Shut him down!”

  But Jim couldn’t. His opponent rushed him, raining solid punches in stinging one-two rhythms. Jim tried to counter, but Gould was right—he just didn’t have a left-hand punch. Worse, his right couldn’t even block anymore, and his boxing shoes felt like they’d been dipped in lead. As Feldman landed blow after blow, Braddock was practically standing still, a defenseless six-three bag of sand for Feldman to punch at will.

  Time usually slowed for Jim under the broiling hot lights, but now it was hurtling forward in a violent frenzy, a breakneck merry-go-round that turned Feldman into a blur of unpredictable movement.

  Desperate, Braddock began to throw out his left again and again. His wild jabs missed, but he managed to send one serious uppercut to Feldman’s chin. Abe was still hurting from the right cross Braddock had fed him in the last round, and the uppercut did some damage.

  Both boxers fell into another clinch. They swayed in a drunken dance, back and forth across the canvas, and the gallery began to jeer again, hurling insults and catcalls.

  “Pay attention!” Gould shouted.

  The faces in the irate crowd were a whirling blur in Jim’s pain-racked vision—

  “You stink!”

  “Go home!”

  “No good—”

  Suddenly Jim decided maybe he had one more right cross in him.

  “Bum!”

  Yeah, thought Jim, one more—

  Jim cocked back and let fly. He struck Feldman on the sweet spot, and the boxer reeled, but beneath Jim’s glove, beneath his tape, his broken hand had completely shattered.

  As Jim braced against white-hot convulsive spasms, Feldman counterpunched with a vicious right. Jim’s head snapped back. He staggered, pulling Feldman into yet another pitiful clinch, holding onto his opponent like the intoxicated host of a party, desperately trying not to pass out. Feldman didn’t look much better. His arms wrapped around Braddock, and once again the two waltzed across the canvas.

  Gould barely heard the bell over the booing.

  “An embarrassment! That’s what it was. An embarrassment.”

  Gritting his teeth, Joe Gould forced himself to stand quietly and listen to the rantings of Jimmy Johnston, the big-suit promoter whose balls he’d squeezed to get Braddock that Tuffy Griffiths shot, not to mention the world title match against Tommy Loughran in Yankee Stadium.

  Barely thirty minutes ago, the referee had stopped the fight. Announcing “enough was enough,” he’d declared it a “no contest,” and threw any further rulings into the hands of the state boxing commissioners, which meant Joe Gould’s worst-case scenario had just come true.

  “Where’s the purse?” asked Gould, trying like hell to hold his temper in front of this makeshift tribunal, which included Johnston, the ref from tonight’s bout, and two state commissioners who’d been in the audience.

  “I wouldn’t have to tell you that if you gave a shit about your fighter,” Johnston said.

  Sitting behind the table with his fellow commissioners, Johnston sucked on his cigar and blew out a fat white puff, like Zeus making clouds for the mortals below him. It joined the smoke already hanging in the armory’s backroom office. Mount Olympus on the cheap.

  “Okay,” said Gould. Time to beg. He opened his fists, held his palms to the gods. “So he’s fighting hurt. Maybe you got fighters who can afford to rest a month between fights.”

  “Christ, he hardly gets a punch in anymore. Fights getting stopped by referees…He’s pathetic.”

  Gould closed his open palms, made two angry fists. Johnston had always thought Braddock was a bum, that he’d never amount to much. Now the prick had his validation. With his own eyes, Johnston had witnessed the lowest moment in Jim’s career. That still didn’t give him the right to call his friend pathetic. Gould was about to tell the promoter to shove the purse right up his ass when Johnston told Gould to wait outside the room for their decision. Ten minutes later, Johnston came out. Gould held his breath.

  “He was no draw tonight,” said Johnston, walking with Gould down the dingy hallway. “And you watch. Next week the gate will be down by half. A fighter like that keeps people away.”

  Gould stopped at the door to the locker room. Braddock was inside showering off blood.

  “We’re revoking his license, Joe,” said Johnston, just like that. “Whatever Braddock was gonna do in boxing, I guess he’s done it.”

  Outside the Armory, a single dim lightbulb cast the parking lot in deep shadows. By now, all the jeering fight fans had cleared out and the paved lot was all but abandoned by a few isolated cars. The ref and the two boxing commissioners moved toward those vehicles and climbed inside. Johnston was the last to leave.

  With a bang, the amory’s weathered back door swung open, bouncing off the dirty brick wall. Jim Braddock strode swiftly across the parking lot, Joe Gould struggling to keep up.

  “Mr. Johnston,” called Braddock. He stepped up to Johnston and planted himself.

  Johnston turned. “Jim.”

  “What’s going on?”

  The big man frowned at Braddock then turned his eyes to Gould’s round face. “You didn’t tell him?”

  “Yeah. I told him,” said Gould. “But he wanted to hear it from you.”

  Johnston’s eyes went back to Braddock. The boxer looked like a walking bruise, his right hand hanging by his side a sickly purple color, swelled and deformed and probably six months away from being able to open a pickle jar, let alone deliver a professional-level punch. One pathetic look from Johnston said it all. It’s over, Jimmy. Get it through your head.

  But Braddock refused. “I broke my hand, okay? You don’t see me crying about it. I don’t know what you got to complain about. We did that boondock circuit for you. I didn’t quit on you.” Braddock’s desperate look turned deadly serious. “I didn’t always lose. And I won’t always lose again.”

  Johnston said nothing.

  “I can still fight.”

  When Johnston spoke again, his bluster was gone, his voice quiet. “Go home.”

  “I can still fight.”

  “Go home to Mae and the kids, Jim.”

  Then Johnston climbed into his car and drove away. Braddock stood there and watched, wondering why the parking lot had suddenly turned into quicksand. For some reason, he couldn’t move his legs and his lungs had trouble taking in air.

  Then a firm hand grasped his shoulder. The usually garrulous Joe Gould guided Jim back inside without a word. The locker ro
om was a stink hole, so Gould led his boxer to the armory’s arena, where the low house-lights cast long shadows over the empty ring. Gould sat Jim down amid the deserted bleachers and searched for a sturdy piece of wood. When he found a section of broken fence board, he sat next to Jim and began taping the board to Jim’s smashed and shattered hand.

  “We’ll splint it with this until you get to the hospital,” said Gould.

  Jim said nothing, just stared at the floor.

  Gould tried to concentrate on the wrapping, but he couldn’t keep his mind from racing—or his mouth from running. “Maybe I shouldn’t have pushed you so hard,” he muttered. “We shouldn’t have gone to California that time…”

  Jim didn’t answer. He didn’t look up.

  Gould kept wrapping, and the memories started coming, crashing over him in waves…all the fights, all the crowds, all the dreams and hopes…

  “Joe Gould, you listen now, I am going to hold you responsible for the development of this fighter…”

  William Muldoon, 1928. His words had come with a sternly pointed finger. The distinguished, gray-haired boxing commissioner had seen Braddock knock Griffiths out in two at the Garden and had ordered Gould to appear before him with Jimmy in tow.

  “He must not be rushed along too rapidly. But with a little weight on him, I predict he’ll some day win the world’s heavyweight championship…”

  The eighty-three-year-old had grabbed Braddock’s hand and shook it vigorously that day. But that day had been a long time ago. Too long. Muldoon now rested in a windswept grave in Tarrytown, New York—as dead and buried as his golden prediction about Braddock’s future.

  Gould cleared his hoarse throat. “Jimmy, listen, your legs are heavy, the body lets you know…”

  “Don’t.”

  Gould’s insides twisted. He hated this. The commissioners were forcing him to KO his own fighter, but he knew they were right. He couldn’t put a washed-up boxer in the ring with a real contender—not if he wanted his man to come out alive. He had to get Jim to understand—