Speed Kings

by Andy Bull

  “A sock on the nose or soft caresses?” Eddie wrote. “It was, at times, hard to elect the socks.”

  One of his teammates was a sly “will-o’-the-wisp” named Gene Tunney, who would go on to make his name by defeating Jack Dempsey to become the champion of the world in 1926. Tunney was certain to be picked to represent the United States in the heavyweight division, which left Eddie competing with Al Norton for a slot in the next category down, the light heavyweights. Norton was a pro. He had fought Dempsey three times himself, and he’d had little more luck at it than Eddie in his exhibition. US coach Spike Webb arranged for the two of them to face off for the spot.

  Norton got the edge over Eddie right from the get-go. Eddie, amateur that he was, began the fight by stretching out his arm so the two men could touch gloves. Which they did, briefly, before Norton, the gnarled old pro, clobbered him with a left hook that knocked him down for a seven count. The blow had caught Eddie unawares and left him so concussed that he suffered from amnesia for three days after the fight. When he fully came to, he was told that he had fought on, furiously, for ten rounds, and that the fight had been called a draw. But seeing as Eddie finished it unable to remember his own name, let alone what day of the week it was, the team had entered Norton for the Games. Eddie was offered the middleweight slot instead, as long as he could sweat off nine pounds. He did it, just. He had more of a struggle making the weight than he did winning his first fight, against an Italian named Negri: it took Eddie thirty-two seconds to knock him out. The Belgian Eddie fought in the second round fared only a little better. The two knockouts made such an impression that Eddie’s two remaining opponents withdrew, “cowed into submission,” as the New York Times put it, “merely by his demonstration in the preliminary bouts.” Eddie became the Inter-Allied champion by a walkover.

  Sweet as the win was, Eddie was even more pleased with two other rewards that came his way. The King of Montenegro, Nicholas I, was so taken with Eddie’s pugilistic prowess that he gave him a medal and made him a member of the Order of Prince Danilo I. “The Montenegro coach says that you fellows that got medals are Counts of Montenegro,” Spike Webb told Eddie afterward. “See to it that you ain’t ever Count Ten.” Better yet, Eddie managed to wangle a press ticket to see the signing of the Treaty of Versailles. He took his place at the back of the Hall of Mirrors, but got so fed up with looking over the backs of so many heads that he pushed his way toward the front. He watched history unfold from thirty feet away. Not that he was all that impressed with what he saw. He expected the great statesmen David Lloyd George, Woodrow Wilson, and Georges Clemenceau to seem “splendid and godlike” and was disappointed to find them, as he wrote later, “acting like a lot of Oxford boys at a coming of age party,” each seeking the autograph of the other.

  Eddie wasn’t long back at Yale. He lost his national title in the spring of 1920, beaten on points by a heavyweight named Karl Wicks. There was a similar result in the light heavyweight final, when he took on Jack Burke. The New York Times reckoned that Eddie fought “with the bulldog spirit for which Yale is noted,” that he had “backed his man into all four corners of the ring” and had Burke “virtually defeated” when he was caught by a lucky punch. He weathered out what was left of the fight, but lost on points. Burke, Eddie said, had a right uppercut that hit like “a rock catapulted up from the floor.” He once used it to knock down Jack Dempsey in a sparring session. He lost in the final of the heavyweight category, too, on points again.

  Eddie had changed in the space of the past twelve months. This time around he was a proud Yalie. He’d traveled to the tournament with his fast friend Sam Pryor, a wealthy young man who would go on to become the vice president of Pan Am. They spent the morning before the Burke fight studying John Singer Sargent’s murals at the Boston Public Library. Eddie actually thought the defeats did him good: “They brought me back to my main purpose at Yale.” He knuckled down and passed his Easter exams with honors. The only fighting he did was during Yale’s mock political convention ahead of the 1920 election, when he was chosen to serve as the sergeant at arms. “He is expected,” the Times reported, “to insure peace and quiet.” That, Eddie gleefully recounted, is exactly what he did. The convention was crashed by a group of socialist delegates calling for “free love, free beer, and no work,” and Eddie, together with the varsity football team, enjoyed a “good rough-house.” By the time it was over, “the intruders were repressed and order was restored.” He did such a good job that he was hired to serve in a similar role at the real Republican convention in Chicago that May.

  By July 1920 Eddie was back in the ring. He traveled down to New York to take part in the qualifying bouts for the 1920 Olympics, to be held in Antwerp, Belgium, that August. He hoped to avenge the two defeats he had suffered in Boston, but Burke had since turned pro, which meant he wasn’t eligible for Olympic competition. Eddie remained resolutely amateur, though there were plenty of times when he was tempted. He was offered a guarantee of $1,500 to fight Mike O’Dowd for the middleweight championship of the world, a “sum that loomed as large as the Allied Indemnity bill.” But accepting it would have compromised his education and committed him to a career as a prizefighter. He turned it down, mindful of what both Tobin and Dempsey had told him in the past, but he spent the rest of his life wondering whether it had been the right thing to do. If Eddie couldn’t fight for money, he would fight for glory. And the most prestigious prize available to him was the Olympic title, so that was what he set his heart on. He won all four of his qualifying fights and took his place on the US team in the light heavyweight category.

  The team traveled out on the Princess Matoika, a rusty old tub that had served as a troop carrier. The trip was a farce, and the ship became infamous when a group of athletes mutinied in protest at the poor conditions on board. The men were packed into the sweltering hold, where plenty were struck down with seasickness. As for training, the runners had to practice on a sixty-yard-long cork track on deck, the javelin throwers were forced to tether their spears to the side of the ship and toss them out into the sea, and the swimmers made do with a leaky canvas tank full of saltwater. Eddie didn’t much mind. As a boxer, all he needed was a little patch of deck to exercise on and a space to spar in. Besides, he had endured worse in his time. “Star athletes can put prima donnas to shame when it comes to demonstrating displeasure.”

  To win the Olympic title, Eddie needed to beat three men. The first of them was a South African, Tom Holdstock. The fight was nip-and-tuck until the last round, when Eddie knocked Holdstock down with a left hook. Next came an Englishman, Harry Franks. He was clever and quick, but, as Eddie’s coach Spike Webb put it, “he couldn’t punch his way through a spider’s web.” Eddie had planned to rush him, but found himself like a bull charging at a matador’s red rag. Every time he closed in, Franks would sidestep and shoot out his jab. At the end of the first round, Eddie was well behind on points.

  “Show him you can dance the tango too,” Webb told him.

  And Eddie did. He switched his stance, putting his right foot and fist out in front instead of his left. It was a neat trick, and it foxed Franks. While he was blinking in confusion, Eddie caught him with an uppercut. By the third and final round, Eddie had the Englishman’s measure. He won on points. “If you’d only made up your mind which way you were going to stand,” Franks told him after the fight was over, “I’d have done much better.”

  They say there is a difference between a brawler and a boxer. One relies on aggression and instinct, the other on art and technique. Eddie was both. His childhood in Colorado had left him with rough edges, but he had learned his craft. He had beaten Holdstock with brute force, and then he had outwitted Franks.

  Eddie spent the day before the final in the Royal Museum of Fine Arts, looking at the paintings by Rubens. That night he slept in a feather bed for the first time, in a room he had rented so he could be away from the noise and bustle of the team camp. His
opponent was a Norwegian, Sverre Sørsdal, a giant redhead, “tireless and game,” with a body that looked like it had been cut from marble. Eddie was cagey. He held himself back in the first two rounds, standing off and allowing Sørsdal to come at him. Each time Sørsdal closed in, Eddie would block and parry the blows he delivered and then pick him off. In the third, Eddie switched up a gear. “I cut loose with every remaining ounce of energy in my body. I tore into him.” If Sørsdal was still landing blows, Eddie couldn’t feel them. When the bell sounded, the two men embraced each other. It had been a great fight. And Eddie had won it. He was the Olympic champion.

  Modern Olympians often talk of the slump they experience after the Games are over. They expend so much time, energy, and effort in the four years running up to that one event that afterward they are left feeling spent, wondering what to do next. Eddie’s life was too full, too rich, for him to waste time worrying about that, but he did decide to step away from the ring for a while and see what else life had to offer during his senior year at Yale. He decided to try out for the varsity football team and played a few games as a tight end. He won good reviews, too, from both his teammates, who reckoned him one of the “most popular members of the squad,” and the New York Times, which reported that he “played a wonderful game” against a scrub team and that “with the rapid strides he is making, in another season he should be a star.” That didn’t happen. Frank Merriwell may have been able to excel at everything he turned his hand to, but Eddie found football a stretch. He did, however, win a coveted “Y,” as captain of the boxing team, and he was elected class secretary and class orator. He had come a long way in the three years since he’d arrived in New Haven, penniless, intimidated, and unsure of whether he was worthy of a place there.

  Eddie graduated with honors in the summer of 1921 and enrolled at Harvard Law School. He celebrated by taking a tour around Europe with his friends Sam Pryor, Mike O’Brien, and Mace Thompson. The other three could pay their way, but Eddie had to work his passage. He wangled a job as entertainments officer on board the ship. They cruised the fjords of Norway, climbed the Alps in Switzerland, and went to the bullfights in Spain. The place that made the biggest impression on him was Oxford, England. He decided to apply for a Rhodes scholarship so he could study there.

  He had an extraordinary interview back in Denver, where he was grilled by a group of old Oxford men.

  “What club would you use if you were in golf and 100 yards from the green?”

  “Suppose at Oxford some of the students decided to debag you in the college quad, what would you do?”

  “Will you drink tea should you go to Oxford?”

  Eddie’s answers were the right ones.

  “That depends on the lie of the ball, but if it’s good then take a mashie [wedge].”

  “If a group of students tries to pull your trousers down, the obvious thing to do is try and debag as many of them as possible before they succeed in stripping yours off.”

  And, yes, of course he would drink tea.

  A few days later the Denver Post announced of the city’s favorite son, Eddie Eagan: “Denver’s athletic and scholastic ace and king of the amateur light heavyweight boxers of the world has been awarded Colorado’s Rhodes scholarship.”

  —

  If Yale had seemed outlandish to Eddie, Oxford was altogether another world. He enrolled at New College, where he was welcomed by the warden William Spooner, an elderly albino who read Eddie’s letters of recommendation with the aid of an oversize magnifying glass. Spooner, of course, was famous for his habit of muddling up his consonants when he spoke.

  Eddie’s rooms had no heating or plumbing. Everything about the place felt antiquated. He was woken each morning by his elderly, gap-toothed scout, who would bring him a cup of tea and sing him a music hall song. His law tutor had served in the war and was riddled with shrapnel. “At frequent intervals he would be laid up while bits of metal worked their way out of his body.” Eddie was never more a fish out of water than when he was invited to a party held by a group who studied at Christ Church and called themselves the “Oxford Wits.” Their ringleaders were Brian Howard and Harold Acton, who provided the inspiration for the character of Anthony Blanche in Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited. Waugh had been part of the esthetes’ set himself, and lampooned them in his 1945 work. Acton, just like Blanche in the book, liked to stand on his balcony and recite T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land through a megaphone to people passing below.

  Eddie wanted to get to know all “types and classes” of the British, so he had accepted the invitation to visit. As he entered, Acton rushed up to greet him with a flower in his hand.

  “Oh, we’re so glad you came!” Acton said. “Have a lily.”

  Eddie, somewhat embarrassed, was struck dumb for a moment. “What shall I do with it?”

  “Oh, nothing,” Acton replied. “Just look at it. Isn’t it beautiful?”

  Eddie, a little lost among the “artistic” crowd, as he euphemistically referred to them, fell into conversation with a poet, most likely Brian Howard. “He was dressed as I had seen pictures of Byron; a velvet jacket, an open-throated shirt, and he wore his hair long and brushed back.” Howard complimented him on his prowess as a boxer, and Eddie politely replied that his feats were “no more glorious than being the champion poet of Oxford,” and jokingly suggested that the two of them should consider switching hobbies. “You come out for boxing, and I’ll write poetry.” Eddie explained, “There’s poetry in any good fight. And if I could write how I’ve felt about some victories they would be epics.” Howard, an earnest fellow, took him at his word. Eddie was mortified when he saw an article in a London newspaper the next day under the headline “Boxer Becomes Poet,” explaining how Eddie was going to “sing about the thrills of prizefighting in metric cadence and rhyme.” His main worry was that word would spread back to Denver, “where they would blame Oxford for ruining a good boxer.”

  In the end, Eddie decided that he was more comfortable in the company of the three fellows from the Oxford boxing club who had come to see him shortly after he arrived. One was Douglas Douglas-Hamilton, the Marquis of Douglas and Clydesdale. Just as it had done at Yale, boxing opened up a new world to Eddie, one that would perhaps have remained unavailable to him if he hadn’t been so skilled in the ring. He and the Marquis of Clydesdale—“Douglo,” as Eddie knew him—became sparring partners, and, eventually, firm friends. Eddie taught Douglo to box, and with some success: he won the Scottish amateur middleweight title. Douglo, in turn, took Eddie under his wing, bringing him to his estate in Scotland. Eddie learned that “beneath the veneer of social customs they were the same fine men I’ve met everywhere in the world.” A little later in his Oxford life, Eddie dined with the Prince of Wales and found him to be “a pleasant, smiling young man” and an enthusiastic fight fan.

  The marquis and his two friends had come to ask Eddie to join the varsity team for the match against Cambridge. Eddie’s reputation preceded him. He had given little thought to the sport since winning his Olympic title, fighting only twice, but he found himself unable to turn them down. “Boxing is in my blood,” he wrote. “And like an old cavalry horse smelling burned powder, the call of battle was proving irresistible.” He was soon back in the ring, though he struggled to find worthy opposition. Eddie once explained that the kindest thing to do to an inferior fighter was to put him quickly out of his misery. “A knockout,” he wrote, “is the most generous treatment” because “a man with fighting spirit will take punishment so long as he remains conscious.” The alternative, he pointed out, was to “bludgeon an opponent until he is goofy.” He was in an especially charitable mood during Oxford’s match against Sandhurst military college, when he fought the team’s coach and knocked him out in the first few seconds of the opening round. In the varsity match, Eddie made such short work of his opponents on the Cambridge team that the Daily Mail published a series of cartoons
showing his adversaries pleading for mercy. “Unlike most heavyweights Mr. Eagan likes it,” read the caption on one. “He is willing to box the whole of Cambridge or anyone who goes there.”

  Eddie’s ambitions didn’t stop there. The Mail’s boxing writer, Trevor Wignall, persuaded him to enter the British Amateur Championship in London. Wignall pointed out that while the competition was open to all comers, the title had “never been won by an American.” That was all the incentive Eddie needed. He fought his way through the preliminaries easily enough, in front of a “strange mob” of sailors and navvies who cried out, “Kill the Yank!” when he came into the ring. He was only really tested during a bout against a policeman named Arthur Clifton. Eddie won the crowd over by beating him, the police being even less popular with the crowd than visiting Americans. Clifton would get his revenge a couple of years later.

  The finals were held at Alexandra Palace, where the crowd was of a different cut. “Around the ringside were monocled toffs, with high silk hats, broad white shirt fronts, leaning on canes. Flashily clothed gentlemen, bowlers atilt, were sandwiched between the men about town.” Eddie, ever the glutton for punishment, had again entered himself in both the light heavyweight and the heavyweight divisions. He fought twice in the morning, winning both times, and then popped into town to eat a steak at Simpson’s on the Strand. Fortified, he returned to the Palace and fought twice more. His battle with Harry Mitchell for the light heavyweight title was, the Times said, “the fight of the day.” Eddie came out swinging. “He sailed into his man with a fury that left Mitchell with a cut eye by the end of the first round” and carried on in similar fashion in the second. But he made the mistake of easing up in the third, as he believed himself to be well ahead on points. His opponent “landed some stinging counters and followed them up with a right to the head.” Mitchell won on points, though both Eddie and the Times agreed that the decision was something of an injustice. In the heavyweight final he was matched against Henry Hulks, a good boxer “with a long, poking left.” Eddie pulled that old trick of his, the one that foxed Harry Franks in the Olympics, and switched his stance midway through the fight. He sold a feint with his right, and as Hulks moved his hands up to cover his face, socked him in the belly with a left hook that put him flat on the canvas.