She had even liked the Band-aid he’d worn across his nose.
“I just see you settin’ here by yourself, and you look special, “he told her.
“Me? Special? They don’t come more ordinary than me,” she assured him.
“Not to me you. don’t look ordinary. ’’
He could not have hit on a better approach.
“I think Calhoun will walk right into a right hand,” it was Jose Salazar’s expressed opinion before their fight in Union City in August of 1964, “and my right is the best hand I have. I saw Nims drop him with a right. If Benson could have hit harder he would have stopped Calhoun cold.”
Salazar opened cuts above Calhoun’s eyes, then slashed the cuts with his laces. When Calhoun was told the fight might have to be stopped, he hit Salazar ten successive punches, but Salazar didn’t give him room to land damagingly and came back with an offensive of his own. Yan Ianelli began waving his arms and shouting, “Stop the fight! Stop the fight!” The fight was awarded to Salazar although Calhoun had been ahead on points.
“I don’t want to fight no more billygoats,” was Calhoun’s only comment.
“Although he can’t box,” one critic observed of Salazar, “he can’t think too well and he can’t punch either.”
“If I win as big as I expect to,” Emil Griffin assured reporters before his fight with Calhoun, “I expect to campaign as a middleweight. I’ve fought seven middleweights and whipped every one. Calhoun is going to be the eighth. I’m going after him at the bell and—BANG!”
In their bout at Pittsburgh, later in 1964, Griffin started slowly, merely jabbing and ducking. Calhoun, who’d been warming up in his dressing room for twenty minutes, landed a solid left into Griffin’s belly. Griffin moved in carelessly, Calhoun pitched another left to the body, pushed Griffin away with considerable force, crossed with a right and drove another smashing left to Griffin’s head.
Griffin landed on his back and rose slowly to beat the count, but his legs were rubbery. Calhoun stormed after him and beat him into the ropes. Another smashing left to the body and Griffin slithered to the canvas. He was still trying to rise when the referee stopped the fight.
Two minutes and thirteen seconds of the first round.
The crowd was stunned momentarily by the suddenness of the knockout. Then broke into cheers and applause for Calhoun.
“He’s a good little man and I’m a good big man,” Calhoun commented. “Though there’s only a three-and-a-half-pound pull in the weights, that doesn’t tell the story. The comparison is marked in other ways—how I pushed him around proves it. It’s silly to match me with welterweights. I’ve told you that before.”
“I was careless and got a lousy break,” Griffin complained. “I know I was down twice and I remember everything clearly.”
He then proceeded to relate details which had never occurred.
“They should never have stopped that fight,” Griffin’s mother insisted, “my boy would have stayed up and gone on to win. I wasn’t worried about that in the least.”
“Griffin was a proud man before he was chosen Fighter of the Year,” Calhoun observed, “he was so proud he forced the fight lest he be accused of running away. And I can knock out anybody in the world who comes at me like that.”
Yan Ianelli announced, at ringside, that he was offering Joey Gardello a hundred thousand dollars to defend his title against Calhoun. “I’m out to do business with Gardello. He’s his own manager, I’m going to talk loud and strong,” Ianelli promised. “I now hold the key to the middleweight situation.”
“You have a towering practical ambition,” Mrs. Ianelli assured her husband before the press. “Like your symbol, the goat, you leap over both adversaries and obstacles in your climb to the heights. You have all the attributes necessary to success, since you are hard-working and reliable; you have tremendous initiative and drive, and the only thing that can possibly stop you is that you have almost no brain at all. To tell you the truth, you really are a goat.”
“I made Ruby Calhoun a contender,” Ianelli added without paying attention to Elvira. “I took him out of prison and straightened him out. Now I’m going to make him a champion.”
“I was a contender before I ever heard of Ianelli,” Calhoun advised the press. “The man keeps on talking about how he took me out of prison, but he never took me out of anything. I served my time and was released. I’d been out months before I went to work for Ianelli. I was straightened out long before I’d met him. He never knew enough about fighting to whip his own wife. Neither of them have the faintest idea of what they’re doing. He told me he lives by ‘the Good Book,’ but the good book he lives by is one on astrology. When he put Elvira to picking opponents according to their horoscopes, instead of on their records, I told them that was it: forget it. Now he’s going to sue me, my father and the Boxing Commission. Let him sue. He claims he’s got six contracts with me but he don’t have a single legal one.”
Floyd Calhoun managed Ruby in his fight with Joey Gardello. Although his father got him little more than his training expenses, Ruby wasn’t dismayed by the prospect.
“I’d fight Gardello even if I had to pay him to get into the ring with me,” he assured reporters. “Gardello will wind up with the money but I’ll wind up with the title. Then I’ll show them how to step.”
Ruby entrained for Philadelphia with Red Haloways. Red was to serve him as a sparring partner. They took a two-room suite in a downtown hotel that had training quarters.
Red disappeared himself the first morning and Ruby had to work without a sparring partner. After a stiff workout, Ruby was relaxing, in the afternoon, when he heard laughter from the adjoining room. He went to the door wearing only his jockey shorts, and found Red lounging on a divan. A young white girl was mixing a drink for him.
“Rube, I want you to meet Marlene.”
Ruby didn’t acknowledge the introduction.
“Who’s paying for this, Red?”
“I haven’t yet got that figured out, Rube,” Red answered cheerfully. “Put on some pants.”
It was plain enough to the girl that the husky young black man in the doorway had no intention of putting on his pants. Ruby shut the door upon her and Red.
Red was on hand in the gym, early the following morning, by the time Ruby got there. He was suited up and was skipping rope.
“You ready for action?” he asked Red. “Get on your headgear.”
Ruby climbed into the ring without headgear. He bulled Red back to the ropes, feinted him to the left, then to the right, moved him around the ring, pulling his punches. He cornered Red, let him go, cornered him again and again let him go.
Red’s breath was coming hard not only from the pace. He knew that Ruby was telling him he could knock him cold whenever he chose and hadn’t yet decided exactly when.
“Get on your duds, Red,” Ruby told him when the round was done, “you’re no good to me.”
“What do you want me to do, Rube?” Red asked after he’d gotten dressed.
“Go home, Red. Go home. Stay there until fight night. I’ll have two ringside for you and Matt.”
“No hard feelings?”
“No hard feelings.”
“People say he’s mean,” Red told a reporter. “They ask me how I can get along with him. I’ll tell you, you can believe me, that man has no meanness in him at all. If he puts faith in you, and you cross him, he’ll hurt you. But if you don’t mistreat him, he’s the best. Absolutely the best.”
“Calhoun’s beard is the source of his power,” Gardello advised the press, “without it he is helpless. There are big germs in it. I have no fear whatsoever of Calhoun himself, but I cannot fight germs of such size.”
The Boxing Commission instructed Calhoun to shave off his beard before getting into the ring with Gardello.
“But the beard makes me feel distinguished,” Calhoun protested. “People take me for a musician. I walk down the street and people say, ‘Where you playin�
�, man?’ and I tell them, ‘Down in the Village.’”
“Calhoun gets smarter and smarter,” Calhoun’s new trainer, Charlie Goldberg, announced. “Every time he fights he fights smarter than his last fight.”
“That’s nice,” one of Gardello’s stablemates observed, “if he lasts fifteen rounds with Gardello he’ll be a genius.”
“After I take care of Gardello,” Calhoun assured him, “I’ll take care of you.”
Gardello was installed as a nine to five favorite. By fight night smart money, coming in from Scranton, switched the odds to Calhoun, seven to five.
Calhoun looked cool and menacing, wearing a black, hooded robe with a knotted golden belt. He’d shaved off his beard but had kept his Fu Manchu.
Gardello swung through the ropes wearing a ratty terry-cloth robe. Neither man acknowledged his introduction.
Crouched, chin in, Calhoun pressed forward, trying to move Gardello, a counter-puncher, around him clockwise. Gardello was too experienced to let himself be moved into a corner. He kept leading Calhoun back, in a wheeling pattern, leaving himself to move away. Calhoun was the aggressor from the start. He remained ahead the first four rounds because he was landing solidly. But he would not follow up his punches.
“I had to figure I was going fifteen rounds,” he explained later. “I’d never gone fifteen before. I knew I had him from the start but I didn’t go all out because I felt I had to save myself. Gardello takes a lot of punishment, then comes back. I held myself back. I didn’t want to punch myself out.”
In the fourth Calhoun staggered Gardello with a head shot and opened a cut above Gardello’s left eye. The trickle of blood down his cheek didn’t trouble Gardello. He’d been cut before and he succeeded, the remainder of the fight, in protecting that eye.
Calhoun stopped pressing in the middle rounds and didn’t keep his hands so high. He was faster than Gardello had thought, slipping punches time and again. Calhoun, however, didn’t sustain the pressing attack he’d begun. Gardello kept bouncing away, leaning back and spinning off. In the tenth Gardello took over, scoring with left hooks to the body and head, and sustained that attack in the last two rounds. There were no knockdowns.
“I think it was mine nine to six,” Calhoun said after the decision had gone to Gardello. “If I could have made him fall, that was all. That would have made the difference. I staggered him half a dozen times, but he wouldn’t go down. I could go another fifteen right now.”
“I wasn’t in the least surprised at the decision,” Gardello told reporters. “I lost three rounds at the most. I hurt him in the thirteenth or fourteenth. I kept getting stronger. Fighting inside won it for me. Calhoun is a tough fighter but he didn’t press me as much as I thought he would. This cut over my eye came from a butt. Calhoun told me he was sorry as soon as he did it. Considering he’s only had twenty-five fights, he’s darn good. Better than Dick Lion.”
“If I’d pressed him any harder he would have had to walk along the top rope,” Calhoun replied. “I didn’t get to sit down once between rounds the whole fight. The ref kept me standing. I couldn’t see what was going on in Gardello’s corner. He just held me standing there, pretending to fix my cup. Fixed it every round. When it took twenty minutes for the decision to come in, I knew it was going to be a hometown decision.”
“Calhoun was doomed before the fight got under way,” Doc Lowry, a New Jersey fight manager, claimed. “The fight was in the wrong town.”
Ask any ten sportswriters who won a bout, if both men are on their feet at its end, and you’ll get six different answers. Boxing is the only sport in which, barring a knockout, any result is so disputable.
The orange-pop carton, and the copy of the Philadelphia News, which landed in the ring after Gardello had been declared winner by decision, must have been pitched there by one of the people who’d been predicting a hometown decision.
“If you’re a Philly fighter you can win in Philly,” one New York sports writer claimed, adding, “Calhoun mauled Gardello.”
“Had it been a street fight,” another writer observed, “Calhoun would have won going away.”
The Calhouns were now living in a big, tree-shaded old-fashioned farmhouse on the outskirts of Jersey City. They were renting but had taken an option to buy.
There was a half-acre of yard space around the place, half a dozen poplars and a one-story coach house made over from a stable.
Now it was Billy Boggs’s home. He paid no rent, but took care of the property in return for his meals and occupancy. Billy didn’t take too much care—but then the old stable couldn’t have brought in much rent anyhow. Billy mowed the lawn, took out the garbage, trimmed bushes on the street side, and stayed out of the way when he was stoned, which was a blessing.
Because, when stoned, he was the biggest bore on the Eastern Seaboard. He’d found this black kid in the joint, and had seen his possibilities, he’d tell anyone whom he could get to stand still long enough to hear him out, and he’d worked on this kid, and had gotten him out of prison, and then, by careful programming, had set him on the road to a world’s title. There was never a word about this kid having married his daughter, thus giving Billy bed and board. He stayed out of Ruby’s hearing when explaining his claim to world fame. He watched Ruby’s fights on TV rather than at ringside, at the Paradise.
Matt Haloways was tolerant of the old man. He’d dealt with drunks and ex-cons all his life. He was a good listener. The other old man of Calhoun’s entourage, Floyd Calhoun, was less tolerant. Floyd came of a long line of backwoods preachers and never took a drink. He enjoyed chatting with old man Haloways, over a soft drink, but he kept an aversion to Billy.
It was their memories of fighters of the thirties and forties that the old men held in common. They could while away a whole afternoon, over a game of five-and-dime rummy in the Paradise, recalling Robinson, Zale, Graziano, Gavilan, Billy Graham and Fritzie Zivic. When Matt was holding a good hand, and a customer came in, Matt would tell him: “Help yourself” The customer would then go behind the bar, pour himself a shot and a beer and call to Matt, “Put it on my tab.” Matt sometimes remembered, sometimes forgot.
“The guy I always liked was Zale,” Floyd Calhoun recalled. “You know what he told Jimmy Cannon after he’d been knocked out by Graziano in Chicago? He told Cannon, ‘They never should have stopped that fight. Never.’ ‘Tony,’ Cannon told him, ‘if they hadn’t stopped it you might have been killed on the ropes.’ ‘I was entitled to get killed for my title,’ Zale told Cannon.”
The Calhouns’ houseguests were now as often white as black: sportswriters, trainers, fighters black and fighters white, fighters brown and high yellow. Color is secondary among fighting men.
Ruby Calhoun no longer drank desperately. He hadn’t been on a real burning-down drunk since his marriage. When Red put the bottle down on the bar for him, at the Paradise, Ruby would take one shot and that would be it.
Although Jennifer regarded Red with suspicion, she never attempted to impose morality on her husband. She knew it could not be done that way. Where another woman might have shrieked reproaches or threats, her silence bore the greater reproach. She had only to give him a certain glance to make his conscience writhe. For a man who’d been such a wild juvenile, Ruby Calhoun was doing well.
He drove Jennifer to the hospital one night, then returned to find his house desolate. He went to the coach house to chat up old times with Billy Boggs, but Billy was stretched out in a paralyzing drunk. He returned to the hospital early the following day, but by evening Jennifer had not given birth. A nurse advised Ruby to go home and get some sleep.
He couldn’t find sleep. The moment his head hit the pillow he was wide awake and wondering. Why had his mother permitted his father to call the police that time of the Elegant Gent caper? After he’d gotten back from Germany, who had fingered him, working in the plastics factory, about his escape from Annanville? Why had the police picked him up, during the Harlem riots, and then let him go? Who�
��d even known he was up in Harlem? At last he put on his clothes and went down to the Paradise. It was shortly before the 2 A.M. closing hour.
Dovie-Jean Dawkins was at the bar as if expecting him. The bar was empty but for her and Red. Red pushed the bottle toward Ruby but Ruby didn’t pour.
“Little action, it looks like,” Ruby observed.
Red grinned. “When a buddy wants action, he gets action.” He ducked down and came up, from behind the bar, wearing a huge hawk nose and a wig of orange-blond more fiery than his own reddish mop. He switched on the record player beneath the bar and began miming Frank Sinatra:
And every afternoon at five
We’ll be so glad to be alive.
Cocktails for two.
Dovie-Jean sat unsmiling. Her look said: “I’ve seen this one before.” Ruby smiled weakly and nodded to Dovie-Jean. She rose and left with him, leaving Red alone at the bar still miming Sinatra:
In our little penthouse way up in the sky,
With hinges on windows for clouds to go by …
They drove, without further word, to the same little highway motel where they’d spent the night of their first meeting.
Ruby talked to women more confidently than to men, and Dovie-Jean was perceptive enough to know that what he wanted tonight wasn’t sex so much as having a woman to talk to.
They lay side by side in the darkened room, her head upon his shoulder, his arm encircling her.
“We left Tiger looking like a fool, singing to himself,” she remembered.
“Anytime anyone leaves that redhead looking like a fool, it’s because Red wants to look the fool.”
“I don’t understand that, Ruby.”
“When people take you for a fool, they’re off guard. Red makes his own plans.”
“Funny way to talk.”
“Why funny?”
“Not friendly. Like you don’t trust him. You are his best friend, after all, aren’t you?”
The Devil's Stocking Page 5
