The Harder They Fall

by Budd Schulberg

  I didn’t go down to the station to meet Harry Miniff and his formidable Eastern heavyweight because sometimes discretion is the better part of public relations. But there was quite a delegation on hand to greet the prominent Broadway sportsman, as Miniff was blithely identified that morning by one of the columnists I had drinking out of my hand. I would like to have seen it, though. Little Miniff, the hungriest of the hungry, as ignored and insulted a man as ever faced daily humiliation on Jacobs Beach, being greeted by Nate Starr, the promoter, and Joe Bishop, the matchmaker, as if he had a stable full of champions; and old Cowboy Coombs, who always looked a little surprised to find himself still on his feet, being treated with the respect usually reserved for more vertical pugilists.

  I had given Miniff the pitch by airmail, writing most of his dialogue and warning him urgently not to refer to Coombs as ‘my bum’ in public, as he was inclined to do. ‘That is all right for those of us who know and love you, but I don’t think it will contribute to the success of Toro’s debut,’ I had written. To which Miniff had answered graciously, ‘Okay, I will give my impersonation of a guy what has all his bills paid and his IOUs called in. And I’ll try not to call my bum a bum.’

  According to the evening paper, Miniff had played his part faithfully, if somewhat ungrammatically. There was a picture of Coombs’ puffy, flattened face, captioned, ‘giant-killer?’ and under it a brief interview with Coombs’ mentor, in which he said, ‘This giant don’t scare us. We don’t fear nobody. We give up a big money match in the Garden to take this fight, that’s how confident we are we can walk all over this Man Mountain. The bigger they are the harder they fall.’

  Late that afternoon Harry came up to the hotel. He had bought a new hat to celebrate his change of fortune, but the way he had already twisted it, with one side up and the other side down, it looked exactly like his old hat. To this day the top of Miniff’s head and I are complete strangers. I am sure if you were to look in on Miniff taking a bath you would find him with his hat on. Miniff seemed as determined to go into his grave with his hat on as other adventurers were about their boots.

  ‘Well, how was your trip, Harry?’ I said.

  ‘Terrible,’ Miniff moaned. ‘Why’d they haveta put this place so far from New York? My ulcers don’t like to travel.’

  ‘This is the healthiest climate in the world,’ I said. ‘This’ll make a man of you, Miniff. All this fresh air and sunshine.’

  ‘I get dizzy in the sun,’ Miniff complained.

  ‘Wanna shot?’ Vince said, pouring one for himself.

  ‘Whatta you wanna do, kill me?’ Miniff demanded. ‘The milk, I’m strictly on the milk.’

  ‘Tell room service to send up one Jersey,’ I told Vince. ‘We can keep it in the bathroom while Miniff’s here. Anything to eat, Harry?’

  ‘Gimme a sturgeon sandwich on rye,’ Miniff said.

  ‘Sturgeon,’ I said. ‘Where the hell do you think you are, Lindy’s? This is California.’

  ‘Don’t they eat in California?’ Miniff wanted to know.

  ‘Only nutburgers and cheeseburgers,’ I said. ‘How about a nice fruit salad?’

  ‘Fruit gives me hives,’ Miniff said. From his breast pocket, he took out three short, fat cigars, stuck one in his mouth and passed the others around.

  ‘Ten-cent cigar,’ I said. ‘Don’t let these write-ups go to your head, Harry.’

  ‘I like my old ones better,’ Miniff said, ‘but I gotta keep up a front.’

  ‘How’s Cowboy?’ I said. ‘He understands he’s to tell everybody he’s betting on himself to knock Toro out? I want to build this up so it sounds like he’s fed up with giving a foreigner so much publicity and out to knock his head off.’

  ‘But don’t get him so steamed up he can’t go in two,’ Vince said. ‘Got that, I want him to go in two.’

  ‘Two!’ Miniff said. He pushed his hat back with a quick motion of his hand. ‘That’s too quick. The fans don’t like it. They don’t get their money’s worth. I gotta better idea.’

  ‘Shove your ideas,’ Vince said.

  ‘Gimme a chance,’ Miniff begged. ‘Whatsamatter, we ain’t got free speech in this country no more?’

  ‘What the hell office you running for you wanna make a speech?’ Vince said. ‘Run as spittoon cleaner and ass wiper and maybe I’ll vote for you.’

  ‘Aaaaaaaah,’ said Miniff in rebuttal. It was a gutter sound, a harsh, embittered protest against bigger men with better connections. ‘I gotta weenie for improving the take and you dial out on me.’

  ‘All right, let’s have it,’ Vince said magnanimously. ‘Ten to one it stinks, but let’s have it.’

  ‘My bum and your bum,’ Miniff began, ‘they fight even …’

  ‘Take it away, it stinks,’ Vince cut in.

  ‘Going into the seventh, eighth, ninth, it’s still even,’ Miniff continued. ‘Then in the tenth, with thirty seconds t’ go, your bum lands and my bum rolls over and plays dead. D’ya buy that?’

  ‘You couldn’t give it to me with Seabiscuit for a bonus,’ Vince said.

  ‘But your bum comes in right under the wire,’ Miniff’s voice rose and accelerated. ‘It makes more talk. The guy’s a hero.’

  ‘Just because it’s the Hollywood stadium, we don’t haveta give ’em a movie,’ Vince said.

  Miniff mopped his forehead with his short fingers in a nervous gesture. ‘But my way we get a rematch. Eddie writes it up how my bum is convinced he lost on a fluke and wants revenge. Then in the rematch my bum goes in two like you want. What’s wrong with that, tell me what’s wrong with that?’

  ‘Don’t be so shoving hungry,’ Vince said. ‘You get seven-fifty for the fight and an extra two-five-o for the act. What more d’ya want?’

  ‘I want it twice,’ Miniff admitted. ‘Twice won’t do you no harm and we c’n use the difference. We ain’t had a fight since Worcester. And the bum has five kids to feed.’

  ‘Shove the kids,’ Vince said. ‘What does this look like, a relief office? Coombs goes in two. If it lasts too long they’ll see what a dog we got. Ten rounds and the ref’ll throw ’em out for not trying. Ain’t that right, Eddie?’

  ‘I’m afraid it is, Harry,’ I said. ‘The longer Toro’s in there, the worse he’s going to look. And Coombs can’t go too many rounds without falling down from force of habit.’

  ‘Well, anyway I c’n pay up my back rent,’ said Miniff philosophically, chewing on his cigar as if it were nourishment.

  A week before the fight, the press came up to have a look at our ‘human skyscraper’, as some of the boys were calling him now. The camp was opened to the public too, and there were a couple of hundred sightseers every day, laying down their buck for a hinge at the freak. There were always a good many women in the crowd. There was something about his brute size that seemed to exert a Stone-Age influence on the girls. I made a mental note of this for future reference. Atavism, I labelled it.

  Everybody seemed impressed as Toro bent and stretched that Brobdingnagian torso. While he was shadow-boxing, I went into the dressing room to talk to George, who was lacing up his ring shoes for the last heavy workout he was going to have with Toro before the fight.

  ‘The two-seventeen took my baby away,’ he was singing under his breath. ‘The two-nineteen will bring her back some day …’

  ‘George, there’s a lot of reporters out there today,’ I said.

  ‘I understand, Mr Lewis,’ he said. And he chuckled again in that way he had of making the whole deal seem ridiculous, profoundly ridiculous, foolish and pointless.

  ‘Toro’s supposed to be a hitter,’ I reminded him.

  ‘Don’t worry, Mr Lewis,’ George said, ‘I’ll make him look as good as I can.’ And the low-pitched, good-natured laughter rose from his belly again, untainted by meanness, a warm and compassionate but disconcerting laugh.

  The sparring looked all right. George cuffed him around a little in the first round and tied him up in clinches that Toro was strong enough t
o break out of. In the next two rounds George mistimed his slips just enough for Toro to catch him with that looping right. George tossed his head, as if to shake off the effect of the punch, and fell into a clinch. Just before the final bell, after being short with a right hook, George ran out one high on the head and dropped to one knee. It really didn’t look too bad. The only funny thing was that when George rose and touched gloves Toro wanted to make sure George wasn’t hurt before continuing.

  ‘What the hell’s going on?’ Danny said when Toro hesitated.

  ‘He does not have the wish to injure George seriously,’ Acosta explained.

  ‘Now I’ve heard everything,’ Danny said. ‘Tell him to keep fighting, goddam it, until I hit the bell.’

  ‘Is the big joker kidding?’ asked the young, jowly reporter who had met us at the train.

  ‘No, he’s just afraid of his own power,’ I ad-libbed. ‘You see, back in Buenos Aires one of the guys he kayoed spent ten weeks in a hospital and damn near died. Ever since then he’s been afraid he might kill somebody.’ It sounded so good I thought I might as well blow it a little louder. ‘In fact, it might be a good idea if you sports writers reminded the referee as a public service that it’s his responsibility to the citizens of California to stop his fights before Molina inflicts serious injury. We’re out to win as impressively as possible, but we don’t want to kill anybody.’

  ‘What’s the name of this guy he almost killed?’ the reporter wanted to know.

  I called over to Toro, whose face Doc was wiping with a towel while Acosta was pulling off his gloves. ‘Toro,’ I said in Spanish, ‘what was the name of your first opponent before you came up here?’

  ‘Eduardo Solano,’ Toro said.

  ‘Got that?’ I said, and I spelt it out for the reporter. The next morning he used that for his lead.

  Al Leavitt was up there too. ‘Well, what do you think of him, Al?’ I said.

  He just shrugged. ‘I never go by training,’ he said. ‘I’ve seen beautiful gymnasium fighters look like palookas in the ring. And I’ve seen good fighters who always looked lousy in their workouts.’

  A wise apple. But he didn’t bother me. You always have to figure on one of those. The rest of the press was fine. My book of clippings was getting fatter each edition. The training camp attendance had built nicely. Toro Molina, Inc., was already in the black. And Nate Starr told me the stadium had been sold out for a week. Five-dollar ringsides were being scalped for two and three times their official price. We were ready to move into town.

  The first day back in LA I took Toro out to MGM for some publicity tie-ups. I had an old buddy out there, Teet Carle, opening doors for me. Toro was wearing the new gabardine Weatherill had cut for him and he looked like a million pesos. He took a child’s delight in this sartorial splendour, with his new specially built two-tone shoes and his size 8½ straw hat that would have made Miniff a nice beach umbrella. The pictures we knocked off were right down the old Graflex groove. There must be something about the chemistry of a press agent and a still camera that makes it impossible for them to produce any other kinds of pictures except the ones I set up at Metro – Toro squaring off with Mickey Rooney standing on a box; Toro with a couple of pretty stock-girls in bathing suits feeling his muscles; Toro on the set with Clark Gable and Spencer Tracy showing off the size of his fist. ‘Two stars see fist that will make Coombs see more stars,’ I captioned that one.

  The Main Street gym, where Toro and Coombs were to put in their final workouts, looks like a shabbier twin of Stillman’s in New York. The street is gaudier than Eighth Avenue. It offers cheap burlesque houses and dime movies for adults only, dim and dingy bars with raucous jukeboxes and blousy B-girls, your fortune for a dime, your haircut for a quarter, whisky for fifteen cents, love for a dollar and a five-cent flop.

  Outside the entrance to the gym was the usual sidewalk gathering: boxers, managers, old fighters, hangers-on. On the kerb a huge, shabbily dressed, fight-scarred Negro swung good-naturedly at a much smaller Negro who had sneaked up to goose him. ‘Keep away from there, man,’ the big Negro cried, grinning with a mouthful of gold teeth. It was only then, as he raised his large, punished face, that I saw he was blind.

  George went up to him and said, ‘Whatcha doin’, Joe?’

  The blind Negro cocked his head. ‘What you want, man?’

  ‘Putcha hands up, brother,’ George said gaily, ‘and see if you can still lick Georgie Blount.’

  ‘Georgie!’ the blind man said. ‘Where you been, gate? Gimme some skin, man.’

  They both laughed as they shook hands. George told him what he was doing out here and then Joe said, cheerfully, ‘Well, we gave ’em some fights, didn’t we, man? We really did it, didn’t we, George?’

  ‘You’re not kidding,’ said George. ‘I still got a dent where you hit me in the ribs.’

  ‘Man, oh, man,’ Joe chuckled. ‘Them was the days.’

  George looked at Joe and reached into his pocket. ‘Here’s that sawbuck I owe you, boy. Remember that time in KC?’

  ‘KC?’ Joe said.

  ‘Yeah,’ George said, and pushed it into his hand.

  Joe’s grin disappeared into that curiously dead expression of the blind. ‘Good luck, Georgie,’ he said. ‘See you around.’

  Going up the long, grimy stairway that seems to be the standard approach to every fight gym, George said to me, ‘That’s Joe Wilson, Joe the Iceman, they used to call him. He col’cocked so many of ’em. I fought him four times. He sure could hit you a real good punch. Busted two of my ribs one night out at Vernon.’

  ‘How long you been fighting, George?’ I asked.

  George’s eyes narrowed in a private smile. ‘Tell you the truth, Mr Lewis, I lost track.’

  ‘How old are you, George?’

  George shook his head mysteriously. ‘Man, if I ever told you, they’d take me off the payroll and send me straight to the old folks’ home.’

  Upstairs were the same dirty grey walls, the same lack of ventilation and sanitation and the same milling activity of concentrated young men with narrow waists and glistening skins, bending, stretching, shadow-boxing, sparring, punching the bags or listening earnestly to the instructions of men with fat bellies, boneless noses, dirty sweatshirts, brown hats pushed back on sweaty foreheads, the trainers, the managers, the experts. Only here on Main Street there were even more dark skins, not only black like those that had come to outnumber the whites in Stillman’s, but the yellow and brown skins of the Filipinos and Mexicans who poured into the gym from the slums of LA. For if racing is the sport of kings, boxing is the vocation of the slum-dwellers who must fight to exist. When were the sons of Erin monopolising the titles and the glory: the Ryans, Sullivans, Donovans, Kilbanes and O’Briens? When waves of Irish immigration were breaking over America. Gradually, as the Irish settled down to being politicians, policemen, judges, the Shamrock had to make room for the Star of David, to the Leonards, Tendlers, and Blooms. And then came the Italians: Genaro, LaBarba, Indrisano, Canzoneri. Now the Negroes press forward, hungry for the money, prestige and opportunity denied them at almost every door. In California the Mexicans, fighting their way up out of their brown ghettos, dominate the light divisions: Ortiz, Chávez, Arizmendi and a seemingly endless row of little brown sluggers by the name of Garcia.

  In the centre ring, throwing punches at the air, ducking and weaving as he crowded an imaginary opponent to the ropes, was Arizmendi himself, who seemed to have inherited not only the strong, stoic face of an ancient Aztec, but the courage and endurance as well.

  As Toro climbed through the ropes for a light workout with George, a short, plump, brown-skinned guy in a cheap but spotless white linen suit and white shoes came down to a corner of the ring, raised a megaphone to his lips and began to announce in a Spanish accent, made more inarticulate by too many blows on the head, ‘Eeen-tro-ducing, ot two hondreed ond seventy-wan pounds, the beegest heavyweight in the worl’…’

  ‘Who is this clow
n?’ I asked a second who was going to help Doc in the fight Friday night.

  ‘Oh, that’s Pancho, one of our characters,’ the second said. ‘He’s a little punchy. Been around here for years. Thinks he’s an announcer. Nobody pays him but he comes in the same time every day just like he had a job. For practice. The guys throw him a quarter once in a while. And the dope spends every nickel he has keeping himself in them white clothes. He once saw an announcer in a white suit and I guess it kind of stuck in his bean.’

  Coombs climbed into the adjoining ring. He was heavily built and seemed ready to wink at anybody who would smile at him. I watched Pancho raise the megaphone to his lips, throw his head back and close his eyes in ecstasy. ‘Een-tro-ducing ot two hondred and seex pounds thot great hovyweight from da yeast, Cowboy Coombs.’

  One of the regulars in the place, an unshaven, bald-headed second with a couple of swab sticks in his mouth, started toward Pancho, and the little Mexican began to back up, half-threatening, ‘Stay ’way from me, you barstid, stay ’way from me.’

  ‘What goes with him?’ I asked the second.

  ‘Aw, that’s just a running rib,’ he said. ‘The fellas know what a nut he is about stayin’ so clean. So some of ’em go over and rub their burnt matches down his suit or smudge his white shoes just to hear him holler.’

  Pancho kept backing and pleading as he worked his way crabwise until he reached the door and darted out. Some of the boys were amused. ‘Did you see that little greaser run?’ Vince laughed.

  The next day, the last training session before the fight, we found Pancho at his regular post, busy making those announcements to which no one paid any attention. I just thought Vince was going over to give him a quarter when he started toward him. I didn’t realise anything was up until Pancho started backing away frantically just as he did the day before. The whole crowd of us, who had come in together, saw how Pancho retreated until he reached a high stool near the entrance. He drew his feet up, wrapped his arms around himself and pulled his head in like a turtle. ‘Stay ’way, you stay ’way,’ he was crying.