The Professional

by W. c. Heinz

  “How did you start?”

  “Here comes a car.”

  We stepped off the blacktop and waited this time. The car was probably doing fifty, but standing as close to the road as we were, with me feeling naked in its lights and resenting it, it seemed to be doing a hundred as it went by.

  “Zoom,” Eddie said.

  “How’d you start fighting?”

  “In the PAL, and then the Golden Gloves. There was this little guy in our gang, Louie. You’ll meet him. He always comes up one day when I’m training. He owns half a poolroom now in the neighborhood, and you’ll meet him. He’s a good guy and he used to train me in the gym and handle me in the Gloves. Then, when we decided I should turn pro, he still handled me. Doc bought him out.”

  “What’d he pay him? Do you remember?”

  “Sure. He gave him fifteen hundred.”

  “That probably seemed like a lot of money then.”

  “It was, and it was a break for me. I’d had four fights. I got twenty-five bucks for the first three and fifty for the fourth. In the fourth fight I fought a guy in the Ridgewood and Doc was there and he liked something about me. I don’t know what it was.”

  “It was what you are now, and he saw it way back then.”

  “I guess that’s right.”

  “I don’t suppose Louie knew much about training or managing.”

  “Louie? No. He’s just a great little guy. Besides, after Doc took me, he took me in the gym for nine months. I mean, before he put me in another fight, and in those nine months, believe me, I found out I didn’t know anything about fighting.”

  “I believe that.”

  “Any fighter who thinks he knows how to fight should spend a half hour in the gym with Doc. He’d take him down.”

  “There are no others like him.”

  “The man’s a genius. I was scared of him, too. I was just a kid, and the night he came to our flat to pay Louie and meet my mother and sign me we were all sitting at the kitchen table, and he said to me: ‘Look, if I take you, I’m the boss.’ I said: ‘Yes, sir.’ He said: ‘I mean that. If you don’t like it say so, and I’ll get out right now. Otherwise you do what I tell you the way I tell you. You can ask questions, but when I give you the answer, that’s it. I don’t like arguments. I’ll tell you when you’re fightin’ and who you’re fightin’ and where. You just do the trainin’ and the fightin’. I do the rest.’ Then he said: ‘That is, after you learn how to fight.’

  “I thought I knew something about fighting. I figured I’d show this guy. I was pretty cocky, but for nine months he had me in the gym, and no fights. ‘Step here. Step there. No. Stop. What are you tryin’ to do, make me out a liar?’ That’s always his great saying. When you don’t do something his way he says: ‘What are you tryin’ to do, make me out a liar?’ He looks you right in the eye and kind of snarls it at you, and makes you feel about as big as nothing.”

  “What were you doing for dough, without any fights?”

  “He was giving me twenty-five a week, for my mother, and I always ate my big meal with him. So he could watch what I ate, and talk more boxing to me, too. He really filled me with boxing.”

  “A lot of people don’t know that about a good manager. All they know is that he’s cutting into the big purses after the fighter makes it.”

  “Sure. Suppose I quit? Where would he be for the fifteen hundred and the twenty-five a week and the expenses? Many a time I thought to quit, too.”

  “Seriously?”

  “I don’t know. I’d come out of the gym some afternoons, and I’d think to myself about quitting. I mean Doc would be at me and at me, and I couldn’t seem to get it and I was hating him and the whole thing.”

  “I can believe it.”

  “But what else could I do?”

  “That’s what makes fighters. The ones who can do something else better, do it—or should.”

  “What could I do? I quit school when I was sixteen. I didn’t want that plastering, like I saw my old man. You look at the guys from my neighborhood. Good guys, but what could they do? Run a poolroom? Work loading beer trucks? Tend bar? Work on the tracks for the I.R.T.? Pump gas? That’s what they do. What could I do? I didn’t want those things.”

  “Oh, I don’t know. You could do a lot of things now.”

  “Sure. If I win this title I’ve always got that. When I quit fighting I can get a job representing one of those liquor companies, going around. You know? What they call good will. Ruby Goldstein and Ray Miller and Joe Benjamin and Billy Graham do it and they’re pretty good jobs. If I make some money with the title I might even invest in something, like a bowling alley. What could I do then, though, when I was a kid starting?”

  “Not much.”

  “You can’t do anything, so you don’t quit.”

  “When do you stop thinking about quitting?”

  “All of a sudden things start to come to you,” he said, stopping and gesturing with his hands. “Doc keeps telling you: ‘Do this. Do that. Throw it like this. Then step here.’ It really doesn’t mean anything to you. I mean you don’t really understand it. He gets you a few fights and you’re trying and you win, but you still don’t feel good. You’d rather fight your own way. All of a sudden—I remember the fight—you try something and it works and you try something else and, just like that, it’s like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle and everything fits into place. All of a sudden, for no reason, you’ve got it. You see the meaning of everything.”

  “I know what you mean. It’s that way in anything. Ralph Branca, who used to pitch for the Dodgers, once told me that about learning to pitch, and what a great feeling it was when it all came to him. He won twenty-one games that year.”

  “The feeling is the greatest. All of a sudden you understand. Everything you do feels good. Your mind works good. When that happens in a fight it’s the greatest feeling you ever have in your life. I can’t explain it, but it really is.”

  “I know. I think, Eddie, that everyone, no matter what he does, has felt it at least once, at some time. It’s why we all go on.”

  “Then Doc takes you down,” he said, laughing. “He gives you that sourpuss, and shakes his head and goes at you again.”

  “But he knew it, too, the moment you found it. He liked it as much as you did.”

  “Sure, but he won’t let you know. Two days later in the gym he’s giving you something else, just as tough, but now you go along with it.”

  “As you said, a great man.”

  “You wouldn’t believe this, but I think I want to win that title as much for him as for myself.”

  “I believe it. At his age he won’t be up there again. He won’t have another fighter like you. If he doesn’t make it now he never will.”

  “He’ll make it,” Eddie said. “I’m sure I can lick this guy. I’m just as sure as we’re walking here.”

  8

  Two days later, just before noon, Doc Carroll arrived, cantankerous, vehement and vindictive, with every reason to be all of these things, and the best man with a fighter that I have ever known. I have known many who led their fighters to titles, and some who took them right to the end of the rainbow. I have found, however, that Destiny controls the passes to these places, and I keep telling myself, trying to believe it, that it is not important, really, how far you go but how you make the trip. Doc always paid his own way.

  “So you really think so, do you?” Doc was saying to Girot when I walked into the lobby.

  He was white-haired and bespectacled now, tall and thin, neatly dressed in a dark blue suit and somehow emitting an intimation of another time. He was standing at the desk, while Girot stood behind it and, off to one side, standing next to an old black Gladstone, Vince DeCorso was waiting. He was a six-round fighter who, in a dozen years in which he must have lost half of his eighty or ninety fights, had made most of the small clubs and the small towns of the East.

  “I don’t know,” Girot was saying, and he shrugged his shoulders. “Eddie is
a good fighter, and such a nice boy. He never makes no trouble. He has manners.”

  “Isn’t that nice?” Doc said, nodding. “What do you think this is, a popularity contest, and the judges should give him four points for neatness and four more for being kind to his mother? Ah, Girot, you stick to your hotel.”

  “I don’t know,” Girot said.

  “Hello, Doctor,” I said.

  “Hello, Frank,” he said, turning and then shaking my hand. “How long have you been here?”

  “All my life. Almost a week.”

  “I told you.”

  “I knew.”

  “You know Vince DeCorso?”

  “Hello, Vince,” I said, and we shook hands. He was a stocky, short-armed middleweight, starting to get bald, with the story of his career written over his eyes and under them and across his nose.

  “I’m glad to know you,” he said.

  “Girot, tell him where he sleeps,” Doc said, and then to DeCorso: “You can take your bag up. Johnny Jay’s around somewhere.”

  “Sure.”

  “You have room four,” Girot said. “You go to the top of the stairs and you turn right.”

  DeCorso went into the sitting room, carrying his bag.

  “He’s going to work with Eddie?” I said.

  “Aah,” Doc said. “What can you do? You go to the gym, there’s nothing there. He’ll do for a while.”

  “It’s a living.”

  “Isn’t that dreadful? There’s a fella should have been talked out of it after a year. Going around and getting his brains scrambled. Dreadful. At least he won’t get hurt up here.”

  “What do you give him, if I may ask?”

  “Fifteen a day and his keep. For him it’s a break. Next week I’ve got the Memphis Kid coming up. You know Memphis.”

  “I certainly do.”

  “Well, he’s still got the brain. Girot?”

  “Yes, Mister Doc?”

  “Come in and give us a drink, will you?”

  It was too early in the day for me, and I don’t think Doc wanted to drink, either. I think he just wanted to talk.

  “How’d you get here?” I said.

  “My nephew. Thirty years old, with a college degree and a wife and two kids and a good job in a chemical plant in Jersey, and he wants to manage a fighter.”

  “That’s your fault.”

  “My fault? It’s my fault I put him through college.”

  Doc had six months in the City College of New York himself. That is why the fight game gave him the honorary degree of Doctor.

  “When did he get the fight bug?”

  “Ah, he’s a kid, running around the streets in Brooklyn. I had Rusty Ryan then. You remember him.”

  “You know that.”

  “I’m getting old.”

  “What about Rusty Ryan?”

  “I had him in camp on that lake in Pennsylvania.”

  “I remember.”

  “I had the kid out in camp with us for three weeks. Get him off the streets in the summer. Great idea. He shadowed that Ryan like a dog. Rusty made a mascot of him, let him walk with him, fish with him, bought him ice cream. He got him a pair of kid’s gloves, and showed him a few punches. He never got over it.”

  “I can understand that.”

  “So, he wanted to be a fighter. That’s why I sent him to college. He’s out of high school then. I said: ‘I’m promising you, Tommy. If I hear of you pulling on a pair of gloves I’ll hit you right on the head with a baseball bat. I’m not kidding.’ I’d have done it.”

  “I don’t doubt it, but there was always that one chance he could have made it.”

  “Ah. If he could have been a good fighter, I’d have let him. Don’t you know that? He couldn’t make it. This is the worst business in the world for amateurs. They’re liable to get killed. How many fighters do you think I’ve turned down in forty years?”

  “Dozens.”

  “Dozens? I’ll bet I’ve turned down a hundred. I say: ‘Look, kid, you can’t make it. Be a half-baked plumber, you won’t get hurt. You’ll make a living. You’re a half-baked fighter, you may get killed.’ The kid goes away hating me. Goes to somebody else. He’s a better fighter because he hates me. He’s gonna show that Doc Carroll, but that doesn’t make him a fighter. Nothing can make him a fighter. The kid goes to one of those slobs who turns him over to one of those amateurs with a towel over his shoulder. He gets scrambled. There’s about twelve thousand fighters in the world today. You know how many of them belong in it?”

  “You tell me.”

  “About a hundred. Maybe less than a hundred.”

  “It’s that way in anything.”

  “Hello, Doc!”

  It was Polo. He walked up to Doc and pumped his hand, and smiled for the first time since I had been there.

  “Hello, Polo,” Doc said. “How are you?”

  “All right. I’m glad to see you. You’re gonna win the title, hey?”

  “How’s your fighter?”

  “My fighter?” he said, sobering. “You tell me. He don’t want to train. He don’t want to do nothin’ he should do. The way the heavyweight division is today I tell him: ‘Look. You got a chance. Do what I ask you to do. Please, do me a favor, will you?’ It’s no good. All he wants to do is eat and sleep.”

  “Sure,” Doc said.

  “Eddie can work with him, if you want it. I mean my guy’s big enough he’ll just move around and Eddie can throw them in there, if you want it.”

  “All right, Polo. I’ll let you know.”

  “Anything, Doc. You just tell me what I can do with my fighter. What can I do with him?”

  “Sure, Polo.”

  “I’ll see you later.”

  “What can he do with him?” Doc said, when Polo had left, and then he mimicked him: “‘Please, do me a favor. Do what I ask you.’ Can you imagine asking a fighter to do you a favor? Do what he asks him? Ask a fighter nothing. Tell him. You know what he should do with that Schaeffer?”

  “I have several suggestions.”

  “That’s no fighter.”

  “That’s no manager, either.”

  “Dreadful.”

  He had a way of sliding the word out, as if it were a product of pain. His face would narrow and his eyes would grow smaller and sharper and he would slowly bare the word.

  “How did he get in the business?” I said.

  “I don’t know. He can’t manage a corner newsstand, but they all think they can manage a fighter. Who cares how he got in?”

  “I do.”

  “How do they all get in? A kid is a street fighter, and he’s got a pal. The kid goes into the amateurs and his pal goes into the corner with him. The kid wins a dozen fights and wants to turn pro, so he brings his pal along. His pal’s gonna train him, maybe even manage him. They’re friends, and it’s a beautiful thing. The kid has a half-dozen fights and gets flattened. He quits, but does his pal quit? Oh, no. Of course not. He’s a trainer now. He’s up in the gym. He’s got a towel over his shoulder. He’s in for life. Some innocent kid comes walking in, wants to be a fighter. Now he’s got another fighter.”

  “You make it sound real.”

  “Do you think, for a moment, that I’m making this up? Amateur fights don’t make fighters. They make trainers and managers. Trainers? They know nothing about training. They’re rubbers. Valets. They’ve got a towel and a lot of gall. Dreadful.”

  “What can you do?”

  “Do? Nothing. All you need to be a trainer or a manager is fifteen dollars and a license. This entitles you to ruin a kid’s life, maybe end it. You know this Al Penna who’s up here?”

  “I can’t help but know him.”

  “You know who manages him?”

  “No.”

  “A guy named Klein, from Long Island.”

  “I don’t know him.”

  “Of course not. Guess what he does for a living?”

  “Oh, he’s a glass blower.”

  “Aah!�
��

  “All right. He picks the dead petals off petunias in the Brooklyn Botanical Garden.”

  “He’s a manufacturer. He’s worth maybe a quarter million, but he manufactures falsies.”

  “It has never even occurred to me to wonder who did.”

  “Figure what he’s doing in boxing.”

  “I pass.”

  “Say he’s worth a quarter of a million. Wherever he goes, though, somebody says: ‘Who’s that?’ Somebody else says: ‘Klein. He’s got money.’ The first guy says: ‘What’s he do?’ The other guy says: ‘He makes falsies.’ He could make ten million dollars, and they’d still laugh. So poor Klein—get this, poor Klein—he’s gonna manage a few fighters now. Then they’ll say: ‘There goes Klein. He manages fighters.’ Isn’t that nice?”

  “It’s pathetic. There are a couple of people up here—Girot and Polo—who would prefer Klein’s product to his pugilist.”

  “They’re right, but Klein is staking him. Puts him up here. Pays his bills. Lets him work with Barnum’s fighter. Gets him a fight when he can. Buys a hundred tickets and gives them to his friends.”

  “And teaches him nothing.”

  “They ought to teach him to throw his cup and his ring shoes and his gloves and his mouthpiece in the lake, and flag a bus home.”

  “Speaking of buses, where’s that nephew who brought you up? Talking with Eddie?”

  “He’s halfway home by now.”

  “You kidding?”

  “I didn’t even let him get out of the car. I gave him two ringside tickets to the fight and I said: ‘Turn this thing around and get going.’”

  “You’re a hard man, Doc.”

  “I told him once: ‘Look at yourself, and look at me.’ He put in four years in that lab, and now they’ve got him in the front office. I said: ‘In ten years, with your ability, you can own a piece of that place. What have I got? Forty-three years in the business and what have I got? Let’s say I started out selling cars. By now I’ve got a Ford agency in Westchester. I’ve got a manager. I’ve got salesmen. I’ve got mechanics. I sit back. In the winter I go to Bermuda for a month. In the summer I go to Europe.’ He wants to manage a fighter.”