by Jack Tunney
Like everyone else in the arena, Big Jake Krupa knew it was over.
The will and spirit to fight left him.
Something that looked like resignation crossed his expression. I could see it in his eyes.
Looking pathetic and sad, he sagged against the corner ropes. Defeated and beaten. The ropes were the only things keeping him on his feet. I squared my shoulders and pulled back my right, ready to slam it on his chin again. Krupa could only stare helplessly and wait for the punch that he knew was coming - the one that would end his night and send him back to Western Pennsylvania. But in those last few seconds I remembered those other lessons I had learned from Father Tim – the ones about compassion for your opponent.
Letting a guy walk away with a little bit of dignity and honor, even when he didn’t deserve it.
That it took a man to show mercy when everyone else wanted blood.
I heard Father Tim’s voice in my ear and wondered what he would say if I unloaded that final punch on Krupa. Ten years since the last time I saw Father Tim and I was still worried about what he thought.
I took a step back and turned to the referee. “It’s over,” I said.
The ref looked at me with a weird expression. Like everyone else, he was waiting for the knockout punch that would finally drop Krupa. But when he looked at Krupa – really looked at him - he saw how helpless and vulnerable Big Jake was as he leaned against the ropes.
The referee turned back to me and nodded. He stepped between us and put a hand under Krupa’s armpits to hold him up, and with the other hand signaled the time keeper to ring the bell. The crowd went wild.
I heard later it took over thirty-five stitches to close all the cuts on Krupa’s face – if nothing else, by the time his career ended his face would look like a road map with all the scars and lines zigzagging across the skin, and Big Jake Krupa would keep ring doctors busy in every town where he fought.
“You ain’t stopping this fight,” Krupa said. “I still got a couple of rounds left.”
His corner men rushed towards the ring, taking up his cause. “Let him finish the round,” his corner yelled.
Krupa nodded his head and begged, “Give me another round.”
“I got that coming to me,” he said although there was no emotion in his voice – just resignation. “At least another round.”
The referee shook his head.
He helped Krupa stagger back to his corner where he dropped onto the stool and let his chin fall to his chest. He closed his eyes as his corner poured water on his head and wrapped a towel around his shoulders. The referee checked to make sure he was okay, then came to me, wiping his hands on his pants and trying to clean away the blood before it dried.
He raised my arm in victory.
Frankie put his arm around me in the center of the ring. “Thought I told you to put him away?”
I shrugged. “Had him beat,” I said with a smile. “What’s the difference? A win’s a win.”
Frankie just shook his head. “You ain’t never gonna get to the top if you can’t finish a guy off when you have the chance,” he said. "That’s the thing that’s gonna get you noticed.”
I kept smiling. “Didn’t see Sugar Ray in the crowd tonight,” I said. “I wasn’t expecting him to come up here and offer me a shot at the title.”
“Something like that never happens.”
ROUND TWO
The dressing room wasn’t much bigger than a closet. Gray and drab, with a dozen steel lockers against one wall and a long wooden bench bolted to the floor in the center of the room. A mirror was screwed to the other wall. A long wooden bench was bolted to the floor in the center of the room.
A couple more chairs were scattered throughout the room. The floor was littered with pieces of tape, empty tins of Vaseline petroleum jelly, cigarette butts, and somebody’s jock strap. And then there was that smell – impossible to describe but unforgettable once you got a whiff of the odor.
The local writers at ringside congratulated me when I left the ring and there were handshakes from some fans as I made my way down the aisle towards the dressing room. A couple of “nice to meet ‘ya” moments as people slapped my back, but for most of the crowd my fight was soon to be forgotten.
Even my own satisfaction about beating Krupa had disappeared.
The fight was barely a half hour into the books and it could have been any other Saturday night.
It was quiet – the roar of the crowd cheering on the fighters in the main event was muffled by thick concrete walls and the silence was broken only by the steady drip of water leaking from a shower faucet. I sat on the trainer’s table in the dressing room with a towel wrapped around my waist and rivers of sweat still running down my face and chest. My silk robe was crumpled in a heap on the floor with Krupa’s blood smeared across the shoulders and sleeves.
Frankie had cut the tape off my hands and was working his fingers into my shoulders, digging out the tightness as he rubbed and massaged the muscles. My ribs hurt, and with every deep breath I could feel something sharp and jagged digging into my side from the inside.
“Quit moving around,” Frankie grumbled.
“Sorry,” I said. “Guess a couple of those shots were harder than I thought.”
“Tagged you pretty good.”
“Guess so.”
“Might’ve cracked something,” Frankie said. “Might take a day or three before it stops hurting. Might be pissing blood a couple of days longer than that.”
On the other side of the room Ray Gold looked up from his newspaper and shot me a stare. He rolled an unlit cigar from one corner of his mouth to the other and wiped a trail of spit off his chin.
“You’ll be fine,” he growled at me.
He turned his stare on Frankie. “Don’t baby him,” he said. “He ain’t going nowhere if he can’t take a punch.”
“I can take a punch,” I said. “Been taking them for years.”
“Kid needs to learn how to take a punch if he wants to get somewhere.”
I wanted to tell him that if what I had in the locker room was ‘somewhere’ nowhere had to be on the outskirts of Hell but I kept my mouth shut. Ray had been in the fight business so long he made Frankie look like a kid.
Ray had miles on him. He had started out working the preliminaries and four round fight cards fifty years earlier and had made his way up to managing fighters and working main events. Somebody told me he had been around for Jack Johnson’s “fight of the century.” He had forgotten more about boxing than most people remembered, even the guys who had been around as long as him.
If you asked Ray, he would tell you that nothing happened overnight in the fight game.
Not to expect anything more than that.
The problem was that I wanted a lot more.
I eased back on my elbows as Frankie dug his fingers deeper into my muscles. I stared up at the light bulb hanging off a wire from the ceiling then slowly closed my eyes.
I thought about the long road I had followed, the choices I made since leaving St. Vincent’s, and the path I had taken the day I walked out the front door with a suitcase in my hand and twenty dollars for the bus. I was determined to make it as a fighter. Aside from a two year stretch in Korea, I spent ten years since leaving Chicago in gyms, arenas, and locker rooms just like this one trying to make my dream come true.
Boxing was the only thing I knew how to do. The only thing I wanted to do.
I never would have thought a kid like me from the ugly side of Chicago could be chasing his dream as a prize fighter.
Never thought I even had a shot.
The only one who ever believed I could make it – hell, the only one who ever believed in me – was Father Tim.
“You’ve got something in you,” he told me. “Got a fire inside you that can take you places.”
“I don’t know anything about a fire.”
“You’ll find it,” he told me. “It’s going to take time, but it’s there.”
My road through the middleweight ranks had been long and hard, and sometimes it felt like I had been running in place for years.
They say there’s a fork in everybody’s road – a point where you have to choose a direction. Where things happen that shape your future. Mine was a fight a couple years out of St. Vincent’s against my old buddy Michael Boyle.
It was right before I went off to fight for Uncle Sam in places like Chipyong-ni and Kapyong – dots on the map that had never appeared in any of the history books I studied in school, but places that suddenly took on a whole new meaning of awful.
We were two young middleweights from St Vincent’s – kids from the wrong side of the tracks, abandoned by our families, taken in by Father Tim and given a home and a place to stay. Taught respect, values, and the benefit of hard work, along with the importance of a strong kick to the ass when we got out of line.
I got out of Chicago and bounced around the Midwest for a year or so while Michael Boyle went east to New York City – once away from Father Tim, he quickly returned to old routines and the habits he learned on the streets. Each of us fell into boxing at St. Vincent’s because we knew there was nothing else for us – and if you had some decent skills and a little luck, boxing offered a better way to earn a living than most other jobs we could find.
Both of us started out the same way – picking up fights wherever and whenever we could, earning some cash, and trying to build our reputations with each win. It was inevitable that sooner or later our paths would cross. Somebody got the idea it might be worth the price of a ticket to put two so-called friends in the ring together to see what could come out of it – “two twenty year old middleweights on the rise” was how the matchmakers hyped it.
I had gone toe to toe with Boyle a hundred times at St. Vincent’s, but this time it was different. Nothing about that fight ever felt right. Not the way Boyle hurt me with his punches. Not the way I bled from the first bell to the last. It wasn’t even a close fight. He beat me in a bloody, lopsided decision and after the fight he never looked back.
My career didn’t take off quite the same way.
Michael Boyle wound up with a shrewd manager named Tommy Domino who guided him steadily through the middleweight ranks, hand-picking opponents and putting him in fights that fattened his record while getting him attention and headlines.
I would pick up The Ring Magazine and read about Boyle’s successful climb up the ladder. Preliminary fights on cards in Miami, Chicago, and Boston against ranked opponents and name contenders. One round knockout wins against tomato cans and walk-overs against has-beens. He even wound up on the undercards of a couple of bouts in the Mecca of boxing – Madison Square Garden in New York.
A few weeks earlier Sugar Ray Robinson had just won back the title from Gene Fullmer with what the sportswriters called the “perfect punch” in a fifth round knockout in Chicago, and I was reading stories that Boyle was in position for a shot at Sugar Ray’s title.
All I could do was wonder what might have been if I had been the one to take the decision instead of Boyle.
Plenty of “could have’s” and “might have been’s” along my road since that fight.
Not too many headlines though. And even fewer opportunities.
My path had taken me to Philadelphia where I fought in relative obscurity, banging out a living with fights against anyone who would give me a shot. I won a lot more than I lost and had a decent record. But without the kind of manager Michael Boyle had – the kind who knew people and got things done in ways that Ray Gold couldn’t - I was destined to keep fighting the Krupas of the middleweight ranks unless something happened. I knew in my gut that I was just as good as Michael Boyle. That I was as good as any of those guys lining up for a shot at Sugar Ray’s belt, if only somebody would give me a chance.
But nobody ever mentioned me when they were talking about contenders and title shots.
I was lucky when I got a line or two in the papers.
“Hey Ray,” I asked softly.
“What?” Gold answered without lifting his head from The Bulletin.
“We been together for a while now, right? Maybe four or five years?”
“Something like that.”
“Ever since I got back from Korea.”
“Think it was ’52 when you showed up at the gym that first time,” Gold said. “Came walking in off the street, new in town, looking for somebody to train you. Thought you knew everything but you didn’t know nothing.”
“You ever think about where we’re going?” I asked. “Ever wondered what we got to do to get recognized and get a shot?”
Frankie’s hands dug a little harder into my muscles. “What’s the matter? You ain’t happy doing what you’re doing?” he asked.
“It’s not that,” I said. “Just wondering what I’ve got to do to get better fights.”
“Keep winning. Knock some people out.”
“I don’t want to miss my chance,” I said. “Don’t want to lose my shot.”
“It ain’t your time yet.”
I looked at him but his expression didn’t change. He didn’t look up from his paper.
“I just want a shot before it’s too late.”
“Just keep doing what you’re doing and be satisfied with where you’re going,” Gold said, still flipping through The Bulletin’s sports section. “Too many guys out there now wanting something they ain’t earned yet. Got to pay your dues to get your shot.”
“Your time will come,” Frankie added.
I wasn’t sure how much more I had to do or what else it was going to take before somebody figured out that I had paid my dues.
Gold had a couple of other fighters, including a big Cuban heavyweight out of Miami and a welterweight kid from Philly who were starting to turn heads. It seemed like they hadn’t paid their dues, at least to me, but they were getting the headlines I wanted. Nothing that made the front page of the Inquirer or the back page of the Daily News sports section, but they were the ones getting write-ups. I overheard the phone calls and conversations in the gym. They were the guys the east coast matchmakers wanted for their four and eight round preliminaries on the undercards of weekend fights.
Nobody was calling for me, and nobody looked at me like that anymore.
I wasn’t sure they ever did.
I knew Ray didn’t think of me as that kind of fighter. He didn’t think of me as much more than a ham and eggs kind of fighter – the kind of guy who got some decent bouts, worked up the ranks a little, and maybe got in the ring against a name a year or two down the road. Just a stepping stone for another contender. Somebody else for someone to build their career on. But not somebody he thought could go places – at least not far enough for him to spend a lot of time promoting or arranging good fights. A couple of fights after that and I would be fighting in the walkout bouts – the ones that were so bad they followed the main events.
“Keep at it, kid,” Gold said.
It felt like time and my chances were slipping past, but I wasn’t ready to give up on my dream.
RO UND THREE
Outside the dressing room, my girl Ginny, was waiting for me. She was a hot “to die for” redhead in a tight black dress with an hourglass figure that had me wanting to learn how to tell time all over again. Like Rita Hayworth only younger. She had curvy hips, long legs, and large round melons that took my breath away.
We’d been together for a couple of years, ever since meeting at a dance in a high school gymnasium near South Street. “Whole Lot of Shakin’ Goin On” was playing when she bumped into me. I felt my heart skip a beat the first time she smiled and
said hello. We were from opposite sides of the street, but none of that mattered – I fell for her in an instant.
She was a couple of years out of a two year college and working as a secretary at a Center City law firm, and there was nothing she didn’t know. I had struggled through every class at St. Vincent’s, and I was impressed by anybody who got past high school. I never thought a guy like me would wind up with a girl like her, and there were lots of days where I wondered what she saw in me.
I could never figure out that answer, but I did my best to keep her happy.
I felt my face light up when I saw her standing against the wall. I rushed to grab her in my arms and plant a kiss on her lips.
She turned her head and grimaced. “You’re all sweaty.”
“I took a shower,” I said.
“You’re all wet,” she said, although her tone softened and she offered a cheek to kiss.
Ray Gold and Frankie came out of the dressing room right about then and Gold growled, “Hey kid. Ain’t got time for no broads. You’re in training.”
I grinned. “Not tonight, Ray.”
Gold just shook his head and exchanged a look with Ginny.
She cracked her gum, and gave him a look that said, “He’s all mine and there’s nothing that will change that.” She knew she had me.
“Have a good weekend, kid,” Gold said, walking down the corridor towards the arena so he could catch what was left of the main event. He didn’t break stride or turn around.
“Get some rest,” Frankie said. “Be back in the gym Monday morning.”