The Only Game in Town

by David Remnick

  Mizner’s honeymoon was still producing dividends when Willus Britt, one of the superior crazy men of San Francisco, arrived in New York. Mizner loved him like a brother. They had been pals and accomplices for years in Nome and San Francisco. Willus, who preceded Mizner in the dynasty of managers of Stanley Ketchel, was in 1906 managing his brother, Jimmy Britt, a great lightweight, who was scheduled to fight at the old Madison Square Garden with Terrible Terry McGovern. Willus felt that the training camp in the Yerkes mansion lacked facilities for roadwork, and he took his brother to Coney Island. Mizner closed up his palatial gym and joined them there. This caused a certain amount of domestic friction. Mrs. Yerkes had been horrified by the publicity attending her marriage to Mizner, especially by the cartoons of Tom Powers and by reports that had reached her of the ribald ballads on the Mizner-Yerkes nuptials that were sung at Hammerstein’s by Jack Norworth. Just as the notoriety was simmering down, the sporting pages broke out with accounts of Mizner’s sparring with Sam Berger, the learned and philosophical heavyweight of San Francisco. Mizner was not a man to let a few millions stand between him and the fun of hanging around a training camp, and he became the new Coney Island sensation. He hired an infant prodigy called Groucho Marx to sing to Jimmy Britt in order to cure him of homesickness, and he helped Willus with the arrangements for the fight, which resulted in a victory for Jimmy Britt before ten thousand people. After the fight, the fighters were arrested on suspicion of fighting, but the case was dropped for lack of evidence. Mizner went home and made up with his lawfully wedded lady, but after several additional differences and reconciliations he chucked the millions out the window forever, in the summer of 1906, by going to Goldfield, Nevada, to hang around the training camps of Joe Gans and Battling Nelson.

  Mizner was thirty-three when, in 1910, he became the manager of Stanley Ketchel. At seventeen, he had managed a boxing black bear, and in the sixteen intervening years he had managed fighters in Dawson City and Nome and picked up great fistic experience in San Francisco. Bat Masterson, onetime free-shooting Western marshal and later sportswriter on the New York Morning Telegraph, has said that Mizner attracted much favorable attention as a gentleman sparring partner. Mizner, according to Bat, made such a showing against the great heavyweight Tom Sharkey that he was implored by Sharkey’s manager, Tim McGrath, to turn professional, but Mizner was afraid of alienating his extremely respectable family. According to Bat, Mizner contemplated turning professional only once, and that was when a miner named Jack Munroe was matched with Jeffries for the heavyweight title. As Wilson made a practice of sampling the punches of all champions and contenders, he sparred with Munroe and found that he could handle him like a sack of potatoes. Thereupon, Mizner confided to intimates that he was going to take a shot at the heavyweight crown himself if Jeffries had any trouble with the miner. But when Munroe collapsed almost at sight of the champion, Mizner decided to cling to his amateur standing. Mizner was, in fact, a rather silly amateur in most matters. While he devoted much of his life to preying on suckers, he was himself the prize sucker of the era. He let everybody else cash in on his wit and brilliance. Short stories and theatrical dialogue were plundered from his conversation; he threw more anecdotes and epigrams into the public domain than any other man of his time. In similar fashion, he gave away his fistic science as an unpaid sparring partner and lavished it on the public in street fights and saloon brawls. Jack Hines, a globetrotter and the author of Minstrel of the Yukon, said he was present when Mizner took the revolvers out of the hands of two men who were blazing away at each other in a Nome saloon, and said, “You kids oughtn’t to be allowed to play with these toys.” One of the San Francisco weeklies commemorated a fracas at Spider Kelly’s saloon in which Mizner fought against enormous odds until he was finally subdued by three civilians, a policeman with a nightstick, and a bartender with a bung starter named Dearest, in honor of Little Lord Fauntleroy’s mother.

  Tim McGrath wrote a letter to Mark Kelly, Los Angeles sports and screen writer, describing a battle in which Mizner knocked out longshoremen by platoons in a San Francisco barroom. Wilson, one of the leading dudes in town, wore a suit that was a declaration of war in a waterfront saloon. He started to sing “Sweet Alice, Ben Bolt,” with which he had melted sourdough audiences in the Klondike and Alaska. There was a horse laugh. Mizner resented it, and in a moment everybody was punching. Mizner was, luckily, accompanied not only by McGrath but also by the savage middleweight Mysterious Billy Smith, so called because in his early days in the ring he kept disappearing and changing his name. He was famous for biting off a chunk of the ear of the Barbados Demon, Joe Walcott, and for biting a chunk off the index finger of his manager, who had taken the liberty of shaking it at him. McGrath wrote that in the end only one of the longshoremen was on his feet. Mizner was punching away at this man, and the man was paying no attention. Poor Mizner was in despair, believing he had lost his wallop, until Mysterious Billy Smith shouted, “Leave him alone, Wilson! I knocked him out five minutes ago!” Billy’s punch had wedged the man between two pieces of furniture, so he couldn’t fall.

  Mizner was arrested several times in New York for rough-and-tumble fighting, twice becoming the hero of spectacular trials that resulted in acquittals. One complainant asserted that he thought Mizner had hit him with a pile driver; another penned a challenge to Mizner in blood. Wilson’s physical condition deteriorated in his early thirties, but he was still able to throw one terrific punch. If his one punch landed, it would finish an average opponent; if it missed, Mizner was through. Old-time acquaintances of his say that when Mizner saw that war was inevitable, he would arrange for friends to interfere and stop the brawl after his one punch. In an interview in San Francisco, in his riper days, Mizner delivered a sermon against striking one’s fellow man with one’s fist. “If you do,” he said, “he goes out to the washbasin and is soon almost as good as new. But you go to the emergency hospital with two awkward doctors trying to get your broken knuckles back in place. Then you are out for two months. Always hit a man with a bottle—a ketchup bottle preferred, for when that breaks he thinks he’s bleeding to death.” Mizner was loyal to this principle in the latter part of his life. Once, a year or two before his death, when he was dining in a Los Angeles restaurant with Cecil Beaton, Irving Berlin, and Anita Loos, some people at another table started to heckle Berlin. Fat and decrepit though he was, Mizner went into action with bottles, glasses, and crockery, driving out not only the hecklers but the peaceful patrons of the restaurant. “How are you, Cecil?” Berlin asked after it was all over. “I am gray,” said Beaton.

  Mizner was introduced to Ketchel by Willus Britt in a hotel room in San Francisco, and Ketchel opened the conversation by cursing Mizner hysterically for throwing his hat on the bed—the worst kind of bad luck. After this poor start, Mizner and Ketchel got on wonderfully. They had much in common. Both of them were ordinarily brimming over with high spirits, and neither of them cared much about anything, although they were both rank sentimentalists, always ready to cry over a sad story or a sad song. The main difference between them was that Mizner was a sophisticated child of nature and Ketchel was an unsophisticated one. Ketchel had been a bouncer in the underworld of Butte, and Mizner had been an executive in the underworld of Nome, and each was tinged with the red-light philosophy of life. Ketchel had a thirst for knowledge, and Mizner had a passion for imparting it. Whenever he could get his clutches on an untaught intellect, he tried to inspire it with a love of literature by reciting poetry. Irving Berlin was the most eminent of Mizner’s pupils. Catching Berlin just after his singing-waiter days, when his mind was still a blank sheet of paper as far as general culture was concerned, Mizner sought to create an appetite for literature in the young genius by reciting Kipling’s “If” and Wallace Irwin’s “Chinatown Ballads” to him. Ketchel delighted in hearing Mizner declaim verses and read O. Henry stories. The middleweight champ was stunned by Mizner’s recitation of the Langdon Smith classic that starts “When
you were a tadpole and I was a fish, In the Palaeozoic time” and follows the romance of two lovers from one geological age to another, until they wind up in Rector’s. Ketchel had a thousand questions about the tadpole and the fish, and Mizner, a pedagogue at heart, took immense pleasure in wedging the whole theory of evolution into the fighter’s untutored head. Ketchel became silent and thoughtful. He declined an invitation to see the town that night with Mizner and Britt. When they rolled in at 5 A.M., Ketchel was sitting up with his eyes glued on a bowl of goldfish. “That evolution is all the bunk!” he shouted angrily. “I’ve been watching those fish nine hours and they haven’t changed a bit.” Mizner had to talk fast; one thing Ketchel couldn’t bear was to have anybody cross him. He was a creature of emotions, and he could be a lamb or a devil, according to which emotion happened to be stirred up.

  One night, Mizner, Britt, and a famous newspaper artist took Ketchel to meet the chatelaine and maids of honor of one of New York’s gaudiest establishments. They received a wild welcome. Corks popped, and eyes sparkled with love and larceny. Suddenly it was discovered that Ketchel was missing. There was a quick search, and he was found in the entrance hall weeping and wailing. On the wall was the picture titled “Lost in the Storm,” showing a sheep in a blizzard. “Oh, the poor little thing!” Ketchel sobbed again and again. A few days later, he opened fire with a Colt .44 through the door of his bedroom at Woodlawn Inn and put a bullet through the leg of one of his best friends, Peter (Pete the Goat) Stone, a nightclub owner, who had persisted in knocking at the door to get him up for his roadwork. In the ring, Ketchel was handicapped at times by his humanity. He was loath to hurt any opponent he regarded as a nice fellow. Edward Dean Sullivan, author of The Fabulous Wilson Mizner, stated that Ketchel, in order to overcome the disadvantage of his good humor, would say to himself in the middle of a round, “That son of a bitch insulted your mother,” and filial piety would then turn him into “an example of tumultuous ferocity”—to borrow Philadelphia Jack O’Brien’s description of him.

  Ketchel had emerged from obscurity on July 4, 1907, when he fought a twenty-round draw at Marysville, California, with Joe Thomas, claimant of the middleweight championship. In the next two years, Ketchel knocked out middleweights and heavyweights in great abundance. He was being managed by a San Francisco photographer named Joe Coffman, who was said to hypnotize him, keep him locked in a bedroom, and impound his clothes every night to prevent other managers from stealing him. In 1908, Willus Britt climbed up a fire escape and stole Ketchel in a bathrobe, according to W. O. McGeehan, the famous sports columnist. Britt was regarded as the smartest manager in the country. A few years earlier, he had been considered rattlebrained. He had once tried to borrow five hundred dollars from James W. Coffroth, the San Francisco sporting czar, for a business trip to New York. Noticing that he was dressed in evening trousers but no coat, Coffroth loaned him a hundred freshly minted pennies, which Willus took for five-dollar gold pieces. Overwhelming Coffroth with gratitude, Britt caught the next train east in his shirtsleeves, with his rouleau of one-cent pieces, and a few weeks later came home comparatively wealthy. Coffroth was greatly impressed, named a saloon the Willus in Britt’s honor, and went into business with him. Willus was credited with inventing the Native Son decision, according to which any Californian, if alive at the end of a prizefight, was automatically victorious over any nonresident. After mopping up the Western territory with Ketchel, Britt decided to take him East. W. O. McGeehan, who was then living in San Francisco, called on Britt and Ketchel shortly before they left California and was surprised to find Ketchel wearing a Phi Beta Kappa key. Britt said that he had procured it at Abe Attell’s pawnshop and that he intended to present Ketchel in New York as a young fellow fighting his way through college. Coffroth disapproved of the idea because Ketchel said “dese,” “dem,” and “dose.” Britt said that New Yorkers would never know the difference, but Coffroth had the key stolen, and Britt decided to take Ketchel to New York as a cowboy in high-heeled boots, spurs, chaps, and a sombrero.

  Mizner became involved in the management of Ketchel as an unpaid specialist on the political and graft setup in New York. Prizefighting was as illegal as cockfighting or bullfighting. The referees never named a winner, since the fighters were not supposed to seek victory but to cooperate like dancing partners. Any person who “instigated a contention” was liable to a five-hundred-dollar fine or a year in jail; the same penalties were incurred by persons who “published a challenge” or who “trained or assisted a fighter to train.” Like streetwalking and gambling, however, prizefighting was generally tolerated upon the payment of protection money. In his ignorance of New York, Britt found himself paying protection to the wrong parasites, and he called Mizner in to teach him the difference between the responsible tapeworms and the frauds. Fights were at that time put on by “athletic clubs,” which were organized the way speakeasies were later. Every new arrival was scrutinized by sentinels; anybody who looked like a reformer or stool pigeon was barred. There was no public sale of tickets. Only duly elected club members were admitted. The payment of two dollars at any saloon near the arena made any man a duly elected club member and provided him with a card calling for a good seat; one dollar made him a junior member, with a card entitling him to a bad seat. According to the late Bob Davis, every card was issued in the name of John Smith, in order to simplify the clerical work. Club meetings usually started with a speech bawling out members for being derelict in attendance at previous meetings and threatening drastic action under the bylaws.

  In spite of the punctual payment of graft, fights were raided whenever the authorities were seized with a fit of law and order, and elaborate precautions were considered necessary to prove that the entertainment consisted strictly of amateur sparring exhibitions of, for, and by club members. The principal arenas were an old dance hall and an old stable, Madison Square Garden having become too ladylike for fistic programs. The legal niceties of boxing were like those of drinking in the prohibition era. Soft punches were innocent, like soft drinks under the Volstead Act. But a hard blow was like hard liquor and instantly transformed all present into criminals. The only thing that saved the boxing game in those dark days was club loyalty. It was impossible to find a clubman who had seen a violation of the law. On one occasion, a Headquarters detective tried to stop a fight in the stable. He was thrown down a twenty-foot hay chute. The incident was invisible to fifteen hundred clubmen, including about a hundred policemen, all honorary members. But at best the boxing situation was precarious. Newspapers joined the reformers in demanding the suppression of the sport. The New York Globe asserted that the so-called sparring matches were gory encounters, denoting a low state of civilization, and charged that “the brutalized spectators howl with delight at a knockout.” A bill was offered in Congress making it a crime to mail a picture of a fighter and canceling the postal rights of newspapers that printed news of fights. It was dangerous for a pugilist to admit that he was a pugilist; it placed him outside the law and in danger of being “vagged,” or jugged as a vagabond. Ketchel and Mizner were once arrested on a charge of speeding. When Ketchel appeared in court, he was asked his occupation. “Physical instructor,” he said. In view of the general situation, Britt felt that he couldn’t have too much unpaid advice. He wouldn’t trust anybody but Californians, and Mizner became his chief adviser. Britt and Mizner called in Hype Igoe, a cartoonist and sportswriter of Native Son origin, as an additional consultant.

  One of Britt’s peculiarities was that although he constantly solicited advice, he seldom took it. After collecting the best opinions available, he would leave all important decisions to a pack of playing cards. He had studied under celebrated fortune-tellers, and he always carried in his pocket a deck of cards, which he used as an artificial brain. Whenever he had to make a decision, he would select a card and take a surreptitious look at it. If the card was lucky, he would say “Yes;” if unlucky, “No;” if dubious, “We’ll cross that bridge when we c
ome to it.” One day, Mizner stole Britt’s little god of fifty-two opinions and substituted a deck consisting entirely of queens of spades. Every time Britt peered into the future, the lady of disaster glared at him. He went all to pieces, spent a week in bed under a doctor’s care, and thereafter meekly accepted the suggestions of Mizner and Igoe.