Sparring With Hemingway: And Other Legends of the Fight Game

by Budd Schulberg

  High ratings (with Ali-Shavers a recent record-breaker) will keep the networks in the ring. ABC has signed the Olympic gold-medal winner, flashy Sugar Ray Leonard, to a long-term contract. So far he’s been knocking over stiffs in what could be an update of the Jim Norris-Chuck Davey saga. To paraphrase McLuhan, the media becomes the manager. CBS is enriching another Montreal golden boy, Howard Davis, $80,000 per fight, with Davis paying his own opponents as little as he can get them for. Not even Norris made it that obvious.

  Picking up the chips dropped by Don King and Hank Schwartz, Top Rank’s Bob Arum is busy signing European champions, promising to match them against America’s best. Hal Conrad, setting up a Muhammad Ali tournament to establish national championships, is promising “no fixes, no rigging, no house fighters.”

  So it should be an interesting season, with all three networks ever deeper into the game we’ve called “show business with blood.” And who knows, maybe these new fights in our living rooms will produce another Sugar Ray Robinson, Bronx Bull LaMotta, or Willie Pep. But the new era also needs bread-and-butter fighters, solid citizens of pugilistica like Tiger Jones and Indian Ortega.

  Holly Mims, where are you now that we need you?

  [April 1977]

  No Room for the Groom

  TWO OF MY HEROES are Joe Louis and Joe E. Lewis, a couple of champions who know how to set you up and move in and murder you, the former with quicker-than-the-eye combination punches, the latter with smart, jabbing lines, satirical songs, and a mischievous elegance that earns him my vote on the first ballot in the comedians’ hall of fame.

  This may seem a roundabout way of getting to the main item on our agenda, the forthcoming Saxton-DeMarco welterweight title fight. But bear with us, for both Joes cast their shadows over the Palermo-Sam Silverman thing that is coming up in Boston, April 1. April 1 is, of course, April Fool’s Day, which just goes to show that Philadelphia’s Blinky and Boston’s Sam have a sense of humor. In this case the joke is on Carmen Basilio, the perennial No. 1 welterweight challenger who lost an eyelash title fight decision to Kid Gavilan a year and a half ago and has been doing a lot of road work ever since, chasing first Gavilan and then his successor, the crowned unchampion, Johnny Saxton. Saxton, you may remember, won the title from Gavilan in Blinky’s hometown last fall in the smelliest fight since a couple of grapplers wrestled in the mud in You Asked for It.

  Joe Louis, unlike Blinky and his eight-armed—forgive the word—champion, never walked away from a challenger. Unlike Johnny and practically every heavyweight champion including John L. Sullivan, the Bomber took on the best heavyweights alive between 1934 and 1951. Call him a champion and you have to find another word for Saxton. This is some indication of what hoods like Palermo are doing to our cruel and noble sport. A Palermo champion leads you out of the world of sport and into the hair-splitting netherworld of semantics.

  As for Joe E. Lewis’s right to a paragraph or two in a boxing column, I submit that he described the Gavilan-to-Saxton-to-DeMarco runaround of Basilio with all the humor of a Red Smith and all the eloquence of a Jimmy Cannon in a certain ballad with which he used to regale the late-show customers at the Copacabana. It concerns the unhappy lot of a prospective husband whose efforts to wed the lady of his choice are hopelessly thwarted by the crowding in of all sorts of visitors from the butcher to the baker to his uncle who plays the horses at Jamaica.

  The butcher, in this case, would be Gavilan, on the basis of what he does to the King’s English rather than the King’s men. Saxton will do nicely for the baker, a fellow who kneads the dough so desperately that Referee Abe Simon can’t pry him loose from the stuff. The uncle who plays the horses at Jamaica could be Blinky, although booking the numbers might put him a little more in character.

  Boxing fans from San Ysidro, California, to Fort Kent, Maine, will fill in the name of the groom, Carmen Basilio, who to my mind hasn’t lost a fight since the one to Billy Graham nearly three years ago. In 1953 he was uncouth enough to knock Kid Gavilan off his feet and nearly off his throne. The commissioners, whose word is as good as their word, decreed that Gavilan should meet the upstate (New York) left-hooker within six months—another six months—and another. Dissolve through, as we say in the movies, and who’s in the ring with the fading mambo dancer? The fifth-ranking Saxton, clearly entitled to the honor by virtue of a draw with Johnny Lombardo, who himself had qualified for Saxton by losing six of his last nine. Before Lombardo, Saxton had gone into the record books as a winner over Johnny Bratton, in another Donnytrickle that gave off a heady perfume of dead fish.

  But don’t go away, fight fans, your interests were being protected. The commissioners were going to see to it that Saxton defended against Basilio within six months or forfeit his title.

  So what could be more logical (for this business) than that Johnny Saxton, inspired by his nontitle defeat at the hands of Ronnie Delaney, meet fourth-ranking Tony DeMarco in Chowder Town this April Fool’s Day?

  Basilio celebrates his twenty-eighth birthday the following day and is beginning to look a little old for a groom after being left waiting at the church since September 18, 1953. As usual he has been promised a title bout with the Saxton-DeMarco winner on his home ground, Syracuse, on April 29. Norman Rothschild, the youthful, personable and trusting promoter up there, says, “We have contracts on file with the New York State Athletic Commission calling for Basilio to meet whoever is the welterweight champion on that date.”

  Meanwhile the Massachusetts Boxing Commission has its own contracts on the record, calling for a return Saxton-DeMarco match within ninety days.

  Harry (short for harried) Markson, the book-reading Union College graduate who is the managing director of the IBC, really had his heart set on a Saxton-Basilio match. It used to be protocol to stab you in the back in the boxing business. There seems to be a new trend toward the frontal assault. Quoth Markson, “As Joseph Welch, the Boston attorney has said, ‘I can stand one stab in the heart a day.’ Lamar [Massachusetts boxing commissioner] has stabbed me in the heart this day. From a Harvard man yet.”

  As Joe E. Lewis’s parable would put it, the church is just too crowded. The brother-in-law from Toledo got in, a guy with a misfit tuxedo got in—but the groom …

  Tony DeMarco is a pretty fair fighter, but Basilio has been all dressed up and no place to go for a long time. April Fool’s night in Bean Town, Tony and his soft-shoe partner will be a couple of guys in misfit tuxedos.

  P.S. APPPFF (Association for the Protection of the Poor Putupon Fight Fan) arise! You have nothing to lose but your patience.

  [March 1955]

  Marciano and England’s Cockell

  Prefight

  AN ENGLISH HEAVYWEIGHT has come over to the States for a visit. While he’s here he hopes to win the championship of the world. He has a better chance of accomplishing that than Archie Moore, Nino Valdes, Bob Baker, or any of the other challengers, because the latest importation from the far shore is being allowed to meet our champion, Rocky Marciano, in San Francisco on May 16.

  This may signal a victory for modesty over brashness, for while Archie Moore, the light heavyweight champion, has gone around the country beating a big bass drum for Archie Moore, Cockell has remained quietly on his English farm, raising pigs, growing fat, and waiting for the gods and the IBC (two separate organizations though sometimes confused) to wave their magic wand over this stoutish figure and wisp him off to San Francisco for his night of glory. On the other hand, there is a school of thought which contends that even if Archie Moore outsilenced and outhumbled Don Cockell, the pig farmer with the soft Battersea accent would still have gotten the shot, because Al Weill, the last of the Medici, has a soft spot in his heart for Englishmen who can’t hit too hard and who are unable to do any better against Roland LaStarza than to squeeze through a hometown London decision. That is what Cockell-and-muscles did a year ago, slap through to a decision that turned Roland LaStarza against the United Kingdom.

  The champ
ion of England hasn’t much of a record. He had outpointed Elizabethan heavyweights like Johnny Williams and Johnny Arthur for the high-sounding but fistically plebeian Empire championship. In three fights with Jack Hurley’s aging and fading heavyweight Harry Matthews, Cockell won a couple of close ones and was finally credited with an eight-round knockout when Harry’s aching and ancient back began to give way on him. Cockell hasn’t knocked out anybody else recently except the venerable Tommy Farr, who happens to be the last Britisher to have had a go at the big title. Farr tried it with Louis eighteen years ago and scored a moral or a Pyrrhic or some kind of a nonvictorious triumph by remaining on his feet the full fifteen. This was hailed the world over as an accomplishment of rare significance, for the truth was that English fistfighting, especially among the big ones, had plain gone to hell in the twentieth century, and a British heavyweight who could maintain a vertical position over ten or fifteen rounds was credited with courage above and beyond the call of duty and qualified for a V.C.

  Describing a man as a British heavyweight has become something less than a compliment in this century, which has seen such stand-up, knocked-down specimens as Joe Beckett and Bombardier Wells, vintage World War I, who were both flattened twice by Carpentier. That Frenchman didn’t help Franco-British relations by scoring three one-round KOs over the London prides; the Bombardier stoutly hung on until the fourth the first time he was in there with the Parisian middleweight. A decade later there was Phil Scott, who boxed quite well but seemed to resent being hit to the body. Phainting Phil, they used to call him. More recently there was Bruce Woodcock, another Empire champion, who was being touted by his countrymen not so many years ago as a coming champion of the world. He also visited our shores and turned out to be a stand-up straight-left boxer with a chin of purest porcelain. Tami Mauriello dumped him in five and that was the last of that Empire champion except for a couple of appearances with Lee Oma and Lee Savold that would be described more appropriately in Theatre Arts than in a magazine devoted to competitive sport.

  In the previous century it was altogether different. Prizefighting owes its resurgence to the English, who were stirred by the remarkable courage and endurance and ferocity of such bareknuckle heroes as Daniel Mendoza, Tom Cribb, Tom Sayers, and Jem Mace. These were men who stood up for two or three hours and fought effectively with blinded eyes, broken arms, and injuries that could only be endured with superhuman pride.

  In this century that sort of valor seems to have been inherited by such American champions as Corbett and Dempsey, Louis and Marciano. Whether our British visitor is of that mettle remains to be seen.

  Along Piccadilly the London buffs may like to think of Cockell as a throwback to the glorious days when Britannia ruled the waves and a champion of England ruled the ring. But on Eighth Avenue, where feeling for the English prize ring tradition does not run high, my connection says they’re laying 6 to 1 that Cockell is just another imported stiff.

  The Fight

  FOR YEARS I HAVE pored over accounts of the English prize ring bareknuckle battles and tried to visualize what those fights were like. Daniel Mendoza, the heavyweight champion from the London ghetto, had introduced the art of footwork and some fancy blocking, but the average bareknuckle pug a century ago was a strong, squat, determined slug of a man who stood his ground like an ancient gladiator, dealing out punishment to the limit of his endurance and taking the full force of his opponent’s blows without flinching. The prize ring was a test not so much of skill but of what the fancy liked to describe as “British courage.” If a man had sufficient pluck—or “bottom,” as they used to say—if he was a glutton for “facers” or belly blows, he could make a name for himself inside the ropes. He might be a feeble hitter or a sluggish performer, but as long as he fought on manfully to the bloody, insensate end in his hopeless cause, he was carried back to his barouche and cheered like a winner.

  Except for the technicality of wearing eight-ounce gloves, Don Cockell’s stand against Rocky Marciano in the fading daylight hours of a cool San Francisco sunlit day was a glorious—or appalling—throwback to this pre-Marquis of Queensberry condition. This was a bareknuckle brawl with gloves—and not a pleasant sight either—as an uncouth, merciless, uncontrolled, and truly vicious fighter (the unbeaten champion Marciano) wore down an ox-legged, resolute fat man who came into the ring with the honor of the British Empire weighing heavily—and consciously—on his massive, blubbery shoulders. He had promised his Union Jack supporters that he would not let them down, and the first words he mumbled through swollen lips after his fearful beating in nine rounds were an apology to his fellow countrymen for not having done better.

  But the sad truth is that Don Cockell never will do better than he did against Rocky Marciano in the waning light of Kezar Stadium. American boxing writers had not underestimated him in unanimously dubbing him as a hand-picked opponent with whom Marciano would toy for a little while before he knocked him out. They had only underestimated his gluttony. He can eat thundering left and right hooks by the dozen, stagger around the ring like a Skid Row drunk, throw up between rounds from the force of the body blows, and then rise dutifully at the sound of the bell for another frightful three minutes of the same. Don Cockell was acclaimed by sportswriters on both sides of the Atlantic for his ability to absorb hundreds of Marciano’s hardest blows, and one Englishman went so far as to write that “… this was the kind of extra courage which makes you proud to belong to the human race and to have been sired by the same breed as the boy who grew up in the back streets of Battersea.”

  The defeat, in which the English champion won only a single round, and that by a shade before Marciano had warmed up to the slaughter, has installed Cockell as a national hero. “It was really a victory,” insisted the London Star. English Promoter Jack Solomons after the fight was talking of the rematch as a natural for London, where the sporting bloods have convinced themselves that their man could win if Marciano’s foul tactics were prevented by a fair referee willing to enforce the rules.

  British pride has always run high and perhaps never higher than in these embattled years when the sun finally seems to be setting on the second Elizabethan Empire. Every one of the visiting Englishmen I talked to, including Cockell, his high-strung, peevish manager, John Simpson, and the angry British newsmen in the tense visiting dressing room after the fight, seemed acutely and even painfully conscious that this was not just a scrap between a couple of heavyweights but between representatives of brawny America and dear old England.

  The plain fact is that Don Cockell is not too much of a fighter, despite the fact that most of us thought he would only be around for five or six rounds and he managed to suffer on for eight or nine. He’s just another brave bull who comes straight at you, holding and moving his hands fairly well until he gets tired; he doesn’t hit nearly hard enough for the head-on style he uses, nor does he have any of the evasive footwork and headwork of a Walcott or Charles when they were at their best. He’s just a light-hitting plodder, a sitting duck—and a nice plump one too—for any heavyweight with the guns to bring him down. If he were not the champion of the British Empire, and if the patriotism of fading glory did not steam up the prose of the British sportswriters, he would seem to be what he is—a willing trial horse, a dogged tub of fat.

  You may give three cheers for his stoutness of heart; but even braver, it seems to me, are those who talk of a rematch, for one has to be a man of iron nerves—utterly fearless—to throw this defenseless warrior back into the pit with the most destructive heavyweight since Joe Louis and the most uninhibited one since Two-Ton Tony Galento used to swing fists, shoulders, elbows, head, and knees in the general direction of his victims. Tony even bit ’em once in a while and may qualify as the only cannibal now residing in Orange, New Jersey.

  In the Cockell dressing room after the fight there was much to-do about Rocky’s unmannerly tactics and such bitter attacks on American sportsmanship that we were more than ever aware of the difference
between American fistfighting and British boxing. There is no doubting that the English adhere more closely to the rules. Their boxers are penalized for infractions that are overlooked as “just part of the game” over here. Fritzie Zivic, Sandy Saddler, Willie Pep, Jake LaMotta, and other topnotchers have gotten away with stuff that would probably get them banished for life from the English ring. It may have something to do with the difference in cultures. The British would seem to be more “civilized,” while we still have one foot in the backwoods. Or, in Rocky’s case, it would be more apt to say, in the jungle. Yet despite the rising tide of British indignation, I don’t think Rocky fouled his hapless opponent deliberately. He goes into a fight like an old-time rough and tumbler who locks himself in a room with a man to see which one of them can stand it the longest. He lunges at you like a fullback, and when two big men collide in the middle of a ring heads are going to smash together. His punches are the equivalent of a home-run-happy slugger, and when he misses, his elbow is likely to catch you on the swing-around. He’s a wild man when he’s in there bombing for a knockout and he isn’t listening for the bell at the end of the round. In this case the bell happened to be a dull antique, and the roar of the crowd and Rocky’s obsession with annihilation could easily account for his hitting after the bell. Punching poor battered Cockell while he was down was another foul—in the old Dempsey overexuberant tradition—but, as Rocky tried to explain next afternoon, he had already started his swing and it isn’t easy to suspend a punch in midair. Just the same, I thought Referee Frankie Brown might have warned Rocky occasionally—or even taken a round away from him for butts and low blows.