Sparring With Hemingway: And Other Legends of the Fight Game

by Budd Schulberg

  “Fighters are a dime a dozen, but managers go on forever,” is the slogan of this hardened tribe who go on managing kids who get knocked out six times in eight fights—and if you think this is exaggeration, thumb through a Ring Record Book.

  Threading through the pages full of power and glory are records like that of Marcus Dorsey, a Houston middleweight, knocked out ten times in seventeen fights, winning only his very first fight. Or Al Byrd, a North Carolina heavyweight, knocked out in eighteen fights in twenty-four starts. Or Irving Booth, knocked out in all seven of his first seven fights, in the first or second round. Where are the commissions, the promoters, the managers who should be telling these sacrificial lambs in wolves’ clothing to go home and forget it—the world of Holmes, Hagler, and Hearns is not for them?

  In this climate of neglect—with too many meat merchants and not enough Cus D’Amatos and too many no-talent “Christians” thrown to the lions—the public cry for abolition or reform comes only when an exhausted Duk Koo Kim is inadvertently beaten to death by Ray (Boom Boom) Mancini, or a drug-abused Willie Classen, stopped in two of his previous fights, is allowed one more, fatal round with then-undefeated Wilford Scypion. Instead of waiting for tragedy to strike again, it behooves defenders of boxing not to shrug off but to take a good, hard look at the charges of the AMA.

  According to its high-sounding Council on Scientific Affairs, its own study of thirty-eight boxers, as well as a study in the British medical magazine Lancet of fourteen Finnish boxers, and a further study by six physicians published last May in the AMA Journal—all based on CT (computed tomographic) brain scans, electroencephalograms, and neurological tests—a significant number of those boxers suffered from chronic encephalopathy, cerebral atrophy, and, in about one-third of the cases, a condition described medically as cavum septum pellucidum. This abnormality has been discovered in tests both of Muhammad Ali, and of the best white heavyweight in recent years, Jerry Quarry, who fought all the tough ones of the sixties and seventies, Joe Frazier, Muhammad Ali, Ernie Shavers, Ken Norton. … Jerry is not at all the punchy stereotype with which enemies of boxing like to belabor the sport. He’s not walking on his heels, and his speech isn’t slurred. Articulate and responsive, he’s an effective TV colorman at ringside. But when he volunteered to participate in a series of tests sponsored by Sports Illustrated, along with Tex Cobb, who took an unmerciful (and needless) beating from Larry Holmes, and a club fighter named Pacheco (no relation to Dr. P), his CAT scans and psychoneurological results were subnormal.

  Without overloading readers with statistics and medicalese, it’s the AMA conclusion that boxing is deleterious to the human brain. But not all experts agree. Dr. Bennett Denby, the neurosurgeon at New York University Medical Center who advises the New York State Athletic Commission, studied 125 CAT scans of fighters knocked out last year and found no evidence of brain damage caused by boxing. While the jury is still out, there is no point in denying the possibility of brain damage, especially from the accumulation of blows over a number of years. Just as there is little point in defending the boxing status quo by citing the number of fatalities in auto and horse racing, tobogganing, hang-gliding, and so many other dangerous sports. Yes, Pat Ryan, the starting quarterback for the Jets, was sidelined for the rest of the 1984 season after serious concussions suffered in two successive games. Of course, the 280-pound linemen blindsiding a star quarterback are trying to do more than stop the passer; consciously or subconsciously they’re trying to whack him out of the game. Nor is it of any value to a brain-damaged veteran of sixty or seventy fights to argue that Ron Turcotte, a little gem of a jockey, is paralyzed from the waist down, as is Daryl Stingley of the New England Patriots. Or that major automobile races are advertised on TV by featuring again and again deadly crashes with cars rolling over, slamming against walls, and trapping their drivers in fires. Bodily harm, intended or accidental, attends every sport of violent contact. But we who follow boxing have an obligation to deal with our own sport. If a jockey keeps falling off his horse, he is disqualified. But for the fighter who gets knocked out almost every time he climbs through the ropes or shuffles through his bloody career as a hopeless loser, there is no Thoroughbred Racing Association to rule him off the track.

  It is not the findings of the AMA—alarming if still inconclusive—that we question, but its conclusions: to abolish both amateur and professional boxing. In the first place, these are two different sports, the first limited to three rounds, with headgear, and the referee ready to step in practically with the first sign of a bloody nose. The professional main bout goes anywhere from ten to fifteen rounds and is a test of endurance as well as courage and skill. This kind of prizefight has been banned again and again.

  A fight to the finish was outlawed in England throughout the bareknuckle days of the nineteenth century but flourished just the same with such natural rivalries as champion Tom Cribb vs. the American slave champion, Tom Molineaux, and Richard Humphries vs. Daniel Mendoza, “the Jew,” drawing tens of thousands, from bluebloods to scalawags. Forbidden in the United States as well, the Manly Art responded to an insatiable urge all over the country. “The Great” John L. Sullivan had to go all the way to rural Mississippi to face a major rival, Jake Kilrain. If Gentleman Jim Corbett had to meet San Francisco rival Joe Choynski on a barge to avoid police interference, so be it—they fought it out. Wherever boxing was banned, there was always some state or territory beyond the law where natural rivalries were settled with impunity.

  After winning his bareknuckle championship from Paddy Ryan in the wilds of Mississippi, Sullivan went all the way to France to defend his title against Charley Mitchell. Only the oldest of old-timers remembers that New York banned boxing completely about eighty years ago. And what were the results? Did boxing disappear? No, like booze in the twenties, it flourished in speakeasies—only they were called boxing “clubs.”

  Instead of a ticket, you bought a “membership”—oh, man’s ingenuity is endless when it comes to something he (and she) is unable to resist. In the years of boxing’s “banishment” there were many more fight cards in New York than there are today. Every borough had its club or clubs, with professional boxing every night of the week. But it was totally without supervision. There were no weigh-ins and no safety precautions. Lightweights were thrown in against middleweights. There are grim stories of battered bodies being found in the river or abandoned in alleys after brutal club matches that mindless referees never bothered to stop.

  Finally, boxing was welcomed back to respectability again under the Walker Law (the famous Mayor Jimmy), allowing ten-round fights without awarding decisions, a sop to reformers who reasoned that without official decisions at the end of the contests, the gambling element would be eliminated, along with their fixes and underworld coups. So this became the era of “newspaper decisions,” with the gamblers as involved as ever and paying off on the round-by-round tallies of the boxing writers.

  Unfortunately, this group had no more of a lock on public virtue than commission judges, who have made their share of strange and suspicious calls over the years. And so, finally, boxing was “normalized” in New York again, with the hope that a state athletic commission could keep it as clean and safe as this demanding contact sport will ever be.

  But New York is only one state, faced with the problem that it has forfeited its championship franchise to Las Vegas, not to mention Latin and European rings on the TV satellite circuit. There was a time when a champion sanctioned in New York enjoyed credibility as a champion of the world. But the fact that New York rulings have no effect in Maine, Mississippi, Arizona … that some states have their own commissions, while some have none at all—and that boxing may be the one sport practiced in every part of the globe, North and South America, Europe, Asia, and Africa—makes an American ban on boxing an exercise in self-righteous futility. Not only would the ban lead to a mushroom spread of “speakeasy” boxing clubs from New York to San Diego, but American fighters would become a co
mmodity for export to Buenos Aires and Mexico City, Monte Carlo and Rome, Tokyo and Johannesburg. …

  So the AMA “ban on boxing” can be written off either as a publicity ploy (why did they hold up until after the ’84 Olympics their vote to outlaw even amateur boxing?), or a futile cry in the wilderness of the fight game. To cry for abolishment is a cop-out, really, for everybody knows that boxing is no closer to its end in 1985 than it was in 1885, when John L. Sullivan was king. The plea from this corner, then, is not to join the AMA lobby in its grandstand move but to take its most cogent facts to heart and work from there. Decades overdue but now more urgently needed is a federal boxing commission, not a body of dodo politicos or anything-goes boxing apologists but people who care about boxing and know about boxing, who love boxing without being blind to its faults and who want to lead boxing out of its jungle chaos into the world of legitimate sport.

  Challenged by the AMA, boxing needs a Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis, who was appointed to reform baseball after the Black Sox scandals of 1919. It needs a program of protection that is uniform from state to state, via a master computer with a data base of all boxers’ performances and medical histories—so that “opponents” who have no business in the ring could no longer stumble on from state to state, with nobody checking and nobody caring.

  Such a commission, staffed by professionals, would insist on much more than the routine physical examination, which in many states is a perfunctory knee-jerk exercise. There should be CAT scans and EEGs and neurological tests before and after every bout. Cerebral atrophy may not be totally avoidable, but at least thorough before-and-after exams would identify potential victims. Boxers over thirty should be monitored with special care, for it seems axiomatic that the older a fighter is and the more blows he absorbs, the more susceptible he becomes to cerebral abnormalities.

  A promotion that exploits an over-the-hill Ali, or the comeback of eye-injured Sugar Ray Leonard, or encourages a brave but punched-out ex-champ like Vito Antuofermo to return to the ring is not going to welcome a federal commission with strict standards for all the states. Big-time promoters have been a law unto themselves and laugh off their critics as do-gooders and bleeding hearts. Too often the prevailing attitude is “boxing is a gutter sport—trying to reform it is like trying to reform hooking on Eighth Avenue.” But the history of the modern prizefight, all the way back to seventeenth century’s James Figg, is studded with reform—from bare knuckles to gloves to thumbless gloves; from fights to a finish to thirty rounds to twenty rounds and now a limit of twelve to fifteen; the use of mouthpiece and groin protector; the judgment of doctors and referees to stop unequal contests. … The trouble often lies in the enforcement. When what proved to be fatal injuries were being inflicted on Benny Paret, Jimmy Owen, Willie Classen, and Duk Koo Kim, officials more sensitive to their dilemma might have stepped in and saved their lives. The brutal shutout that Larry Holmes pitched against Tex Cobb could have been stopped after five or six rounds and simply called “no contest.” Two men parrying each other’s blows and trying to box, think, and will their way to victory make an exhilarating contest. One man beating on a defenseless opponent round after round makes it brutal and boring.

  Along with computerized medical records based on CAT scans, EEGs, and the recently developed MRIs (magnetic resonance imaging), a federal boxing commission should also appraise the fitness of referees and cornermen in whose hands lies the safety of thousands of young competitors, most of them hoping to fight their way out of the oppressive social conditions into which they were born. Without exception, they are willing to take their chances, brain damage and all. “It’s my one shot at moving up, man—only way outa the ghetto,” says a hungry, quick-fisted black kid at the Bed-Stuy gym who admits that if he weren’t here, cleaning up his act and accepting the discipline, he’d be out there with his jobless, street-hustle brothers dealing drugs, squeezing Saturday-night specials. “Like, my fights are in the streets, and my roadwork is outrunning the cops.”

  A featherweight novice from Spanish Harlem agrees: “Talk about brain damage, man. You get it out there a helluva lot faster ’n you get it in here!” As long as those conditions motivate kids like these off the streets and into gyms from Bed-Stuy to downtown L.A., no AMA is going to stop them.

  So let’s step up to realism and give them what they need. Not the rhetoric of abolishment but the reality of reform. Including a long-needed and studiously avoided pension plan, plus a retirement home/hospital along the lines of the Motion Picture Relief Home. Two percent off the top of every multimillion-dollar promotion could underwrite this plan. This fight fan/reformer trial-ballooned these ideas thirty years ago, and all he has to show for it is a plaque from Notre Dame for having done the most for boxing that year. My predecessor was Bishop Shiel, my successor Rocky Marciano, with whom I held a press conference to push our reform. It’s a handsome plaque, but I’m still waiting for the improvements it symbolized.

  Congressman Henry B. Gonzalez of Texas has already opened the next round in the battle to ban boxing by swinging into Congress with a bill calling for the sport’s abolishment. There are a lot of poor white Texas kids and brown-skinned Chicanos in his constituency. So we’d advise the honorable Henry B. to move for our federal boxing commission. Let him help set it up soundly and promptly, so that these boys—his constituents—would be protected against both an unsupervised, multimillion-dollar fight industry and the bootleg “club” operators ready to step in should the legal rug be pulled from under some four thousand pro boxers—plus countless amateurs—by the good doctors of the AMA.

  [April 1985]

  Journey to Zaire

  IN THE CONGO (NOW called Zaire: rhymes with My Ear) the old African hands like to quote a native proverb:

  “Only when you have crossed the river can you say the crocodile has a lump on his snout.”

  And now that I have flown across the equator by way of Iceland, Luxembourg, and Trier, Germany (thanks to the topsy-turvy logistics of Video Techniques, which masterminded our press charter flight), to see a Festival of Music that failed to fest, and the Fight of the Century that failed to be fought, I have an amendment to that ancient African saying:

  “Even after you have crossed the river, you still may not know if the crocodile has a lump on his snout.”

  From Joe Louis’s days I’ve flown to the scene of championship fights. But today I’m recalling the flight from California to Miami to see young Cassius Clay challenge the sinister Sonny Liston, the 10-to-l favorite, and the hysterical scene at the weigh-in when Cassius and his resident guru, Bundini Brown, first introduced the slogan, “Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee,” carrying on like banshees, with Clay’s eyes bulging, his mouth screaming and blood pressure doubling. Officials were being urged to call off the fight because Clay was so emotionally disturbed that he should not be allowed in the ring with a killer like Liston. That night he climbed into the ring cool and self-contained, darting in, out, and around the lumbering Liston who, as veteran fighters are wont to do, went from middle age to senility between rounds.

  Next morning at his press conference, the multifaceted Clay, by far the most complex and provocative of all the champions I’ve known over the years, had undergone another personality change. Now the new champion declared his faith in Black Muslims and, taking the lead from his mentor Malcolm X, announced that henceforth he would no longer use his “slave name” Cassius Marcellus Clay but would be known as Cassius X.

  When I asked what kind of champion he intended to be, his answer was unexpected, touched with pomposity, and yet, with hindsight, a reliable projection of the man. “I want to use my championship as a calling card on all the great leaders of the world,” he said. “I want to travel to all the great capitals. Boxin’ has brought me to where I am but I know there’s a lot o’ things more important than boxin’, even than being the Greatest, the champion of the entire world.”

  Ten years ago I could not have foreseen that this spirit of
defiance, intellectual curiosity, and the search for roots would lead all of us on the strangest journey of my forty years of fight-going, the journey to Kinshasa.

  On Ali’s last weekend before his departure for Zaire, I drove to his self-designed complex of log cabins on a mountain top in the Amish country. No frills at the camp, just good solid cabins, solid benches to sit on, solid food. The only decorations are enormous rocks, the size of three Bubba Smiths put together. Each bears the name of a former champion, Sonny Liston, Rocky Marciano, Archie Moore. There is a smaller rock for Angelo Dundee, the veteran trainer-manager to whom Cassius first turned for help when Dundee was managing champions and Clay was the teenage amateur pride of Louisville.