“I can show you the guy from the river,” Sandy says.
She digs out the file and hands me a Polaroid. The body is shrouded in blue so only the face is visible, offering the dignity in death he never had in life. His eyes are closed, and his nose looks as if it’s been broken. He’s got a slight overbite, and his front two teeth just stick out on his bottom lip. He doesn’t have a scar.
Case 2008-03065 is not Sweet Jimmy.
He’s not here.
OUT THERE . . . SOMEWHERE
Sweet Jimmy is gone. He didn’t leave a record. He doesn’t exist on paper, just in the minds of those left in Overtown. He won’t even exist there much longer. I walk into James Hunt’s home one Saturday morning, and he tells me the news.
Three days earlier, Racetrack Shorty died.
“They’re dropping like flies,” James says.
Instead of getting closer to finding Jimmy, I’m getting further and further away. The old boxer grows more elusive every day. There is more talk about a brother who supposedly came looking for him. Some people say the brother took Jimmy home. Others say the brother never found him.
I ask everyone the question: Where did he go?
“I think Missouri.”
“He might be in Clearwater.”
“St. Pete.”
“His brother took him to Tampa.”
“They say he took him up to Louisiana and he died in Louisiana.”
“New Orleans.”
“I heard he went to Belle Glade.”
“He went to Texas.”
“He had an accent that would be more Georgia.”
“Georgia, Alabama, I don’t know.”
“Ohio.”
He’s everywhere. He’s nowhere. He’s both.
EVERYTHING IS EQUIVOCAL
Al Owens lives north of Liberty City, in a house on a corner. He fought Jim Robinson twice. He looks at the photo on the flier.
“That ain’t him,” he says.
The first time they fought was three months before the Ali bout, the second seven months after. When he got into the ring the second time, he says it was a different guy. He remembers the night because a crowd of hustlers from 2nd Avenue screamed for Al to kill Jimmy. “They wasn’t following him to see him win,” he says. “They was following him to see him get his ass whupped.”
It was a long, hard fight, and Al says he repressed the memory of it until an autograph collector began writing him letters. Al says he knew Jim Robinson, and he knew Sweet Jimmy, and he claims he saw them together. Then, he says, Jim Robinson quit boxing to join the army and the street hustler Sweet Jimmy began fighting under his name. “He had the same beard,” he says. “He had the scar already. He wore the same visor. The visor was the thing for the guys playing three-card monte.”
But Al is a strange character, too, and his memory doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. The timeline he lays out is, simply, impossible. He, too, has lost pieces of himself along the way.
I send three photos—two of a young Jim Robinson in boxing gear and one taken by Brennan—to a lab in England for scientific comparison. The Centre for Anatomy & Human Identification uses a six-point scale, ranging from “Lends No Support” to “Lends Strong Support.” One means they are absolutely not the same person; six means they absolutely are. Their report:
There are numerous morphological and proportional similarities between the man in image 1 and the man in images 2 and 3. There are no apparent morphological or proportional differences which cannot be easily explained by the effects of 20 years of aging, or the differences in camera angle, lighting and resolution; hence, there is nothing to indicate that the man in image 1 is not the same man shown in images 2 and 3. However, these same factors (time, difference in angle, lighting, expression, resolution, etc.) also make it difficult to be more conclusive.
On their scale, they give it a four: Lends Support.
Even science is equivocal. Nothing in the strange search for Sweet Jimmy is certain. Everything is gauzy, covered in a haze of mights and maybes, his disappearance a mirror held up to his life.
GOING HOME
One stop remains before I step out of Sweet Jimmy’s world for the last time and return to mine. On my final Sunday morning in Miami, I show up for my shift volunteering in the Camillus House kitchen. After slicing four hams and dicing a crate of onions, I make my way to the exit. I see a familiar face coming in. Two minutes either way, I’d have missed him.
His name is Shelly. He’s 80. He’s weathered smooth, like a piece of driftwood, with milky eyes. His rap sheet reaches back to the ’70s, with busts from trespassing to auto larceny to drug possession. I met him yesterday, in the street, and he told me he saw Sweet Jimmy leave town. He said he and Jimmy were close, hanging out in the pool hall together. But he seemed out of it, and in a hurry, and standing in the middle of an Overtown street isn’t the place for an interview. I thought I’d never see him again.
“Shelly!” I say.
He tries to place me. I remind him we’d spoken yesterday, and he seems to remember.
“Do you need anything?” I ask.
“A Pepsi,” he says.
I return with two sodas, and we sit in the courtyard, surrounded by other homeless men and women. They are gathered around a radio, listening to gospel and R & B, the old soul hits, staring intently, as if the music has the power to take them away. The tops of some waterfront luxury condos rise high above the shelter, and hidden behind them is the AmericanAirlines Arena, its outdoor jumbotron flashing messages from another dimension.
“I miss Jimmy,” Shelly says.
We talk for an hour and a half. He tells me the story again, and it’s the same as he told it yesterday. That’s what makes me believe him, because the streets have left his mind fractured, full of images he can’t order. I don’t think he is capable of remembering a lie.
He says he arrived here 10 years ago: March 15, 1999. He repeats the date over and over. Later, he says he’s been here 20 years. I know for sure he was arrested here in 1973, so who knows.
He tells me about his parents, back in Atlanta, who left one day to go to the store and never came back. He tells me about the pool hall regulars trying to hang together after it closed but ending up scattered, about Clyde Killens making sure they all had something to eat and about the last day he ever saw Sweet Jimmy. They were sitting in the pool hall.
“He told me a long time ago,” Shelly says, “his brother was gonna come for him, you know. But I didn’t know when. Jimmy said he had a brother. I didn’t believe it until I saw him. His brother came and got him and took him home. I’m probably the only one who seen him get in the car. Everybody know he left town, but I was there when he got in the car and hauled ass. Shook my hand and every damn thing. Shook my hand. Said, ‘I’ll see you when I come back.’ I never saw him no more.”
He points up at the perfect blue sky. “I’ll see him again.”
A deformed pigeon, large tumors growing off its head, pecks around the concrete patio for crumbs. A crackhead stops throwing himself into a chain-link fence and crawls around under my chair, checking every stray cigarette butt for leftover tobacco. A man who looks too healthy to be here leans back in his chair, closes his eyes, and sings along to the music: From the bottom of my heart, it’s true . . . I wish I could take a journey. Shelly sits quietly with the addicts and the sick, all huddled together, unwanted. Shelly takes a sip of his Pepsi and thinks about all the people who’ve come and gone.
“They disappear like the wind,” he says.
EPILOGUE
The journey ends where it began. Six years after he first called, Stephen Singer leads me back through his office until we’re standing in front of what he calls the masterpiece: two large frames six feet across containing a collage of photos, programs, ticket stubs, and, of course, 49 signatures. There’s an engraved plaque: �
��Jim Robinson’s whereabouts unknown . . . autograph missing.”
He’s no longer searching for Jimmy. “I moved on,” he says. “I haven’t really thought about it for a couple of years. I’m way past that. I’ve got real work to do.”
It’s easy to believe the journey of Sweet Jimmy is unique. It’s not. Singer’s collection is a reminder of how a boxing life often goes completely off track.
Tunney Hunsaker, the first opponent, spent nine days in a coma after a bout.
Trevor Berbick, the final opponent, was beat to death with a steel pipe.
Herb Siler went to prison for shooting his girlfriend.
Tony Esperti went to prison for a Mafia hit in a Miami Beach nightclub.
Alfredo Evangelista went to prison in Spain.
Alejandro Lavorante died from injuries sustained in the ring.
Sonny Banks did too.
Jerry Quarry died broke, his mind scrambled from dementia pugilistica.
Jimmy Ellis suffered from it too.
Rudi Lubbers turned into a drunk and joined a carnival.
Buster Mathis blew up to 550 pounds and died of a heart attack at 52.
George Chuvalo lost three sons to heroin overdoses; his wife killed herself after the second son’s death.
Oscar Bonavena was shot through the heart with a high-powered rifle outside a Reno whorehouse.
Cleveland Williams was killed in a hit-and-run.
Zora Folley died mysteriously in a motel swimming pool.
Sonny Liston died of a drug overdose in Las Vegas. Many still believe the Mafia killed him.
“That’s the saddest one,” I say to Singer.
“They’re all sad,” he says. “They’re all sad in their own way.”
Even finding Sweet Jimmy isn’t certain to provide any answers about his life; he might not remember he ever fought at all. Many old fighters end their lives stripped of their memories. The night Jimmy fought Ali, the main event was a light heavyweight title fight between Harold Johnson and Jesse Bowdry. Today, Johnson lives in a Philadelphia VA nursing home and has good days and bad days. His memory is going. Bowdry’s wife answers the phone in their St. Louis home. “He’s not gonna remember,” she says. “He has dementia.”
Even Ali is a prisoner in his own body, a ghost like Sweet Jimmy, lost in a different way. He paid a price for his fame, just as the men who fought him paid a price for their brush with it. Nothing is free. Confronting the wreckage reminds me of an old magazine story, written by Davis Miller. There’s a haunting moment, in 1989 when things were turning bad. Ali stands at the window of his suite on the 24th floor of the Mirage hotel in Las Vegas. His once booming voice comes out a whisper.
“Look at this place,” he says. “This big hotel, this town. It’s dust, all dust. Don’t none of it mean nothin’. It’s all only dust.”
A fighter jet lands at an Air Force base out on the desert. Ali watches it through the glass, the lights on the strip so bright it seems like they’ll burn forever.
“Go up in an airplane,” he says. “Go high enough, and it’s like we don’t even exist.”
DECEMBER 2009
Here and Gone
The strange relationship between Lionel Messi and his hometown in Argentina.
ROSARIO, ARGENTINA—In the imagination of guidebook writers, who see places as they should be but rarely as they are, there is a passionate love affair between the city of Rosario and its famous progeny, global soccer star Leo Messi.
I know this because it said so, right there on page 179 of the Lonely Planet, which I thumbed through during the three hours of countryside between Buenos Aires and Messi’s hometown. An Irish ex-pat named Paul, my translator and friend, drove. He’d agreed to help me act on my obsession with Messi, who is one of the world’s most famous—and most unknowable—athletes, a combination of which sucked me in. I’d been reading everything I could find, watching Internet videos of him scoring one ridiculous goal after another for Barcelona. Other players seem to chase the ball, while Messi moves in concert with it, full speed to full stop. Then, when the game ends, the fire inexplicably goes out: vanishing eye contact, single-syllable answers—a flatline. The more I read, and the more I watched, the less I understood. Maybe in Rosario, where he was born, that might change.
Pulling into town, Paul and I searched for some sort of acknowledgment, casually at first. You know what I mean. Billy Cannon’s Heisman Trophy is on display in a Baton Rouge rib joint, and there’s a bar-turned-shrine in Brett Favre’s hometown. Signs all over the world let those who happen to rumble past know that this piece of dirt once produced greatness: a football hero, a rock star, an astronaut. Our first day in Rosario, we didn’t see a thing that indicated Messi grew up here. The next morning, eating gas station empanadas, we noticed a sports bar across the street, just a few blocks from Messi’s old neighborhood. On the windows, there were big photographs of Muhammad Ali, Maria Sharapova, and Rafael Nadal. No Messi.
In the coming days, the pattern would repeat itself around town. You’d never know he was from Rosario. Not even at the first pitch where Messi ever played, which we found as the sun set on an urban moonscape of Soviet-style apartment blocks and howling dogs. On the wall outside, in bright colors and abstract lines, someone had spray-painted a graffiti mural. The headband and face looked familiar. Holy hell. I laughed. That’s Keith Richards. Then I saw enormous lips next to Keith, as another out-of-context face came into focus: Mick! On the spot where Messi first played, the Rolling Stones capture the imagination more than him. Baffled, and certain I’d missed something obvious, I described what we’d found—or, rather, hadn’t—to a local youth coach who knows Messi and his family. I felt better. He saw Rosario the same way we did, and he imagined how he’d react if his hometown spurned him. “You don’t feel it’s the city of Messi,” David Treves said. “If you are the best player on the planet, and you don’t even get the most miserable bit of love from your own people, most would say, ‘Go to hell. I will stay in Barcelona and just keep filling my wallet.’”
Finally, we carried the guidebook into the local tourist office.
“We are interested in Leo Messi,” we told the young man behind the counter. “Is there anything in town we can visit?”
One of his co-workers chuckled.
The guy said no.
Before we left, he remembered one thing. Messi’s family owns a bar called VIP—the local pronunciation rhymes with “zip”—and it was just down the road on the waterfront, with the blue umbrellas, in the shade of a willow tree. The low-slung building arches with slick glass and vaulted ceilings, trendy in a suburban and soulless way. There wasn’t a single mention of Messi inside. It was Sunday afternoon. Across the ocean, Messi and his Barcelona teammates were kicking off. The game was being broadcast all over the world, but not in Messi’s own bar. I looked up at an enormous high-def television, which at the moment was tuned to a cooking show called Clasico Shawarma.
DRAWING BLOOD FROM A STONE
Beyond the lack of visible acknowledgment, we soon found something more bitter than mere ambivalence. Late one night, walking back from dinner on Pellegrini Avenue, the town’s vibrant restaurant row, Paul and I ducked into a dark, dimly lit pool hall. Everyone looked up for a moment, checking us out. The walls were bare, cigarette-stained, chipped plaster. Smoke hung in the air. A battered espresso machine hissed. No music played. Old men circled the billiards tables, while others sat in small groups, holding cards, fingering dominos. Two thick-ankled women talked with the bartender. One of them wagged her finger at a guy shooting pool. Later, he’d tell us he worked in America for the mob, once moving 16 kilos of cocaine up the Eastern Seaboard in a car. In some detail, he described what it’s like to have your fingernails ripped out with pliers. Paul, ignoring my signals to shut his damn mouth, asked if he’s ever killed anyone, and he said no. Then he winked. We ordered a few liters of bee
r, shot a game of pool, and brought up Messi to the old man serving our drinks.
“He hasn’t won anything for Argentina,” he said.
Just as we saw little of him in Rosario, many of its citizens see little of him in themselves. Messi is as unknown to the people of his hometown as he is to me, sitting in my office watching his famous goal against Getafe over and over on YouTube. They don’t understand how he plays, or how he acts, and they don’t see a clean cause and effect, no X + Y = Z, that would explain either. Diego Maradona, they get. He grew up violently poor, in a slum named Villa Fiorito. His entire life was a fight to escape the facts of his own birth, and when he succeeds, and even when he fails, his countrymen recognize his struggle. They understand the wellspring of his talent and his demons. Everything Maradona has ever done can be explained by the rough streets of Fiorito.
Messi, now 25, plays like no one they’ve ever seen. His talent can’t be easily explained by biography: a middle-class kid from a stable and ordinary family. Until he became a superstar for Barcelona, seemingly overnight, most people in his hometown had never heard his name. His greatest accomplishments in Rosario came for a youth team. They lost one game in the four years they played together. In the small world of people who follow local children’s sports, they became known as the Machine of ’87, after the year they were all born.
There was a problem, though, an ocean separating potential and realization. When Messi was 9, he stopped growing. Doctors discovered a hormone deficiency and put him on a regimen of daily injections, which he gave himself, carrying around a little cooler when he went to play with friends.
“Will I grow?” a teary Messi asked.
“You will be taller than Maradona,” his doctor, Diego Schwarzstein, told him. “I don’t know if you will be better, but you will be taller.”
The Cost of These Dreams Page 13