Once They Heard the Cheers

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Once They Heard the Cheers Page 9

by Wilfred Charles Heinz


  The whole thing had taken no more than fifteen minutes, but I was spent. I walked out into the sunlight and onto the terrace, with the weeds starting to grow between the cracked and uneven slates. Bill Mason, the sound engineer, had set up his recording equipment out there, with the cord to the microphone running through an open window, and he was still sitting there in front of his gear on a wooden folding chair.

  "Wow!" he said. "What an interview!"

  "It was all right," I said.

  "All right?" he said. "Let me tell you something. I've been in this business for twenty years, and I've recorded everybody, including Presidents in the White House. I never recorded anything like that."

  "That's Patterson," I said.

  "When he told that story about the little girl dying in the hospital," Mason said, "I couldn't see him, but just sitting here with the headset on and listening—I'm telling you—the tears were running down my cheeks."

  They had signed up James Cagney to host the program, and I could remember him dying on the church steps in The Roaring Twenties, his body riddled with the sub-machine gun bullets that had spewed out of the black limousine as it came around the corner, sliding and careening across the screen, while I sat, a teenager, in the Proctor's theater, gripped and hollow-sad. I could remember him, dead and bound like a mummy and propped against his mother's front door, falling forward onto the floor in Public Enemy, and now the teen-ager still in me found it almost absurd that he should be reading lines I had written.

  "Patterson's great in the interview," he had said, after we had shown him and Robert Montgomery in a screening room on Broadway the rushes of what we had shot in the camps, "but can he lick the other guy?"

  Between reels, while we waited for the projectionist to change over, we had talked about fights and fighters he remembered, and I had found that he has what I call the ability to read fights. It is like the ability to read writing, when the writing is worthy of it— not just what a writer says, but what he doesn't say and what he implies. Reading fights is not just reading the punches, which are obvious, but it is reading between the punches, the styles and the thinking, or what each fighter should be thinking, to set up what he has to say while silencing the other.

  "He can lick him if he fights him right," I had said. "All he has to worry about is that one punch, the right hand."

  "It's some right hand," Cagney had said, "and the way Patterson comes up out of his crouch he bobs right up into it."

  Alvin Boretz had shown me how, filming Cagney in the studio, we could interpolate him into the interviews, and then I had had to convince Jack Dempsey to give Patterson a chance. For the last segment of the program I had wanted Dempsey and Joe Louis, the dream match, with Dempsey picking Johansson and Louis explaining how Patterson could beat him. Someone at the advertising agency, or perhaps the sponsor, had discovered, however, that Louis was associated with an advertising firm that represented an account in Castro's Cuba, and so they had turned down Joe, who had defended his title without pay for Army and Navy relief and is one of the noblest of men any of us has known in sports, and they picked Gene Tunney.

  "I like Johansson," Dempsey had said, when I had gone to see him in his Broadway restaurant about the segment on the show. We were sitting in one of the booths.

  "I know," I said, "but Tunney picks Johansson. Let me tell you what I'd like you to say."

  It was another absurdity. A small boy, his hair freshly shampooed and his mother insisting that he not go to bed before it had thoroughly dried, would come down the stairs to listen on the radio to "The Cliquot Club Eskimos," "The A & P Gypsies," or Billy Jones and Ernie Hare, who called themselves "The Happiness Boys" when they broadcast from the Happiness Restaurant in New York, and later "The Interwoven Pair" when they advertised men's hose. The small boy, out-punched in the playground and scared in the street scrambles, would be wearing a heavy flannel bathrobe with an Indian blanket design on it, as he walked into the living room.

  "Here he comes now!" his father would inevitably announce, and the boy would inevitably cringe inside. "Jack Dempsey!"

  So I told Dempsey how I thought Patterson should fight it. If he worked inside Johansson's left jab, which in the first fight had set him up for Johansson's right, and if he kept firing left hooks while he turned it into a street fight and backed Johansson up, he could win it.

  "That's right," Dempsey said. "If he does that, he could lick the Swede. I can say that."

  After we had filmed Cagney in the studio, leading into the interviews and then with Dempsey and Tunney, someone had asked him to visit the two camps for some publicity still photos with the fighters. The next day, he and his friend Roland Winters drove into Patterson's camp where a half dozen of us were waiting.

  "You have a picture over there on the wall," I said to Patterson now, sixteen years later, "of you with James Cagney and Roland Winters. That was taken for that TV program before the second Johansson fight when I interviewed you and Ingemar."

  "That's right," he said. "I remember."

  "After the picture-taking," I said, "the rest of us went to lunch at the inn in Newtown. You weren't having your meal then, but you came along and sat with us. You were at the end of the table, with Cagney on your right and me on your left. We talked awhile, and you were about to leave to work out, and that's when I asked you not to make the same mistake again."

  "You did?" Patterson said.

  "Sure," I said, thinking that he should remember this. "I said, 'Floyd, do yourself and me a favor. This guy has only one punch, the right hand. His jab isn't much, but it's just heavy enough to keep you in range for the right, so you've got to slip the jab, work on the inside, back him up and turn it into a street fight. None of these fellas from Europe, who have that stand-up continental style, can handle it when it's a street fight.'

  "Then," I was saying now, and I was up and demonstrating again as I had in that dining room at the inn, "I told you to finish every one of your combinations, every sequence of punches, with the left hook. I said, 'This is the most important point of all. When you finish with a right hand, and if you hurt him with it or back him up, it still leaves you over here on your left, and in line for his right. You've got to finish with the hook, every time, and I don't care if you don't even hit him with it. Even if you miss it, it will carry you over to your right and out of line of his right.' "

  "That's correct," Patterson said now, sitting there and nodding. "That's right."

  "So you said, 'But I'm not sure I can learn that, to always finish with the left.' I said, 'Of course you can. When you're shadowbox-ing, when you're sparring in the ring, finish with the hook. When you're running on the road, throw half-punches and finish with the hook. Keep telling yourself, 'Left hook. Left hook.' You've got to do that, because you'll be taking away his only punch and throwing your best one. You can learn it.' Then you said, 'I'll try.' "

  He had shaken hands with us then, to go back to camp. I didn't tell him now what Cagney had said as soon as he had left.

  "Tell me something," Cagney said to me. "Who's been teaching this guy?"

  "I remember," Patterson said now, "somebody telling me that about the left hook, but I forgot that it was you. Then I remember I also got a letter from a man—I don't know who he was—and he told me to always double-jab."

  "That was good advice," I said, "because Johansson liked to throw the right hand over your single jab. That was very good advice."

  "And that was some hook I hit him with," Patterson said, a small smile of satisfaction crossing his face.

  That night at the Polo Grounds, left hooks and the only anger he ever carried into a ring won the fight for Patterson. He had backed Johansson up from the start, working inside the jab, but he had been in and out of trouble a half dozen times when he had forgotten to finish his combinations with a hook. Only Johansson's inability to spot this and time him had saved Patterson, and then in the fifth round, with Johansson backing up again, he had let go a wide hook, that was more
a leaping swing. Johansson's back was to his own corner, and when he went down he landed on his rump and then his head hit the canvas and he lay there, his right leg twitching and the blood coming out of his mouth, for what seemed like ten minutes, while I feared for him, and before they dared move him back to his corner and prop him up on the stool.

  When I next saw Patterson he was going into training for the third Johansson fight the following March in Miami. I asked him how he had felt after he had won the title back.

  "When I left the Polo Grounds," he said, "the promoters had a car and chauffeur waiting for me. I was sitting in the back seat alone, and when we drove through Harlen and I saw all the people celebrating in the streets, I felt good."

  "You should have," I said. "There'd been nothing like it since Louis knocked out Billy Conn."

  I meant there had been nothing like it for the Negro race in this country, and this will show you how far we have come. In the summer of 1936 I worked with a mixed gang on the railroad tracks that run through the Bronx and into Manhattan, and the day after Max Schmeling knocked out Joe Louis, Joe's people, so expectant and exuberant the day before, worked all day in saddened silence. Then, after Louis had knocked out Schmeling in 2 minutes and 4 seconds in their second fight, I had read about the all-night celebration in Harlem, and I had seen some of it after the second Conn fight and after Patterson had knocked out Johansson, and we have all come so far that there has been nothing like it since.

  "Then I thought about Johansson," Patterson had said, describing that ride through Harlem. "I thought how he would have to drive through here, too, and then he would have to go through what I went through after the first fight. I thought that he would be even more ashamed than I was, because he'd knocked me out the first time. Then I felt sorry for him."

  "Do you think," I had asked him, "that you can call up the same kind of anger and viciousness the next time you fight Johansson?"

  "Why should I?" he had said. "In all my other fights I was never vicious, and I won out in almost all of them."

  "But you had to be vicious against this guy," I had said. "You had to turn a boxing contest into a kind of street fight to destroy this guy's classic style. When you did that, he came apart. This was your greatest fight, because for the first time you expressed emotion. A fight, a piece of writing, a painting, or a passage of music is nothing without emotion."

  "I just hope," Patterson had said, "that I'll never be as vicious again."

  He never was, in his third fight with Johansson, when he was on the floor himself before he knocked Johansson out, or in the two each with Liston and Ali, when anger translated into viciousness might have given him the only chance he had. In what is the most totally expressive of the arts, for it permits man to vent and divest himself of his hatred and his anger, deplorable though they may be, he had delivered his finest performance when he held himself to be out of character, or at least the character he has tried always to assume.

  "You earned a good deal of money," I said now. "Did you get good advice as to how to handle it? Did you have good investment help?"

  "I helped myself," he said, "after experiencing losing tremendous amounts of money through people who were handling my finances. I supposedly made $9,000,000 in the ring. I don't know who got most of it, Uncle Sam or the persons handling it. All the money went to the office. Like $100,000 at one time would go to the office, and I would call and say, 'Send me $1,000 to run the camp.' Then I would go back and look at the account and there would be $12,000 in it. I'd say, 'Where's the rest?' "

  "But you'd had no training in investments," I said.

  "I started learning about various things," he said. "I had some stocks that were very successful. With stocks, if it was not too much of a gamble, I would chance it."

  "So you won't ever have to work again?"

  "I hope not," he said. "I sure hope not. When you retire and leave the limelight, you do what you really want to do. The days go slower. It's healthier, and you live longer. I think all the time. I do most of my thinking while I'm working, and before I realize it, it will be four or five hours later. It's the same thing when I go to sleep. I think a lot."

  "And what are the thoughts that go through your mind?"

  "I think about life now, as opposed to the way it used to be, and about my peace of mind."

  "And the life you have now," I said, "is it what you wanted, and hoped that someday it might be?"

  "Let me put it this way," he said. "Being raised in Brooklyn and coming up through the slums, life is very different. I don't think anyone knows what they want in life. They know what they don't want. It's a process of elimination. I knew what I didn't want. I didn't want the slums.

  "Living here," he said, "married, with a couple of kids—I didn't know I wanted this, but I am perfectly contented. I have to remember, though, and that makes me appreciate more what I have today. I wouldn't change one thing in the past because it helped me to this."

  "That's the proper way to look at it," I said. "If we could all look at our lives that way, realizing that there's nothing we can do about the past, we'd all be the better for it. I'm happy for you."

  "Thank you," he said.

  We talked for a few minutes more, about other fighters I would be seeing for the book and about the decline of boxing. Then I stood up to leave.

  "If your wife has read that piece," I said, "I'd like the magazine back. It's the only copy I have."

  "Oh, yes," he said, and then, after he had come back with the magazine, "My wife enjoyed it."

  "I'm glad," I said.

  He walked me out to the car and we shook hands. I backed out and drove out to Route 299 and back up the hill through the center of the town. I had checked out of the motel, so I turned onto the Thruway, and I was sorry that, for whatever reasons, I had not met his wife. Perhaps, if they had gone to dinner with me, and if she had trusted me, I could have led them to tell me what it is like, a mixed marriage, en island in the sea of our still social segregation. Perhaps they would have told me, if they had known that I have believed for a long time that fifty or a hundred years from now, if this planet survives that long, it will be accepted that the ultimate and only rational solution will be miscegenation.

  2

  The Opponent

  For me it always typified one thing: the dash of

  ingenuity the readiness at the first opportunity

  that characterizes the American soldier.

  Dwight D. Eisenhower, March 7, 1955

  "There's a Bill Heinz calling Norman Rubio," I heard the woman at the other end of the phone saying, and then I heard the phone strike against a hard surface, perhaps a table top, and I waited.

  "Hello?" he said.

  "Norman," I said, "this is Bill Heinz. John Maguire called you about me, and I wrote you a letter a week or so ago."

  "Yeah," he said.

  John Maguire writes a column now for the Albany Times-Union, and we have been friends for a dozen years. When Norman Rubio was fighting out of Albany, John knew him, and I had asked him to find where Rubio was living and to telephone him to explain what I wanted to do.

  "I'd like to come and see you," I said now. "Some week night? Or on a weekend?"

  "Whenever you say," he said.

  "Well," I said, "that's up to you."

  "Look," he said. "I don't know how far you have to come, and I don't want to put you out."

  "Believe me," I said, "you're not putting me out. How about Sunday, about eleven in the morning?"

  "I'll be here," he said, "but I mean, why should you come a long distance to see me? I was never a champion. What have I got to say that anybody cares?"

  "I care," I said.

  I had seen him only once in my life, thirty years before, and we had never met, in the formal sense, and yet he had stayed with me over all this time. It was a Friday night in the Garden, and they were introducing a nineteen-year-old welterweight out of New Orleans named Bernie Docusen. The word that had preceded him
was that he was "the new Ray Robinson," and then four days before the fight the other fighter, whoever he was and for whatever reason, had pulled out, and they had substituted Norman Rubio, who three months before had gone ten rounds with Robinson. He was what they call in the fight game "the opponent."

  It hurt me to watch. They came out of New Orleans—Bernie Docusen, his brother Maxie, a lightweight; Ralph Dupas, another lightweight, and Willie Pastrano, who went on to the light-heavyweight title—and as boxing is an art form, even as jazz, they were all exponents of what I came to call the New Orleans Style. They were rapier artists, feinting you, sticking you, hooking or crossing you when they got you to stand still, but seldom still long enough themselves to mount the punching power of a Robinson.

  If, after the first couple of rounds, anyone in the Garden that night thought Rubio could win, it must have been he, because that was the way he fought. Stocky and muscled and gnarled, he kept carrying the fight to Docusen, who had the height and reach and the hand and foot speed and the youth on him, taking three or four punches or more to get one into the body as Docusen moved away to spear him and then bounce the combinations off him again. On the most generous scorecard he won only one round, and in the papers the next day he was described as "the perfect foil."

 

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