Once They Heard the Cheers

by Wilfred Charles Heinz

  What I remembered more clearly than the fight, however, and after all those years, was the scene in the dressing room later. It was hot and humid in the room and Norman Rubio, still in his boxing trunks and his hands still taped and resting on a towel in his lap, was sitting on a stool and leaning back against one of his handlers while the other held an ice bag to his face. We formed a semicircle around him—Lester Bromberg of the World Telegram, Lewis Burton of the Journal American, Al Buck of the New York Post, and Barney Nagler of the Bronx Home News, and I—folded copy paper and pencils in our hands, and we wanted to know only one thing.

  "Norman," somebody said, "how good is this kid?"

  "He's good," Rubio said, talking from under the ice bag and lying back. "Don't think he can't fight."

  "Well, what makes him a good fighter?" somebody else said. "Can you tell us?"

  Rubio sat up. As he did the handler pulled the ice bag away and you could see the sweat and the red welts, and over Rubio's left eye, the swelling.

  "Well, he moves real good," Rubio said, and now he brought his taped hands up from the towel in his lap. "He's hard to reach and he can use either hand. You can't tie him up."

  "How about his hitting?" somebody said. "Does he hit hard?"

  "I'll tell you," Rubio said. "He's not what I call a heavy hitter, if you know what I mean. I mean he doesn't hurt you as much as he stings you, but don't get me wrong. He can hit."

  "How would he do with Ray Robinson?" That was why we were there.

  "Oh," Rubio said, thinking, and now the handler had put the ice bag back on his face. "I would say that he's not ready yet. Robinson hits harder, and he's too strong for him. This is just a kid."

  "How would he be with Willie Joyce?"

  "Good."

  "What about Tippy Larkin?"

  "That would be a good fight. You know what I mean? When this kid learns a little more he'll go a long way. He can fight."

  "Thanks," somebody said, and then we left.

  We left him sitting there with that ice bag on his swollen face, but I guess you could say that I never left. In the memory center of my mind, and many times, I went back to that dressing room and Norman Rubio. For every champion there were the hundreds who never made it, and yet those who fought the champions helped to make the champions, for it was on them that the champions learned. In non-title bouts, Rubio lost twice to Robinson. He had also split with Fritzie Zivic and won one of three with

  Freddie "Red" Cochrane, both of whom won the welterweight title. On that night in the Garden he also made experts out of those of us at ringside who had never thrown a punch or taken one inside the ropes and who, when we wanted an opinion, went to Norman Rubio because we knew that this was the opinion of a professional who had won title to it through the pains and the ice bags of many nights. That was why I wanted to see him again.

  "Norman Rubio," John Maguire had written, "lives in a place called High Bridge, which is near Chatham in Columbia County, New York, but which is apparently just a neighborhood; it isn't listed in the post offices of the state. He says to drive out of Chatham on Route 203 and turn off onto White Mills Road just before you come on Oliver Chevrolet. His place is on White Mills Road, but apparently doesn't have any street address."

  The Hudson River valley there east of the river is rolling farming country still in the process of a half century of change. Farms, a few of them in the families for a hundred years or more, still exist, but others were lost to the lure of the cities or to the antiquated and inequitable methods of local taxation that throughout our nation are based on the erroneous presumption that the ownership of real estate is the sole indicator of one's ability and responsibility to pay. Now what were once in season unbroken undulating fields of hay or pasture land are invaded by scrub growth, saplings, burdock, thistle, goldenrod, mullen and milkweed, those once open spaces now ignored by the retired exurbanites, small plant employees, and commuters by car to Albany and elsewhere to whom the farmer has given way.

  "Do you know where White Mills Road is?" I said.

  At the crossroads in the center of Chatham the light had gone red, and as there was no route sign showing T had jumped out of the car to ask the driver of the dark green pickup truck that had pulled up behind me. He was middle aged and wearing a red baseball cap, and he shook his head.

  "How about Oliver Chevrolet?" I said. "Do you know where Oliver Chevrolet is?"

  "Of course," he said, motioning. "Straight ahead."

  Just before Oliver Chevrolet another blacktop goes off to the right, and I followed that for a mile or more, seeing no names on the mail boxes, until I came to a Y in the road. On the right, at the end of a short driveway next to a cottage, a rather tall, thin young man in shorts and a sports shirt was on his knees digging with a trowel in a small flower bed, and I turned in there.

  "May I help you?" he said, walking over to the car.

  "I hope so," I said. "Do you know where Norman Rubio lives?"

  "I'm sorry," he said, "but I don't. Do you know what road he lives on?"

  "White Mills Road," I said.

  "Good," he said. "It's the one to the left there at the Y."

  I started checking mailboxes again, most of them nameless, in front of houses close to the road and of independent and non-traditional designs. I pulled over to let a car behind me pass, and after about another quarter of a mile the car stopped in the middle of the road and a woman, slim and dark-haired and wearing white pants and a long-sleeved shirt with a large floral pattern, got out of the driver's side and came hurrying back.

  "Are you Mr. Heinz?" she said.

  "Yes," I said.

  "I'm Mrs. Rubio," she said, smiling. "I noticed your out-of-state license plate."

  "I'm glad to see you," I said.

  I followed her for another mile or more until she turned right into the front yard of a large, two-story square white house no more than twenty-five feet off the road. I parked just beyond the house, and when I walked back she was getting out of the car with a bag of groceries, and Norman Rubio, short, stocky, but no excess weight showing, was coming down the steps from the porch. He was wearing tan slacks and a short-sleeved tan checkered sports shirt.

  "You met my wife, Dorothy?" he said, after we had shaken hands.

  He had a full head of dark, wavy hair, gray-streaked now, and a trimmed moustache. He was wearing glasses, and his face was without visible scars, except for a small vertical path through his left eyebrow.

  "Yes," his wife said, "we met on the road."

  "Or I wouldn't be here now," I said.

  "So where you want to talk?" he said. "Outside? Inside?"

  "Wherever you say."

  "That's up to you," he said.

  "So let's go inside," I said.

  "I don't know what you want to know," he said, leading me up the porch steps. "I mean, I don't know what I can tell you."

  Inside he led me to the left into a large low-ceilinged room, perhaps thirty by twenty-five feet, with the dining area on the right, the living room furniture—heavy chairs and a sofa, end tables and a coffee table—to the left. There was a fieldstone fireplace, and on the hearth stood a telescope mounted on a tripod.

  "Sit wherever you like," he said. "You want something? A beer? We got everything."

  "Coffee?" his wife said, coming out of the kitchen.

  "That would be fine," I said.

  "I don't know what I can tell you," he said, as we sat down. "It's a long time ago, and I don't know what I remember."

  "Don't worry about it," I said. "Just tell me how you keep in such good shape."

  "You hear that? He says I'm in good shape," he said, smiling, and calling it to his wife, and then to me, "They're always kidding me about it, keeping in shape."

  "You must live right," I said. "What do you do for a living?"

  "I worked for Canada Dry in Hudson," he said, and his voice is rather high and husky. "I used to run machines, a filler operator, but now they've moving and a new outfi
t—International Soft Drink Company—is coming in, and we're renovating the building and putting up pipes, and like that."

  "What did you do when you stopped fighting?"

  "I was in the toy business in New York," he said. "My manager was in the business, and I was like a foreman. I was there four or five years, but I didn't like it. I couldn't take the city no more."

  "He's a family man," his wife said, coming in with the coffee.

  Their youngest daughter, Denise, who is a high school student, had followed her mother in and we were introduced. They have two sons, Norman, Jr., who is a sales supervisor for Canada Dry, and married; Gary, who had just come out of the Army, and another daughter, Diane, who is married.

  "We go out on Saturday night," he said, smiling and looking over at his wife. She and their daughter had sat down. "You know, you said the right thing for me here when you said I'm in shape. I mean, with the kidding I get from these two."

  "So what did you do when you left the toy business?" I asked.

  "I came back here," he said. "I first came here in 1933 with my folks, so I had this farm. I was in the chicken business. I had about 5,000 layers, and I raised broilers and cows, and I tried to raise beef for around ten years, but it was all work and no money, you know?"

  I had had a photocopy made of his career record in The Ring Record Book for 1948. It lists eighty-three fights, of which he won fifty-one, eight by knockout; drew in eight; and lost twenty-four, three by KO. I took the page out of my pocket.

  "I have your record here," I said. "It says you were born in 1919."

  "It was 1916," he said.

  They were fighters, but they were entertainers. If you started late and were not making it in a hurry, you wanted to be known as a coming young welterweight, or whatever, like a rising young singer or a promising young comic.

  "Your record starts here in 1940," I said, "but it says your previous record was unavailable."

  "That's right," he said. "I was on the bootleg circuit."

  It was during the Depression, and the circuit flourished in New York State, north of New York City, and throughout Massachusetts and Connecticut. They fought, ostensibly as amateurs, in lofts and armories and in fair grounds and ball parks, using one name one night and another the next. The promoters avoided the restrictions and expenses of a professional production, and they paid off sometimes in cash but, more often and to maintain the appearance of amateurism, in watches. There was a $50 watch for the winners and a $25 one for the losers, but they never left their plush-lined boxes. The fighters immediately sold the watches back to the promoters, and I recall one fighter—I no longer remember his name—telling me that one night he insisted for a while that he didn't want the money but preferred to keep the watch, and almost folded the operation.

  "Those were hard days," Rubio was saying now. "You didn't know who you were fighting, lightweights, welterweights, middle-weights. Then I went into the CCC."

  The Civilian Conservation Corps was the brain child of Franklin D. Roosevelt, who had proposed in his acceptance speech at the 1932 Democratic National Convention that the nation put a million unemployed to work in its forests. Enlistment was limited to single men between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five from families that were on relief, and from 1933 through 1941 some 2,750,000 of them came out of the big cities and the small towns, off the rails and the roads to plant trees, dig diversion ditches, build reservoirs and ponds, erect bridges, restore Revolutionary and Civil War battlefields, and clear camp grounds and beaches. It was an army of the young restoring not only their own country but their own respectability.

  "I left school," Rubio was saying. "A whole group was leaving. We chopped wood and all that through Idaho and out that way. You got $30 a month and $35 if you were like a leader and up to $45. I used to run through those Idaho mountains in the nice fresh air, and so clear. You know? I spent five years in different camps, and in all those little towns I'd fight. I'd make $100 a week, and I used to save everything. No vices—you know?—and I used to send the folks the money to help out."

  "Was that," I said, "when you decided that you wanted to make a living as a fighter?"

  "Oh, no," he said. "I always wanted to be a fighter. When I was just a kid I met Jack Dempsey. I was caddying, and he stopped at this golf club in Albany. He was gonna fight Jack Sharkey, and he said, 'I'm gonna knock him out in the sixth round.' I still remember that."

  Once, while Dempsey still had the restaurant on Broadway near Fiftieth, I asked him about that fight. In the seventh round he had landed a punch that Sharkey and a number of ringsiders thought was low, and as Sharkey had turned to protest to the referee, Dempsey had landed a left hook to the jaw and knocked Sharkey out.

  "In the early rounds he knocked the hell out of me," Dempsey said, "but in the seventh round I hit him on the belt line and he turned and complained to the referee. What was I supposed to do? Write him a letter? I hit him and knocked him out. He said I hit him low, and I said, 'The ref didn't think so, and he's the boss.' "

  "So when you decided to become a fighter," I said to Rubio now, "did you think that some day you might be a champ?"

  "No," he said. "When I fought I just fought to make money. It was Depression days, and I thought if I could be champ, all right. But I really did it for a dollar."

  "As I wrote you," I said, "I've never forgotten you in that dressing room in the Garden after the Docusen fight, and how you sat there in pain and disappointment and still showed so much professional class."

  "I don't remember that," he said, "but I remember the fight. I wasn't booked for that fight."

  "I know."

  "I should have licked the guy," he said. "I mean, somebody who was supposed to fight him got hurt, and I just fought a guy the week before."

  "Larry Cisneros," I said.

  "A tough fight," he said. "Then I was too light, and a doctor said I should drink Ballantine's ale. I didn't drink, which I thought was dissipating, but I did for three or four days, drinking this ale. Then I had only three days to train, but I had a 147-pound contract and I spent the whole time in a steam room. You know? I really should have licked the guy."

  "How about Robinson?"

  "A good fighter," he said.

  "The best I ever saw."

  "Yeah," he said, "but you know something? Everybody, the referee and judges and everybody, always looked at what he did, and they always leaned his way. You know?"

  "You went ten rounds with him," I said, "but in the first fight he knocked you out in the seventh?"

  "They stopped the fight on a cut," he said. "Always cuts."

  "You were never counted out?"

  "Never," he said, shaking his head. "Always cuts."

  "They don't show today," I said.

  "I had the scar tissue removed," he said.

  "When you fought Robinson," I said, "did you go in really thinking you could beat him?"

  "You see," he said, "you're in the ring every day. It's like you eat food every day, and the guy you're fighting is just another person. You say, 'Tonight's pay night.' I didn't know if I could beat anybody until I was in the ring."

  "Did it bother you?" I said, turning to his wife, "that he was a fighter?"

  "I didn't like it," she said. "I wanted him to quit."

  "I didn't want to quit," he said. "It was all I knew."

  "Money isn't everything," she said.

  "It was to me," he said.

  "He quit just before our first child," she said. "That was the agreement."

  "Did you go to his fights?"

  "I never saw him fight," she said, shaking her head, "ever. I'd wait for him someplace, in some hotel. I used to tune in on the radio at the end of each round to see if he was all right, and then I'd turn it off again."

  "It says here," I said, looking at his record again, "that you were in the Army for three years."

  "That's right," he said.

  "Where were you?"

  "I was in the Ninth Armored," he
said. "Company A, 27th Armored Infantry."

  "The Ninth Armored?" I said. "I was a war correspondent, and I was with you people."

  "We captured the bridge at Remagen," he said.

  "I know," I said. "I was there."

  It was an accident, the most fortuitous of the whole campaign in Europe. We never expected to find a bridge still intact across the Rhine, and when those first Americans ran across it under fire— that thousand feet of stone-buttressed steel span wired with explosives—not knowing when it might blow up under them and scatter them to the skies, they sealed the fate of the German armies in the west and of Adolf Hitler and the Third Reich.

  "How about that?" Rubio was saying, turning to his wife and daughter. "He was there."

  "Not the first day," I said.

  From the briefings they gave us each evening at the press camp we used to try to handicap the units the way you handicap race horses, trying to figure out where the best story would be the next day. For almost a week we had all been covering the Third Armored Division spearheading the drive across the Cologne Plain, and we were all in the city when, to the south, the Ninth Armored took the bridge at Remagen.