Damon Runyon
It was while we were still driving West, heading for Medora and then Jim Tescher's. We were crossing the Red River on the wide, many-laned bridge between Moorhead, Minnesota, and Fargo, North Dakota, and it was midmorning.
"Are we going to stop in Fargo?" my wife said.
"Maybe on the way back," I said. "I'm not sure."
I have a friend named Walter Wellesley Smith, whose mother called him Wells, and who is known as Red. He was born and grew up in Green Bay, Wisconsin, and while he was running an elevator in the Northland Hotel summers and going to Notre Dame the rest of the year, he used to dream about sometime seeing a World Series, a heavyweight championship fight, and a Kentucky Derby. He writes a sports column for the New York Times, and in close to a half century he has attended forty-four World Series, fifty-four heavyweight championship fights, and thirty-three Kentucky Derbies.
"When we drive out to Jim Tescher's," I was telling him several months before, "we'll be going through Fargo. I'm thinking of stopping there and seeing if anybody remembers Jack."
"Oh, sure," he said. "You've got to do that."
"I'll go to the sports department of the paper," I said, "and ask somebody, 'Can you tell me where Jack Hurley is buried?' "
"Of course," he said, "and you'll get some young noodnik who'll say, 'Jack who?' "
"I'm not much for visiting graves," I said.
"Oh, but you've got to do that," he said. "You've got to get Jack in the book."
About ninety miles west of Fargo I turned off the Interstate where we saw several of those gas station signs on their high-legged towers, and got gas and drove into the adjacent restaurant for lunch. The waitress led us between two rows of booths, and in one of them a young man in his late teens, blond, blue-eyed and sturdy, was sitting, looking at the menu. He had on a freshly laundered, blue football jersey with the white numerals 54 and, in orange block letters, the name washburn across the chest, and he was leaning back at ease the way in high school my football heroes used to loll in class.
"Oh, you're from Washburn?" I heard a woman say in a reedy, treble voice. She was one of three, all of them white-haired, that the waitress had started to lead between the booths and, while the others had gone on, she had stopped at the young man's.
"Yes, ma'am," the young man said.
"I used to live in Washburn," she said. "What's your name?"
"Tracy," he said.
"Tracy?" the white-haired woman said. "Tracy? Well, you're a younger generation. I don't remember a Tracy."
"But I'm from Washburn High in Minneapolis," he said, indicating the name on the jersey.
"Tracy?" she said. "It's been such a long time since I lived in Washburn. Tracy?"
The young man started to say something but then, embarrassed, he shrugged and looked away. The woman, still repeating the name, walked on and joined the others in the booth. I looked at my wife and shook my head, and when I glanced over at the other booth again the young man had left.
"She scared him right out of the booth," I said. "Jack Hurley should be here, and it would get him started on the creatures again."
It was Jack Hurley's contention that more fighters are ruined by women, whom he called creatures, than by opponents' punches, alcohol, or whatever. The affliction, as Hurley saw it, was epidemic, affecting not only fighters but all married men, whom he called mules, in all callings, and nothing reaffirmed this for him more convincingly than the sight of women of advanced years enjoying a meal in a public place after, he was certain, they had driven their husbands into early graves.
"On the way back," Betty said, "we'd better stop in Fargo. After all, Jack Hurley meant so much to your life."
Of all those I came to know in sports nobody else ever fascinated me as did Jack Hurley. He seemed to me to be a literary character, as if he had stepped out of the pages of a novel, and I put him in one about a prize fighter and his manager. A novel, of course, should be larger than life but there was no way I could make my Doc Carroll bigger than Jack.
There were the last days I spent with him in Seattle and Boise in September of 1966, and all week I kept telling myself that I had written the book ten years too soon. He was moving his last fighter then, a heavyweight name Boone Kirkman, and when I got off the plane he was at the airport. I hadn't seen him in eight years, but there he was at the edge of the crowd, tall and bony, craning his neck and then waving. He looked a lot older and thinner and paler, and there was dark green glass over the right lens of his bifocals.
"How are you?" I said, as we shook hands.
With Jack I always knew what the answer to that one would be. The moment I would ask the question, I would get the feeling that I was the straight man in an act.
"No good," he said.
That had to be the truth. He was sixty-nine then, and wracked with the rheumatism he said he picked up in France in World War I. In addition to that, the surgical profession had been whittling away at him for years. They had taken his tonsils and his appendix for starters, and then, after he retired Billy Petrolle—his one great fighter—in 1934, they took two thirds of his stomach because of ulcers. While they were still trying to cure sinusitis with surgery, he had twenty-three operations, and recently I had read in The Ring that he had had a cataract removed from his right eye.
"Who hit you in the eye?" I said.
"Ah," he said. "Cataracts, so I decided to go for the operation."
"Good," I said. "That's one they've become very proficient at."
"Don't I know that?" he said. "So what happens? When it's over, I say to the doctor, 'Now, Doc, I understand that after ninety per cent of these operations, the patient's sight can be corrected with glasses to 20-20. Is that right?" So he says, 'Well, that's about right.' So I say, 'But, Doc, I'm not gonna have 20-20, am I?' He says, 'Well, no.' So I say, 'All right. How good is my sight gonna be?' He says, 'Well, pretty good.'
"Now wouldn't you know that?" Jack said, that pinched look of disgust coming over his face. "Ninety per cent are successful, but I have to be in the other ten per cent. Why?"
"I don't know," I said.
"Now tell me something else," he said. "What does he mean by 'pretty good'? Just how good is 'pretty good'?"
"I don't know that, either," I said.
"I can't see a damn thing," he said. "Oh, hell. I can see some, but at the hotel I've already fallen down the stairs twice, and now I've gotta have the other eye done. How about that 'pretty good' though?"
Jack had been living in room 679 of the Olympic Hotel since he had left Chicago seventeen years before to manage a light-heavyweight named Harry "Kid" Matthews. He had also left his wife.
"So I'm hustling to make a living in Seattle," he told me once, "when one day these two detectives from Chicago show up. They've got a paper charging me with desertion, and they drag me back. Now I'm in Chicago again, and late one afternoon I come into the lobby of the hotel where we're living. All the creatures are sittin' around there—they've got nothing else to do—and as soon as I walk in I see them start lookin' at one another and their heads start going. One of them says to me, 'Oh, Mr. Hurley. When you get upstairs you won't find your wife there.' I say, 'Is that so?' She says, 'Yes, she's left you.'
"You see?" Jack said. "She can't wait to let me find it out for myself. So I say, 'Is that so?' She says, 'Yes, she's gone to Miami.' I say, 'Thank you.' I turn right around and I go over to the station house. I walk up to the desk sergeant, and I say, 'I want to report that my wife has just left me.' So the desk sergeant says, 'So what?' I say, 'So what? I'll tell you what. You know those two donkeys you sent out to Seattle to bring me back? Now I want you to send them down to Miami to bring my wife back.' You know what he said?"
"No," I said.
"He said, 'Listen, Hurley. You get out of here before I lock you up.' Now, isn't that terrible? What kind of justice is that?"
It was Hurley the teacher and ring strategist, however, who captured me. In boxing I knew three great teachers. Ray Arcel wo
rked with seventeen world champions and, as one of the most gentle, kind, and refined of men, was concerned about the fighter as a person more than anyone else I ever knew. To him I would have entrusted a son. Charley Goldman worked on a fighter like a sculptor working on a block of marble, always trying to bring out all the truth within, and always afraid that if he did not go deep enough, he would leave some of it hidden, but also afraid that if he cut too deep, he would destroy some of it forever. Over a period of several years I watched him as, without destroying the fighters' gifts, he made a great heavyweight champion out of the awkward Rocky Marciano. Jack Hurley, the great ring strategist and perfectionist, as he crouched at ringside, squinting through those thin-rimmed glasses, saw a fight as a contest of the mind in which he was always moving his fighter a move or two ahead.
"I don't know why it is," Jack was telling me once, "but I can look at a fighter and know that he must do this or he must do that to lick the other guy. There are a lot of things I can't do. You can sit me down at a piano and I couldn't play 'Home Sweet Home' if you gave me the rest of my life, but I can just look at fighters and know what's right.
"Some people are just like that. Some years ago out in the Dakotas there was a kid playing third base for the Jamestown club in the Dakota League. Behind first base there was this high fence, and this kid playing third used to field the ball—and he had a terrific arm, and he'd not only throw the ball over the first-baseman's reach, but he'd throw it over the fence.
"So one day," Jack said, "the word got around that a scout for the Yankees was in town to look at the kid. Everybody laughed. They said, 'What is this? He's wasting his time with a kid who can't throw any better that that.'
"The scout knew something, though. He had the ability to see something that no one else could. He took that kid and put him in at shortstop. He put him at deep shortstop, where the kid could cover a lot of ground and where he could make the throw. He played shortstop for the Yankees for a number of years. His name was Mark Koenig. I still don't know why it is that somebody can see something when everybody else can't."
Over the years, though, I came to know why Jack could see things in fighters and fights that others couldn't. I never saw his one great fighter, Billy Petrolle, in the ring, but fifteen years after Petrolle retired, Wilbur Wood was still telling me about his fights. Joe Williams, the Scripps-Howard sports editor and columnist, once wrote that, in twenty-five years of watching fights in Madison Square Garden, the greatest he ever saw there was the first PetroIle-Jimmy McLarnin fight. As I watched Jack work with other fighters, and listened to him for hours while he talked about Petrolle's fights, it was obvious that he could see what no one else could because he had analyzed and broken down the science that precedes the art.
Jack was born and grew up in Fargo, and he was thirteen when his father, who was a switchman on the Canadian-Northern, was killed pulling a coupling between boxcars. As the oldest of five children Jack had to go to work, and he started selling newspapers on Broadway and Northern Pacific Avenue where, to protect his corner, he had to fight. There was a gym in the basement of Saumweber's Barbershop across the river in Moorhead, and he started to hang around there, learning what he could by watching the other fighters. When he was fifteen he weighed 120 pounds, and he began boxing at smokers at night.
"I liked the boxing business," he told me once, "but I figured there must be an easier way. Then I got the idea of using the talents of others. I figured that if I could get a half-dozen kids and get them each a fight a month I could make more money than if I was fighting myself."
He was eighteen when he started managing fighters. He would go down to St. Paul and corner Mike and Tom Gibbons. They called Mike "The St. Paul Phantom," and Tom went fifteen rounds with Dempsey, and Jack would ask them questions, and as he watched fights, he would lift a move here and a move there, starting to build up his own library of moves and punches.
When World War I started, Jack got into it. He was in D Company of the 18th Infantry of the First Division that, a generation later, I would come to know in Normandy and the Huertgen and in Germany on both sides of the Rhine. For a while they were in Heudicourt in the St. Mihiel sector, and the British sent in a Sergeant Major named Cassidy, to teach the Yanks the bayonet manual.
"He was a miserable s.o.b.," Jack used to say, "but he knew his business. He would stand there unarmed with his hands down at his sides, and he'd say, 'Stick me!' You'd have your rifle with the bayonet fixed, and you'd make a lunge at him and you'd miss. Maybe the next time your rifle would go up in the air, or you'd get the butt of it under your chin. He did it all with feinting and footwork. He'd draw you into a lead, and that would be the last you'd have to do with it. You'd have the bayonet, but this Cassidy, without even touching the bayonet, would be controlling it.
"I used to go and see this guy at night," Jack said. "His stuff fascinated me, so one night I said to him, 'This puts me in mind of boxing.' He said, 'The bayonet manual was taken from boxing. If you're standing in the on-guard position, and I take the rifle out of your hands, you're standing like a boxer. Now I put the rifle back in your hands, and at the command of 'long point' you make a left jab. Now you move the opponent out of position, and you come up to hit him with the butt. Isn't that the right uppercut?' "
It was the footwork that impressed Jack, though. As Jack told it, this Cassidy would stand right there with his feet spread, and he wouldn't move them more than a couple of inches and still they couldn't reach him with the bayonet.
"If a boxer would master this style," Cassidy told Jack, "he'd save thousands of steps. He'd be just as safe as I am, and he'd save all those fancy steps."
"And can't you see it now?" Jack would say. "As you look back on Billy Petrolle, can't you see where I got that famous shuffle step?"
Jack would forget, of course, that I had never seen Petrolle fight, that I was a high school kid at the time, but I had built up such a book on him, listening to Jack and others talk about him, that it was as if I had been at all those fights. Even now, after watching thousands of fights, I can "see" those Petrolle fights, punch by punch, as I have seen few fights.
There was the first McLarnin fight, that Joe Williams cited as the greatest he ever saw in the Garden. One of the moves that Jack had taught Petrolle was the knack of turning away from a right hand and throwing a right hand back, and just before the fight he sat down with Petrolle to map it out.
"Now remember," he said, "you can't turn away from McLarnin's right because he punches too long and too sharp. You'd be too far away from him to hit him. With this guy you have to resort to an amateur move. He won't expect it from you because he knows you're a good fighter, and he thinks you know too much. What you've got to do is drop the left hand. He'll throw the right, and you lean down under it and counter with the left instead of the right. He won't be looking for it, and you can't miss him with it."
Petrolle started drawing the right and countering with the left, and McLarnin didn't know where those punches were coming from. He knew they weren't coming from Petrolle, because Petrolle wouldn't do a thing like that and, as Joe Williams wrote later, at one point he looked at Patsy Haley, the referee, as if to ask, "Are you hitting me?"
"But McLarnin was some fighter," Jack said and, of course, McLarnin went on to win the welterweight title, "and after a while he figured it out. Then I had Petrolle switch. He walked out there and started jabbing and missing, jabbing and missing. McLarnin thought he had him all figured out again, and he tried to anticipate Petrolle and moved in. He came in, right into a right that Petrolle had been building up all the time, and down he went."
Petrolle won that decision, but Jack always said his greatest fight was with Justo Suarez in the Garden seven months after McLarnin. Suarez was out of the Argentine, a bull of a lightweight, and they called him "The Little Firpo." After he came to this country and licked three of the best lightweights around, no one wanted to fight him, but Jack took him for Petrolic
"After the ma
tch was made," Jack used to say, telling about it, "I went up to the gym to get a line on Suarez. He used to box sixteen or eighteen rounds a day without more than breaking a light sweat. The day I was watching him, he fell out of the ring and landed on his head and got up and went right back in. I said, 'Oh-oh, this is going to be it!'
"Well, Petrolle was some hooker, you know, and in the first round he had Suarez down three times. At the end of the round Suarez had Petrolle back on his heels, and when Billy came back to the corner, I said, 'Now don't hit him on the chin again. When you leave this corner you bend over and you punch with both hands to the body.' Petrolle used to follow orders to the letter, and for six rounds it was the most scientific exhibition of body punching anybody ever saw. At the end of the seventh round Petrolle said to me, 'Jack, I think he's ready.' I said, 'Not yet. Stay right down there and punch up.'
"At the end of the eighth round I said, 'All right, now is the time. Start this round the same way, and after three or four punches to the body, raise up and hit him a right hand on the chin. If he don't go, get down again and then raise up and hit him a left hand on the chin. If he don't go, you stay down.'
"Petrolle went out, belted that Suarez three shots in the body and then came up. He landed the right hand flush on the chin and he shook Suarez. Now, another fighter would have been tempted to throw another right, but Petrolle went back to the body, and the second time he rose it was with the hook, and Suarez went over on his head. Hell, it was easy, if they'll only do what you tell them. The other fella doesn't know what he's doing. He's just guessing, but you know, because you've got it figured."
Once They Heard the Cheers Page 15