What Jack meant was that Jack had it figured. Crouched there below the corner he wouldn't be watching his own fighter, because he knew what his own fighter could do. He would be watching the other fighter, and not slipping or ducking any punches, he would be studying the other fighter's moves and analyzing his errors.
"So tell him about the Eddie Ran fight," Wilbur Wood said to him one day. We were in one of the dressing rooms at Stillman's Gym when Jack had Vince Foster, who looked like another Petrolle until Jack lost his grip on him to whiskey and women, and at the age of twenty-one, he died one night in a highway crash near Pipestone, Minnesota.
"Yeah," Jack said, "but the thing about Petrolle was that people never knew how good he was. They thought he was a lucky fighter, but what he did he did because it was planned that way. It wasn't any accident when he won a fight.
"Petrolle, you know, wasn't easy to hit. He gave the impression that he was easy to hit. Sure he did. He invited you to hit him. Do you know why? Because then he could hit you back. Petrolle would go in there and put it up there where you could hit it. He'd take two or three jabs, and then slip under and let go with the heavy artillery. That's a good trade any time you can take three light punches to let go with the heavy stuff. What gave people the impression that Petrolle was easy to hit was that he was always on the edge of danger. That's the place to be. Be in there close where you can work, where you take advantage of it when the other guy makes a mistake, and . . ."
"And don't pull back," Wilbur said. "That's where they get hurt."
"Certainly," Jack said. "For fifteen years I've been schooling myself. If I ever get into a theater fire I'm not gonna get up and rush for the exit. What chance have I got? Like the others, I'm gonna be trampled to death. Do you know what I'm going to do? I'm gonna sit right in my seat for thirty seconds and figure it out. Then I'm going to get up and walk over the others and pick my exit."
"But tell him about the Ran fight," Wilbur said.
"Sure," Jack said, "but, you see, it's like that when you fight. You're safest when you're closest to danger. You're inside where you may get your block knocked off if you don't know what you're doing, but if you know what you're doing it's a cinch. You look so easy that the other guy has to try to hit you. Don't you see? He can't help himself, and then when you've got him coming, you work your stuff, you let the heavy stuff drop. Why, Petrolle used to just sit there in that rocking chair and belt them when they came in."
"The Ran fight," Wilbur said.
"Yeah," Jack said. "In the first round he had Ran down a couple of times with hooks. When he came back to the corner I said, 'You're not going to drop him with a hook again. You've got to get him to throw the right. You've got to slip it like this . . ."
He had his hands out in front of himself, and he moved his head as if he were slipping a punch.
"Do you know," he said, "that we had to wait until the sixth round for that chance for Petrolle to get that opening for his own right? He went out there, jabbing and jabbing and hooking fight and sticking it right out there, and Ran wouldn't do anything. All of a sudden, though, Ran fired that right, and Petrolle slipped it and let his own go. It was really a hook with the right, and Ran went down—like this—like he'd been cut down at the knees with a scythe.
"After the fight, though," Jack said, that pinched look of disgust coming into his face again, "do you know what they said? They said Petrolle was lucky. They said, 'My, what a lucky punch. What a lucky fighter.' It wasn't luck. It was the work of an artist, and after Petrolle got dressed he went into Ran's dressing room. Ran said to him, 'Billy, I'm embarrassed.' Petrolle said, 'Why?' Ran said, 'I'm embarrassed of Eddie Ran. I knew you were gonna do that to me, but I couldn't help myself. You made it look so easy I just had to throw that right.'
"Then when he came out," Jack said, "Petrolle says to me, 'Jack, we'd better not fight them again. They're hep.' "
I wrote that for the next day's paper, the conversation in the dressing room with Jack talking and making the moves and Wilbur Wood cueing him. A couple of days later the old, white-haired receptionist at the paper who, it seemed to me, must have been there when they ran the headline that Lincoln had been shot, came shuffling into the sports department, and he had the name on the slip of paper and he said, "There's a Mr. Eddie Ran here to see you."
"Oh?" I said. "Send him in."
Seventeen years had gone by since the fight. How many times Eddie Ran had refought that one I had no idea, and how does a man react when, suddenly in a newspaper, he reads a description that brings back a night when he was knocked out?
"Mr. Heinz?" he said, walking up to me and putting out his hand. "I'm Eddie Ran."
He had on heavy work clothes, brown pants and a brown windbreaker and heavy work shoes. He was slim, and his face was tanned.
"I'm glad to meet you," I said, shaking his hand and waiting.
"I'm glad to meet you," he said, and then he smiled. "Gee, that was some column you had in the paper yesterday. I'm working on the docks over at the river, so I just had to come in and tell you."
"All I did was write what Jack Hurley said."
"Hurley told you the truth," he said. "That was some fight, and like Hurley said, I knew Petrolle wanted me to throw that right, but I just couldn't help myself."
Jack named Petrolle "The Fargo Express," and gave him one of the great trade names of boxing. Petrolle was of Italian descent, but he had high cheekbones to go with his black hair and dark eyes, so Jack gave him one of the great trademarks—an Indian blanket—to wear into the ring. When Petrolle retired after 255 fights and built a home in Duluth, he wanted to hang that blanket on the wall of his den.
"But it has blood on it," his wife said.
"Only some of it is mine," Petrolle said.
All Petrolle and Jack ever had for a contract was a handshake, but after thirteen years Petrolle retired during the Depression with $200,000 and an iron foundry in Duluth. When I met him years later, he owned a religious goods and gift shop in Duluth, and he was the chairman of the board of directors of the Pioneer National Bank.
After Petrolle retired, after his hook was gone and after his legs had left him, Jack announced in Duluth that he was looking for somebody to take the place of "The Fargo Express." The story went out over the Associated Press wire, and within the next week six hundred candidates showed up in Duluth.
"I forgot what it cost me to get them out of town," Jack used to say. "The Police Department came to me and said, 'Look, you got Michigan Street loaded with guys stranded here.' I had to pay the fare home for half of them, and there wasn't a fighter in the lot. Most of them should have been arrested for even entertaining the thought that they could be taught to fight."
There were very few people in the fight business then who wouldn't have found a way to make some money out of those six hundred, but not Jack. To Jack a fighter was a tool, and he was always looking for the tool that, when he finished shaping it and honing it over the years, would be the perfect tool to do the perfect work. He put all of himself into it, and when a Hurley fighter went into the ring Jack took every step with him. That fighter was what Jack would have been if he had had the body for it, and that is why it took so much out of Jack when, under pressure, the tool broke.
The best Jack had after Petrolle was Harry "Kid" Matthews, who had had seventy fights in twelve years but was getting nowhere when Jack took him on. Before he was done with him, Jack actually started a Congressional investigation into why the International Boxing Club wouldn't give Matthews a fight in the Garden. When they did, they put him with Irish Bob Murphy, who was belting everybody out, and they gave Murphy to Jack because nobody else would take him.
"Well, you're in," somebody said to Jack. "All you have to do is lick this guy and you're in."
A half a dozen of us were sitting around in the boxing office on the second floor of the Garden. We had just been making small talk when Jack had come in. He was fifty-three then, and Royal Brougham had written in the
Seattle Post Intelligencer that he looked like a stern-faced deacon passing the collection plate at the First Methodist Church.
"Sure, we're in," Jack said, those ice-blue eyes narrowing behind those glasses, and a hurt look coming over his face. "We're in with a murderer. This guy never lets up. He rips you and slashes you and tears you apart inside. He's rough and strong, and you can't hurt him."
Jack turned and started to leave. He got as far as the door, and then he turned back and his eyes were big now behind the glasses and he had fear all over his face.
"That's the kind of guy you have to fight to get in here," he said. "Why, we're liable to get killed."
He left then. Pete Reilly was sitting there, and he had been around for so many years and worked so many a deal that they called him "The Fox."
"Listen to Hurley," Pete said, smiling and shaking his head. "When Jack talks like that you know he's got it figured. You know he's ready to slip one over. You can bet your bundle on that."
The smart money bet the bundle on Murphy, and it was some licking that he and they took. Matthews would draw a lead, and then he would slide with that shuffle step into one of those Hurley moves and he would belt Murphy so that the cops with the duty out on Eighth Avenue must have felt it. It was the greatest exhibition of body punching I have ever seen, and all the time that it was happening to Murphy there wasn't any way that Murphy could avoid it without turning his back and walking out.
The next day, up in the Garden, everybody was crowding Jack. They were slapping him on the back and telling him it had been years since they had seen anyone who could punch like that, and that it had been some fight.
"When I got home last night and went to bed," Irving Rudd was telling Jack, "it was like I had just finished a great book. I kept seeing it over and over, and I couldn't get to sleep."
"Why, in the ninth round," Jesse Abramson said to Jack, and Jesse was writing for the New York Herald-Tribune then, "your guy hit Murphy seven solid hooks without a return. I counted seven terrific hooks to the body, and Murphy couldn't help himself. It was wonderful."
"Yes, wasn't that wonderful?" Jack said, and now that pained look came into his face again. "Why, that was stupid. After he'd hit that Murphy with three of those solid hooks and turned him around, if he'd just thrown one right-hand uppercut he'd have knocked that stiff out."
"But it was a still a great fight," somebody said.
"And he'll do the same with that Marciano," Jack said, "if I can get him the fight."
That was one I never wanted for Jack, and I tried to talk him out of it. Putting Matthews against Marciano was like sending an armored jeep against a tank, but by the time Jack had sold the press and the public on Matthews he had also sold himself.
"I've been watching Charley Goldman working with Marciano," I told Jack. Jack had come into New York and we were having lunch in one of the booths in Muller's across Fiftieth Street from the Garden.
"Oh?" he said.
"Charley's really making a fighter out of him," I said.
"He is, is he?" Jack said.
"That's right," I said. "He's got him moving inside now and punching to the body, and you know he can sock."
"Ah," Jack said. "You know what you do with those body-punchers? You belt them right back in the body, and that puts an end to that."
"But this guy is too strong for your guy," I said. "You can't hurt him."
"Ah," Jack said, and there came that look, as if he had just bitten into another lemon. "Matthews will do to that Marciano just what he did to that Murphy. It'll be the same kind of fight."
Jack really believed it, and he had $10,000 bet on Matthews when they climbed into the ring in Yankee Stadium that night. I had to give Matthews the first round, because there he was, drawing Marciano's leads, moving off them and countering in that Hurley style, but all the time that it was going on, Marciano was backing him up. Matthews was winning the round, but losing the fight, and then, just as the bell sounded, Marciano hit him a right hand under the heart and Matthews bent under it, straightened up and started for Marciano's corner. Jack hollered at him, and he turned and walked to his own corner and I knew it was over. Early in the next round, and with a left hook, Marciano knocked him out.
"So are we going to stop in Fargo?" my wife was saying now. "We'll be there well before noon."
Driving back now from Jim Tescher's, we had got as far as Bismark, and had spent the night in a motel on the outskirts. We were having breakfast, and I was looking at the front page of The Forum, the Fargo-Moorhead paper. There was a two-column picture of a farmer standing thigh-deep in a fissure in his alfalfa field near Durbin, North Dakota. The farmer's name was Richard Hillborn, and it said in the caption under the picture, that he couldn't recall conditions ever being so dry, even in the drought of the 1930s.
"I guess so," I said, "but as it's a Saturday, there may not be anybody in the sports department of the paper. They may all be out covering football games for the Sunday paper."
"But I'm sure there'll be someone there in some department," she said. "You'll probably find someone to ask."
"I'd like to find somebody in sports, though," I said. "I doubt that anybody on the city side will remember Jack, but I'll find out."
When we passed the turnofi to Jamestown, and I saw the high-towered gas station signs on the left now, it reminded me of the white-haired woman who had flushed the high school football player out of his booth. The last we had seen of him he had been having a sandwich across from the cashier's counter when I had stopped to pay the check. The last we had heard of her she was still rasping, as she had been throughout our lunch, about ailments, flbt only her own but those of what must have been a whole battalion of invalided friends or acquaintances, none of whom, as walking wounded, could compare with Jack.
"Now isn't this something?" Jack was saying outside the Olympic when we got out of the cab that time he met me at the Seattle airport. "I checked in here for a week to manage that Matthews, and I've been here seventeen years. You have to remember, too, that I've got the two worst things in the world for this climate— rheumatism and sinus."
He waited while I checked in, and then we followed the bellhop up to the room. The bellhop went through all the business with the window shades and the closet doors and the bathroom light, and Jack beat me to the tip.
"All right," he said, when the bellhop had left. "Let's go down and get something to eat."
"Eat?" I said. "It's the middle of the afternoon."
"You know me," Jack said. "You know I have to eat every three hours."
Jack hated to eat alone, and that was how Ray Arcel came to call him "The Life-Taker." Jack was still around Chicago at the time, and it was just after they had taken two thirds of his stomach and he had to eat six times a day.
"It was during the Depression," Ray told me once, "and Jack had just retired Petrolle and had money, so he'd take these poor guys who were half-starving to eat with him. Jack would have a bowl of soup, or milk and crackers, but they'd order big steaks. One guy ate so much that Jack had to buy him a new suit of clothes, and another one actually ate himself to death."
They used to say around Seattle that while Jack had Matthews he would spend $1,000 a month feeding sportswriters and cops and press agents and hangers-on. Whenever he had it, he spread it around.
"When Petrolle was fighting," he told me once, "I loaned out $60,000. I had it all in a little book. Then, when I had the ulcers and I went into the Mayo Clinic, I sent out eight letters and six telegrams to guys who owed me $500 and up. I never got one reply, and I've got $75,000 more standing out since."
That first afternoon I walked Jack down Fourth Avenue to his favorite cafeteria, and watched him have a bowl of soup and a sandwich and a cup of tea. Then we walked over to the Eagles Temple at Seventh and Union, where the fighter trained, and all along the way people recognized Jack.
"How are you, Jack?" they'd say.
"No good," he'd say.
"Why, Jack!"
they'd say. "How are you feeling?"
"No good," he'd say.
One noon we sat down in the restaurant in the Olympic Hotel. He had been living in that hotel for so long by then that just about everyone on the staff knew him, and when the waitress came over she was smiling.
"Why, Mr. Hurley!" she said.
"Hello, Hilda," Jack said.
"Mr. Hurley," she said, "you won't like what I'm going to say."
"What's that?" Jack said, squinting up at her.
"You're looking much better than the last time T saw you."
"Isn't that terrible?" Jack said to me. "You know I set the world's record for those sinus operations. They found out with me that there's no sense in operating. I was a guinea pig for medical science, just a living sacrifice to make the world safe for guys with bad noses."
That first afternoon at the Eagles Temple, I could see why Jack was high on the fighter. He was a dark-haired, dark-eyed kid who looked right at you, and you could tell that he was not going to be cowed by anybody or anything. He had a good pair of legs, but the best of him was up in the arms, chest, and shoulders, and he was just the right height to carry 195 pounds and still get under tall jabbers who stick out a left hand and think that they're boxing.
"So he was the 1965 National A.A.U. heavyweight champion," Jack was saying while the fighter was getting into the ring, "but he was like all amateurs—awkward and over-anxious, and just a wild right-hand swinger. For six months, every day, we worked on the footwork. His stance was too wide, so I had to tie his feet together with shoe laces and a piece of inner tube that would give about six inches. He'd walk with it, shadow-box with it, and this is a long tedious thing. You get sick and tired of it, but it's balance and leverage that make punching power.
Once They Heard the Cheers Page 16