"You've really been most kind," I said, as we shook hands, "and I thank you."
"Glad to do it," he said, smiling. "I guess Jack was quite a guy-"
"Yes," I said. "He was."
I walked around the corner to the hotel and, when I had the college student at the desk ring the room, Hank Hurley answered. He said he was amazed, and he sounded it, that I should be right there in the lobby. He had been about to take a nap, he said, but he would be down as soon as he dressed. I told him I would walk back to The Forum, where my wife would be waiting in the car, and he said he would meet us in the parking space across from the hotel. When we got out of the car he walked up, shorter and with more weight on him than Jack, but with the same look in the eyes and the same mouth. He took us to lunch at the Elks Club, and while we ate, he talked about Jack.
"You know," he said, "Jack used to say to me, 'When the good Lord takes me, I hope he does a clean job.' I told my sister, 'He couldn't have done a cleaner job.' If he'd had all his marbles and been in one of those nursing homes, he would have been oh, so unhappy.'
"How did he go?" I said.
"At the Olympic," he said, "Jack was always there at the front desk when the four o'clock mail came in. When he wasn't there, and it got to be 4:45, somebody got the assistant manager and they found him dead at the foot of his bed in that room 679."
It was out of that room that, in 1957, Jack also promoted the Floyd Patterson-Pete Rademacher fight for the heavyweight championship of the world. Cus D'Amato was protecting Patterson then, and he accepted Rademacher, who was the Olympic heavyweight champion but had never had a professional fight, as a likely victim and Jack as the logical promoter. Jack forgot for a while that he had no use for amateurs and, out of his pockets and a box under the bed, he sold $74,000 worth of tickets out of the $243,000 they took in, and Rademacher, green as he was, had Patterson down in the second round before Patterson put him down six times and then, in the sixth round, knocked him out.
"Just think," Jack said, after it was over. "An amateur did this for me. I guess it just goes to show there's some good in everybody. Somebody told me that he went to a college, too, and took a course in how to be an animal husband. Now what kind of a college course is that?"
"At the Olympic," Hank Hurley was saying now, "they put a floral display on the door of the room. In the dining room, at the table where Jack always sat, they had a black ribbon and a single rose and a card that said, 'Reserved for Jack Hurley.' At a chair at the counter they had another single rose and another card, and they kept them there for a week."
"They thought a lot of him there," I said, "and I remember he used to tell me, 'You know I've got my plantin' suit. I've had it for years, and every now and then I try it on to see that it still fits.' "
"He had several plantin' suits," Hank Hurley said. "Every now and then he'd buy a new one."
"He said he had sent you an insurance policy and told you, 'When I check out, this is for the burial, but nothing fancy. Just have them sharpen my feet and drive me into the ground, and I hope it's not during the winter.' "
"That's right," Hank said, "he used to tell me, 'Don't make a production of it, and don't open the casket except for you and our sisters and a couple of friends. Nobody else knows me there.' We did open it for our sisters and Billy Petrolic"
After lunch he drove us out past the airport and then turned left onto a gravel road past two cemeteries on the left and then into the third. He stopped the car about 150 feet inside the gate, and we walked over the sun-baked sod, the dried yellow grass making a sound under our shoes. Backed by two spruce, there was the gray granite headstone with Jack's father's name on it and a cross on top and a red geranium at the base. To the left there two granite markers, one with Jack's mother's name on it and the other with his sister's. On the right was the marker that said "John C. Hurley." So severe was the drought that there were cracks about an inch wide in the black topsoil and they outlined in a rectangle the shape of the coffin.
"Jack hated that name John," Hank Hurley was saying. "Oh, how many fights he got into in school when somebody called him 'Johnny.' I guess I made the mistake. On the memorial card it said 'Jack C. Hurley,' and I sent it out to the stone-cutter. When I saw this I called him and he said, 'But you ran a line through it and wrote "John." ' I guess it's my fault."
"Forget it," I said. "It was the name with which he was christened. That makes it right."
"I don't know," he said. "I don't remember doing that, but I guess it was my fault."
After he drove us back to our car and we thanked him and said good-by, I drove back through the city and out to the Interstate once more. I was seeing again that rectangle in the ground.
"I can just hear Jack," I said to my wife. "I can hear him saying, 'Wouldn't you know it, Ninety per cent of the people get planted and everything goes all right. They plant me, and they have this drought. Why, there's a farmer in Durbin, North Dakota, who says it's worse than it was in the '30s. Isn't that terrible? How can you explain that?' "
5
The Onion Farmer
Who made them serfs of the soil? Why should
they eat their sixty acres, when man is
condemned to eat only his peck of dirt? Why
should they begin digging their graves as soon
as they are born? They have got to live a man's
life, pushing all these things before them, and
get on as well as they can.
Henry David Thoreau, Walden
There is a stretch of narrow blacktop road that runs northwest out of Canastota, New York, and it had remained in my memory for twenty-one years. Whenever I would see his name in print or hear it or he would otherwise come to mind, I would remember the road, straight and raised above the flat black fields that reach toward the horizon on either side. The fields, known as the Muckland, had been reclaimed from swampland many years before, and had been planted ever since in corn and potatoes, but mostly in onions. Each year, during the growing season, the families of workers would move out of town to live in the two-story square, weathered-gray shacks spotted every hundred yards or so along the road.
"Everybody worked—my father, my mother, all of us kids, everybody," he had told me, when he had driven me slowly along that road for the first time more than two decades before. "In the spring we'd plant by hand. It would be wet and cold, and my ma would take old inner tubes and sew patches on the knees of our overalls so they wouldn't get soaked. In the hot summer we'd weed on our hands and knees. We'd get up at five in the morning and work till nine. Then we'd start again at 3:30 and work until nine at night.
"In the fields we used to talk what we called 'wish-talk.' We'd see a kid go by on a bike, and one of us would say, 'I wish I had a bike.' Then we'd imagine where we'd go if we had bikes. Sometimes tourists would stop their cars on the road and look at us. It was something they'd never seen before—a whole family of people, little kids and all, on their hands and knees in the hot sun. One of us would say, 'I wish I had a car.'
"One day," he had said, and this I shall never forget, "I'd had enough. I stood up, and I had a handful of onions and I threw them on the ground. 'Hey!' my pa shouted. 'What do you think you're doin'? I said, 'I'm tellin' you, Pa, I'm all done workin' on onions.' So he said, 'So then what you gonna do?' I said, 'I'm gonna fight professional.' He said, 'And you gonna get plenty lickin's.' And I said, 'Sure, and I'll give plenty too.' "
And he did. Of the fighters who won titles in my time, none took more punishment while delivering more than Carmen Basi-lio, who twice won the welterweight championship and beat Ray Robinson for the middleweight crown in the first of their two brutal fights. He walked into the guns to bring his own into range, fearless and ferocious, and over his career of seventy-eight fights they sewed more than two hundred stitches into his face. His fights were described as blood-lettings and all-out wars, and I still see them not as action flowing, but as a succession of still photos snapped in a thousandth of a second
by the mind, of head punches landing, faces distorted, necks strained, the spray of sweat and sponge water flying off the heads and shining under the overhead lights, and his own eyes slits between swellings above and below. Most of our fighters came out of the poverty of our ghettos, but this one fought to escape the imprisonment of the Muckland of mid-New York State.
LeMoyne College is on the eastern outskirts of Syracuse, and it was started by the Jesuits in 1946. It is coeducational, with an enrollment of about 2,000, and it stands on a hill, its red brick, flat-roofed buildings still devoid of the patina and ivy of age, overlooking the Athletic Center and the playing fields below. He has been an instructor on the athletic staff there since September 1961, four months after he lost a fifteen-round decision to Paul Pender in a third attempt to regain the middleweight crown.
"Wait till I get my schedule," he had said on the phone, and then, "Let's see. I'm off at noon, but if there's a game—like today I watched the soccer—I'll be there. I think they've got a baseball game scheduled that afternoon, but whatever it is, I watch them all. I love it, and you'll find me somewhere around."
It was early October, but across the black asphalt parking lot from the Athletic Center there was a baseball game under way between LeMoyne and Cortland State. There were about a hundred students and others in the low wooden bleachers along the third base line, and I recognized him—the Roman nose, the heavy brows, but the narrowed eyes now behind metallic-rimmed glasses, and the face a little fuller. He was sitting on the top row, wearing a dark green wind-jacket, watching the game but turning to talk with a dark-haired young man standing behind the low seats.
"Hey, how are you?" he said. I had walked around behind him, and he introduced me to the young man. "This is my heavyweight, Greg Sorrentino. Come on around and watch this game. It's all tied up, 3-3."
I climbed up the half dozen rows and sat down. When I did Sorrentino excused himself and left.
"He's a good kid," Basilio said. "He's twenty years old and he was a hell of a football player for the University of Vermont. He was only a freshman, but he was playing fullback when they gave up football. He came to me and I said, T know a lot of people at Syracuse, and maybe I can get you in there.' He said, T don't want to play football. I want to fight.' I said, 'I'll work with you for a month if you'll do everything I tell you, including at the end of the month if I tell you to pack it in.' At the end of the month he surprised me, so I took him for two months in the gym. He's just learning how to bob and weave now, but he's got four pro wins and one draw, and he really won that draw."
"How big is he?" I said.
"He's 196."
"Six feet?"
"Just about. I wish he was six-three, six-four. I wish he'd quit fightin'. Managing isn't my bag, but he's such a good kid, I don't want to see him hurt."
"Excuse me, Carmen," someone said. It was a middle-aged man standing behind the bleachers, and Basilio turned and shook hands and they talked for a minute or so and then the other left.
"He's from Chittenango," Basilio said. "It's for St. Patrick's Church, and he wants me to show films. I'll show one that I won."
"Because those are the only ones you have," I said.
"No," he said. "I bought a couple of losses, too."
"Tell me," I said, "how you became associated with the college here."
"In a second," he said, and LeMoyne was at bat in the fifth inning with a runner on first. "Watch this kid steal now. He's a great base-runner."
The runner was leading off first, feinting and hazing the pitcher. When he took off on the next pitch the catcher's throw was on a line, and he was out sliding.
"He got a bad start, but he can really run," Basilio said. "About the college, I always knew a lot of priests. I made a lot of appearances for charity and at breakfasts and things, so after I fought Pender and retired they talked to me about coming here. It's a great college, and when a kid walks out with a degree from LeMoyne he doesn't have trouble getting a job."
He himself had quit high school before his eighteenth birthday to enlist in the Marines in March of 1945, but when I had first heard of his association with the college it had not surprised me. As ruthless as he was in the ring, as rough on his sparring partners and opponents, he was as compassionate outside it. I knew that while he was fighting he had appeared often for charity, had spoken at the graduation breakfast of the Canastota High School, was an assistant scoutmaster and the sponsor of a Little League team, and that on a visit to the Syracuse Cerebral Palsy Clinic he had been unable to fight back the tears. To me he had always represented the ambivalance I had found in some of the roughest fighters I had known.
"What are your duties here?" I asked him now.
"I've got ten physical fitness classes," he said, "and it's compulsory for freshmen. They can't graduate unless they complete it. We use the Marine Corps physical fitness test as a barometer, and if they score over 325, they're over the average. The most you can get is five hundred points, and we have a few kids around four hundred. The only kids I have are 325 and down, in other words average or below average. They get four cuts a year, and I tell them, 'Don't use your cuts in this good weather'. Save 'em until the weather is cold and snowing, and you don't want to walk down that hill.' "
"You'd know about that," I said, "from when you used to do your roadwork in the winter."
"Right," he said. "I used to wake up mornings and I'd look out the window and it'd be snowin'. It's zero or five above, and I'd think maybe I shouldn't run this morning. Then I'd think of that other guy down there where the weather is better, so I'd better run. I'd talk myself into it.
"Then I'm in charge of the intramural program," he said. "We've got football for seven weeks, soccer for four weeks, and basketball lasts from December to the end of March. I'm also Athletic Physical Fitness Coordinator, and I pre-condition all the athletic teams before their season starts. I give them push-ups, run, stop, backwards, sideways. I teach a lot of them, basketball players particularly, to skip rope. It strengthens the ankles and builds up the cardio system. Ten minutes of good rope skipping is equal to thirty minutes of jogging at a good pace. It's in a medical report, and you can look it up."
We left the ball game at the end of the seventh with the score 4-4. As we walked toward the parking lot, he noticed two small boys wrestling on the grass about twenty yards behind the backstop.
"The kids here worry me," he said. "I'm always afraid one of them is gonna get hit on the head with a foul tip."
While he went into the Athletic Center to call his wife, Kay, I waited in the parking lot, watching the frantic flow of an intramural touch football game on a field just beyond, the players lining up, then dispersing in crisscross patterns, arms waving, and the ball arcing through the air and bouncing off hands. He had told me that his wife worked afternoons and into some evenings in the office of an automobile agency, and I had asked him to see if she could join us at dinner.
"She can't make it," he said. "She hasn't been too well and I was supposed to clean the house, and now she's mad at me because I didn't do it. She's a hell of a person, I'll tell you that. She got an ulcer while I was fighting, and when I quit she got rid of it. Anything that had to be done to better me, she was for it."
I remembered it well. They had met while she was a waitress in the Kirk Hotel in Syracuse, and been married early in 1950. They had moved into a three-room apartment in a two-family house on the south side of Syracuse, and there they had battled a series of misfortunes together.
"One weekend early in 1951," he had told me years before, "we had exactly thirty-nine cents between us. She wanted to sell her engagement ring, but I wouldn't let her because I'd sold my ten-year-old car to buy it for her. I'd broken the first metacarpal bone in my left hand when I fought Vic Cardell, and I had a cast on my wrist. There was a big snow storm in Syracuse, and they put out a call for snow shovelers. It paid a dollar an hour, and I shoveled for three nights from eleven o'clock until seven the next morning, with the
temperature around zero."
Not he, but someone else, had told me that on one of those nights a friend, who was later to become his accountant, had happened along and had seen him. He had offered to lend him eight hundred dollars, but Basilio had refused it.
"When I got the twenty-four bucks for shoveling," Basilio had told me, "I thought I had a million dollars. I paid ten dollars on our rent and five dollars on a bill we owed."
I remembered, too, how weeks before his fights, his wife would get up with him at five o'clock each morning to follow him in the car while he ran on the hilly Chittenango Falls road. Afterward, when he came home with his face swollen or cut and with bursitis paining his left shoulder, she would apply the ice bag and hot packs until the early hours of the morning.
"She's mad at me, too, for managing this kid," he said now, "but he's such a nice kid, and he could be a hell of a fighter sometime."
"I'm sorry she hasn't been well," I said as we got into his car, a two-year old orange compact Oldsmobile Omega. "I seem to recall that she had a hearing problem."
"That's right," he said. "Otosclerosis. In the inner ear the windows were completely plugged with calcium. They opened them up and put in a metal plate and then covered it with flesh from the ear lobe. I think they call it fenestration. Something like that."
"It means to make a window, or opening."
"Fenestration of the stapes," he said, driving out of the parking lot. "Now she hears through walls. She hears me think, but that was twenty years ago. In 1972 she had two heart attacks. The second one she was in the hospital on the monitor, and when that went flat, in twenty seconds there were two nurses and a doctor right there. They put her on that electric thing, and they were pounding on her chest and rubbing her ankles, and the doctor said she was out two minutes, and in one more minute she'd of been gone. That's when they called it a real cardiac arrest, and that was a fabulous guy who brought her back and we've got a great internist, too, and I'm forever grateful to them."
Once They Heard the Cheers Page 19