"Which is why I make doctors more important than writers or fighters."
"You can say that again," he said. "Now she's all right, but she's got all these pills she takes and she pops those nitroglycerins like they're candy, God bless her, and then she takes all that bull I put out while I'm runnin' around trying to make ends meet."
"What do you do while college is out during the summers?"
"Public relations for the Genesee Brewing Company. I travel with the salesmen full time, so I'm away a lot."
It is a small Italian restaurant with the bar on the left. As a waitress led us back to a table near the kitchen, several at the other tables waved or nodded to him. When he was fighting he was, of course, lionized locally. Two years before he won his first title the members of the Knistestota Club, a men's social organization in Canastota, staged a testimonial dinner for him, hoping to raise enough money to present him with a traveling bag. In two hours they collected enough for him to buy a new car. After he won the welterweight title, his followers gave him a $3,900 convertible, but it seemed to me that the ultimate unique proof of his popularity was demonstrated when, in several hours at the Schisa meat markets in Syracuse, he autographed 2,000 photographs of himself, and attracted 7,000 entries in a drawing for boxing gloves and other prizes while the markets sold 49,510 pounds of meat, 26 per cent more than they had ever sold on any day in their ten-year history.
"They still remember you here," I said now, as we sat down. "What about the kids at the college?"
"They were too young," he said, "but their fathers remember. Just today one kid said, 'My father remembers you. He used to watch you fight all the time.' "
"Drinks, Carmen?" the waitress said. "Would you gentlemen like a cocktail?"
"An orange juice for me," he said, and after she had taken my order and left, "Would you believe I got an ulcer? I found out two weeks ago."
"The stress of modern living," I said. "Now you have to follow the diet and learn to relax."
"Yeah, but I have to scramble, too," he said. "I bought a motel in the Thousand Islands, and I lost $70,000 up there and that wiped me out. I didn't touch that property we live on, or I'd really be wiped out. I almost took a mortgage on it, but I changed my mind. I've got ten-and-a-half acres, all building land, in Chittenango and six acres at the other end of town that I own, but the taxes are close to $4,500 a year. The biggest rap is school taxes, and they keep building on them like they're country clubs. I went to a little nothing school, and I learned just as much as they do."
"Yes," I said, "you learned how to fight by beating up on all the other kids."
"No," he said, shaking his head. "Not me."
He was being the college instructor now, but I was remembering the fighter with whom toughness had been an obsession from childhood on. He had told me once how he had had a fight every day he had gone to school.
"I used to go home for lunch period," he had said, "and I used to think, 'Now, who am I gonna have a fight with?' Then I'd go back and bother somebody. I'd push him or shove him. Then the other guy would swing, and we'd fight. Sometimes I'm ashamed when I think of it now. I had no pity because I had to prove my toughness."
"Come on, Carmen," I said now. "You were a terror in school when you were a little kid."
"Yeah," he said. "There was one kid I gave a lickin' to once a week from kindergarten through the eighth grade, but it wasn't my doin'. He'd say, 'Come on, you Wop. I'm gonna kick your tail for you.' He lives in Oneida, New York now, and I run into him and he's got a good job. He'd come into my house and he loved spaghetti and meat balls, and whenever you came into my house my ma always had to feed you. She's still the same way, and this kid would sit down and we'd eat, and then he'd go home and we'd have that one fight a week."
"When did you first think that some day you'd be champion of the world?"
"When I was little," he said. "You know who my idol was? Jim Braddock."
"A wonderful guy," I said. "During the Depression when he got laid off on the docks he had to go on relief. After he won the heavyweight title he paid that money back. I don't know anyone who didn't admire and like him."
"I had just started reading the sports pages," he said, "when he won the championship from . . . uh . . ."
"Max Baer."
"Right, and my pa had this rule that you had to be in bed by 8:30. Braddock was fightin' Louis, and they had the fights then on the Adam Hats radio program. I said, 'Pa, let us stay up.' My two brothers and me, we sat on the floor, and when Braddock got knocked out in the eighth round I walked up the stairs cryin' and sayin', 'Someday I'm gonna be a fighter, and get big and lick Joe Louis.'
"Now I'm fightin' in Syracuse and I'm working for the Autolite Company, assembling parts for radios and things. The guy next to me says, 'You fight a lot?' I said, 'Yeah.' He said, 'What do you think you're gonna do fightin'?' I said, 'I'm gonna be champion of the world some day.' He looked at me, dropped the tools and walked away. We got laid off then, and after a couple of weeks I came back, but he wasn't there. I often wondered what he thought when I became champion of the world. He walked away as if to say, 'This sonofabitch is crazy.' "
"Man has to dream," I said. "It's like your 'wish-talk,' and sometimes his dreams come true."
"When you stop dreaming you're done," he said. "Who else are you going to talk to for this book?"
"Fighters?" I said. "Among those you fought, well, Lew Jenkins, and . . ."
"Lew Jenkins?" he said. "Every time I pick up something he's knocking the stuff out of me. He says I couldn't fight enough to keep warm. He calls me a bum. What's wrong with him?"
The two fought in Syracuse on March 6, 1950. Basilio was twenty-three, and a future champion on the way up. Jenkins was thirty-four, and a former champion on the way out. After he lost that ten-round decision to Basilio, Jenkins was knocked out by Beau Jack in Washington, and then he enlisted in the Army for his second war. He went to Korea where, his general told me later, he was a great combat sergeant, and where he won the Silver Star.
"I don't know what he's got against you," I said, "but he came out of the cotton fields of Texas just like you came out of the onion fields around here, and you two should really like each other."
"Who else are you going to see?"
"Ray Robinson," I said, "and there's someone you don't like."
After he beat Robinson in that bloody combat in Yankee Stadium in 1957, when he was thirty and Robinson thirty-seven, Robinson regained the middleweight title with a split decision over him the next year in Chicago in another savage battle. Then the two went head-to-head over the terms for a third fight, which never came about.
"I don't dislike him," he said now. "What I really believe is he was afraid of me. In that second fight I fought seven rounds with one eye. The referee gave me the decision and the two judges voted for him, but I walked to the dressing room and they had to carry him. He had a $600,000 guarantee for the next fight, and I'd of got $300,000. At that time it was the hottest match in the world, so he lost his title to Paul Pender for $65,000."
"At his peak he was a great one," I said, wanting to go beyond that, for Robinson was the greatest I ever saw.
"The greatest I ever saw," Basilio said as if he had read my mind, "was Willie Pep."
"He was certainly the greatest creative artist I ever saw in a ring," I said, "and I'm going to look him up, too."
"He won't agree with you," Basilio said. "Whenever I see him and we start to talk and I say something, he says, 'No.' It doesn't matter what it is, he always says, 'No.' Why would he do that?"
"I have no idea."
"The smartest guy I ever fought was Billy Graham."
It was his two fights with Graham in 1953 in Syracuse that started Basilio on his way to his titles. Norm Rothschild was trying to build boxing in the area, and Ray Arcel was trying to build an audience for his Saturday night fights on TV, and they talked the New York State Athletic Commission into recognizing the rights as deciding the New Yor
k State welterweight title. Basilio won the first, and the second was declared a draw.
"I'll see Billy, too," I said. "I once spent three weeks with him in camp."
"He couldn't break an egg, but I learned more in three fights with him than from anybody I ever fought. I hit him with punches that would knock other guys dead. I fought him in Chicago, and he said, 'You hit me a punch, and I went back to the corner and my feet were tinglin'. In Chicago I was coming off mononucleosis, but I got him back in Syracuse."
"Whenever you think back on your career," I said, "do you ever fasten on one moment as the greatest?"
"There's nothing like winning a world championship," he said. "That has to be the greatest moment, but there was one key bout. In 1956, March 14 in Chicago, when I had the title and I fought Johnny Saxton. I had him hurt, and in his corner they took a razor blade and cut his glove and held up the fight. They gave him the decision, and they made the fight back in Syracuse. Now, if I don't win the welterweight title back, I never fight for the middleweight championship, and after I beat him I was cryin', it meant so much to me.
"In the ninth round," he said, "I come out and I hit him a right hand and he staggered into the ropes. Instead of going for his head, I hit him a left hook to the solar plexus, and his knee came up and I knew I had him hurt bad. He went into the ropes again, and I was gonna hit him a right hand and Al Berl grabbed my hand. I hollered, 'Let me go! I wanna flatten the sonofabitch!' Then in my corner I was crying and I said, 'I finally got him. I finally got him.'
"Now, after the Ali-Norton fight in the Yankee Stadium I was in Ali's dressing room, and Saxton was there. He was big as a horse. He said, 'Hey, Carmen, how you doin'?' I said, 'All right. You still with that youth program in Harlem?' 'No,' he said. 'I'm not workin'.' I felt sorry for the guy, and I'd like to send him a thousand, but I haven't got that kind of money."
I, too, had often felt sorry for Saxton, for he suffered from Robinson's syndrome. As every great artist in any field acquires a host of imitators, so did Sugar Ray and, just before him, Henry Armstrong. When Armstrong held three titles at the same time— the only man ever to do so—you could walk into the Uptown Gym on 116th Street in Harlem and see a dozen Armstrongs. Then came Robinson, and the gym was filled with young Robinsons.
One afternoon I got to the gym early, and over in a corner, in the half light, I saw Robinson working on the big bag. I stood there and marveled at his natural grace, the speed and fluidity with which he turned on his variety of combinations. It seemed to me that at the age of thirty he looked better than ever, and then he stopped and turned around. It was Johnny Saxton, and a week or so later, I watched him box Joe Miceli at the St. Nicholas Arena. For the first five rounds he did his best to look like Robinson, and he took a beating. After the fifth round they sent him out to fight his own fight, and he knocked Miceli down and managed to pull out the decision, but I knew his problem after that night.
Saxton went on to win the welterweight title, not once but twice, but it was my opinion that he never became the fighter he should have been because of Robinson. I once expressed this to Sugar Ray.
"That's right, and it's too bad," he said. "I used to work with the boy when he was first starting. I showed him a lot, but there's things you do that you can't show another man. You do them in a fight, and you don't know why you do them. You do them without thinking. You do them because you just have to, and you can't explain that."
While we were eating I asked about the two boys Basilio and his wife adopted. They are the sons of his wife's sister, and one was five and the other five months old when the Basilios became their foster parents.
"They're fine," he said. "The one is twenty-four and manages a marina up in Cape Vincent, and he's married and has a boy and a girl. The other is twenty-nine and works for an electronics firm in Marysville, California, and is married and has two daughters. I love them like my own, and I told them, 'I made a lot of mistakes and I lost a lot of money, but if you need anything just call on me.'"
"You mentioned your mother . . ."
"She's eighty-three now, and my pa died two years ago. He was eighty-eight, and the nicest man in the world. He'd give you the shirt off his back. We were ten kids, and he'd do without to be sure we had shoes on our feet, clothes on our backs."
I recalled how, when Basilio was six years old, his father had driven a truckload of onions into Albany, and returned with a set of four boxing gloves. Basilio had told me, "When he opened that box, it was like seeing gold. We kids boxed for three hours that night. Then my old man used to have friends in, and we'd box for them in the living room. My older brother, Armando, would make me cry, and I'd make Paulie cry. The old man would say, 'O.K., rest period.' Then they'd give us a hand. That was their TV."
"What a sweetheart he was," he said now. "I didn't know a person who didn't like him. When he died in that little town, the undertaker said it was the biggest funeral he ever had, the most people that ever came to a wake."
"It's good to have that to remember."
"It's a hell of a thing to brag about," he said.
"Excuse me," someone said, and when we looked up he was standing at the table, slim, his dark hair starting to gray. "I don't like to interrupt."
"That's all right," I said.
"Carmen Basilio," he said, offering his hand, "You're my hero."
"Thank you," Basilio said, taking the hand, "but. . ."
"You don't understand," he said, stepping back, and then to both of us, "Jimmy Lombardo. For twenty years I want to meet Carmen Basilio. To me he's just a great man. I have this friend Frank, and he eats here. Last week he tells me that sometimes Carmen Basilio comes in to eat here, too. I said, 'Do you think I could meet him, Carmen Basilio?' He said, 'Sure.'
"Now listen to this," he said. "He told me, 'Now next Wednesday I'll meet you at this restaurant, and we'll have veal scallopini and maybe we'll see Carmen Basilio.' So Wednesday is tomorrow, and we're supposed to meet here, and what happened? He just called me up and he said, 'I'm here and I'm having veal scallopini, and Carmen Basilio is here. Come quick.' It was supposed to be tomorrow."
"And he called you," Basilio said, "and you came over?"
"Of course. And I never thought that today, after all these years, I would meet you, a great man, and here I am and I shake your hand."
I was watching Basilio. He had taken his glasses off and placed them on the table, and with his forefingers he was rubbing his eyes.
"What's the matter?" the other said, looking at him. "What happened?"
"Carmen Basilio is crying," I said.
"You made me cry," Basilio said, blinking his eyes, and trying to smile.
"I'm sorry," the other said. "I didn't mean to make you cry."
When I drove into the campus the next morning and parked by the Athletic Center and got out, a pale sun was shining between white, fleecy clouds. A light breeze was blowing out of the south and the air was fresh and warm, and a workman on a garden tractor with a rotary cutter beneath it was mowing the playing field where the touch football game had been under way the afternoon before.
In the lobby of the Athletic Center I stopped by the trophy case. In the middle of it, behind the glass, there is an oil portrait of Basilio, gloved and wearing boxing trunks and in a fighting pose. On either side are trophies for the Queens-Iona Relays . . . the Canisius College Run . . . the Harpur Invitational Golf Tournament . . . the basketball from LeMoyne's 300th win on February 24, 1971, when they beat Cortland 72-70 . . . another with LeMoyne's individual college scoring records painted on it in white . . .
The coaches' office is down a hallway to the left of the main gym, and Basilio was sitting at one of the four desks. He introduced me to Dick Rockwell, the baseball coach, Tom Mooney, who coaches basketball, and Whitey Anderson, the sports information director, and when he came out of his private office, to Tom Niland, the Athletic Director.
"That ball game yesterday," Basilio said. "We won it 5-4 in the ninth when that kid
I told you about, who was thrown out at second, stole home on a double steal. I told you he can run."
"Very good," I said.
"Hey!" he said, looking at his wristwatch. "I've got my class."
He was wearing his instructor's uniform, gray trousers with a dark green stripe down the legs and a gray top. He picked up his attendance book at his desk and walked out to where, just inside the doorway of the main gym, five of them in dark green shorts, white tops, sneakers and socks were waiting for him.
"How many here?" he said. "Five? Wow, there's supposed to be eight. You guys do your five laps? Good, so let's go."
Once They Heard the Cheers Page 20