Once They Heard the Cheers

by Wilfred Charles Heinz

  He followed them across the hall to a square, almost barren room next to the weight room. With his attendance book in hand, he called off the names.

  "O'Reilly here? Tiberio not here? Okay, who's gonna tell me why we do these silly little exercises? To stretch out? What? To loosen up the muscles? Right, so we don't get muscle spasms. Okay, so let's start off with some jumping jacks . . . one, two, three, four . . . one, two, three, four . . ."

  He put them through toe-touches, waist twists, running in place, and squats. On the push-ups, after the first half dozen or so, most of them started faking it, skipping a count and then two counts and not going all the way down.

  "Okay," he said. "You know you're going to have to do thirty. If you don't do them here, you'll never do them on the test, so when you're here playin' basketball or whatever, come in here and work because this half hour isn't enough. Okay, now the sit-ups, and four guys hook their feet under that bar over there and I'll hold this one on the mat here . . . C'mon . . . one, two, three, four, five, six . . . Bounce off that mat . . . eight, nine, twenty-four, twenty-five . . . only nine more to go . . . thirty-four, thirty five. . . . Okay, now go out in the gym and do ten laps and sprint the last one, and a couple of months from now you guys will be tigers."

  He followed them out and into the gym where two middle-aged men in gym shorts and T-shirts were going one-on-one at one of the baskets. We sat down on a bench along a wall and watched the small pack of five start out together, the slap-sound of their sneakers fading, and then in the hollow silence of the gym the thump of the basketball coming through.

  "Those two guys are professors here," Basilio said. "They don't have classes in the morning, and they've been doing this for two years."

  "That's a pretty stiff set of exercises you put these kids through," I said. "Ages ago in college we didn't have anything like this."

  "It started with the Kennedy fitness program," he said. "It's amazing how these kids will improve in three or four months, and in the fifteen years I've been here, there haven't been two or three kids I didn't like. You know what's gratifying in this job? Next May a lot of these kids will come and say, 'Thanks a lot, Carm. I never thought I could be above average.' Some guys who graduated ten years ago say, 'You were a tough bastard, but you helped me.'"

  "You had better help this kid," I said.

  One of them had come off the floor to our right, gasping for air, his face contorted, and he was bent over now, an arm and his head against the wall.

  "You'll be all right," Basilio said, getting up and walking over and putting an arm around the young man's shoulders. "Here. Sit down. No, put your head down between your knees. Take short, fast breaths. That's right. Good."

  The others were finishing their ten laps now, strung out, the last two unable to sprint. Basilio got up and saw that the one on the bench was sitting up now, still breathing heavily but his face starting to relax.

  "Okay," he said to the others. "If you need clean towels, remember I can't give you a clean one if you don't turn in a dirty one."

  From behind the counter in the equipment room he handed out the clean towels, and we walked back to the coaches' office. Whitey Anderson was sitting at his desk and he looked up.

  "Here comes the matchmaker," he said.

  "The what?" Basilio said.

  "The matchmaker," Anderson said. "Didn't you tell him about Chuck Davey?"

  During the early 1950s, Chuck Davey was the darling of the college-cultured who, through him, discovered boxing on television for the first time. A lithe, blond graduate of Michigan State, with his masters in physical education and his boyish looks, he attracted to the sport a whole new audience, women as well as men. With his flitting, in-and-out, spring-kneed southpaw style he confused and defeated a succession of opponents until he flunked his doctorate trying for the welterweight title against Kid Gavilan. Basilio fought Davey twice, first in May of 1951 in Syracuse, where the fight was called a draw, and two months later in Chicago, where although he opened deep cuts on Davey's left cheek and over his right eye, Davey was declared the winner.

  "Chuck Davey?" Basilio said now. "He's doing all right. He's on the boxing commission out there, and he's making a mint in the insurance business, and he's married and got kids. In Chicago I put him in the hospital, and while he was there he met this nurse and he married her. Two years ago I went down to Philadelphia where all the champions boxed each other—we did it for expenses and made $35,000 for cerebral palsy—and Chuck was there with two of his boys. I said to them, 'If it wasn't for me you wouldn't be here.' Chuck said, 'Hey, he's right.' "

  After his 11:30 class he and Dick Rockwell, the baseball coach, teamed up for three games of paddle-ball against Mike Yost, the dean of students, and Jim Welter, a biology professor, on a court separated from the main gym by a sliding wall. He is a natural southpaw who seldom reverted in the ring, but he kept switching the paddle from one hand to the other as he tried to overpower the ball against the wall even as he had tried to overpower every opponent he had ever fought.

  "I love this game," he said, after he had showered and changed. "It's like golf. It's a disease. I wait to play it, like yesterday I played six games. I won four of the six, and they were cut-throat games—not two-on-two, but two-on-one. It's great exercise."

  He had no classes that afternoon, and I had asked him if he would drive me out again to that road raised above the Muckland from which he had fought to escape so many years before. We stopped for roast-beef sandwiches in one of those gaudy, plastic, however immaculate fast-food eateries that one finds among the gas stations, laundromats, drive-in banks, and furniture outlets on the outskirts of our cities. As we ate in the small booth, I could look over his shoulder and see, across the parking space, an automobile muffler shop with three lifts and a mechanic in uniform working under a car raised on one of them.

  "Have you had to get a new muffler lately," I said as we walked toward his car, "and discovered what they rap you for one now?"

  "You're telling me?" he said. "I need one and I saw this ad for mufflers for $16.85. I went and got one, and then the guy who was gonna install it said it wasn't just the muffler but the piece of pipe, and you couldn't just buy that piece but you had to buy the whole assembly. Then he ripped me off on the labor—$28 for forty minutes—and the whole thing came to $98.75 when it was finished."

  As we approached the car I noticed for the first time his New York license plate: KO 1.

  "I knew the fellow who had Massachusetts KO 1," I said. "Rocky Marciano."

  "I've had that since 1955," he said, "but it wasn't my idea. After I won the welterweight title they gave me that car, and Norm Rothschild and an assemblyman who's dead now got me this plate."

  "They used to give you cars," I said, "and now when you want to buy a muffler they give you a going-over."

  "I don't want anything for nothing," he said, "but I don't like to get rolled."

  The blacktop road from Syracuse to Chittenango is bordered on the left in places by the Erie Canal which, a century and a half ago, linked the Hudson River to the Great Lakes and tied the industrial Northeast to the agricultural Midwest. It was one of America's life lines, and now, along here, the tow path on the far side has been converted into a bicycle path, and we could see an occasional rider and sometimes two or three, with the pale sunlight glinting off the brightwork of their bikes.

  "I'll just whip in here for a second," he said, turning right up a driveway on the outskirts of Chittenango, "and you can see where we live."

  It is a two-storied house, with weathered shingles and white trim, standing on a slope that rises behind it. It is hidden from the road and the house next to it by trees and bushes, and there was a car in the driveway.

  "My wife's still here," he said, backing around, "so I guess she's not feeling too good. She has a hard time mornings and afternoons, or I'd take you in. Also four years ago I moved the furniture from the fourteen-room house in Alexandria Bay into these nine rooms, and I
've got stuff piled up all over the place. I gotta have a garage sale, and she said, 'Don't bring anybody in this house. It's a mess.' She's a sweetheart, though. When I had a fight coming up and I'd start to get edgy, I'd take it out on her. I'd start snappin' at her and she'd say, 'I know you're ready.' Twenty-six-and-a-half years we're married, and we've had our ins and outs and our little spats now and then, but I still love that gal.

  "What we've got here, too," he said, "is apple trees. We had bushels of apples this year, and I asked a lot of people if they wanted any. They all said, 'Sure.' Then nobody came and got any, and they just rotted."

  "They wanted you to pick them for them, and then deliver them."

  "That's it," he said. "You're right."

  We drove through Chittenango and from there to Canastota, towns that, like their counterparts all over America with populations of about 5,000 or less that are still apart from the mainstream of commerce, do not change much over the years. On the main streets the places of business are low and flat-roofed, only their modernized facades and their signs differing from the fronts in the old photographs of three quarters of a century and more ago.

  The road itself had not changed much either since the last time I had been there, the straight blacktop running northwest toward Oneida Lake and raised several feet above the flat fields of black soil on both sides. Where the onions had been harvested more than a month before and the ground refilled, it looked the same, but I had not remembered that there had been so much corn, the stalks standing golden brown in the October afternoon sun.

  "You're right," he said. "There's a lot more corn now where there used to be onions. The onion business is dying because the families don't work like they used to, and the growers can't meet the labor costs. There's still some, but they're growing them now in Florida and Texas and California."

  "Do you still have the scars on your hand?" I said, remembering that he had told me how, before the harvest, his father would sharpen the knives until he could shave the hair off his arms with them. During the haste of the harvest their hands bled each day, and he had shown me the fingers of his right hand crisscrossed with small white scars.

  "Oh, yeah," he said, and he had turned off on a gravel road, "but I'm not the only one. Pop, everyone of the kids had them, so I'm not feeling sorry for myself. You see along here? This was my pa's land, ten acres, and while I was still fighting I bought it from him. It was all onions, and now look at it."

  It was covered with scrub growth, mostly box elders. A few of them were fifteen or twenty feet tall and a foot or more in diameter, and others had fallen in wind and ice storms.

  "Some of that could be cut for fireplace wood," I said.

  "I know," he said. "I told some people who have fireplaces, 'You want some wood? Help yourself.' They said, 'Sure.' Then they don't do it. It's like the apples. They want you to cut the wood for them, too. You see where that one big tree is standing now? We used to have our house right there. It was only four miles from town, but in those days it was like a hundred miles, and the idea was you could get up in the morning and walk right out the door and start working. You see this stream here? Sullivan Creek."

  He had stopped on a narrow, steel-framed bridge. The stream, about fifteen feet wide, it's banks overgrown, was almost still, its waters an olive green.

  "Right there," he said, pointing, "is where we used to go in at the end of the day. My pa would give us soap, and we'd soap ourselves and jump in. One day I was just a little kid, and I'm standing up to my waist in the water right there and all of a sudden I let out a yelp. I hollered, 'Hey, Pa! A fish just bit my pecker!' Everybody just howled. I was such a little kid but I still remember it, and this was the only place we could get clean."

  "When I was writing about ballplayers and fighters," I said, "I used to wonder if the people who went to the events ever conceived of the athletes as being other than as they then saw them. I mean, the ballplayers weren't born with a glove and a bat and a ball in their hands and wearing Yankee pinstripes, and the fighters didn't come into the world wearing white trunks and 8-ounce gloves. I'm thinking of that now, as you describe yourself as a kid bathing in this creek here."

  "That's right," he said. "Who the hell ever heard of an onion farmer comin' out and fighting in Yankee Stadium?"

  About a quarter of a mile down the road he stopped again. In the field on the left the corn had been harvested for silage, and only the stubble, clean cut about eight inches above the ground, remained. He rolled down the window on his side and pointed to about two dozen Canada geese resting among the cropped rows, some fifty yards from the road. He let out a couple of harsh calls, but as we watched the black heads with the white chin patches just visible and the black necks, there was no movement.

  "I haven't got my voice in shape yet," he said.

  "Do you still do some hunting?"

  "Pheasant and deer," he said. "I fish for trout, too. I go up around Osceola, New York. I had a hundred acres I paid $3,200 for in 1956, and after I put $500 into the house and built a trout pond, I sold it in 1971 for $4,000. I stopped by there, and a guy said, 'Carmen, you should have held it. They're gettin' $1,000 an acre now.' They were breaking into the house, though, and shooting down the TV aerial, so that's what you call the breaks of life."

  He drove back to the blacktop and back into town. The houses on North Main Street are modest, standing on small pieces of ground with well-kept lawns between them and the sidewalk. He stopped in front of one on the right, narrow and two-storied with new dark green asphalt shingles and with white trim that looked like it had just been repainted. On the small patch of grass between it and the sidewalk, a young man was sawing a piece of 8 X 4 plywood that was resting on two saw horses.

  "Two eleven North Main Street, Canastota," Basilio said. "I was born in that house. Six of us out of the ten were born in that house. You see where that bay window is downstairs? When my mother was ready, my father would move the bedroom in there. It was a bigger room for the doctor to operate on her."

  Near the center of town he turned right and drove down the street and pulled into the parking lot in front of a flat-roofed blue-and-white-sided building. A woman in a ground floor window in the house next door was peering between the white curtains.

  "Carmen Basilio's Hot and Sweet Sausage," he said, and he got out and tried the door and came back. "They're delivering now, Paul and Armando. They also make frozen meat balls, and we're going to start canning sausage with sauce and meat balls with sauce, and ship it around the country. We'll see if my ma is home."

  Down the street he pulled into the driveway next to another narrow two-storied house, this one white-shingled with white trim, I remembered his mother well, a short woman, only 4 feet 10, who also had told me what it was like in the onion fields. For three years, beginning in 1934, Basilio's father had been invalided by sciatica, and the rest of the family had had to work the farm without him. Some years a blight, caused by early morning fogs and burning sun, had ruined the crop. Other years the price of onions had dropped to a point where the growers had decided to hold out and, finally, to dump their crops rather than sell.

  "You take the gamble and you lose," she had said. "You can smell those onions decay, and you think, 'A whole summer's work for the whole family, and the seed and the fertilizer, too.' "

  "Raising a family through all those hard years in the onion fields," I had asked her, "what dreams did you have for your children?"

  "We had no dreams," she had said. "None. We just tried to bring up our children to be good."

  There is an enclosed porch at the right of the house, and when Basilio opened the door and we walked in, she came out of the kitchen to the left. She seemed even smaller than I had remembered, bespectacled and wearing a black dress. We shook hands, and she led us, moving slowly, into the kitchen. In the front room, off the kitchen, a television was on.

  "How are you feeling?" Basilio said.

  "All right," she said, sitting down at the kitchen tabl
e with us. "With the arthritis I can't do so much, but I'm all right. I don't see you, though, for a long time."

  "I know, Ma," he said, "but I'm busy. I gotta keep hustlin'."

  "I know," she said.

  "She's eighty-three now," Basilio said to me. "She came here when she was four. In 1914 she and my pa went back to Italy to see his family, and they drafted him and he fought in the Italian Army. They didn't get back here until 1921, and my sister Matilda and my sister Anna were born in Italy, in Veroli, north of Rome, where my pa came from."

  "We didn't go where I came from," she said.

  She had got up from the table. While they talked about the family I watched her. She had taken a jar of tomato sauce and two pork chops out of the refrigerator, and she had filled a pot with water and carried it to the range.

  "She's starting to cook," I said to Basilio.

  "What did I tell you?" Basilio said, nodding. "I said you can't come into the house without her feeding you."

  "We can't eat now," I said. "We just had lunch."

  "Ma, we just ate," Basilio said.

  "So eat again," she said. "You should have something to eat."

  "We can't, Ma," he said. "We just ate lunch. Really."

  "No?" she said and, moving slowly, she put the chops and the jar of sauce back in the refrigerator, and sat down at the table with us again.