Once They Heard the Cheers

by Wilfred Charles Heinz

  "Mrs. Basilio," I said, "I remember you the night that Carmen won the welterweight title in Syracuse from Tony DeMarco."

  This was a television first, long before presidential candidates paraded their families through campaigns and capped their acceptance speeches and concession statements with connubial kisses. After Harry Kessler, the referee, had stopped that fight with DeMarco helpless in the twelfth round, more than 32 million viewers had seen Basilio drop to his knees, cross himself and pray. When he arose, they saw his wife standing on the ring apron and they watched him embrace her. Then this small semi-stout elderly woman in a black dress and an aging, bald man—Basilio's parents —had been helped into the ring from the other side. For weeks after that Basilio received mail from strangers throughout the country who had been moved by the scene. When he went to New York, others stopped him on the street to talk about it, and when he appeared on Ed Sullivan's TV show, Sullivan commented on it. What the television audience had sensed without completely understanding was all the family hardship that had gone into the making of that moment.

  "I remember you in the ring," I said now, "and how many people throughout the country were impressed by that."

  "Yes," she said. "Many people saw it, but it is getting to be a long time ago."

  As we drove back toward Syracuse, we talked about some of his fights, the two late in his career with Gene Fullmer that had been halted by the referee in the late rounds and how he had protested, he was saying now, because he had never been stopped and it was a matter of pride. In his last fight, the one with Paul Pender, his final attempt to regain the middleweight title, he had foirght with a torn cartilege in his left shoulder, suffered in training. It had deprived him of his best punch, the left hook, and he had lost the fifteen-round decision.

  "I should have had a couple of cortizone shots," he said, "but I didn't know then. I only learned now, sitting around the field house and hearing these guys with degrees talk."

  "How much do you miss it?" I said. "I mean, an athlete always knows it's going to end some day and yet, when that day comes, he will never again be able to do that which expresses him best and fulfills him the most. How often do you think back?"

  "I really don't have the time," he said. "Sometimes I go back and eat my heart out about fights I lost that I shouldn't have lost, like the Pender fight, but you can't live that way. I see fights now, and it makes my heart sick. The good trainers are gone. They don't know how to set up, how to hook off the jab. I wasn't what you call a clever fighter, but I could put combinations together, but all that's gone."

  We were in the outskirts of Syracuse again now. The late afternoon truck traffic was heavy, with an ambulance, its red roof light turning and its siren going, trying to get through, and in the stretches between the traffic lights, the drivers of the passenger cars cutting back and forth between lanes.

  "So much is gone," I said. "You buy a muffler and the ad misleads you. Then they phony the labor cost and rip you off. The kids today, they don't want to work like you did. I don't mean in the onion fields, because that should never be again, but how many of them would work and sacrifice like you did to succeed?"

  "Some of it we don't like," he said, "but some of it I do. The kids go around with long hair and all that, but they just want to be one with the crowd. They're really good kids, and I believe in them. Speaking of hair, though, my wife said this morning, 'And don't come home without getting a haircut today.' "

  6

  The Unsinkable

  Mister Brown

  "The next best thing to a lie," Joe Palmer wrote,

  "is a true story nobody will believe," and any-

  body who would believe the story of Freckles

  Brown ought to report himself.

  Red Smith

  One of the secrets of selling whiskey is to make a secret of time, and so in the cocktail lounges of this country an eternal twilight prevails. It was midafternoon when we walked into the lounge of the Holiday Inn West in Oklahoma City, and before our eyes could adjust to that light-damped eventide, we could hear them.

  "Hey, there's Brownie!" . . . "Hey, Freck, come over here!" . . . "Hey, Brown, you old dog, have a drink!" . . . "Come sit down, Freck! Somebody find a chair for Brown."

  It was the first week in December, and the National Finals Rodeo was in town. The lobby had been crowded with them in their quilted vests and jackets and under their big hats, and in the lounge they were sprawled in the chairs they had pulled up to the tables they had rearranged, leaving the waitresses, holding the drink trays over their heads and perspiring and suffering like bearers on safari, to pick their way through an underbrush that was constantly closing ahead and behind them.

  "You want me to tell you something?" one of them said to me. "You want to listen to me?"

  "Why, certainly," I said.

  There were five of them at two tables they had pulled together just inside the door, and Freckles had introduced me and we had sat down. We were waiting for one of the waitresses to make her way to us and take our order.

  "This man," he said, sweeping an arm toward Freckles, "is an immortal. Did you know that?"

  "Yes," I said, "I did."

  "You did?" he said. "How well do you know this man?"

  "Aw, old Bill knows me," Freckles said, embarrassed. "He's been out here before."

  "That's right," I said. "During the Finals in '68 I followed Freckles around for nine days and . . ."

  "And I was fallin' off everything," Freckles said. "I sure was ridin' sorry."

  "That don't matter," the other said to Freckles, and then to me, "And I want to tell you somethin' else, too. This man has a million friends, and not an enemy in the world. Did you know that?"

  "Aw, not that many," Freckles said, "and I'm sure there's some don't like me."

  "Listen," the other said to Freckles now. "What I said is right. You haven't got an enemy in the world."

  Stay with it, Freck, I was thinking, and you'll win this by making an enemy right now.

  "Well, I just try to live with people," Freckles said, still embarrassed.

  "You want to know something else?" one of the others said to me now. "You are in the presence of a legend. Did you know that?"

  "Yes," I said. "That's why I'm here."

  He was, as Red Smith wrote, the most improbable athlete in creation, a smiling little chipmunk of a man who was two months from being forty-eight when I trailed him for those nine days and watched him as he spent more time in the air and on the ground than he did on the back of the bulls he drew until he finally rode one. Each time he came out of the chute, a sudden silence would descend over the packed seats of the Fairgrounds Coliseum, for they had been watching him, or had been reading about him, for years, and when I added up the injuries he had sustained over a quarter of a century they surpassed the seasonal totals for a couple of National Football League squads.

  He had had his right leg broken four times, and his left leg twice, his left ankle once, and his right ankle twice. He had had his left foot smashed a couple of times, and his neck broken twice. There was a piece of tendon from his upper left leg tied to the tendon in his left ankle, and the severed tendon in his right arm had been retied. There was a metal screw in his left ankle, and his neck was held in place by a plug made out of a piece of his hip bone. He had had ruptured blood vessels in his right thigh, and pulled muscles and ruptured vessels in his groin. He had suffered three concussions, and there is a scar over his upper right lip where it was hooked by a horn.

  "You know what I do when I get into one of them strange hospitals?" he said to me one night. "I get ahold of one of them old head nurses and I ask her, 'Who's the good doctor around here?' Those interns sittin' around there, they don't know, and if you get one of them, it's like havin' a court-appointed lawyer."

  I took that to be the considered opinion of the world's leading expert on the subject. He had been in more strange hospitals than most people have motels. He had known three cowboys who h
ad been killed by the bulls, and in Sidney, Iowa, in 1963, he had almost lost his friend Tex Martin. They had been going down the road together, as they say in rodeo, for two years when a big bändle threw Martin and then came down with one of its hind feet on his chest.

  "He stepped plumb through Tex to the back of his rib cage," Freckles was telling once, "and when he brought that leg up, Tex was on it. It was like pullin' a cork, but there was a doctor right there, and he had the guys hold Tex out straight in the air and he just kept wrappin' the bandage around him.

  "I got into the ambulance with Tex, and he was hurtin'. On the way over to the hospital in Hamburg he got to gaspin' and sayin', 'I can't breathe.' I told him. 'You sorry little sonofabitch, take a deep breath.' He said, 'It hurts.' I said, 'The hell it does. You sorry little bastard, keep breathin'.' Later, after he was gettin' better, that ambulance driver told him, 'You know, I never heard anybody talk to a dyin' man like that friend of yours was talkin' to you.' "

  That next afternoon at Sidney, Freckles drew the same bull and rode him to get second money of $260 on him. The year before, in Portland, Oregon, he himself came close to being killed when a big spinning bull named Black Smoke threw him after the whistle and then butted him.

  "I lit with my face in the dirt and my butt up," he said, "and he just kinda mashed my hips and head together. In the hospital, after they X-rayed me, they shaved my head and drilled holes in my skull and they put these tongs—like ice tongs only littler—in there. Then they had a rope comin' off those tongs to a pulley with some sand bags hangin' on it, and it felt like somebody had their ringers in my head and pressin' all the time. One of my friends come to see me there, arid he took one look and got so sick he had to run to the men's room and vomit.

  "They found my neck was broken, that the bones was just pulverized, and there were two bone specialists there that said I'd never be able to ride again. There was this neurosurgeon, though, who'd been learnin' this front neck fusion—what they call it—and the two bone specialists were against it, but I told him to do it. He took all that broken bone out of there, just cleared it out, and took that piece of my hip bone and put it in there instead. I was in that rig for thirty-four days, and they had me on sheepskin. Every five hours they'd tip me one way, and then in five hours they'd tip me the other way.

  "Before I left," he said, "they stood me up and they put a cast on me from the top of my head down to my hips, with just my face and my ears and the top of my head stickin' out. For about two days, until a cast cures out, it's real tight, and when they were puttin' it on, I kept tryin' to keep a little air in my lungs and this nurse kept givin' me smelling salts. The doctor was standin' on his toes, and he said, 'I'm glad you're not any taller than you are.' "

  He was in that cast for three months. He was in it at the National Finals at Los Angeles when they named him World Champion Bull Rider for 1962. By the time that bull had butted him at Sidney, he had been so far ahead in prize money earned that year that the competition had never caught up.

  "But that neck kept me out for six months," he said.

  He was telling me this in '68, sitting around the Wiley Post Suite that Skipper Lofting and I were sharing in the Sheraton Oklahoman. After the evening go-rounds at the Coliseum, he would come up to have a drink and answer my questions and just talk.

  "And he came back," Skipper said, "in a little rodeo in Claymore, Oklahoma, just before Cheyenne."

  "That right?" Freckles said.

  "When he got on that bull in the chute," Skipper said, "and they announced his name, it was so quiet that you could hear cars a mile away on the highway."

  "That's right?" Freckles said.

  "He rode that bull," Skipper said, "but he bucked off a saddle bronc and landed on his shoulders."

  "Yeah, I did," Freckles said.

  "Those other guys just held their breath," Skipper said.

  "But when I got up," Freckles said, "I was all in one piece."

  Three times over the years he had been knocked unconscious. In Lawton, Oklahoma, he was out for an hour. At Odessa, Texas, he woke up in the hospital at 4 a.m. with no memory of his ride.

  "When the nurses came in in the morning," he said, "I said, 'What the hell am I doin' in this hospital?' They said, 'Don't move.' Then in Chickasha, Oklahoma, a bull knocked me out. I was in the wild horse race after the bull ridin', so they poured water on me. I rode in that and we came in second, and that night we were sittin' in a cafe in Lawton, fifty miles away, when I come to. I didn't remember that race."

  In 1965 he got into Springdale, Arkansas, at three o'clock one morning, and at the motel he left a call for five. There were so many entries in the bull riding that, as they say in rodeo, they were riding the slack off at six. He got up and showered, and drove out to the arena.

  "I hadn't warmed up and got the circulation goin' and I was cold," he was telling. "When I ride I take my hold with my left hand, and I was on a real arm-jerker. He was really stout on that rope, and after the ride, I was puttin' up my rope when I noticed something lyin' like a big lump near my elbow. There was just skin and bones above, and that was my bicep lyin' there. This tendon had pulled in two, and this doctor went in and grooved the bone and tied the tendon back together at the shoulder. I carried my arm in a sling for ten days, and I was squeezin' a rubber ball. I thought I could win somethin' ridin' with my right hand, but that was a mistake. I couldn't ride so good."

  "But don't you ever have any fear?" I asked him one night. "You've known cowboys who were killed. You almost lost Tex Martin, and in Portland you were close to being killed yourself, and could have been paralyzed for life."

  "Bein' afraid?" he said. "Nope. I've never been afraid ridin' a buckin' horse or a bull. If you're gonna ride, you have to ignore it. You couldn't be thinkin' about it. Some of them guys, they like to find out what they drew so they can worry all night, I guess, but there ain't nothin' you're gonna do about it. And it ain't courage, either, because I think you got to be scared to have courage."

  "When you were just a kid," I said, "what were you afraid of? Children have fears."

  "Nothin' but the dark," he said, "but I could go anywhere if I had an animal with me, a cat even. I could get on a horse and ride all night, but I didn't tell anybody."

  So he has that ability, of which Hemingway wrote, to suspend the imagination and thus supress the fear. He has, a doctor once told him, a high pain threshold, and so he is able to live with the aftermath of his injuries without being a semicripple or even a complainer. He is one, however, whom I wanted to see again, as I had wanted to see Jim Tescher, to reaffirm, while I watch society go soft all around me, that a man, not with just that indefinable courage but with determination, can survive poverty and deprivation and still ride adversity out to the whistle.

  He was born Warren Granger Brown in Wheatland, Wyoming, between Lingle and Fort Laramie on the North Platte, on January 18, 1921. The family homesteaded on 160 acres, raising sugar beets, corn, beans, potatoes, alfalfa, and hay.

  "We lived in this house of cottonwood logs that Poppa had built because there wasn't any real lumber around," he said, "and we had this tarpaper shack, what they call it, about thirty yards from the log house. My two oldest brothers had died before I was born, but my other two brothers and me slept out there. We had a potbellied stove and a coal oil lantern, but in the winter it would get thirty below, and it was cold. When I was nine, we built a new house with two bedrooms in the basement where my brothers and me slept. There was a bathroom and a windmill and a pump, and if the wind was blowin' you had water in the house. Otherwise somebody had to go out and pump.

  "We always had plenty to eat," he said, "but otherwise we were poor. We had none of the things kids get today."

  "What about Christmas?" I said. "What would you get on Christmas?"

  "One year I got a mouth harp," he said. "One year I got a horn. One year I got a little wagon, and then one year I got pants and a shirt."

  "You were outgrowing toys," I sa
id. "How far did you go in school?"

  "I went a month in the ninth grade," he said. "I run off to Nebraska and got a job pickin' spuds. My folks and I got along fine, but there was this superintendent's boy, and we were playin' football and I tackled him and he skinned his face. He told his dad, and his dad jerked me up by the ears. My feelings were just real hurt, and the next morning I let the school bus go by and I jumped on the hay rake. My dad said, 'You go to school. You got to go to school tomorrow.'

  "The next morning my dad waited to be sure I got on the school bus, so I put on two pairs of pants and two shirts and I rode the school bus six miles into Lingle. Then I got off and I walked over to the highway and I hitch-hiked to Mitchell, Nebraska. I had a job pickin' spuds that evening."

  "Tell me what that was like," I said.

  "Well, you pick in a basket and dump 'em in a sorter. There are ten guys pickin' and each man is on a row, and you got to keep your row up because at the end of the day they count the sacks and divide by ten. It was mostly Mexicans, because them beet workers don't want to pick spuds, and we were in the field before eight until dark. You could make around two dollars a day.