"That was sad about Stirnweiss," I said now.
"Snuff?" he said. "Yeah, I read about it. Sad."
One morning in September 1958, three cars of a commuter train out of New Jersey plunged through an open liftbridge into Newark Bay, and Stirnweiss was one of the more than two dozen who drowned in the cars. He had been a fine baseball and football player at the University of North Carolina, and he played for the Yankees from 1942 until 1950, once winning the American League batting championship, once setting a major league fielding record for second baseman, and twice, with his speed, leading the league in stolen bases.
"What struck me when I read about it," I said, "was that the speed that made him such a great athlete cost him his life. Someone, who had seen him get on the train, said that when he arrived at the station it was pulling out and he ran to catch it."
"You remember," he said, "how the first thing he'd do when he'd get on the train was go to sleep? I thought of that."
"In the last game of the '47 Series," I said, "when you threw that spitter to Gil Hodges, did he pop it up to Stirnweiss?"
"No, I struck him out," he said, "but it wasn't a spitter. That was the oil, the graphite oil. I used to keep it inside my belt."
"You told me it was a spitter," I said. "In the clubhouse, during the celebration, I came over to see you and DiMag, and you said, 'Billy, don't write this, but I threw that Hodges a real hocker.' How could I, alone, write it? If I did, you and Joe would have denied it and clammed up on me forever."
"That Roe was throwin' it for them in '50," he said, meaning Preacher Roe of the Dodgers. "He later wrote about it. I used to load it up during a foul ball, when everybody looks up."
He got up now and walked slowly toward the barroom. When he came back he handed me his glove, still formed as it had been to fit his right hand, the dark brown, almost black leather cracked now.
"A Diz Trout model," he said.
"You ought to put oil on it," I said, as I handed it back.
"We're going to have it bronzed," Mitz said.
He sat down, and she stood up and began kneading his shoulders again.
"Them were good days in New York," he said. "We had a lot of fun."
"One day," she said, "he told Jon, 'Remember, if you're going to make it, you're going to have to work hard. And stay away from women.' Then we were going through some old things, and found a picture of Joe and Joe DiMaggio in Hawaii with these girls. So Jon took it to him, and said, 'What about this?' "
"I tortured a few in my day," he said.
"So you had your good days," she said, "and you should remember those."
"Yeah," he said, "and the young buck can play ball, too."
"Jon was playing over in Johnstown," she said, "and Joe used to tell this story of one he hit there."
"I hit one out 380 feet," he said.
"So Jon hit one out 440 feet," she said, "and Joe said, 'I'll never tell that story again.' "
"That was the end of that hit," he said.
"I have to get a loaf of bread," she said, walking out from behind the chair, "and where do I get a headlight? The low beam is out."
"In a garage," he said.
"But what one? The outside of the light is square."
"But the light is round," young Joe said. "Go to Mobil."
"I'll be back in a few minutes," she said.
"She don't know cars," Page said, "but she's got a hell of a brain. She works twelve, fourteen hours a day, Skip."
"She seems to be a fine woman," Skipper said.
"You can say that again," he said. "What beats me is that I can't hunt any more, and I've got them guns."
"What have you got?" Skipper said.
"I got a .320, a .406 and a .373 Magnum, and I can't use them."
"Didn't you once go on a bird hunting trip to Maine with Enos Slaughter and a couple of others?" I said.
"It was South Dakota," he said. "Huron. A guy had to be blind not to get fifty roosters."
"You were telling about it in the clubhouse one day," I said, "and Yogi was listening. You said, 'We were going after birds, and Slaughter had this cyst on his back, but it didn't make any difference to him. He went climbing through that brush and under those branches like it wasn't there.' And Yogi said, 'What the hell kind of a bird is a cyst?' "
"That's right," he said. "That was Yogi."
"With all you've been through," I said, "I've been thinking about that ballplayers' retirement plan. I've forgotten when that came in."
"We started it in '47," he said, "but it went back to '44. I know on the hospitalization they don't give you all of it, only 80 per cent."
"But that's a big help."
"Hell, yes," he said, bringing his hand over to his neck again. "This thing cost $19,000."
Young Joe had turned on the TV again, for the American Football Conference play-off. We talked about the game against Boston on the next to last day of the season in '49. The Red Sox led the Yankees by one game in the standings, and were ahead, 4—1, in the second inning when he came in and held them the rest of the way until Johnny Lindell won it with a home run. Then the Yankees beat them again, to win the pennant on the last day.
"The good old days," he said, as we got up to leave. "I'm glad you came, and that you're looking good."
"And I'll call you now and then," I said, "to hear that you're feeling better."
"I was fifty-nine in October," he said.
"I know," I said.
He walked us out, after we had said good-by to young Joe, and closed the door behind him and stood, watching, under the overhang while we walked to the car. Darkness had come by now, and another car, its lights on, drove in and Mitz got out. We walked over and shook hands.
"I'm really pleased you two came," she said. "It's done a lot for him."
"You've done a lot for him," Skipper said.
"It's been a long time," she said, "since he's talked that much or sounded so well, or moved so well."
"I'm glad," I said.
"So any time you're nearby," she said, "stop in to see him again."
"We'd like to," I said.
As Skipper backed the car around I looked back. He was still standing under the overhang, under the pale overhead light, waving good-by with his right hand.
"You know how pitchers are," Skipper said. "When they're talking, especially about pitching, they'll demonstrate with their pitching arm. He has to use his right arm."
"It was one of the great left arms," I said, "and it's a damn shame."
I had a terrible time trying to get to sleep that night. The Deny Sportsmen's Club was having its annual dinner dance in the ballroom of the motel, and it came up through the ventilating system and through the floor. The band must have played "Rock Around the Clock" a dozen times, but I would have had trouble sleeping anyway.
9
The Artist Supreme
It is not strength, but art obtains the prize.
Homer
"How did you get my number?" he said on the phone. I had called him one evening late in January at his home in Wethersfield, Connecticut.
"Come on, Willie," I said. "You're not unheard of."
"I'm a has-been," he said. "Nobody remembers me."
He was the greatest creative artist I ever saw in a ring. When I watched him box, it used to occur to me that, if I could just listen carefully enough, I would hear the music. He turned boxing contests into ballets, performances by a virtuoso in which the opponent, trying to punch him out, became an unwilling partner in a dance, the details of which were so exquisite that they evoked joy, and sometimes even laughter.
In 1940, when Guiglermo Papaleo—Willie Pep—turned professional after winning the Connecticut amateur flyweight and bantamweight championships, he was seventeen, still an adolescent. He won fifty-three fights in a row, and then at age twenty, beat Chalky Wright for the feathweight championship of the world. He won another eight before Sammy Angott, the former lightweight champion, a grabber and smotherer an
d too big for him, outpointed him. Then he won another seventy-three before Sandy Sadler knocked him out in the first of their four fights. In other words, of his first 135 fights, he won all but the one in which he was out-muscled and out-wrestled. In our time we never saw another like him.
"I'm on the Boxing Commission," he said. "It's in the State Building, so see me there. I'm there every day from eight until 4:30."
He gave me the directions, rapidly, for he always talked the way he boxed, the words spurting out. He told me what exit to take from the Interstate and what streets and how to get around the park and how to recognize the building. Hartford is a city I once knew and walked, but when I drove down the ramp off the elevated Interstate and got into the noontime traffic, I turned into the parking space of the high-rise motel and checked in. I had lunch, and I took a cab. At my age I wanted to have something left for Willie.
"Excuse me," I said. "I'm looking for Willie Pep."
I had found on the directory in the lobby "Athletic Division," under "Department of Consumer Protection." A middle-aged balding man, his jacket off, was sitting behind a desk on which there was a sign that read "Michael Boguslawski." On the door it had said that he was the assistant to Mary Heslin, the head of the department.
"Sure," he said. "You go out and take a left. Go down one flight of steps and go through the doors. Go straight ahead down the hall to the end. Take a right. It's the fifth door on the left, 31-A."
"I'm sorry," I said, "but will you give that to me again?"
"I'll give him a call," he said, picking up the phone and dialing, and then, "Sure he's here, and you're there, but come up and lead him down."
He came through the doorway quickly, sticking out his hand. He is five feet five, and he never had any trouble making the 126 pounds, but he was a little heavier now, his fifty-four years in his face, and he was wearing a glen plaid suit and a striped sports shirt open at the neck. He led me down, walking rapidly with those small, quick steps, thrusting the doors open, talking.
"It's a good job," he said. "Last year we had about thirty-five wrestling shows, twenty-three boxing shows. We supervise. We check to see a guy hasn't been knocked out in thirty days. If one guy's got forty fights and another's got ten, we don't allow. We go in before the fight and see that they bandage properly. Hugh Devlin is the director. A good guy. I'm under him with Sal Giacobbe."
He led me into the office and introduced me to Devlin, a rather short, gray-haired, smiling man behind one of the gray metal desks. There were three desks, filing cabinets, a metal locker, a weigh-in scale, a sofa and armchair, and a coat rack.
"Hughie was the bantamweight champion of Massachusetts," he said, and then to Devlin, "How many fights you have?"
"I had 121," Devlin said, "and I won 113."
"He was a good fighter," Willie said.
"You weren't bad yourself," I said.
"Thank you," Willie said.
"The greatest I ever saw," Devlin said. "I can still see Willie's fights. I'll never forget them."
"He was a creative genius," I said to Devlin, "and he could do those things because he had the reflexes of a housefly."
"Thank you very much," Willie said, sitting down behind his desk. "That's very kind of you."
"I have to laugh at you, Willie," I said. "All we're doing is telling you the truth, and you think we're doing you a favor. You did us a favor being the fighter you were."
"That's nice of you to say that," he said, and that's the way he always was, slipping compliments the way he slipped punches while sticking out another jab.
"The last time I saw you in a ring," I said, "was in the Fifth Street Gym in Miami, about 1952. It was after the third Saddler fight, and you didn't have the title any more, and you were starting to hit the road."
"That's right," he said. "I fought in a lot of places."
He did, indeed. Once the really big pay nights were gone forever, he took what was left of his inimitable talents into Moncton, New Brunswick; Bennington, Vermont; Athol, Massaschusetts; San Antonio, Texas; Lawton, Oklahoma; Florence, South Carolina; Presque Isle, Maine; Painesville, Georgia; and Caracas, Venezuela, among other places. In 1959 he retired, to come back six years later at the age of forty-two to add nine more wins to a record that reads 241 fights, 229 wins, one draw, and eleven losses.
"Tell Hughie," I said now, "about the time you fought the local boy in the town where the sheriff weighed you in."
"That's right," he said, and then to Devlin, "They didn't have no boxing commission, so the sheriff weighs you in with a gun on his hip. The fight's in the ball park, so when he calls us to the center of the ring . . ."
"Wait a minute, Willie," I said. "Tell him about the kid at the weigh-in."
"Oh, yeah," he said. "So at the weigh-in, the kid I'm gonna box comes up to me and says, 'Mr. Pep, can I have your autograph?' I looked at him, and I said, 'Get away from me, kid. There's people watchin' here. We're boxin' tonight, and what are they gonna think?' "
"You were his hero," I said.
"Yeah," he said. "So at the ball park they got a pretty good crowd, and the referee calls us to the center of the ring to give us the instructions. I look at the kid, and he's white. He's scared stiff. I'm thinking, 'Oh, boy, what kind of a fight can this be?' So the bell rings and we move around, and a lot of guys turn white, but this guy is startin' to turn purple. I figure I have to do something, so I threw a right hand over his shoulder, that would look good to the crowd but that would miss, and I stepped inside and grabbed him under the arms, and I said, 'Look, kid. Just relax. These people here paid their money, and we'll give them a show. We'll just box, and you won't get hurt. We'll have a nice evening, and everybody will like it.' That's exactly what I told him."
"And wait until you hear the ending," I said to Devlin.
"So I take my arms out from under his and let him go," Willie said, "and he falls right on his face and the referee counts him out."
"I love that," Devlin said, laughing. "That's a great story."
"That's the truth," Willie said.
"Then there was the time," I said to Devlin, "that Willie boxed Kid Campeche in Tampa. Frank Graham and Red Smith were covering the baseball training camps, and they were driving out of Tampa one afternoon on the Tamiami Trail starting back to Miami. Over the car radio they heard that Willie was boxing that night in Tampa so, without either of them saying anything, Red just turned the car around and headed back. Willie pitched another shut-out, and in Carapeche's dressing room afterward, either Red or Frank said, "Well, what was that like?' And Campeche said, 'What was it like? Fighting Willie Pep is like trying to stamp out a grass fire.' "
"Yeah, Kid Campeche," Willie said, nodding. "I remember him."
"He'll never forget you," I said. "None of them will."
He picked up a pair of black-rimmed glasses from the top of his desk, and put them on. He opened the desk drawer and took out a photostat of a newspaper column by Don Riley and handed it to me.
"He writes for the paper in Minneapolis," he said, "and it's all in there. It's about when I boxed Jackie Graves there in '46."
Jackie Graves was a pretty good puncher out of Austin, Minnesota. He had had thirty-nine fights before he boxed Willie and had won twenty by knockouts while losing two decisions, and Willie knocked him out in the eighth round.
"It's all in there," he said. "Before the fight I told this Riley, 'In the third round I'm not gonna throw a punch. Watch what happens.' So in the third round I did like I told him. I moved around, feinted, picked off punches, made him miss, and I never threw a punch, and all three officials gave me the round. Riley never forgot it."
"How could he?" I said. "And another fight I'll never forget was your one with Famechon."
Ray Famechon was the European featherweight champion. Lew Burston, of the International Boxing Club, had talked him into coming over to box Willie in the Garden for the championship of the world.
"The afternoon of the fight," I said, "I stopped by th
e Garden to pick up my ticket, and Lew Burston grabbed me. He said, 'You weren't at the weigh-in. You should have been there.' I said, 'Why?' He said, 'Why? Because, Eddie Eagan was explaining our rules. He was telling Famechon that you can't spin a man, and Famechon just reached across in front of him and grabbed Pep by the elbow and spun him and said, 'Comme ça?' "
"Yeah," Willie said now. "He was kind of fresh at the weigh-in. He grabbed me, so I figured I can't fight him here, so I'll see what I can do in the ring."
"So then," I said, "Burston said to me, 'Why shouldn't he treat Pep like that? Who is Willie Pep to him? Famechon has had hundreds of amateur fights and sixty pro fights. He's boxed all over Europe, and fought every style there is and . . .' And I said, 'Wait a minute, Lew. He's fought every style there is except Willie Pep's style, and unfortunately he has to fight that style tonight.' "
Once They Heard the Cheers Page 29