"Thank you," he said. "Good luck."
As I approached the corner, the light changed and the cars began to move. When he passed me he waved quickly, just once, and then turned back to the wheel, and that was the last I saw of the great artist, the like of whom I'm sure I shall never see again.
10
The Uncrowned Champ
He was as good as a fighter can be without
being a hell of a fighter.
A. J. Liebling, The Sweet Science
When he would come out of Stillman's Gym and walk down Eighth Avenue he looked as if he should be over on Fifth. He was given to good clothes and an occasional manicure, and except for a small scar on the bridge of his Roman nose, there were no marks on him. In 126 fights over fifteen years he was never off his feet, and one night in Madison Square Garden, with the title on the line, he licked the welterweight champion of the world, and emerged uncrowned.
The science precedes the art, for the art is based on it, but with the great ones it is instinctive. The rest of us are at best professionals, the science acquired by study and effort, by imitation and adaptation, always waiting for and expecting the art to emerge and transcend the science. It never does, and Billy Graham, the consummate professional, was one of the rest of us. I think I was attracted to him because he seemed to me to be the symbol of the rest of us as he waited for the masterpiece that never emerged.
"When you started to box," I said to him the first time I ever sat down to talk with him, "did you want to be a champion?"
"Sure," he said. "When I was a little kid, I wanted to be heavyweight champion of the world. When I was eleven years old, though, I weighed sixty-five pounds, so I decided I'd like to be middleweight champion. As it turns out, I'm a welterweight, you know?"
We were sitting on one of the benches behind the rings at Still-man's Gym. He was in his ring clothes, bandaging his hands while he waited to get into the ring. By then he had been boxing for eight years. He had had eighty-five fights and had won all but the three he had lost by decision.
"And you'd still like to be champion?"
"Sure," he said, "but you know how it is. You have to pick your spots."
"You have one of the best records in boxing," I said. "Have you ever wondered why you don't receive more acclaim?"
"I think I understand that," he said. "A friend of mine said to me, 'You know, I enjoy seeing you box. You're a good boxer, but watching you, I don't get excited.' "
"I know what he means," I said.
"Teddy Brenner was talking to me about it once," he said. Teddy Brenner was a matchmaker then, and later the director of boxing at Madison Square Garden. "Teddy said, 'You're such a good boxer that you always make it look too easy. The people don't like that.' "
He was never one of those runners who, Jack Hurley used to say, should have been in track and field. He had mastered the science of punching distances and angles, so he was always there where the danger should have been but seldom was, and boxing divorced from danger is devoid of excitement and the emotion that is, of course, the quintessence of the art.
"Do you ever get mad in the ring?" I said to him, for suppressed anger, under control until released perhaps in a single punch, has always been in all the great ones.
"No," he said, "I fight best after I've been hit hard, but I know what I want to do. I want to be the boss in there, and I don't fight harder because I get mad, but because I want to show that I'm the boss."
"How are you in the dressing room?" I said. "Are you excited before a fight?"
"A little," he said, and then to be sure I understood, "but not afraid. There's nothing to be afraid of. I can handle whatever the the other guy tries, so I know I won't get hurt. I can smother a lead, but what I'm nervous about is that maybe I won't fight my best fight. I'm a little nervous that I won't give my best performance."
"Works of art," Rainer Maria Rilke wrote, "are indeed always products of having-been-in-danger, of having-gone-to-the-very-end in an experience, to where man can go no further."
So the Himalayan peaks are scaled by those who dare, while the rest of us frequent the foothills. We, too, have the desire to stand atop the world, but there is something in the psyche that saps the will, a timidity that tethers us to what we know, and so our work is never the product of having gone to that very end in that experience.
One night Billy Graham went to the end. It was August 29, 1951 in the Garden. He and Gerardo Gonzalez, out of Cuba and called "Kid Gavilan," had split two earlier fights, Billy winning the first and Gavilan the second, but now Gavilan was the welterweight champion of the world. Over the fifteen rounds, all of them close, it was a boxing contest and Billy Graham was never behind. He outjabbed Gavilan, waiting for his leads, and when they came he picked off the hooks and turned from the right hands and stepped inside the swings. He had the better of it inside and, late in the fight and chancing right hands as he never had with as good a fighter before, he rocked the champion. I had him winning it nine rounds to six, and Red Smith gave it to him eleven rounds to four in the press rows that were unanimous for Graham.
As Johnny Addie announced the decision, an angry roar thundered down from the balconies and rose from the floor. One judge gave it to Graham by a single round, the other and the referee gave it to Gavilan. In the ring Billy Graham, unbelieving and bewildered, held his gloved hands out in supplication, and out of their seats and into the aisles they came, waving their fists and shouting, their faces contorted by their anger, as the Garden ushers and security men and the city cops struggled to restrain them into islands. In the passageway under the seats on the Fiftieth Street side there was a fight, and in his dressing room Billy Graham sat, still unbelieving, while they tried to console him.
"You're still the champ," one of them was saying over the heads of the others. "You're still the champ, and when you walk into a joint they'll call you 'Champ.' "
Billy Graham knew the truth, though, and so did we. He had gone to very end of his experience, beyond where he had ever been before, and he had won—but he had lost. They might call him "Champ," but it would never be there in The Ring Record-Book, in the histories of the game, in the purses he would command, and in whatever use of the title he might be able to make in the years to come outside the ring.
That is the price the professional must pay when he performs within an art form. There are no goal lines to cross, no home plates to touch, no scoreboard to record his victories. In the decision contests of boxing, as in painting and writing and piano competitions, the judgments of honest men, who cannot totally explain them, are subjective, and so they differ.
It was two years later that I went into camp with him for the better part of three weeks as he prepared to fight Joey Giardello in a twelve-rounder in the Garden. In Havana, five months before, he had gone against Gavilan again, but his moment had passed, and he was out-pointed. Now he was thirty-one years old, his chance for a title gone, married and with two small children, a journeyman fighter making a living even as you and I. We so seldom celebrate them, those who are just honest workers, and yet it is they, and not the champions, who best represent and reflect us. That was why I wanted to do the magazine piece about him, about the way he lived and learned his trade and practiced it.
He picked me up with his car at midafternoon in early March at the Fiftieth Street entrance to the Garden. We drove through the Lincoln Tunnel and then, through the gray, damp gathering dusk, over the wide, flat concrete highways of New Jersey to the Long Pond Inn.
"You have too many distractions at home," he was saying. "My wife understands, but take like this morning. At 7:30 the kids wake me. They wake me at 8:30. At 9:30 they wake me again. I said to Lorraine, 'Look, can't you keep these kids away from me? I gotta get my sleep.' She said, 'You slept enough, didn't you?'
"Every once in a while," he said, "Lorraine talks about me giving it up. It's tough on a wife. At first there's some glamour to it. You go out and you're recognized, but you're keeping in shape,
so you can't go out a lot. She's alone—like now, for three weeks— and it's rough. So I tell her, 'Sure, I'll quit, but what else am I gonna do? Do you want to live on sixty a week? Let me work something out.' "
That morning he had driven her to the supermarket to load up with the groceries for the three weeks. Then they had driven to a toy store to buy a red wagon for young Billy's third birthday, two days away, and that he would miss.
"With me," he was saying, "it's a case of winning every fight now. If you don't have the big punch—you know, the glamour— you have to win for your bargaining power. All you have is your record,"
This fight would be his attempt to rewrite that record. Three months before, he had lost in the Garden another of those split decisions. He had boxed Joey Giardello, and again, when the scoring of the three officials was announced, another near riot had followed. At ringside, within minutes, the New York State Athletic Commission had changed the card of one of the judges to give Billy Graham the fight, an act that was later to be reversed by the State Supreme Court.
"Did you ever try to build up your punch?" I said as we drove north. By now he had won ninety-nine fights, but only twenty-five by knockouts. He had fought eight draws and had ten losses, eight by split decisions, and whatever your art form is you want to make the definitive statement that overpowers subjective judgment, and in boxing it is the knockout.
"A punch is something you're born with," he said. "Either you have it or you don't. I gave it a try. I thought punching the heavy bag would do it. In 1946 I knocked out Pat Scanlon in five. I knocked out Frankie Carto in nine and sent him to the hospital. When I fought Tony Pellone he just managed to keep his balance, and I had Ruby Kessler on the deck. The papers were starting to write that I was becoming a puncher, and then I fought Tippy Larkin in the Garden, and I was looking to kayo him too. He won it big. After that I forgot about the big punch."
He was born and grew up on Manhattan's East Side, but not in the tenement section thirty blocks to the south that spawned Rocky Graziano and so many other street toughs who peopled boxing in those days and fought in the Garden ring. The neighborhood was starting to run down, but it was better than tenement. And Billy's father owned a candy store where he also sold some sporting goods, until after Prohibition went out, and he opened a saloon at Thirty-sixth Street and Second Avenue.
"Did you ever have any street fights?" I asked him, driving out.
"Lots of them," he said. "We had the candy store, and the park was across the street. My mother would come out and see a whole bunch of kids scrambling around, and I'd be in the middle of it. At least I've been told this, that my father said, 'Where can I send this kid to be taught how to fight before he gets killed?' He got up on a ladder and took these Everlast gloves down and said, 'Come with me.' He took me to the Catholic Boys' Club on Thirty-seventh, and I used to go there every night."
"Those street fights," I said. "You're so mild-mannered that it's hard for me to imagine you being in them. Did you have a temper?"
"I don't think I had a temper," he said. "I don't remember starting a fight, but maybe I did."
He weighed sixty-five pounds then, when he started to box for the club, and in more than eighty fights, of which he won all but two or three, he learned the rudiments. His hero was Walter "Popeye" Woods, who was out of the neighborhood and who, they used to say in boxing, could have been the middleweight champion of the world if he had just worked harder at it and lived right.
"I'd see him hanging around the corner or at the Boys' Club," Billy said. "I'd say, 'What round are you gonna knock him out in?' When he fought at one of the clubs in town I'd save up. A seat was seventy-five cents upstairs, and to get there I'd sneak on the subway or hitch on a bus or a taxi or any car that stopped for the light.
"He used to bust guys up with his jab. Once he told me something I never forgot. He said, 'You can watch a bum, and he may do one thing you can use.' I never forgot that."
For me the almost three weeks in camp were as pleasant an experience as I have known in sports. My own fight, the writing, would not have to be done until Billy fought his, and it was reassuring and rewarding just to watch a professional prepare at his own pace and in his own way, knowing always what he wanted to do and why he wanted to do it.
Greenwood Lake extends north and south across the line that separates New Jersey from New York State. A two-lane concrete highway runs along the west shore of the lake, and the camp, only the burned ruins of which remain now, was near the New York end. It stood, a long, low cement-block-and-wood building painted white with green trim, between the highway and the lake where the shore drops down to the water. At the highway level were the gym and the dressing rooms and the rooms where the fighters slept, and at the south end steps led down from the parking space to the bar and dining room and kitchen at the lake level.
The establishment was owned by Johnny Dee, Ollie Cromwell, and Eddie McDonald and his wife, Catherine. She did the cooking, assisted by her husband, who walked around, often in a butcher's apron and with a cigarette, the ash long on it, hanging from his mouth. He was a talker, and when he was at a loss for something to say, he would call on Skipper, a brown-and-white part-beagle that, after repeated commands, would emit a low guttural sound that Eddie McDonald insisted was talking. . "Here, Skipper!" Eddie said to the dog after we had come into the dining room late that afternoon. "Say hello to Billy. Say 'Mama.' "
We had shaken hands with Eddie, with Roland LaStarza, the heavyweight who was finishing his training to meet Rex Layne in the Garden, and Walter Cartier, the middleweight who was preparing to box Randy Turpin in England. The dog was squatting now at McDonald's feet.
"Speak, Skipper!" McDonald said. "Say hello to Billy. Say 'Mama.' "
"But why would he say 'Mama' to Billy?" I said, as we waited while the dog remained silent.
"Because he's a smart dog," McDonald said, "and he likes Billy. He'll talk to him later."
The first couple of days Billy slept late, ate well and, after his meals, took long walks along the side of the highway. I walked with him, and we talked about fights and fighters and their styles, interrupting our progress to demonstrate, as we squared off and made tentative leads and went through the motions of countering.
When Whitey Bimstein, who trained him, came up, he would get Billy up at 8:30, and Billy and Walter Cartier would do their roadwork. They would start out from the camp, running easy along the left side of the road north and into the town of Greenwood Lake, then off to the right along the shore of the lake by the white cottages with the rowboats turned bottoms up on the lawns. Then they would make the circuit back through the town again and down the highway to the camp, in all a distance of 3.3 miles.
When they would come off the road they would go to Billy's room. Whitey would bring them hot tea and lemon, and they would sit there with towels around their necks, sipping tea and sweating and talking. Then Walter Cartier would go into his room to read and listen to a disc jockey on his radio. He was reading William F. Buckley's God and Man at Yale, and Billy would lie down on his bed and cool out and listen to the radio through the wall.
On the fourth day Johnny Noel, the sparring partner, came into camp and Billy went into the gym. The gym was immaculate, with knotty-pine planking on the walls and the ring set over by the windows that looked down and out onto the lake. While Billy boxed, Whitey Bimstein would stand on the ring apron, never taking his eyes off him, every now and then calling to him and, at the end of each round, telling it to him again.
"Inside more," he would say. "Under the lead and to the body. "Stick. Stick. Slip the lead and the combinations to the body. You gotta do that."
"Sure, Whitey," Billy would say. "Relax. I know."
In the evenings, after we would walk on the road, Billy would shoot pool with Ollie Cromwell on the table beyond the bar. Then we would sit around and listen to Eddie McDonald argue fights with Whitey and talk to the dog.
"Watch this, Billy," Eddie would say. "Listen
to Skipper now. Skipper is a real smart dog, and he likes you, Billy."
There would be the same songs, over and over again, on the juke box. Someone, who had dropped in for a drink at the bar, would plunk a coin into the juke box and out would come once more "Don't Let the Stars Get in Your Eyes" or "Blues in the Night" or "Glow Worm."
"Billy will lick this guy," Eddie McDonald would say, "Billy will lick him, but good. He will make mincemeat of Mr. Giardello."
He had a genuine affection for Billy, but it also seemed to me that he took a proprietary interest in the fighters who trained at his place. I think he regarded them, when they climbed into a ring, as advertisements for the Long Pond, and when, at the end of it, we drove into New York for the fight, he and his wife were in the car with Billy, Whitey, Johnny Dee, and me.
"You'll lick him good," he said to Billy, when we dropped him and his wife off in mid-Manhattan on our way down to the offices of the New York State Athletic Commission for the weigh-in. "You'll put lumps on him. You'll see."
"Sure," Billy said, smiling. "Don't worry about it, Eddie."
That was the way he was at the weigh-in too. When the photographers positioned them, stripped to the waist and facing each other in the fighting poses, Giardello's fists were trembling, while Billy's were motionless.
Once They Heard the Cheers Page 31