Once They Heard the Cheers

by Wilfred Charles Heinz

  "You're right," he said.

  "And I'll tell you a night," I said, "when you did out-smart yourself."

  "What night was that?" he said.

  "That night in the Yankee Stadium when you fought Maxim and it was 104 degrees in there. You were not only licking him, but you were licking him so easily that you made a show of it, dancing around in and out, throwing unnecessary punches. That's why, in that heat, you collapsed at the end of the thirteenth."

  "You're right, old buddy," he said. "That was a mistake. I was incoherent all the next day. I never remembered when Goldstein fell out. I had a premonition the night before that fight too. I had a premonition that I would die."

  He had finished the pastry and reclosed the package again, and he returned it to the desk drawer.

  "There's this Sugar Ray Leonard," I said, "who won a gold medal in the Olympics. There was another one—Sugar Ray Seales. How do you feel about these kids calling themselves Sugar Ray?"

  "Bill, you know," he said, sitting back and smiling, "it's a good feeling to think that the kids think that much of me."

  It was different when he was a fighter. There was another welterweight at that time named George Costner, and in Chicago in 1945 Robinson knocked him out in two minutes and fifty-five seconds of the first round. Five years later they were matched again, this time for Philadelphia, and in the days leading up to the fight, the other, by then known as George ("Sugar") Costner, was quoted on the sports pages as disparaging Robinson.

  "Listen, boy," Robinson said to him at the weigh-in, "I've been readin' what you've been sayin' in the papers about what you're gonna do to me."

  "Why, there are no hard feelings, are there, Ray?" Costner said. "I just did that to boost the gate."

  "That may be all right," Robinson said, "but when I boost the gate I do it by praisin' my opponent."

  The logic of publicity, revolving as it does around the build-up of the underdog, was all on Costner's side, but this time Robinson knocked him out in two minutes and forty-nine seconds. While it was succinct, this was, in its scientific precision, one of Robinson's finest performances.

  "There's only one 'Sugar,'" Robinson was quoted as saying right after the fight, but I remember another aftermath. It involved still another welterweight who was asked by his manager if he would fight Sugar Costner.

  "No thanks," the fighter said.

  "But you can lick Costner," the manager said. "Robinson flattened him twice inside of one round."

  "I don't want to fight anybody named Sugar," the fighter said.

  "I've been remembering," I said to Robinson now, "the first time I ever met you. It was in Pete Vaccare's office in the Brill Building, and we heard you singing out in the hall, and you and June Clark came in wearing road clothes and harmonizing 'The Very Thought of You.' You two did it very well."

  "Yeah," Robinson said, smiling. "June Clark, he was a musician—Armstrong was in his band—-and he, too, was a believer in God."

  "That was a long time ago," I said. "It was in March of 1946."

  "Are you sure?" Robinson said. "Didn't we meet before then?"

  "I'm certain," I said, "because I didn't start to write sports until I came back from the war."

  "You were in the war?" Robinson said.

  "Yes," I said, "but only as a war correspondent."

  "Where were you?" Robinson said.

  "All through northern Europe," I said.

  "In the ETO?" he said. "Then how come we didn't meet over there?"

  "I don't know," I said. It was as if I had just been stunned by a sucker punch, one you never expect the other to throw, and I was sparring for time.

  "We were over there," Robinson was saying now. "Joe Louis and I we had a troupe, and we boxed in the ETO and everything."

  I still didn't know what to say. There were the others at their desks—Thelma Smith and Mel Zolkover and a secretary—who could have heard us, and I didn't want to challenge it there. I am quite sure that, if we had been alone, I would have, just to try again after so many years to understand him, but as I have thought about it since, I believe it was better that I let it ride. He is a man who has his own illusions about his life, as do we all, about the way he wishes it had been, and there is little if any harm, although some sadness, in that now. I shall send him a copy of this book, however, and when he reads this chapter I hope he understands that, as a reporter, my responsibility, as pompous as this may sound, is to draw as accurate and honest a portrait as I can.

  "I want you to meet Mr. Fillmore," he was saying now. "Mr. Fillmore can tell you a lot about the foundation."

  "I'd like to meet him," I said, and he led me into Fillmore's office and introduced us.

  Fillmore, a slim, immaculate man, bald and wearing dark glasses, said that he would be seventy-eight in a couple of months. He had worked, he said, for the Southern Pacific Railroad for forty years, as a waiter and then as an instructor, and he had been retired for seven years when Robinson and he started the foundation in 1969.

  "The first time I met Ray personally," he said, "was through his present wife. She was rooming with us, and he was going with her, and then he finally married. We got to talking and got to be buddies, and one day I got a telegram from London that he wanted to see me.

  "I wondered, with all the people he knew, why he wanted to see me. I waited, and he and his wife flew in and, it being hot, we sat in the back yard. I asked him what was so important, and he said he'd always wanted to do something for youth. I said, 'What do you want me to do about it, Ray? With all the people you know, you want me to put together something for children? I'm retired.' He said, 'No. You have just started working.' I told him, 'We need money, and we need children. If you can get the money, I can get the children.'

  "From the back step we moved to Millie's kitchen, then to the church, and when it got too big for there, we moved here. Since 1969 there's no black mark on this organization, and I challenge anybody to go to the 1RS or wherever.

  "The Southern Pacific," he said, "had given me a three-year course in human relations, and what we try to do here is make good citizens, not only a Sugar Ray Robinson or a Sandy Koufax. We had these fellas here, and they called themselves 'The Young Black Panthers.' They knew every way to do wrong. There was 'One-Legged Joe' and there was 'Bluefish,' and the one was fourteen and the other was fifteen, and we gained their confidence.

  "The news came out one time that a hamburger stand had been held up, and it sounded to me like 'One-Legged Joe' and 'Bluefish,' so I called in Tony, one of the lesser lights. I said to him, 'Where were you on such-and-such a night?' He said, 'I know what you want, but I wasn't in it.' I said, T know, but if I could find out where it was and I could find the pistol, I could help out.

  "He told me where it was, where to find the pistol, and it was a toy. 'One-Legged Joe' went to UCLA and stayed there three years and got a job. 'Bluefish' joined the Navy, and that was what Ray Robinson had in mind, and what we try to do."

  When I came out of Fillmore's office, Robinson was at his desk, finishing another Danish, and he suggested that we go over to the foundation's annex. We walked up the sidewalk, then through the blacktopped parking area of a shopping center, and at the far side, into what had been a store and was now partitioned into several rooms. He led me into a conference room, and we sat down with Zolkover, and with Richard Jackman, a then thirty-two-year-old law graduate who is the program director, and his assistant, Scott McCreary, then twenty-six and a graduate of the University of California at Santa Barbara.

  "Tell Bill," Robinson said, at the head of the long table, "what we do here."

  "Well, take our baseball program," Zolkover said. "We kind of take the place of the YMCA and the Little League for kids six to sixteen in the lower socio-economic areas where they can't afford those others. The children are not allowed to pay, and when you think of it, when Ray was a kid his mother couldn't afford it."

  "We're not trying to build a Sugar Ray," Jackman said.

&
nbsp; "That's right," Robinson said, "and the last thing, that we're just goin' to start now, is the boxing. I didn't want people to think we're a boxing organization."

  "At the same time," Jackman said, "it's Mr. Robinson's charisma that makes it go. He has friends all over the world, and if we get the Junior Olympics started here it could include ten to fifteen cities, and we could expand to Europe, too."

  "He can open any door," Zolkover said, nodding toward Robinson. "One day the question was, where could we get readership? I said, "The Reader's Digest.' I looked up the chairman of the board, and Ray called, and it was, 'Hey, Ray!'

  "You see," he said, "we're like a church. We pay no money, so we have to have people with dedication like Ray."

  "When he was boxing," Scott said, "they called him the greatest fighter, pound-for-pound. We say that, pound-for-pound, we get the greatest distance out of our money."

  When Robinson and I left them a few minutes later, we stood for a moment on the sidewalk edging the parking area, looking out over the quadrangle of parked cars. The California climate, unlike that of the Northeast where I abide, is conducive to keeping cars clean, and I was struck by how they glistened, older models as well as new, in the sunlight.

  "Are you still on the Cadillac kick?" I said to him.

  "No," he said. "No more."

  "I remember you turned that chartreuse one in for the fuschia one."

  "The car I drive now," he said, and then pointing, "is that little red Pinto over there."

  "That's your car?"

  "Yeah," he said, and then, smiling, "but I've been there."

  "I'll say you have," I said.

  We walked slowly across the parking area. We were dawdling in the warm sunlight.

  "While you were fighting," I said, "did you take out any annuities?"

  "Nope," he said.

  "Did you buy any stocks?"

  "A few, and I sold those."

  "When you had all those investments in Harlem," I said, "I was always afraid you were going to get clipped."

  "That's right," he said.

  "So how do you get along now?"

  "I've got friends," he said. "I borrow five grand, and I pay back three. I borrow three, and pay two. Then something drops in, and I pay everybody. People say to me about this foundation, 'What are you gettin'?' They can't understand doing something for kids. I've always been a Christian believer in God. I was gifted with a talent that helped introduce me to people, and all that was in preparation for what I'm doin' now."

  "And I celebrate it," I said.

  When we got back to the office I called for a cab. While I was waiting for it, he said he thought he would take his five-mile walk, and we shook hands and wished each other well. He went out the door and, through the wide front window, I saw him start up the sidewalk, the greatest fighter I ever saw, the one I wanted so much to know.

  13

  G.I. Lew

  . . . tens of thousands of young men fighting

  for . . . for . . . well, at least for each other.

  Ernie Pyle, Brave Men

  "Bill, this is Lupie," his wife said on the phone when I called from Los Angeles. It was just after ten o'clock in the evening.

  "How are you?" I said. "And how's Lew?"

  "I'm fine," she said, "and Lew's in bed. I'll see if he's still awake."

  "Don't wake him," I said. "I just called to say that I'll be there tomorrow."

  "He's asleep," she said when she came back to the phone. "I have to wake him up at eleven o'clock, though, to give him a pill, and I'll tell him then."

  "How is he?"

  "He's all right," she said. "He's coming along fine."

  Jack Fiske had found him for me. Jack covers sports for the San Francisco Chronicle, and he had written to ask if I could find him a copy of a boxing anthology I edited and that went out of print about a decade ago. I didn't find the book, but he found Lew Jenkins living in Concord, just outside of Oakland, and he had written that Lew had had a heart attack some three years before.

  "We'll be delighted to pick you up," Lupie was saying on the phone now. "I'll have to drive Lew."

  "Then don't do it," I said. "I'll rent a car and . . ."

  "Oh, no," she said. "I do anything that has to be done for Lew, and he'll want to pick you up. He'll insist, and he's been so excited since you told him that you were coming."

  "Well," I said, "you know that he's a hero of mine."

  "I just know," she said, "that, whatever it is, you two really have something together."

  "Yes," I said, "we do."

  We do, indeed. No athlete of our time, perhaps of any time, lived more wildly than this man who disgraced the title he held of lightweight champion of the world. During his days in the ring, before I knew him, he was the epitome of the anti-hero, the antithesis of all I had grown up to admire in sports and in life, and yet when I came to know him we came to know something together that goes deeper than life styles.

  During the summer of 1952 I was trying to put together a magazine piece on what it takes to be a great combat infantryman. At Fort Benning, Georgia, the captain who was in charge of public relations took me in to meet the commandant, a major general named Robert N. Young. The general was just back from the war they called a police action that was going on in Korea, and he had commanded the Second Infantry Division there.

  "I brought two fine combat men back with me," he said. "I had places for a staff, but I didn't have a staff, so I picked two good combat sergeants. I brought back a sergeant named Adams and a sergeant named Jenkins."

  "I know the sergeant named Jenkins," I said. I knew it was Lew, because I had seen the AP story out of Korea when he had been awarded the Silver Star.

  "He's a great combat soldier," the general said. "He's famous up and down the front."

  He was famous up and down Broadway and on the main streets and side streets of so many of those towns in which he boxed, or tried to when he was coming off those drunks that lasted for days and sometimes weeks, and more than once they put whiskey in his water bottle to keep him from falling on his face in the middle of a round. He was jailed in half a dozen towns, and they wrote about that and about him, but they didn't know the half of it, and they didn't know him. I came to know hitn because of when and where I met him.

  It was that summer of 1944, and it was one of those blue and pink evenings they were getting then off the Channel coast of France. We were tied up with a Coast Guard LST several hundred yards off the beach, waiting to get in, and it was quiet and the air was soft and the water was almost flat and had in it those same pastel colors of the sky.

  The Army had pushed inland, breaking through now toward Paris, and I was coming back from England, trying to get with the Army. I was sitting in the jeep among the other jeeps on the forward deck, reading, when I heard them talking off to the right.

  "You know who's on this tub tied up with us?" the fust one said, in the high voice of a kid.

  "Sure," the second one said. "Betty Grable."

  "Lew Jenkins," the first one said. "He was the lightweight champion of the world."

  All I had to do was step from our ship to his and ask for him, and there he was. He had on a pair of dirty blue jeans and a faded blue shirt and a dirty white cap stuck on the back of that wild bush of reddish hair. There he was, a skinny little guy with the heavy brows of a fighter and those pale blue, sunken eyes, and we sat on a deck housing and we talked.

  He had put the First Division ashore at Sicily and the Thirty-sixth Division ashore at Salerno. He had put the British ashore behind the Japanese lines in Burma, and he had put them ashore again here in Normandy on D-Day. He had been up and down many beaches in the small boats, bombed and strafed and shelled, and now he was saying that that wasn't fighting.

  "Lew," I had said, "how's the Coast Guard?"

  "I guess it's all right," he said, in that Texas drawl. "But I don't like it."

  "Why?"

  "I don't want to knock the Coast Guard or
the Navy either," he said, "but we don't fight."

  "Don't fight?" I said.

  "Sure the Coast Guard and the Navy been in there," he said, looking at me in that sad, matter-of-fact way of his. "We ain't always had it easy, but we take the Army in there and then we go away and leave 'em. It ain't the same as the Army.

  "When I say the Army," he said, "I mean the soldier. I mean like the First Division. Before we took 'em in, I talked with them, and when I talked with them I knew this was the greatest Army in the world. Then I took 'em in and seen them get killed, and you know what I'd do now if I had a house?"