Somebody described him, undernourished and bony-thin at 129 pounds and with that bush of hair, as a floor mop walking on its stick end. They said, though, that you had to go back to Willie Jackson and Richey Mitchell and Charley White and Benny Leonard to remember any lightweights who could punch like him. They were amazed by the way he could punch with a straight right hand, and he was born with that, and he had it in the alley in Sweetwater and when he got to the Garden in New York.
Lew won seven fights in a row in the smaller clubs around New York before they put him in the Garden, and every fight was a brawl. By now Hymie Caplan had moved in to manage Lew, but although he had handled three other champions—Ben Jeby and Lou Salica and Solly Krieger—he couldn't handle Lew. Johnny Attell was making matches for Mike Jacobs at the Garden then, and without telling Hymie, he went up to the hotel where Lew and Katie were living and signed Lew to fight Billy Marquart. Jack Hurley had Marquart, who was another of those hands-down, walk-in left hookers like all of Jack's fighters, and he could hit.
"Are you out of your mind?" Hymie screamed at Lew when he heard about it. "This guy is a murderous puncher. He'll kill you."
"I'll kill him," Lew said. "This is gonna be a short trip. I'll knock this guy out so they'll have to give me a fight for the title."
"You're crazy," Hymie said.
Hymie tried to get out of the match. The contract had Lew's signature on it, though, and the night of the fight Marquart was another 9-5 favorite over Lew.
"Never mind," Hymie said to Lew in the dressing room. "Don't worry if he knocks you out, because we'll start building you up again."
"Ain't this awful?" Lew said, and he looked around the room. "There ain't anybody here believes in me. I'm the lone man who believes."
Eddie Joseph was the referee that night, and once he had to pull Lew off Marquart while Marquart was through the ropes and going down. It ended in the third with Joseph holding Lew off with one hand and counting Marquart out with the other.
When they matched Lew with Ambers for the lighweight championship of the world, no one could see him winning it. Ambers had fought all the good men and licked Armstrong and Zivic and Tony Canzoneri, and as it was, Lew almost walked out on the fight.
He was training at the Long Pond Inn at Greenwood Lake, and one day they brought a half dozen sportswriters up from New York to watch him work twelve rounds in that pine-paneled gym overlooking the lake. Hymie Caplan was there too, and when Lew started to work, Hymie started to shout.
"Jab!" Hymie was hollering. "Cross! One-two! Turn 'em off!"
Willie Ketchum told me later that he could see what was going to happen, and he was standing across the ring and he was trying to flag Hymie down. Nobody could flag Hymie down, though, and at the end of the fourth round Lew climbed through the ropes, ripped off his headgear and gloves and headed into the dressing room.
"What's the matter with him?" Hymie said to Willie.
"I told you," Willie said. "He don't like that stuff. With all these newspaper men here, he thinks you're trying to show him up."
Hymie took the newspaper men down to the bar, and then he saw them off. A few minutes later he ran up to Willie's room.
"Quick," he said, "he's puttin his suitcases in his car and he's leavin'!"
When Willie ran out, Lew was pulling out onto the road in his black Ford. Willie ran to Hymie's car and he got in and he chased Lew until he squeezed him off the road in Suffern, New York, about twenty-five miles from camp.
"What are you doing?" he said to Lew.
"I'm goin' back to Texas," Lew said.
"But you can't," Willie said. "You're fighting for the lightweight championship of the world."
"I don't care," Lew said. "I can knock that man out, so I don't care."
It took Willie a half hour to convince Lew to come back. Finally, Lew said he'd turn around if Hymie would stay away from him and if he could train in New York. Hymie was with Lew the night of the fight, though. Two hours before Lew climbed through the ropes for the biggest night he would ever know as a fighter, Hymie was showing him off in the restaurants around Broadway. Two hours before a fight a fighter is in a hotel room, resting in a bed, and the sportswriters never forgot Lew walking around in an old rumpled suit and a flannel shirt, with that seamed, drawn leathery face and that hair sticking up, shaking hands and smiling that small, sad smile when somebody asked him how he thought he would do with Ambers.
"You would have thought," Frank Graham wrote later in the New York Journal-American, "he was going to fight some stum-blebum in an out-of-the-way fight club, for all the tension he showed."
Lew had Ambers on the floor before the fight was a minute old. In the second round Ambers came back and started to take the lead when Lew dumped him with a left hook. Just as the bell sounded, Lew hit him a right on the chin and then he belted him two more before Billy Cavanaugh, the referee, could pull him off. In the third, Lew was on top of him and knocked him down for seven. Ambers got up groggy, and Lew piled in, and that was the end. He was the lightweight champion of the world.
"But how about hitting him after the bell at the end of the second round?" one of the newspaper men asked Lew in the dressing room, with everybody crowding around and the noise and the photographers taking pictures.
"I didn't hear any bell," Lew said.
When the cops finally cleared everybody out, Lew sat there on the rubbing table for a minute, not saying anything. Then he looked up at Willie.
"Willie," he said, "you know damn well I heard that bell."
"I know," Willie said.
"But when they start to go," Lew said in that sad way, "they got to go."
"On December fourth," Lupie was saying now, "Lew was so pleased. He said, 'Imagine, I'm sixty.' "
"I never imagined I'd make it," Lew said. "I was thrilled. Our son said, 'I never thought you'd make it.' People around New York never thought I'd make it either."
"That's right," I said.
After he won the title they matched him with Ambers again in the Garden, over-the-weight. Lew had Al Dunbar, a welterweight, with him out at Pompton Lakes, and early one morning, with Lew driving, they hit the bridge going into Paterson on Route 4.
"He's been in an auto accident," Mike Jacobs said, calling Willie on the phone and getting him out of bed. "They think he's dead."
He didn't have a scratch on him, but that afternoon he was back in New York and riding in a cab when it hit the back of another. Lew pitched forward and came out with a bad knee.
"You see?" Lew said to Willie. "I smash that car to pieces, and nobody would think I would come out of it alive. Now I'm ridin' in a cab and mindin' my own business and I hurt my knee. It don't pay to mind your own business."
Two weeks before the Ambers fight Lew came down with the grippe. For seven days he was running a fever and in bed, but Willie said it won the fight for him.
"This is one guy," Willie said, "that the grippe helped. He rested for seven days."
When they came in from Pompton for the weigh-in it was snowing. About two o'clock in the afternoon, after Lew had had his big meal and they were still sitting in Lindy's, Lew said he had some tickets to deliver.
"Lew, it's bad weather," Willie said. "Let me deliver them."
"No," Lew said. "These are personal friends, and I got to deliver 'em myself."
Willie went to the suite in the Astor to wait. At eight o'clock they were supposed to be at the Garden, and at 8:15 Lew walked in.
"Whatta ya know?" he said, and there was a big smile on his face.
"Oh-oh," Willie said. "You're drunk."
"Willie," Lew said, "I like you. You're a man."
The blizzard had closed down all the cabs, and they walked the eight blocks to the Garden through the deep snow. They had to sneak Lew into the dressing room, past the boxing commission inspectors, and WiMie sent out for mouthwash to get rid of the alcohol on Lew's breath.
It took Lew four rounds to sweat the drink out. In the sixth he had A
mbers going, and in the seventh he finished him.
"Willie," Lew said in the dressing room, "how come I didn't knock him out as quick as I did the last time?"
"I don't know," Willie said. "I can't imagine."
After that Ambers fight, Lew fought Montgomery again in the Garden, and Montgomery gave him an awful cuffing around. They had to put twenty stitches over Lew's eyes and across his nose. Before he fought Cleo McNeill in Minneapolis, he developed an abscess in his throat, and he had trouble swallowing, and he was unable to eat.
"So I took him to a doctor," Willie was telling me, "and he lanced it. Lew just swallowed and he said, 'That's fine. I'm hungry.' "
Lew knocked McNeill out in the third round. He hit him so hard that McNeill's cheek and upper lip opened as if they had been cut with a knife—and that was the way Lew could punch.
Lew was to fight Freddie "Red" Cochrane in the Garden three weeks later, and he had driven his car to Minneapolis for the McNeill fight. Willie didn't want him bouncing back in the car, so he sent Lew by train and he drove the car back. On the way he stopped off at Pittsburgh to see Harry Bobo fight Bill Poland, and that morning he turned on the radio in his motel room to listen to the news while he was shaving.
"Lew Jenkins," he heard the voice say, "the lightweight champion of the world, is in critical condition in a New Jersey hospital as the result of a motorcycle crash."
At that time Benny Goodman was playing at Frank Daley's Meadowbrook in New Jersey, and Peggy Lee was singing with the band. Lew used to ride his cycle over to the club from Pompton Lakes, and he would sit in the back with the band after they came off the stand and he would drink. About three o'clock in the morning he got on his cycle to find an all-night spot, and he hit a traffic circle.
He woke up in a hospital three hours later. They had his arms and back and neck taped, and two hours after he came to, he had them carry him back to camp, and he stripped the bandages off.
"I had to train," he told me, "but I couldn't even wash my own face."
Cochrane had him down five times, and that was when they wrote in the papers that Lew was a disgrace to the title he held. After the fight Lew went back to Texas, and it was in a clinic in Fort Worth that they found he had the three broken vertebrae in his neck. They put a cast on, and Lew went out the back door while the newspaper men were waiting at the front door because he was matched to defend his title a month later against Sammy Angott in the Garden. Then he took the cast off. He never told Willie what was wrong with him, and Angot won fourteen of the fifteen rounds.
Nineteen months after he had won the lightweight title, he had lost it. Starting with the Cochrane fight, he had lost nine in a row and eleven out of twelve before he enlisted in the Coast Guard in 1943. The last time Willie ever worked with him was when Lew fought Al Tribuani in Wilmington, Delaware. The week of the fight Lew was drunk on Broadway, and he got into a bar fight with a couple of sailors. He grabbed a glass and cut his left hand across the palm, and it took thirteen stitches to close it.
"This will heal all right," the doctor told Lew and Willie, "but I've got bad news for you."
"What?" Lew said.
"You'll never be able to close the index finger of that hand."
"Then how can I punch?" Lew said. "How can I make a fist?"
"I don't know," the doctor said. "I'm afraid you can't."
Willie told me that, when they walked out of the doctor's office together, Lew didn't say anything for a while. Then suddenly he stopped.
"Don't worry, Willie," he said. "I know what we'll do."
"What?" Willie said.
"We'll cut it off," Lew said, "and we'll make it even with the knuckles."
"You're out of your mind, Lew," Willie said. "Don't even talk about it."
"But you have to, Willie," Lew said. "Please, Willie. You got to cut it off."
"All right," Willie told him. "I'll cut it off."
Lew was training at Stillman's with one hand, and after another doctor took the stitches out, the cut reopened. Willie bandaged it, and the day before the fight he sent Lew and a sparring partner to Wilmington with Artie Rose, who worked in the corner with Willie. At midnight Artie called Willie at his apartment in New York.
"You got to come out here quick, Willie," Artie said. "They're drunk, and they're breaking up the town."
"I thought you were gonna keep an eye on him," Willie said.
"I did," Artie said, "but they went into the diner on the train, and when they came back they were drunk."
"Forget it," Willie said. "There's nothing you can do. Go back to sleep."
Lew and the sparring partner had had a pint of gin apiece on them when they went in to eat. Lew was still high when Willie got to Wilmington the next day, and he was just starting to come out of it in the dressing room.
"Get me in there," he kept saying. "I'm gonna die."
Willie sent Artie out to get a bottle of whiskey. That got Lew back on the track, and then it was time for Willie to bandage Lew's hands.
"Now we got to face it," Willie said. "I can't bandage you, Lew, with this stiff finger."
"Give it to me," Lew said. "I'll fix it."
Willie told me that Lew walked up to a wall with his finger sticking straight out. Willie said that Lew put the finger against the wall and he pushed against it, and Willie said that he couldn't watch. He said he felt himself getting sick, but Lew pushed until he closed the finger.
"You see?" he said, showing Willie his fist. "There it is."
Willie bandaged him, and he put a sponge in the left glove to keep the blood from running down Lew's arm from the cut that Willie knew would reopen when Lew punched. Lew was good and high now with the whiskey, and as they started to leave the dressing room, he hit the door with his right fist and Willie said he split it as if it had been hit with an ax.
"I'm ready," he said.
It took Tribuani three rounds to discover that Lew wasn't ready, and he knocked Lew down six times in the next seven rounds. The crowd was booing and calling Lew a bum, and when Lew and Artie and Willie got back to the dressing room Willie called it quits.
"Lew, you got to quit," Willie said, and Lew told me later that the tears were in Willie's eys and starting to run down his cheeks. "If you don't quit, I'm through, anyway. I can't stand to see a great fighter like you gettin' licked by guys like this. I can't stand it."
"Imagine that," Lew was saying at Benning. "Willie was cryin'."
"When you got out of the Army," I was saying to him now, "did you have your twenty years in?"
"Yeah, with the Coast Guard included," he said. "I couldn't stand it any more, what was happenin' to the Army. When they sent me back to Korea in 1954 the war was over, and oh, it was disgusting. It was the same everywhere. Even little Lew, when he was in, said, 'Oh, Pop, you'd kill yourself in this kind of an Army.' My whole heart, as far as the Army, is gone now, but at least I still stand at attention when they have the 'Stars and Stripes.' "
"So what did you do about a job?"
"I took any goddamn thing I could get," he said.
"You couldn't get a job without belonging to a union," Lupie said, "and you couldn't belong to a union without a job. His first job was selling cars, but Lew was such a horrible salesman. He felt sorry for the people paying all that money for those cars."
"That's right," he said.
"But at the same time," she said, turning to him now, "you weren't thinking of us, the family, and we didn't have the money."
"I stayed a month," Lew said. "I told 'em, 'You're all a bunch of goddamn thieves.' And I left the place. Some poor old farmer with no money would come in with his family in an old truck, and I was supposed to sell him what I knew was another piece of junk. I could have done it, but I didn't have the heart for it. I told 'em, 'You're all a bunch of sorry bastards.' I walked out."
"Then what did you do?"
"I was a greenskeeper," he said. "I worked almost five years on a golf course out here. Then I went to the linen
supply as a driver, and I worked there about five years."
"Until he had the heart attack," Lupie said.
"After I was out of the Army three months," he said, "I'da gone back as a corporal if they'da had me."
He got up out of the armchair and took several steps and he held out his hands. Disgust and anger were in his face.
"Look at these friggin' bums hangin' around in civilian life on the corner like this," he said, dropping his jaw and hanging his head. "Long hair, beards, dirty. It's such a shock. We went up to San Francisco a couple of years ago, and Lupie had to hold me. I said, 'Look at these goddamn bums.' I like to cried. It's so far gone now, nobody can save it.
"You go to a shopping center here, and they talk about things bein' high, and there's all that money. There's no honesty in anything, and there's no faith in anything anymore. You go to a store and see bums like me loaded up and their kids with everything.
"Lupie and me," he said, "we go down there and look at it. I said to Lupie, 'I'm gonna get in this food stamp line.' Lupie said, 'Get out of there.' The guy told me, 'You can't have 'em.' I said, 'Whatta you mean? These people have more money than I have.' Ain't that awful?"
Once They Heard the Cheers Page 41