Once They Heard the Cheers

by Wilfred Charles Heinz

  "Ask him about his favorite football player," Wergeles said to me another day in the dressing room at Stillman's. Again it was as if Beau were a child.

  "You have a favorite football player, Beau?"

  "My friend," he said smiling. "He number seven. He a tackle, I think."

  "Number seven," I said, "is Mel Hein. He's a center, Beau."

  "That's right," Beau said. "He fast, and he my friend."

  "Ask him about his favorite hockey player," Wergeles said.

  "You have a favorite hockey player too, Beau?"

  "Yeah, number seven," he said.

  "That's Phil Watson," I said.

  "Yeah," Beau said. "He fast, and he my friend too."

  "Has he met Mel Hein and Phil Watson?" I said to Wergeles. I should have asked Beau, but as I have said, that was the way it was around him, and it becomes almost instinctive for a reporter to try to belong.

  "No," Wergeles said. "He never met them, but he likes the way they play. He thinks everybody he likes is his friend."

  "That's right," Beau said, laughing and nodding his head.

  His Maker was his friend too. He conceived of that relationship, however, as one in which he had a responsibility to protect his Friend.

  "Chick tells me," I said to him once, "that you pray before every fight."

  "That's right," he said, grinning.

  "For what do you pray?"

  "I pray that nobody get hurt," he said. "Then I pray that it be a good fight."

  "Don't you ever pray to win?"

  "No," he said, shaking his head. "I would never do that."

  "Why not?" I said.

  "Suppose I pray to win," he said. "The other boy, he pray to win, too. Then what God gonna do?"

  In that Janiro fight, four months after the operation, the knee gave out again in the fourth round, and Beau fell to the canvas. He managed to rise and he tried to go on, but they had to stop it. After that, and after another operation, he fought for five more years, mostly outside of New York, but he was never again as good as he had been. In his last fight in the Garden, where he set the record of appearing in twenty-one main events, Tuzo Portuguez licked him, and I went back to the dressing room to see him.

  "I'm sorry, Beau," I said.

  He was sitting on a stool, his white terrycloth robe over him, the sweat still on him.

  "Were it a good fight?" he said.

  "Yes, it was a good fight," I said, and it had been.

  "Did the people like it?" he said.

  "Oh yes," I said. "They liked it."

  "If the people like it," he said, smiling, "that's all that matter. That's good."

  He was born Sidney Walker in Augusta, Georgia, and he fought in the battle royals. They would blindfold a half dozen or more blacks in a ring and sound the bell, and the survivor was the winner. It came in after bearbaiting went out, and he shined shoes at the Augusta National Golf Club. Bobby Jones and Jimmy Demaret and the others whose names could have floated a bond issue staked him to his boxing career. They sent him north, and somebody was supposed to be handling his money. Those twenty-one Garden fights drew a total of $1,578,000 at the gate. When he fought Bob Montgomery there on August 4, 1944, and admission was by purchase of United States War Bonds, the gross gate for that fight was $35,864,000, but where Beau's money went I could never find out.

  He retired in 1955 after 112 fights and after twice holding the New York State version of the lightweight championship of the world. Some five years later I saw Chick Wergeles upstairs in the boxing office at the Garden, and I asked him what Beau was doing.

  "He's down in Miami, shining shoes at the Fontainebleau," Wergeles said. "He's doin' fine."

  "How fine can he be doing?" I said. "He started as a shoeshine boy, and now he's a shoehine boy again."

  "But now when he shines shoes," Wergeles said, "he gets twenty bucks. Them guys with money, they want a former world's champion to shine their shoes, so they ask for Beau."

  The cab driver dropped me off now at the south entrance, and I walked through the lobby looking for either a bellhop or the bell captain at his station. The lobby is Grand Central Terminal with foreign marble, furniture, and potted palms, and I found the station just inside the north doors.

  "Excuse me," I said, "but can you tell me where I can find Beau Jack? In the barber shop?"

  "Beau?" he said. "I'm not sure. There's a TV fight card on, and he may have gone to the weigh-in. Just a second."

  He pushed open the nearest of the glass doors. Two couples were getting into a car at the foot of the broad steps, and a couple of carparks were standing off to the right, talking.

  "Hey!" he shouted at the two. "Did you see the Beau go out? Did Beau go to the weigh-in?"

  The two shrugged their shoulders and shouted back something I couldn't hear. He let the door swing back and turned back to me.

  "I don't know if he went out or not," he said, "but you might find him in the barber shop."

  "And how do I find that?"

  "Take an elevator over there. Go down to the basement and turn left."

  "Thank you," I said.

  "Sure," he said.

  It was just after ten o'clock in the morning and just into the start of the slow season in the temples of Ra along Collins Avenue. Back north again now the winter's sun worshippers would be contemplating their fading tans and confronting their credit card accounts, and when one of the elevators stopped on its way down, there was only one couple on it. They were in tennis clothes and carried racquets, and I rode to the basement with them, turned left and found the barber shop.

  In one of the chairs a customer, his head back, his eyes closed and towelling around his neck, was being shaved by the lone barber. In front of her vanity, her back to it, the manicurist was sitting on a stool and reading a newspaper. In the far left corner, with three pairs of white shoes and one black shoe on the floor in front of him, Beau Jack was sitting on a chair, buffing the other black shoe. He had his head down, but I recognized that head with the small, tight curls of hair grayed now.

  "Beau," I said. "I'm Bill Heinz."

  He looked up. He put the shoe down on the floor beside the others and stood up, heavier now but the weight well distributed. He had on neat gray slacks and an immaculate white T-shirt with the logo of Don King, the boxing promoter, on it, and he smiled and took my hand.

  "I used to be a sports writer in New York," I said, "when you were a fighter there."

  "Sure," Beau said. "Sure."

  I doubt that he remembered me for, starting with that day some thirty years before when I printed my name on that slip of paper so that he could study it, our conversations were always brief, and I was but one of many. He was still smiling at me now, though, as if he did remember.

  "What I'm doing, Beau," I said, "is writing a book about athletes I remember, and . . ."

  "Good," he said. "Good."

  "—and, of course, I remember you. If you have a few minutes, now or later, I'd like to talk with you."

  "Yes, sir," he said.

  He turned and led me past the barber chairs to the small carpeted foyer just inside the glass door. He pulled one of the chairs away from the wall and turned it for me. Then he turned another so that, as we sat down, we faced each other.

  "Beau," I said, "how are you doing?"

  "Fine," he said, smiling. "Just fine."

  "How long have you been here?"

  "It's twenty-two years," he said. "Mr. Ben Novack, he's my friend. You know him?"

  "No," I said, "but I know he runs this hotel."

  When they built the Fontainebleau right after the war and it became the show place of Miami Beach, I would see his name often in what they used to call the Broadway columns. This singer or that comedian would be appearing there for Ben Novack.

  "He's a fine man," Beau was saying, "and I get along just fine. All my friends come here. Joe Louis. Muhammed Ali and Willie Pep, they come by and say hello. My great friend Frank Sinatra and Sammy Davis
and all his friends, they come by here. I know no man like Frank Sinatra and Sammy Davis and all his friends, and they pay me respects."

  "That's good, Beau," I said.

  "Rocky Marciano was my friend too," he said. "He was some man."

  "That's right," I said.

  "He was my best friend," he said, "and I went to his funeral, but they wouldn't let nobody see him, just maybe his family."

  On August 31, 1969, on the eve of his forty-sixth birthday, Rocky Marciano died in the crash of a private plane in an Iowa cornfield. He was buried in Fort Lauderdale, Florida.

  "They didn't open the casket," Beau was saying. "Just for his family and Joe Louis. I know they opened it for Joe."

  On October 26, 1951, in Madison Square Garden and in his last fight, Joe Louis was knocked out by Rocky Marciano. Joe was thirty-seven years of age and he took a beating. In the eighth round, he stood helpless against the ropes, his eyes glazed and his arms hanging at his side, and Marciano landed a right to the jaw. Louis's head went back, and he was suspended there for the briefest of moments, the back of his neck against the top rope. Then he slumped through the ropes and onto the ring apron, and that was the end of the great career of the man for whom Beau Jack was telling me now, they would open his conqueror's coffin.

  "Are you married now, Beau?" I said. I knew that he had been married while he had been fighting, and that there were a number of children.

  "I been married twice," he said. "This time eleven years."

  "How many children do you have?"

  "I got all together fifteen. Ten and five, boys and girls."

  "Any fighters among them?"

  "No, they not fighters," he said. "Just to protect they own self and don't fight on the street. Maybe they want to be fighters, but they ain't gonna stick to it. Too much life otherwise."

  "Yes," I said. "Life is easier now than it was when you were growing up."

  It was different talking with just Beau now, without Chick Wergeles or someone else prompting him. I felt, though, that even if there had been someone else there, we would no longer be talking around Beau, for the manchild, more serious now, had grown up.

  "My wife is strict," he said, "because you got to put the bell on 'em or otherwise you're gonna have a bad child somewhere. They respect her and me, and so far I got wonderful children."

  "Some live up North?" I said.

  "That's right," he said. "They live in New York, and every other Saturday they call me. One have two cabs in New Rochelle, New York, and the other boys have jobs on the dock and things, and they doin' fine for theirselves."

  "I'm glad to hear that, Beau."

  "Then I have one son here that goin' to college next year, and he gonna be a doctor. That's what he says."

  "Well, I hope he makes it," I said. "That would be wonderful."

  "Then the other younger boy he say he gonna be an arch-i-teck. He fourteen, and he say he gonna build houses that moves, and you don't have to have trucks to move 'em. When he just small he draw a round thing and he draw boxes around it. He say that's a house and those rooms, and I don't see how, but he got it up here in his mind."

  "That would be truly wonderful," I said, "to have one son a doctor and another an architect."

  "That's right," he said, smiling.

  "You earned a lot of money as a fighter, Beau," I said. "Do you know where it went?"

  "No, sir," he said. "I don't know and I don't care. The members of the Augusta Golf Club gave me enough to get started, and I enjoyed it and I thankful. I'd never got out of Augusta but for Bobby Jones, may he rest in peace, and them, and they give me the money."

  "I never asked you how you started fighting," I said. "Was it on the streets, or did you start in the battle royals?"

  "Some guys took my shoe shine polish," he said, "and I come home cryin' and my grandmother . . ."

  "Excuse me," a woman said, standing just inside the door. "Can you tell me where the lost-and-found is?"

  "Yes, ma'am," Beau said. "Right there to the left, and go down there and push the door."

  "Thank you," the woman said.

  "Yes, ma'am," Beau said.

  "You came home," I said, when he turned back to me, "and your grandmother . . . ?"

  "That's right," he said. "She said, 'You pull your clothes off.' Then she gave me a good spankin' and said, 'Don't you ever run.' She live to 112, and she plowed a mule like she nineteen. She worked a farm—that's what we had—and all that work and farmin' made me strong in my fights."

  "What were the battle royals like?" I said.

  "They used to put five, six guys in a ring at the same time," he said, "and they blindfold us, and when the bell ring you walk into a shot and you don't know where you are. I stay in my corner, and when I feel the wind I know to get goin'. One time it only my brother and me left and I knock him out. Yes, sir."

  "Where were those fights held?"

  "In Augusta, in an auditorium like a car place but the cars are gone, and the guy put in a ring, and it was a nice place."

  "I never knew anyone else," I said, "who seemed to enjoy boxing as much as you did."

  "That's right," he said, smiling. "I liked that."

  "You'd be the first one into Stillman's, and about the last to leave. As long as there was sparring going on, you'd be there behind the rings watching."

  "You remember that?" he said.

  "Yes, I do."

  "I watched 'em all," he said. "I love that, and sometimes a boy I lookin' at I was gonna meet him, and I know exactly what he's doin'. In my lifetime, though, I never want to hurt anybody, just that it be a good fight."

  "I know," I said. "You used to ask me if it had been a good fight and if the crowd liked it."

  "You remember that too?" he said. "That's right. I liked to see the crowd, and even when I losin' I could hear my name and the screamin' and that make me fight harder. I used to have so many ladies on the Forty-ninth Street side in the Garden, and I'd hear the screamin' and that make me fight harder, too."

  "In your work here now, Beau," I said, "have you any idea how many pairs of shoes you'll shine in a day during the busy season?"

  "No, sir, I don't," he said. "At the Master's in Augusta was the most I did, though. Oh, my goodness, I don't know how many I did there. That Jimmy Demaret he had all kinds of shoes. He had green shoes. He was a real sharp man."

  "I know," I said. "What are your hours here?"

  "I work kind of late," he said. "I here at eight until six, and then I go to the men's room upstairs until twelve. I give towels and soap, and you got to keep goin' when you got a lot of children and the food so high, but I don't mind workin'."

  "Are you here five days a week?"

  "Seven days," he said.

  "Seven days a week?"

  "That's right," he said, "but I come a little late on Sunday."

  "That's a lot of work hours, Beau."

  "My grandmother taught me how to live in the world," he said, "and everything she taught, it come true. 'If you want to live a long life like me,' she used to tell me."

  "Well, you're fifty-six," I said, "so you're half way there."

  "And I think I gonna make it," he said, grinning. "I don't smoke or drink, and I do thank God for lettin' me live."

  "So, Beau," I said, getting up, "I'm glad to see you looking so well and doing so well, and I thank you for taking this time to talk to me."

  "That's all right," he said, standing up and taking my hand, "And I want to thank you for all the time you took writin' about me when I fightin', and all the time you're takin' to write about me again now."

  I thought about that, leaving Beau. The next morning I had packed my bag to leave for St. Petersburg, and I was checking the room. The Miami Herald was on the lamp table where I had left it, and I started to pick it up to put it into the waste basket. It was opened to the second section, and the banner headline across the page read: "Novack Said to Owe Hotel $3.3 Million."

  "Hotelman Ben Novack," I read, "o
wes the Fontainebleau Hotel $3,394,000, according to bankruptcy court testimony made public for the first time Friday."

  I know nothing about that beyond what I read. All I know is that, down in the basement of that hotel during the day, and then up in the men's room on the first floor at night, Beau Jack, who twice won the lightweight championship and set a record for appearances in Madison Square Garden, works more than a hundred hours a week, shining shoes and handing out soap and towels, paying his own way.

  16

  The Man They Padded

  the Walls for

  He was the best I ever had, with the possible