Once They Heard the Cheers

by Wilfred Charles Heinz

  "Feel that?" he would say. "Hit me a punch there."

  "Please, Charley," I would say. "I believe you."

  "No," he would say. "Go ahead. Hit me."

  Embarrassed, I would throw a right hand underneath, not really hard but harder than I would want anyone to throw one into me.

  "Come on. Hit me harder," he would say and then, after I had complied, he would grin and say, "You see? Not bad for a fella my age."

  He trained five world champions, four of them for an avaricious man named Al Weill, and he was a teacher. In fact, in my seventeen years of formal schooling I knew only four other teachers I would put up there in the same class with Charley.

  "You watched that fella in the ring?" he said to me that afternoon at the CYO after the two heavyweights had finished pounding each other. He nodded over toward the corner where the shorter of the two was punching the heavy bag.

  "Yes," I said.

  "What do you think of him?"

  "What do I think of him?" I said. "I don't know. From what I saw, I think he's just a strong, awkward kid."

  "But he ain't a kid," Charley said. "He's twenty-five."

  "Oh?" I said.

  "Weill's got him," he said, "and he wants me to work with him. At my age, though, and startin' all over again with some guy who's twenty-five and all he don't know and has to be taught, I could be just wastin' my time."

  "That's right," I said. "If you ask me, it's a real long shot."

  "I'll tell you somethin', though," Charley said. "He can take a punch, and he can punch like hell. With the heavyweights we got around today, maybe that's all you need."

  "Maybe," I said, "but I don't know, Charley."

  "I'll introduce you," he said.

  He walked over to where the fighter, wide-legged, was throwing heavy punches at the bag. He brought him back to me. The fighter's black curly hair and face and neck glistened with sweat, and it had soaked through his white T-shirt, graying it.

  "This is Rocky Marciano," Charley said, "and this is Bill Heinz."

  We shook hands, my right hand in his right glove, the fighter smiling.

  "Bill's a sportswriter," Charley said.

  "Is that so?" the fighter said, smiling again.

  "Rocky and a buddy of his bum down from Brockton, Massachusetts, on the trucks," Charley said. "They stay in the 'Y' for $1.50 a night."

  "That's right," the fighter said.

  "Well, you're with a real good man here in Charley," I said.

  "I know that," the fighter said.

  "You listen to him," I said, "and do what he tells you."

  "Oh, I do," the fighter said.

  "Yeah, he does," Charley said, and then to the fighter, "You can go back to the bag now."

  "I'm pleased to have met you," the fighter said.

  "I'm pleased to have met you, too," I said, "and good luck."

  "Thank you," he said.

  We watched him walk back to the bag and set his feet and start punching again.

  "Who knows?" Charley said.

  I didn't. I saw a lot of the fighter and Charley after that, and one night four years later I sat in what was then called the Municipal Stadium in Philadelphia and I watched the fighter, with one right hand punch, knock out Jersey Joe Walcott in the thirteenth round in one of the greatest of all title fights and win the heavyweight championship of the world.

  That was why I was talking with Dr. Josephat Phaneuf. I was putting together a magazine piece about the impact upon Brockton, twenty miles due south of Boston, of that right-hand punch. The year before, Brockton had exported 12,384,378 pairs of shoes, and I went into the shoe factories where, in the executive offices, salesmen told me that coming from a champion's town gave them access throughout the country to buyers whose doors had been closed to them before. I checked with television dealers whose sales had gone up since Marciano's fights had begun to be shown on TV, and with repair men whose clients demanded impossible guarantees that their sets would not malfunction during a fight. I visited loan offices where Marciano's supporters signed for monies they bet on his fights, and I traced the profits of some of those wagers to automobile salesmen who told me of customers who had started out with near wrecks and were now driving new Buicks, and Oldsmobiles, and even Cadillacs.

  I went, of course, into the home of Pierino and Pasqualina Marchegiano at 168 Dover Street, where they had moved with their three sons and three daughters when Marciano was eleven. They lived in five immaculate rooms on the first floor of the two-family green-shingled house across the street from the James Edgar Playground where the fighter had played baseball and dreamed of some day being a big league catcher.

  Allie Colombo took me there, as he led me elsewhere around Brockton. He had been a boyhood friend of Marciano's, the one who, as Charley Goldman had said that first day, used to bum to New York on trucks with the fighter, and he helped train him and he worked in his corner. I had come to know him in the training camps at the Long Pond Inn and then at Grossinger's as an intelligent, perceptive young man who found the consequences of his close friend's rise to the heavyweight championship not only gratifying but highly amusing.

  "You know Pop," he said, driving me to the Marchegiano home then.

  "Of course," I said.

  I had seen him around the camps, a rather short, frail, bespectacled, quiet man in his late fifties, his close-cropped black hair turning gray. After he had come to this country in his teens and gone to work in the shoe factory, he had fought in World War I at Chateau-Thierry and elsewhere and been wounded by shrapnel and gassed.

  "Have you met Mom?" Allie asked.

  "No," I said.

  "They're a great pair," Allie said, chuckling, "and you'll love Mom. After Rocky started knocking guys out in his fights in Providence, the press started to come around. Rock's built like Mom, you know, so they'd take a look at little Pop and they'd look at her, and you could see them thinking, 'Oh, she's the one. That's where Rocky gets it.' So they'd all talk to Mom.

  "Then Rocky started training in camp, and Pop came along. Now the press was all interviewing Pop, and Mom would read it. So one day there was a phone call for Pop at the Long Porld and it was Mom."

  He was chuckling again.

  "She said, 'Hey! When you come home?' He said, 'I can't come home.' She said, 'What you mean, you can't come home? You a husband and a father, and you supposed to be home.' So Pop said, 'I gotta help Rocky.' She said, 'What you do to help Rocky?' Pop said, 'I carry the pail and I carry the towel.' She said, 'You carry the pail and you carry the towel? Rocky got Allie, and he got Charley Gold to carry the pail and carry the towel. You come home.' So Pop went home."

  He parked the car, still savoring his story, in front of the house. As we got out a mailman, the bag suspended from his left shoulder, had turned off the sidewalk toward the house.

  "Hey, Red!" Colombo said, and then to me, "You got to meet this guy. He was a good shortstop, and he and Rocky went South together when they tried to make it with the Cubs' farm team."

  He introduced me to Red Gormley. Standing across the street from that James Edgar Playground where he, too, had dreamed of being a big leaguer, Gormley told how they had been released by the Fayetteville, North Carolina, farm club of the Cubs and then had gone to Goldsboro, where they were also let go.

  "Our arms were gone," he said. "We couldn't throw. We were broke, and I guess we looked like a couple of bums, so we decided to come home. A guy picked us up in an old car. Rocky got in front and we were driving along and Rocky turned to me and he said, 'The heck with it. I'm through with baseball. I'm gonna get some fights, and you're gonna handle me.'

  "There I was," Gormley said, "sitting right next to half the money in the world, and I didn't know it."

  He hitched the mail sack higher on his shoulder and started up the steps of 168 Dover Street. To that address now it had become his duty six days a week to deliver some of the mail that a heavyweight champion gets from around the world.

  "So wha
t's the sense of talking it?" he said, turning back to us. "I've got a wife and three kids now."

  Allie Colombo took the mail from Gormley and we went into the house. It was early afternoon, and Pop was in the living room. We shook hands and Mom came out of the kitchen, a robust, blackhaired woman in whom I, like all the others, could immediately see her son the fighter, and by whose warmth I was immediately engulfed.

  "You hungry?" she said to Allie, and then turning to me. "I fix you something to eat?"

  "Oh, no," Allie said. "We just had lunch."

  "You sure?" she said to me.

  "I'm sure, but thank you," I said. "I just want to talk with you and Pop."

  "Sure, we talk," she said. "We tell you what you want to know."

  "Do you ever go back to the shoe factory?" I said to Pop. "I mean, just to visit with some of the workers you know?"

  "Sometimes I go back," he said. "Not much."

  For years, with the nails in his mouth and using both hands and both feet, he had run a Number 5 bedlaster. It formed the toes and heels of the shoes, and Marciano had told me that the shoe workers claimed it took more out of a man than any other machine. Two years before, at the age of fifty-eight and suffering from a respiratory ailment attributed to his war experience, Pop had retired.

  "Now I go back," he said, "and I see my old friends and everybody say, 'What a difference, Pete. Years ago you couldn't talk with the super, and now he take you around the shop.' "

  "I'll bet," I said. "Now you're the father of the heavyweight champion of the world."

  "In the shop they have the shoe," he said. "There's something wrong with the shoe. These are good shoe, but they don't try to sell these shoe because they have some little thing wrong. Every year they sell these shoe cheap to the worker. Every year I work there I go to old Lucey, and I tell him I want to buy a pair of these shoe."

  "Luce," Mom said. "He manage the shop."

  "And every year," Pop said, "old Lucey he tell me, 'We no got your size, Pete.' "

  "That's right," Mom said.

  "Now every time I go," Pop said, "you know what they do? They measure the feet!"

  I looked over at Allie Colombo, and he was laughing. That got me to laughing too, and I looked at Pop and he was serious, just contemplating it.

  "What I'd like to do, Pop," I said, "is see where you used to work. I don't want to put you out, but do you think you could take us to the factory and show us?"

  "You want to go to the shop?" Pop said.

  "Sure," Mom said. "You take Beel and Allie. Beel, he's a friend of Rocky now, too, and he wants to see where you used to work."

  "So," Pop said.

  He got up and left the room, and when he came back he was carrying an obviously new, light gray topcoat. When he started to put it on Colombo got up and helped him into it.

  "You notice that?" Colombo said, turning to me, and he was chuckling again. "You see how Pop just shrugged his shoulders then, kind of hiked the coat up? After the Rock knocks those guys out, I climb up into the ring with the robe. After I help him into it, he shrugs just like Pop did, as if to say, 'Okay. Let's go.' "

  "So when you come back from the shop," Mom said, "then you hungry. Then you eat with us. Yes?"

  "Fine," I said. "I would like that."

  He led us through the shop, and everywhere they turned from the machines to greet him and shake his hand and clap him on the back and ask him about Rocky. Then the word must have spread to the front office, because one of them came out and led us in there and introduced me to another. I no longer remember their names or the positions they held, but I told them what I was doing in Brockton.

  "Well," one of them said, "we're not interested in any publicity or any advertising."

  "Good," I said, the ire popping up in me like a cork, "because you're not going to get any from me. I'm not in publicity, and to get any advertising in the magazine you have to buy it. I'm a reporter, and all I'm interested in is Pete here, and where he used to work."

  "Well," he said, "all we care about is Pete, too."

  I know, I was thinking In all those years he worked here you never could fit him with a pair of shoes, and his son, now the heavyweight champion of the world, once told me how, during the summer and on school holidays, he used to carry his father's lunch to the shop. He saw how his father had to work and he saw the money he brought home, and he told me he resolved then that he would never go into the shoe shops.

  I have forgotten what we talked about for the next few minutes As we were walking toward the car, though, Allie Colombo was chuckling again

  "What's got to you now?" I said.

  "You," he said. "I wish Rocky could have heard you lay that on them in there about the publicity and Pop "

  "I hope I didn't embarrass Pop," I said.

  "Pop's all right," Allie said. "Right, Pop?"

  "What?" Pop said.

  Allie let Pop and me out at the house, and we talked for a while in the living room while Mom prepared dinner. Peter, the youngest of their six children, was thirteen then, and it was while the four of us ate that Mom told, when I asked her, about the birth of the eldest son at 80 Brook Street and about Dr. Phaneuf.

  "I'd like to go and see him," I said.

  "He's not well," she said, "but you go see him. He remember, and he tell you. You see, I lose my first baby. The doctor say, 'You gonna have no more baby,' I cry. After a while I say, 'If God want me to have baby, and if God give me children, I gonna do the best I can.'

  "All I want is to keep my house clean. I keep my children clean, I make my supper. Always at breakfast I tell my children, 'Now try your best in school.' I tell them the same like when they go to church.

  "Now it's just sit in my heart," she said. "It's hard to say the beautiful thing that happen with Rocky. You feel happy, and you feel like crying when you think."

  "A heavyweight champion," I said, "has an influence on the lives of a lot of people. All over this town I guess you meet people who have a special feeling for Rocky."

  "I don't go downtown," Pop said. "Too much talk."

  "I don't go but one day a week," Mom said. "Last week I went to post office and there is a big line and I wait, and a man I don't know say to me, 'How is our boy?' I say, 'Fine.' He say, 'You know, we're very proud of him down at the Cape.' Then he introduce his wife and his sister. Who is this man?

  "I walk on the street and a woman come up to me. She say, 'God bless you, Mrs. Marchegiano. My son and my son-in-law they make a fortune on your boy. I tell no one, but I tell you because I want to thank you.' Who is this woman?

  "I go in a store. In the store the man say, 'If you need credit, Mrs. Marchegiano, you get credit. Your son make a lot of money for us.' I go to Rocky's house and I see a letter there from someone who wants his picture. I bring it home and I look at the letter and I say that God been so good to my son to give this beautiful luck, why can't I give to people who like my son? So I send these poor people the picture. Sometimes I cry."

  After dinner Peter and I helped clear the dining room table, but Mom said she would rather do the dishes alone.

  "You talk," she said. "You sit and talk."

  At the kitchen table Pop, with two saucers in front of him, was slowly and carefully peeling an apple. Peter and I sat down with him, watching him turning the apple in one hand, the peel curling over the knife in the other. He put the peels in one saucer, and then he cut a half dozen slices from the peeled apple and placed them in the other saucer and passed it first to me and then to Peter.

  I asked Peter what it was like for him, being the brother of the heavyweight champion, and if he found it difficult to concentrate in school on a day when his brother would fight that night. He said that on the day of the second Marciano-Walcott fight, the science teacher had announced a test.

  "Then he asked me," Peter said, "if I thought I could take it. I said, 'I'm afraid I can't today.' Then he let me take it the next day."

  As the three of us talked, there were lo
ng pauses in our conversation. There was just the quiet in the room and throughout the house, with none of the conversational clatter that clutters so many American homes, and with just the sound of Mom doing the dishes. At one point there were no more apple slices on the saucer.

  "Cut me another slice of apple, Pop," Peter said. "Please?"

  "What's the matter?" Pop said. "You old enough now. You know how to cut the apple."

  "I know," Peter said, smiling, "but I like the way you do it."

  Pop said nothing, just nodding. He began to slice the apple again and when, fifteen years later, I heard on the radio that a small private plane had crashed in Iowa and Rocky Marciano was dead, that scene in that quiet kitchen and what Mom had said there earlier and all it conveyed to me came first to mind. Now another eight years had passed, and I called Peter at the sporting goods store he owns in Mansfield, just west of Brockton.

  "You sound just like your brother," I said, startled by his voice. There was not only the same broad 'a', but the same cadence—the same level and the same rhythm—and it was as if I were talking to his brother.