Once They Heard the Cheers

by Wilfred Charles Heinz

  "I know," he said. "Everybody says that."

  "How are you and your folks?" I said.

  "Pop died three years ago," he said, "but Mom is fine. She's living with my sister Alice now."

  "I'm sorry to hear about Pop," I said. "He was a shy and quiet man and a good man."

  "You're right, he was," he said. "He was seventy-nine when he went."

  I told him that I wanted to visit with Mom and him again, and three days later I drove to Mansfield. It was early afternoon when I got into the town and found the store. It occupied a single-story red-brick building on a corner, and when he came out of the office in the back I was startled once more.

  "You not only sound like your brother," I said, as we shook hands, "but you look like him, too."

  He was wearing chinos and a white T-shirt, his build the same as that of his brother, and his face split into the same smile.

  "That's right," he said, "but I'm a little heavy right now."

  Not certain how long it would take me to drive to Mansfield, I had arrived more than an hour early. He said that he had some work to finish, and I went out and, following his directions, found a diner. When I returned he was still busy in the back room, and he introduced me to the two young women working with him and then I waited in the front of the store amid the baseball gloves and bats, the baseballs, basketballs, footballs, and soccer balls, the boxing gloves, track shoes, tennis rackets, fishing poles, and fishing lures.

  Several times he came out to serve customers. One was a woman who wanted a baseball glove for her son, had no idea what position he played and said she would return another day. Two young men were comparison shopping for jogging shoes, and there was a father who led in his son seeking a baseball glove. The boy was about eight or nine, and it was as if he were silenced by finding himself in a shrine. The father tried to bring the boy into it, asking him his opinion of one glove after another as they tried them on him, but the boy was elevated beyond opinions. When the father finally settled on one, the boy walked out ahead of him, the new glove on his left hand, and on his face a small smile and a faraway look that, I presumed, was now reaching as far as Fenway Park.

  "Gee, I'm sorry," Peter said, after the two had left. "I didn't know I was going to be so tied-up."

  "That's all right," I said. "I'm in no hurry."

  "My sister Alice is bringing Mom over to our place for dinner, and we can talk then. I have to deliver some bats at the high school in Brockton, though."

  "That's fine," I said.

  I followed him in my car and parked it in front of his split level in one of Brockton's newer residential areas. I got into his station wagon and we started for the high school.

  "How's the business going?" I said.

  "Real good," he said, "I started it in '73 and I sell Brown University, and I've probably got a hundred schools and colleges."

  "Do I remember that you played some professional baseball?"

  "Right," he said. "Three years in the Milwaukee Braves farm system, but I didn't make it."

  "That was a big disappointment?"

  "Very much so," he said. "Like a ton of bricks. You feel as though you're as good as anybody there, but you look around and see guys who can run faster than you, hit the ball better than you, and do everything better than you. The one thing that kept me going was the love of baseball, like Rocky must have loved boxing.

  "I said to myself, 'Should I go home and tell everybody?' I wanted to lie about it, but I figured if I told the truth, I'd be better off in the long run. My dad always told me, 'Tell the truth, and you can't go bad.' Rocky was one in a million, because he never had to make excuses. How do you follow forty-nine straight fights and never lose a fight? It's very difficult."

  "But Rocky didn't make it in baseball either," I said. "Boxing saved him. Did you ever want to be a fighter?"

  "I boxed in college," he said. "At the University of Miami. I was successful. I loved it next to baseball, and I won a championship. I knocked out two of my opponents in college, but I don't know, I didn't go into it."

  "You had a college education, and you didn't have the economic hunger your brother had."

  "That's it," he said. "I didn't have to do it. Rocky's answer was that you always have to be hungry."

  The Brockton High School is an example of architectural cubism, a huge gray-white rectangular block, the upper stories overhanging the first, and we drove down off the road and around one side of it. He parked the car and got out and opened a rear door and picked up the half dozen bats that were on the back seat.

  "I'll be back in a couple of minutes," he said.

  Beyond, and down a slight slope, I could see part of the stadium, the back of the concrete stand, and part of the field and the running track bordering it. There were two yellow school buses in the parking space near the stand, some students standing by them.

  "When was all this built?" I asked him when he came back.

  "In 1970," he said, "right after Rocky died. Armond Colombo, a cousin of Allie's, is married to my sister Betty, and he coaches football here. In '70, when they named the field Rocky Marciano Stadium, they won every game they played. It was like someone was directing the show."

  He had started the car, and he drove slowly around the side of the school and back onto the road. He stopped at the side of the road where we could look down the length of the field, with the concrete stand on one side and, across the football field, the wooden bleachers. There were some runners in warm-up clothes jogging around the track bordering the field and clusters of others here and there. Facing the road was the sign: rocky marciano stadium. Centered under the sign, resting on the turf, was a large boulder.

  "You see the rock there?" he said. "The teams are now called the Boxers, and the mascot is a boxer dog, Rocky. They also have a Rocky Marciano room in the city museum."

  "It's an impressive memorial," I said.

  "Yes, it is," he said.

  "When he went," I said, "I naturally thought immediately of your folks and of you. How did you hear about it?"

  "I'm glad you asked that now," he said. "When we get to the house I'd rather that you didn't ask Mom. She took it real hard."

  "I presumed that," I said. "That's why I asked now. What was he doing in a private plane in Iowa at night?"

  "It was sort of a business-pleasure thing," he said, "He was flying from Chicago to Des Moines. The next day was his birthday, September first."

  "I had forgotten that."

  "He was going to be forty-six. They crashed about 10:30. I was woke up by Mom, who was home alone with my Dad. It was about 1:30 or 2 a.m. She woke me up screaming on the phone. She kept repeating, 'Figlio mio, cuore di mama!' I understood what she was saying, but immediately I thought of my dad, because it's a kind of idiom in the Italian language. It means, 'My son, heart of my life.' I still had my dad in mind, though, because he wasn't well.

  "I said, 'Mom, please settle down.' But she kept repeating, 'Figlio mio, cuore di mama!' I said, 'Mom, what's happened there?" She said, 'Your brother was killed in a plane crash!' I have another brother—Louis."

  "I know."

  "I jumped in my car and this close friend, Henry Tartaglia, came up. He said. 'Do you know what's happening? Have you heard anything? I heard that Rocky Marciano or Rocky Graziano was killed in a plane crash.' I said, T hope it's Graziano.' Hank drove me over and we went into the house, and then the phone calls started coming and the reporters and so on."

  "I hope this isn't going to upset Mom," I said. "I mean my coming back after all these years and reviving memories of Rocky."

  "Oh, no," he said. "Mom's all right now, and she'll be glad to see you."

  He put the car in drive, and we started along the road.

  "As you know," I said, "when Rocky was training at Grossinger's, Mom would be there some of the time, and she called it 'The Grossinge.' She didn't eat her desserts, so she'd carry them over to the cottage and she kept them in the refrigerator. She'd say, 'Beel, you
get hungry tonight you come over and you have a piece of pie, piece of cake.' "

  "That sounds like Mom," he said.

  "Her heart was always going out to the acts that appeared in the night club on the lower level there. There was this dance team that I think she wanted to adopt. She said to me one night, 'Oh, Beel, they such a lovely young couple. They dance so nice, and they have this lovely baby. It's so hard for them to make a living. Why don't you write something about them, Beel?"

  "That's Mom all right," he said.

  "Your mom and Rocky and Allie Colombo used to tease your pop about Charley Goldman. You know what a gnarled, little old guy Charley was, and your mom would say to your pop, 'You go to bed tonight, because I have a date with the Charley Gold. We go to the club and we dance.' Allie used to chuckle about that as he did about so many things. There was so much that amused him in life."

  "I know," he said.

  "At the time that I spent about a week here in Brockton," I said, "Allie was starting another heavyweight. One night he had him on a fight card in a place over a pool hall somewhere here in town."

  "I know the place."

  "I went along, and Allie's guy knocked out the other guy in a couple of rounds or so, but he was just a strong earnest beginner. As we walked out in the dark to the car Allie was chuckling again. I said, 'What are you laughing at now?' He said, 'I was just thinking that this guy may go all the way, too.' I had to laugh, too, because it was ridiculous. He'd had only one other fighter in his life, but that one went all the way, and now Allie thought that lightning would strike twice."

  "That was the way Allie was."

  "Of course, your brother didn't look like anything either when he started."

  "That's what everybody thought."

  "That's what I thought, and I as much as told Charley Goldman that in the CYO gym in New York. Charley wouldn't train Rocky in Stillman's because Rocky was so awkward that Charley was afraid people would laugh at him and discourage him."

  "They'd never discourage Rocky," Peter said.

  "I know," I said, "but anyway, a few months after I'd met your brother at the CYO I saw Charley one afternoon in Stillman's, and I said to him, 'How's that fella who bums down on the trucks from Brockton doing?' Charley said, 'He's knockin' out guys, but he scares me.' I said, 'Why?' He said, 'Because of his stance. The way his stance is, he gets hit with too many punches, but I'm afraid if I change his feet I might take something off his own punch.' "

  "Charley said that?"

  "He did," I said, "and that's where Rocky was so lucky. He could have fallen into the hands of any one of dozens of guys who call themselves trainers, but who would have changed his stance and ruined him. Charley altered it gradually without taking anything off the punch."

  "That's interesting."

  I could have told him, but I didn't, about an afternoon at the Long Pond Inn when Charley had Marciano sparring with Nino Valdez, the big Cuban. Marciano was forcing the going, as he always did, and Valdez was just moving around, sticking out his left hand, and with his right glove high, he was blocking Marciano's left hooks.

  "Look, Rock," Charley said to him at the end of one round. "You got to learn to move both ways. You got to practice moving to the right the same way you move to your left. Work on it."

  Marciano nodded and turned and started walking the ring, waiting for the next round to start. Charley turned to me.

  "Watch what happens," he said. "He'll throw a punch off that move, and he'll land with it."

  The next round started, and Marciano began to work on it. Suddenly, after a move to his right, he leaned back to his left and he threw the left hook, and it landed on the big Cuban's jaw, inside his high right hand, and it shook him.

  "Time!" Charley shouted and then, feigning excitement, he said to Marciano, "You see what you did, Rock? You just discovered somethin'. When you punch off that move to your right you can get that hook inside the glove. That's great, Rock."

  The two went back to sparring, with Charley watching them. Then he turned to me again.

  "You see?" he said. "If I told him how to do that, he'd forget it. If I showed him, he might remember it. Now he thinks he discovered something new, all by himself, and he'll never forget it."

  There is an ancient Chinese proverb but, of course, Charley had never heard of it, "I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I do and I understand."

  Several months later, in Yankee Stadium, I watched Marciano throw that hook off that move and knock out Harry Kid Matthews, my old friend Jack Hurley's fighter. Off that fight they matched Marciano with Walcott for the heavyweight championship of the world.

  "So Rocky was lucky when Allie took him to Al Weill," I was saying to Peter now. "Nobody ever said Al Weill was a nice guy, but he had Charley training for him, and he knew how to move a fighter. There were a few other good teachers still around then— Ray Arcel and Whitey Bimstein and Jack Hurley—but he needed Weill, and his connections in the fight game too."

  "You're probably right," he said.

  "So Charley died the year before Rocky," I said. "Then Allie went, and when Weill died I realized that the whole corner had gone, all within a few years."

  "Allie was killed just before Rocky," he said.

  "Oh?" I said. "It was in a car accident, wasn't it?"

  "No," he said. "After Rocky retired, Allie had some hard times, and he was working nights at a warehouse. He was walking along by the loading platform when a truck backed up and crushed him."

  I could feel myself cringing.

  "That's awful," I said. "Terrible."

  "And Barbara's gone," he was saying. "She died three years ago of cancer."

  Barbara Cousins was the daughter of a Brockton policeman. Al Weill, trying to possess the fighter totally, had opposed Marciano's marriage to her, and with the fighter away in camp and on personal appearance tours so much of the time, it was never an easy one.

  "And their daughter?" I said.

  "Mary Anne?" he said. "She lives in Florida."

  "I remember her when she was about four years old," I said. "There was a swing in the yard of the house they had here, and one afternoon I must have pushed her on that swing for an hour, waiting for Rocky."

  "She's about twenty-four now," he said, "and we've been in touch with her, trying to find Rocky's money."

  "Trying to what?" I said.

  "Trying to find his money," he said. "We don't know what he did with all his money."

  The total of Marciano's purses as a fighter came close to $1,500,000. Weill's end and expenses must have cut that in half, and there were the taxes. After the fighter retired, though, there was the $80,000 I got him for his life story, and there was the $1,500 here and the $2,000 there that he picked up regularly for personal appearances.

  "You mean that no one knows where the money is?" I said. "He was the closest guy with a buck I ever knew. He never spent anything."

  "I know," he said. "That's the thing. We figure that it's got to be somewhere, but Rocky was a very mysterious guy. He never trusted attorneys, banks, or anyone with his money but himself."

  "You mean you think he kept it all in cash?"

  "That's right," he said. "You see the two families—Barbara's and ours—were never very close. After Rocky died and there wasn't any money, I guess they thought we knew where it was and we kind of thought they knew. After Barbara died, Mary Anne was sort of suspicious of us at first, but she trusts us now, trying to find it."

  "This amazes me," I said.

  "Mom used to ask him about the money," he said. "He'd always say, 'Don't worry, Mom.' Some may have been stolen by some lawyer, but we think that Rocky literally buried his money."

  He had slowed the car slightly, and he nodded across the road. A man, his head bald in back, was raking leaves in the sideyard of a frame house.

  "You see that fella there?" he said. "He set a precedent in the United States. He was brought to court as a male prostitute, and it went all the way to the Supreme C
ourt. It was what they call a

  "Landmark case?"

  "Right," he said.

  "But you think the money may actually be buried?" I said.

  "In the soil somewhere," he said, "but we don't know where to look."

  "And it's a big country," I said.

  "Right," he said. "We've tried to figure out everywhere he went and where he stayed in people's houses and where he may have hidden it."

  "That's amazing," I said, because I couldn't think of what else to say.

  He had pulled up in front of the house and we went in. His wife, Linda, slim and blonde and blue-eyed, met us in the living room and he introduced me and then led me into the kitchen where Mom was standing at the range, stirring something in a pot.

  "Mom," he said, "you remember Bill."

  She turned, at seventy-five the same sturdy woman. She was wearing a black, short-sleeved dress, glasses with hexagonal frames, and her hair had only partially grayed. She was searching my face as we shook hands.