"He was what he was," Peter said.
We talked on, and at one point Mom got up and left the room and came back with her wallet. From it she took some photographs of Rocky, in one of which he was with Muhammad Ali, and when we all got up from the table I thanked Linda and then Mom.
"So many memories, Bill," she said. "So much to talk."
"But good memories, Mom," I said, "and I shall always remember you and Pop."
"And you give my best to your wife and your daughter," she said.
Peter and I walked out to our cars. He was to lead me to the motel where I had a reservation, and we shook hands.
"I hope it was all right," I said. "I hope I didn't . . ."
"Oh, no," he said. "It's eight years now. For a time it was rough, but it's good for her to talk now. Now Mom lives for one thing, the beautiful memories of Rocky."
"And good luck with the sporting goods business," I said. "I'm really impressed by how well you're doing."
"I'm doing real well," he said. "It really surprises me how well it's going."
"And who knows?" I said. "Maybe you'll find what Rock did with his money."
"Who knows?" he said. "We've sure been giving it a try, and we'll keep on trying."
When he was champion they ran at him with all kinds of schemes. They wanted him to sign notes for them or lend them money outright or sponsor them on singing or acting careers. One of them wanted to start a band, and another he had never heard of wanted him to go halves with him in a night club in Buffalo. They tried to get him into uranium and copper and oil wells, a dairy and a home-oil route, but following the red tail lights of Peter's car I closed my mind to that. There was nothing to think about, and I was remembering Mom.
18
The Same Person
Twice
At first, there is a single fertilized egg. Life
then begins as it does for any ordinary child,
but sometime between the first and tenth day
after conception and for reasons that are be-
yond the ken of science, the egg separates. The
forty-six chromosomes perform what has been
described as "the dance of life." Each divides
precisely in half, and now two eggs continue to
grow in the womb. In each egg all the heredi-
tary factors—forty-six chromosomes bearing
an estimated fifty thousand genes—are going to
be exactly alike. The result is the same person
twice.
Bard Lindeman,
The Twins Who Found Each Other
There were these twins, Castor and Pollux. They were sons of Zeus, and before my time, but the one, Pollux, was a boxer. What I know of them I got from Theocritus, who lived in the third century b.c. and is regarded as the creator of pastoral poetry, and who, in The Dioscuri, left a stirring account of Pollux flattening a burly giant, who, it has seemed to me, was misnamed Amycus. Today Castor and Pollux sit in the heavens as the twin stars of the constellation Gemini.
In my time, Charles Cartier, a New York advertising salesman, had three sons. The two younger are identical twins, and during the early 1950s one of them, Walter, was a ranking middleweight fighter, and the other, Vincent, was a young lawyer. Since the days of the mythologists, identical twins have fascinated their fellow man—particularly geneticists and psychologists in more recent years—and Walter and Vincent Cartier fascinated me.
I met them first in 1949. Vincent, the lawyer, was waiting to hear if he had passed the bar examination. Walter, the fighter, was waiting to fight, two nights later in New York's St. Nicholas Arena, a young puncher named Vinnie Cidone.
"Which one of you," I said to them, "was born first?"
This was in one of the dressing rooms at Stillman's Gym. They were handsome young men, with almost classic profiles, wavy brown hair, and deep blue eyes. The lawyer was wearing a sports jacket and slacks, and he was leaning against one of the wooden partitions and smoking a pipe. The fighter was lying, stripped and face down, on the rubbing table, his head turned and resting on his forearms, and an old rubber named Doc Jordan, in soiled slacks that hung loose on him, a sweater and wearing a gray skull cap, was massaging the muscles in the fighter's shoulders and back.
"We really don't know who was born first," the lawyer said. "There was a mix-up. We were mixed up right after we were born."
"And we've always looked so much alike," the fighter said, "that people have trouble telling us apart. Even our father had trouble when we were small."
He rolled over on the table and, swinging his legs over the side, he sat up. He nodded toward his brother.
"Our father used to dress him in pink," he said, "and me in blue so he could tell which was which. He used to call him Pinky and me Bluey, and every once in a while he still calls us that."
"Were you street scrappers when you were kids?" I said.
"Yes," the fighter said. "We fought all right."
"Did you ever fight each other?" I said.
"Our father used to match us," the lawyer said. "He gave us boxing gloves and taught us to fight. We used to box exhibitions. We used to box at country fairs around Connecticut."
"Didn't you ever fight each other when you meant it?" I said
"No," the fighter said. "I've really got the greatest brother in the world. I mean that."
"Who was the better fighter when you were kids?" I said.
"Well, I was the boxer," the lawyer said. "He was the puncher."
"Did you ever want to be a professional fighter?"
"No, I wanted to be a lawyer."
"You have to take a lot of punishment to be a fighter," the fighter said. "I mean you have to punish yourself. You have to train and get up early and do road work, and it isn't easy."
"How much do you weigh now? I said.
"Sixty," the fighter said, meaning 160 pounds.
"And you?" I said to the lawyer.
"Now I weigh 152," the lawyer said.
"This interests me," I said, "because since birth you two were identical, and now because of the professions you have chosen, you have begun to alter what nature started. One of you, because he's a fighter, has developed to 160 pounds, while the other weighs less."
"And I have this," the fighter said, putting a hand to his nose where there was a small scar.
"So," I said to the lawyer, "I should think it would be a trying experience to watch your twin being hit in a fight. I should think it might be tougher than when a mother watches a son fight."
"It's not easy for a mother," the lawyer said.
"But you are identical twins," I said. "You have a relationship that, I would think, would be closer than that between mother and son."
"I'll tell you how close we are," the fighter said. "When we would go to the movies together, and if it was a double feature and one of us wanted to leave, the other would have the same thought at the same time. If he sees a good movie—say like The Snake Pit—I don't have to see it. If I see one, he doesn't have to see it. That's how close we are."
"So," I said to the lawyer again, "I should think it would be hard on you when you see your identical image being hit, and when you see a cut start to bleed. A face that has always been the same as yours is being hit and changed while you watch."
"It isn't," the lawyer said, shrugging but smiling, "a pleasant experience."
I talked with the fighter then about his upcoming fight, and two nights later at the St. Nick he knocked out Cidone in the first round. In fact, he was working on a string of consecutive wins that was to extend to twenty, eleven by knockout, before, one night in Madison Square Garden, I cost him his fight with Kid Gavilan.
"How do you think he's doing?" Irving Cohen said to me late in the-ninth round.
Irving managed him, as he did Rocky Graziano and Billy Graham, and Charley Goldman trained him. Several years before, I had asked the Garden to move me from my permanent seat among my contemporaries in the boxing press to one
adjacent to where the handlers squatted below the Ninth Avenue corner. I wanted to hear what they said during the rounds, what strategies, if any, they tried to work out, and over the years the ones I had come to know well would occasionally turn to me for my opinion.
"I have him way ahead," I said to Irving, "but you know what happened to Billy here."
Only four months had passed since that night when, in that same ring, Billy Graham had out-boxed Gavilan only to be deprived of the welterweight title when two of the three officials saw it otherwise. This one was over-the-weight, and Gavilan's title was not on the line, but I was envisioning that happening again.
"If he were my fighter," I said to Irving, "I'd tell him to go out and win the last round."
There is a basic tenet in boxing that, at the very least, you try to win the first round, not only to impress your opponent but also the officials, and you try to win the last round to reaffirm that impression. You attempt to apply this simple psychology at the opening and closing of each round, and Gavilan, with all his ability and Latin flash, was good at this and, in the last thirty seconds or so of a round, a round-stealer.
What Irving Cohen said I don't recall. At the end of the ninth round, however, after he and Charley Goldman had climbed into the ring, I could tell from his gestures, as he bent over and faced the fighter who was reclining on the stool and against the corner ropes, that he was sending him out to win that last round. Walter Cartier was a stand-up boxer-puncher with all the standard moves and a good straight right hand. He was never a runner or a Spoiler, and he was pressing the fight again when, about halfway through that tenth round, Gavilan crossed him with a right and he went down. When he got up and stood, still groggy at the count of 9, and with Gavilan waiting to storm out of the neutral corner, Ruby Goldstein, the referee, searching Walter Cartier's eyes and talking to him, stopped it.
"I'm sorry," I said to Irving Cohen, as he started to follow the fighter and Charley Goldman, who was leading him back to the dressing room. "I think he had it won, and I'm sorry I gave you bad advice."
"That's all right," Irving said. He is a short, plump, pink-faced and gentle man, and I could never imagine him castigating anyone. "It's just one of those things that happen now and then."
He did have it won. When we checked the officials' cards at ringside it turned out that all three had had Walter Cartier far enough ahead so that if he had coasted the round, he would have won the fight.
I never apologized to Walter Cartier or his brother, Vincent. When I would see them at Stillman's, or up at the Long Pond Inn where, during the weeks I spent there with Billy Graham, Walter was running on the road with Billy and reading William F. Buckley's God and Man at Yale, I refrained. I felt that as long as the fighter was continuing to climb through the ropes to face other opponents, and as long as his brother was enduring the agonies thus imposed on him, I would avoid reminding either of them of the ending of that Gavilan fight.
"That brother, Vincent," Charley Goldman said to me one afternoon at Stillman's, watching the two walk out of the gym together. "I wish he'd leave Walter alone."
"How can he?" I said. "They're identical twins."
"I got Walter up in camp, and he's in great shape," Charley said. "Then Vincent comes up. He says, 'How do you feel, Walter?' Walter says, 'I feel fine.' And Vincent says, 'You don't look so good to me. Are you really all right?' The next thing I know, the fighter is saying he doesn't think he feels just right."
"But you have to understand, Charley," I said. "The brother takes every punch with Walter. In every one of Walter's fights he sees himself being hit. To him it's his own face and body, and he can't do anything about it but worry."
I thought of mentioning Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray, in which the subject's appearance never changes while over the years the face in his portrait grows older, but I doubt that Charley ever read anything but the boxing news and Christmas cards. I think that Charley must have sent out a hundred or more Christmas cards each year. We exchanged them, and he must have saved all of the cards he had ever received because in the furnished room he rented on the Upper West Side, and where he lived alone, he had shoe boxes full of them stored under the bed.
"I understand what's between them," Charley said, "but how can I train a fighter like that?"
Now, some quarter of a century later, I wrote to the fighter at his home in Scotch Plains, New Jersey, telling him about the book and saying that I wanted to see him and his brother again. John Condon at Madison Square Garden had supplied me with the address, and four or five nights later, at about 10:30, the phone rang and it was Walter Cartier.
"How are you?" I said.
"I'm fine," he said. "I'm in North Adams, Massachusetts."
"What are you doing there?" I said.
"I'm on the road for this company I work for," he said. "I called home and my wife read me your letter, and I'm really flattered that you want to put Vincent and me in your book. I wasn't that good a fighter."
"Of course you were," I said. "And how is Vincent?"
"Vincent is just great," he said. "He's a lawyer, you know."
"I know."
"He has two sons and a daughter, and I have two sons and a daughter. He has a very good practice, and he's a fine man and a wonderful brother. We don't see as much of each other as we'd like, but we're very, very close."
"I know," I said. "You're identical twins."
"That's right," He said, "and I often think of how lucky I am. I can actually feel sorry for people who don't have a relationship like Vincent and I have, because I don't know what I'd do without my brother."
He said, when I asked him, that the next afternoon he would be driving from North Adams to Burlington, Vermont, and when I explained to him where I lived and invited him to stop by, he said he would. The next morning I found his record in two volumes of The Ring Record Book and Boxing Encyclopedia. He had been inactive during 1955 and 1956, but between 1949 and 1957, when he had his last two fights, he had won forty-six of sixty, twenty-three by knockouts. He had lost three decisions, fought two draws, and been stopped nine times.
It was about four o'clock in the afternoon when I saw the car come around the turn in the road. When it turned into the driveway I went out and, as he got out of the car, he looked as I remembered him. It was late April, the day sunny and the weather warm, and he was immaculate in a lightweight dark blue blazer and light gray slacks. He had never taken that many head punches, and looking at his still handsome face, one would not know that he had once been a professional fighter.
We walked around on the property for a few minutes so that he could see the view. As I grow older it seems to me that Spring comes later each year, and as we looked across the valley the mountains were still mauve in the late afternoon sun, only here and there the distant clumps of evergreens showing life.
When we went into the house I introduced him to my wife, and then he and I sat in the living room and I asked him about his work. He said that the company he represents, Sabin Metal, reclaims precious metals—gold, silver, radium, platinum, and palladium—that would otherwise be lost in the various manufacturing processes, and that he drives more than 50,000 miles a year covering the East Coast from Delaware to Maine, persuading the manufacturers to send their scrap to Sabin, which then repays them according to the yield.
"There's silver in film," he said, "and I've gotten over a million and a half pounds of film this year from DuPont. Hospitals discard old X-rays, and I've got hospitals all over that use us. In the two-and-a-half years I've been doing it, I've got eighty-five new accounts. There's gold plating in electronic parts. When they pick up the plating from the plating tanks the gold drops off—some of it does—and they wipe them with Kleenex—Kim Wipes, they call them. They used to throw those away, and we have a company that sends us a ton of those Kim Wipes every two weeks. I got that company to use us."
"We're such a wasteful society," I said, "that I'm glad to find out you're into reclamation and se
em to enjoy it."
"It's a challenge," he said, "like a fight. Am I going to be able to sell these people to use our company? Am I going to win the fight?"
"And as you go around to these companies," I said, "does anyone recognize you as Walter Cartier, the former fighter?"
"Not really," he said. "Maybe once in a while somebody will say, 'Don't I know your name from somewhere?' In selling, though, you don't talk about yourself. You talk about them."
"How did you decide to retire from boxing?" I said.
"One reason I stopped," he said, "was that my right hand wasn't flying out there any more. I'd see an opening, and I'd think, 'I should have thrown the right.' I knew I was done."
"Ray Robinson told me the same thing," I said.
"It happens to everybody," he said.
"How many fights did you have in the Garden?" I said.
"I don't know," he said. "Eight or nine."
"And main events?"
"Five or six."
"Every fighter," I said, "used to hope someday to get a main event in the Garden. Was your first one a big thrill?"
'I don't remember it as that earth-shattering," he said. "When I was a boy I wanted to get on the cover of Ring magazine, and I got on, and it wasn't that big a thing."
Once They Heard the Cheers Page 53