Once They Heard the Cheers

by Wilfred Charles Heinz

  "Nothing for me, thank you," Walter said to the waitress.

  "I never drank either," Vincent said to me. "I started after he stopped fighting. You know how it was at the Long Pond at Greenwood Lake, with the bar right there. Twins try not to embarrass the other, and I never wanted to have a good time while Walter was in training, and I never had a good time."

  "I can believe that," I said. "Between some identical twins there is an intuitive understanding that's almost mystic. I remember that when I first met you two, Walter explained how, when you went to the movies together and one wanted to leave, the other had the same impulse at the same moment."

  "I'm not sure it's anything mystic," Vincent said. "You have a tendency to see things the same. I don't use profanity. Walter doesn't. We never used it with each other."

  "That could be environmental," I said.

  "I remember once when I came down to see you," Walter said. "I had just had a discussion with my children, about some problem, and you had had exactly the same thing with yours and had said the same thing."

  "But when you were still very young," I said, "and growing up in the same house, didn't you ever quarrel, say about some toy?"

  "We never had any jealousy," Vincent said.

  "That's right," Walter said.

  "If there was one apple left," Vincent said, "I'd want him to have it. He'd want me to take it."

  "That would be an easy one for King Solomon," I said. "Just divide the apple in two."

  "That's right," Vincent said.

  While we ate we talked about fighters and fights we remembered, and we exchanged opinions of some of the better fighters of today. The movie Rocky had just come out, and Walter said he hadn't seen it.

  "Did you see it, Vin?" he said.

  "No," Vincent said. "I didn't, and I'll tell you why. He loses in the end. I've seen enough heartache and losing in the end. It happened with me."

  After lunch I got into Vincent's car again, and with Walter following us once more, we drove out onto Sandy Hook, that spit of land that marks the entrance to Lower New York Bay. To protect the shoreline, huge, rough-cut blocks of granite have been deposited there, with what must have been massive machinery, in angular disarray. Standing on them, the waves slapping against them below us, we could see across the water to the north, the towers of Lower Manhattan Island gleaming in the early afternoon sun. I wondered if the blocks had come out of the bedrock of the island, perhaps even out of the excavation for the World Trade Center. The southernmost of the twin towers, shielding the other, was the only noticeable change there now from the way it looked when I had come up this bay on that troopship on that gray and fog-shrouded morning thirty-two years before.

  We said good-by to Vincent there, and Walter and I drove back to Scotch Plains. He lives in a fourteen-room English Tudor house, secluded among large evergreens, oaks, and maples. His wife and their younger son were at their country club, so we drove there for dinner, and it was only after I was home again that yet another question came to mind and I phoned him. He said he was working on his expense account.

  "And I'm still on the identical twin kick," I said. "When you and Vincent exchange gifts, say at Christmas or on your common birthday, do you ever find you've bought each other the same thing?"

  "We don't exchange gifts," he said.

  "Not even at Christmas," I said.

  "We never did," he said. "We didn't have to. I've never bought him a gift, ever. You wouldn't buy yourself a gift, would you? You know?"

  19

  Somebody Up There

  Likes Him

  Hey, Ma—your bad boy done it.

  I told you Somebody up there likes me.

  Rocky Graziano, July 16, 1947

  He said it into a radio microphone that had been thrust in front of his face in the ring in the Chicago Stadium. It was 120 degrees under the ring lights, and his hair hung in black streaks, soaked by his own sweat and the water they had sloshed over him between rounds. His right eye was a slit, and over his left eye there was a dark cake of dried blood. In the sixth round of the second of their three vicious fights, he had just knocked out Tony Zale. Now he was the middleweight champion of the world, and it was an event that involved me as did none other among the hundreds I covered in sports.

  "You're a tough man to get hold of," I was saying now on the phone.

  "Yeah, yeah," he was saying. "I get up early, and then I'm out."

  "I know," I said.

  I had been calling the apartment in New York for days. Several times I had talked with his wife, Norma.

  "He's gone again, Bill," she would say.

  "When will he be in?"

  "Who knows?" she would say.

  "Listen," I was saying to him now. "I'll be in New York on Friday, and I want to see you at your place about eleven in the morning."

  "Yeah, yeah," he said. "Good."

  "Now, I'm dragging all the way in just to see you," I said, "so you be there."

  "Yeah, yeah," he said. "I'll be here, and I'll tell you anything you want to know. You always wrote good about me, Billy. You know?"

  "Yes," I said. "I know."

  A reporter has an obligation to objectivity, and although we had a racing handicapper who operated as a bookmaker right in the sports department of my paper, I never bet on a horse race, a ball game or a fight. In every reporter, however, the struggle against subjectivity goes on, and coming up to that second Graziano-Zale fight, I lost that struggle.

  It was the night before the fight, and we had been sitting around the living room of the hotel suite in Chicago for an hour or more, listening to a Cubs' game on the radio. Rocky was lolling in an arm chair, and there were a couple of sparring partners on the sofa. Irving Cohen, who managed him, and Whitey Bimstein, who trained him, had been sitting with a card table between them, counting through batches of tickets, and I saw Whitey look at his watch. I looked at my own, and it was ten o'clock. In twenty-four hours, the fighter would have to climb into a ring once more against the man who, nine months before in Yankee Stadium, in the sixth round and after taking a frightening beating himself, had hit him a right hand in the body and a left hook on the chin to knock him out and end what those who had been around long enough called the greatest fight since Dempsey-Firpo.

  "All right," Whitey said. "You better get up to bed now, Rock. It's time you were in."

  He got up from the chair and stretched and started out the door. Whitey motioned over his shoulder with his head and I followed them out. Nothing had been said about it, but I knew now why Irving Cohen had asked me to come over to the hotel and why, now, I was a part of this night before this fight.

  It had started five months before. In New York they had revoked his license for failing to report the offer of a bribe he had not accepted for a fight that had never been held. There were those of us who had gone to the hearings of the New York State Athletic Commission and who were certain that we could see through this to the politics behind it, and we had been appalled that such a thing could happen in this country.

  An uptown Manhattan politician named Joseph Scottorigio had been murdered. Who killed Scottorigio? It is a question that still hasn't been answered, and for weeks the New York papers played it big. For weeks it confounded and plagued the Manhattan police and the District Attorney's office, until they came up with this prize fighter and the bribe offer he had ignored, and Rocky Graziano chased Joseph Scottorigio off the front pages.

  As I covered the hearings, what I wrote for the front page was what transpired. What I wrote for my piece on the sports page each day was what I had come to know about this former Lower East Side hoodlum who, it turned out, had been in and out of reform school, jail, and prison, and who had found in boxing a way to make a legitimate living.

  I knew it was a tough row to hoe in this garden where I was trying to plant my small seeds of reason. The paper was conservative, resolutely Republican. In my time it had opposed Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Fiorello LaGuardia. It st
ood firm against Harry Truman, organized labor and any social legislation that, it seemed to me, wasn't current during the administration of Calvin Coolidge. I could never have written politics for it, but it had given me my start and I felt an abiding filial affection for it, and I could write sports.

  Two days before a scheduled fight with Cowboy Reuben Shank in Madison Square Garden, Graziano had pulled out, complaining of a bad back. It was the contention of the District Attorney that the problem was not with the fighter's back but with an offer of $100,000 that had been made to him by an unidentified party in Stillman's Gym to take a dive for Shank and that he had failed to report. Graziano admitted that someone had come up to him with an offer that he thought was a gag, and that was the D.A.'s case.

  To anyone familiar with boxing, the proposition was absurd. Cowboy Reuben Shank was a journeyman middleweight whose best move against Graziano would have been to take the next train out of town and back to Keensburg, Colorado. Any syndicate trying to place enough money on Shank to profit from a $100,000 payoff would have signaled that a fix was in and driven the fight off the books.

  I wrote that and I wrote that you had to know Graziano and you had to know Stillman's Gym to understand how he had looked upon the offer. He was the most exciting fighter, those who had seen them both wrote, since Stanley Ketchel, and Ketchel had been dead by then for thirty-seven years or since, as John Lardner put it, "he was fatally shot in the back by the commonlaw husband of the lady who was cooking his breakfast."

  When Graziano fought, you could breathe the tension. When he fought in the Garden, you could feel it over on Broadway, and the night he fought Zale for the first time you could sense it two hours before the fight between the cars jammed along the Grand Concourse, half a mile from Yankee Stadium. When he trained at Stillman's, he packed that place to the walls. They would be stacked on the stairway to the balcony, and they would be packed on the balcony, too.

  "I'll be glad when that Graziano stops fighting," a fight manager said to me there one day. "It's gettin' so you can't even move in here."

  His dressing room would be mobbed, too, and with the characters to cast three road companies of Dead End. There was one there, a little guy named Barney, who always wore a dirty cap, the peak to one side, and who played the harmonica. He played it, not by blowing on it with his mouth, but through his nostrils.

  "Ain't he a good musician?" Graziano would say, sitting back and listening. "Did you ever see anybody do that before? I'd like to get this poor guy a job."

  This minstrel had three numbers in his repertoire—"Darktown Strutters' Ball," "Beer Barrel Polka," and "Bugle Call Rag." While he was playing "Bugle Call Rag," blowing on that harmonica through his nostrils, he would salute with his left hand.

  "Ain't that great?" Graziano would say. "Why can't I get this guy a job?"

  The virtuoso seemed satisfied because Graziano was staking him. He staked a lot of them. One day I saw him give the shirt he was wearing to some hapless hanger-on. The Christmas of the first year that he had made any real money he bought a six-year-old Cadillac and loaded it with $1,500 worth of toys. He drove it down to his old East Side neighborhood, and he handed out the toys to the kids and another $1,500 to their parents. He never mentioned it, but it came out because a trainer at Stillman's who lived in the neighborhood had seen it.

  "Look, Rocky," Irving Cohen said to him, "it's nice to do things like that, but you haven't got that kind of money, and you've got to save money. You won't be fighting forever."

  "Sure, Irving," Graziano said, "but those are poor people. They're good people. They never done no wrong. They never hurt nobody. They just never got a break."

  One day in Stillman's he walked up to Irving. He asked him how much money he was carrying.

  "I've got fifty bucks," Irving said.

  "Give it to me," Graziano said, "and hustle up another fifty for me."

  Irving circulated and borrowed fifty and gave it to him. As you came into Stillman's there were rows of chairs facing the ring, and in one of the chairs a former fighter, still young but blind, was sitting. When Graziano sat down beside him and started to talk to him, Irving sidled up behind them, and he saw Graziano lean over and slip the folded bills into the breast pocket of the other's jacket.

  "There's something in your pocket," Graziano said, and he got up.

  I wrote that and more, weighing it all against the absurdity of the charges, and I wondered how long I would be permitted that freedom. After all, how long could a paper, patterned to please stock brokers, corporate executives, and the ad agencies and their clients that sustained it, afford to speak for a prize fighter, an ex-convict with a fifth-grade education, against the office of the District Attorney and the undoubted integrity of Colonel Edward P. F. Eagan, Yale graduate, former Rhodes Scholar, lawyer and chairman of the New York State Athletic Commission?

  Late one afternoon I found out. When I checked my mail cubicle in the sports department, there was a typed note there from Wilbur Wood.

  "Mr. Speed," the note read, and Keats Speed was the managing editor, "suggests that you write no more opinion pieces about Graziano. WW."

  I wrote one more. I knew that neither Wilbur nor Speed came in early enough mornings to check the copy going into the first edition that went to press at 10 a.m. After the first edition, the piece was yanked.

  "Didn't you get my note?" Wilbur said, when I saw him in the office later that day.

  "Gee, Wilbur, I didn't," I said. "I was in a hurry to write my piece and catch my train to Connecticut, and I didn't check my mail until this morning."

  "Well, that's the end of it," he said. "No more pro-Graziano pieces. That's an order."

  "Whatever you say," I said.

  "It isn't just what I say," he said. "It's what Speed says and what a lot of other people on this paper are saying."

  "You're the boss, Wilbur," I said.

  The afternoon that Eagan announced that Rocky Graziano was banned, ostensibly for life, from boxing in New York State, I covered that. In that crowded hearing room, I watched the fighter, who had seemed to have finally found his way in this world, drop his head into his hands, his elbows on the table as he sat there across from Eagan, and I rushed back to the paper and wrote the piece that ran under the eight-column headline that bannered page one.

  "Listen," Wilbur Wood said to me, coming back from the city room after the edition had closed. "The city desk wants you to get ahold of Graziano and find out how he's taking this. You're his good friend, so he'll talk to you, and it should make a good piece for tomorrow."

  "Sure, Wilbur," I said, thinking that yes, I am his good friend and now you want me to play that friendship you all found so embarrassing, but it is a good piece if I can find him.

  With Irving Cohen and Jack Healy, who was another of his managers, I found him. In the fighter's new buff and light blue Cadillac, with "Rocky" on the doors, with Healy at the wheel and Irving beside him, we drove into the Lower East Side. It was early February, and darkness had come by now and there was a mist in the air. At Cooper Square, Healy turned under the El and drove down a side street and parked across from a Chinese laundry on the first floor of an old tenement. Some kids had a bonfire going in the street, piling crates on it, and Healy got out and walked across the street and into the building.

  In about ten minutes he came out and Graziano was with him. As they crossed the street toward the car, the wavering light from the bonfire played on them, and then they were silhouetted by the lights of a car turning around in the block.

  "Hey, Rocky!" I heard the driver of the car shout, leaning out. "You're still all right!"

  Graziano turned around on the wet street and waved his hand, and then he came over to the car and he opened the front door. His face was drawn and his eyes small and Irving Cohen moved over to make room for him on the front seat.

  "I been sleepin'," he said. "For three hours I slept at my friend's place."

  He started to slide into the front seat.
Then he saw me sitting in the back.

  "Oh," he said. "Hello."

  "Hello, Rocky," I said. "I'm sorry to bother you at a time like this."

  "That's all right," he said. "It's a job. I understand."

  He was in the car now and he shut the door. Healy got in and drove to the end of the street and started uptown.

  "I don't want to pester you, Rocky," I said, "but I have to ask you a couple of questions."

  "That's all right," he said. "I understand."

  "Were you nervous going in to hear that verdict today?"

  "No," he said. "I wasn't nervous. Not nervous."

  "How is that?"

  "Well, I figured," he said, "I figured that the guy, that Eagan, would say, 'Dismissed.' You know, 'This case dismissed.' "

  "But you could tell in the hearings, Rocky," I said, "that they were going to throw the book at you. I mean you could sense it as Eagan began to describe the findings."