The 34-Ton Bat

by Steve Rushin

  Peckinpaugh was stretchered from the field as the president and first lady stood to applaud him. But Judge stayed in the game for one more batter—Giants slugger Hack Wilson, who struck out to end the game. The Senators won the World Series the following day, in twelve innings, to the obvious delight of Mrs. Coolidge, who had earlier called the series “the greatest thrill of her life.” The grieving president openly rooted for the Senators and said he “had never seen such exciting games.” The Senators’ twelve-year-old ball boy, Calvin Griffith, wept when the supply of baseballs he was supposed to be guarding was stolen by celebrating fans.

  After being speared in the groin at the Metropolitan Opera, Foulproof Taylor set aside his protective cup for two years, not fully realizing its potential until he found himself gazing at the stage in another New York City cultural institution, Madison Square Garden.

  That night, on a full card of boxing, two bouts had ended prematurely on below-the-belt punches, enraging the crowd. In the 1920s, when a fight ended in a foul, all bets were declared void. “The Prohibition gangsters sat at ringside and had thousands of dollars going,” Foulproof said in 1961. “If their boy was losing, they’d just yell to him to foul the other guy. He wouldn’t even feint it, he’d just sock the other guy. Down he’d go, moaning, and the fight would be off. So would the bets.”

  And so Taylor began to wear his cup to prizefights, local gyms, and the offices of the New York State Athletic Commission, chaired by James Farley. Everywhere he went, Taylor implored boxers, fight promoters, and sportswriters to kick him as hard as they could in the testicles. “Kick me here” became Taylor’s catchphrase, and many fighters—which is to say most—happily obliged.

  He called the device his “Foulproof Cup,” and he quickly became familiar in New York boxing circles as “Foulproof Taylor.” It would remain his preferred form of address for the rest of his life. One evening at Madame Bey’s, a training camp for champion prizefighters run by a Turkish woman in Chatham Township, New Jersey, Foulproof asked Hype Igoe, boxing writer for the Hearst newspaper chain, to hit him in the groin with a baseball bat. Igoe graciously obliged. He swung from his heels, and the resulting collision—of Bud Hillerich’s bat and Foulproof Taylor’s cup, a meeting of two great American inventions—nearly knocked the inventor through a wall, leaving a man-shaped hole in the plaster. A plaque was hastily commissioned to cover the hole. It read:

  HYPUS IGOE THROUGH THIS WALL

  KNOCKED FOULPROOF TAYLOR, CUP AND ALL.

  Alas, such intrepid salesmanship went mostly in vain until the night of June 12, 1930, when Max Schmeling of Germany fought Jack Sharkey of Boston for the heavyweight championship of the world, a title vacated by the retirement two years earlier of Gene Tunney.

  A few days before the fight at Yankee Stadium, the boxing writer for the New York Evening Graphic wrote, “Chairman Farley could save himself many gray hairs by ordering Sharkey and Schmeling to wear Taylor Foulproof cups.” (That particular boxing writer—Ed Sullivan—had a soft spot for the world’s eccentrics, as he would demonstrate decades later on his own television show.)

  In any event, Farley didn’t mandate Foulproof Cups for the title bout. And so Sharkey was leading the fight with four seconds left in the fourth round, in front of eighty thousand baying spectators at Yankee Stadium, when his left hook caught Schmeling flush on the groin and felled the German. Referee Jimmy Crowley began counting Schmeling out, oblivious to the foul, but when a lone judge alerted him to the low blow, Crowley had no choice but to declare Schmeling the winner and new world champion.

  The Schmeling–Sharkey fight was the first heavyweight championship to be awarded on a foul, and Farley and the rest of the New York State Athletic Commission wanted to make sure it was also the last.

  On July 1, three weeks after the bout, Farley and the State Athletic Commission made cups mandatory. The device profoundly changed the fight game, and did the same for New York’s boxing commissioner. Hailed as the man who saved boxing, Farley was also Franklin Roosevelt’s campaign manager in that year’s New York gubernatorial race. Two years later, he would serve the same role in the 1932 presidential campaign. Farley swept Roosevelt into the White House, but left Foulproof Taylor at the curb, forlorn and forgotten, befitting a man whose mantra was “Kick me here.”

  Foulproof’s Foulproof Cup failed to become the industry standard because—he would claim for decades to come, in court and out—Farley steered boxing to the cast-iron cup of Jacob Golomb, Foulproof’s archnemesis.

  As a child, Golomb had left Riga, Latvia, for the Lower East Side of Manhattan, where—in 1910, aged seventeen, with $5 and a sewing machine borrowed from his father—he began to manufacture swimsuits that would last for more than a year. A swimmer himself, Golomb also boxed briefly as a ninety-pound flyweight at a time when fighters’ gloves were little more than leather skins, and a heavy bag was a sailor’s duffel stuffed with sawdust. Without mouth guards, headgear, and soft gloves, the heavyweight champion Jack Dempsey toughened his hands and face by soaking them in slaughterhouse brine.

  Like flannel baseball pants, boxing trunks were held up by leather belts, until Golomb made an elasticized waistband for the trunks of Jack Dempsey. In 1927, Farley mandated that all fighters in New York wear Golomb’s trunks, an order he rescinded only after receiving heavy criticism. It didn’t matter. Golomb’s wonderful trunks appeared soon enough on boxers everywhere. Their waistbands, glove cuffs, and jockstraps, their punching bags and sparring headgear, were all emblazoned with his ubiquitous brand name: EVERLAST.

  In boxing, as in baseball, “the trouble at first was in getting them to use ’em,” Golomb said of the cups. “Many oldtime fighters thought they were sissy.”

  But the cup, hidden from view, caused an athlete no embarrassment, and Foulproof—undaunted in his pursuit of sales—managed to sell some prominent heavyweights on his version.

  Primo Carnera was intrigued when Foulproof approached the six-foot-seven, 270-pound Italian with a proposition. “I told Carnera to place his huge paws on my shoulders and then whang me in the groin full-strength with his knee.” The Italian obliged Foulproof, who required extra aluminum and a greater quantity of rubber cigars when making the heavyweight’s cups. “Carnera was hung like a horse,” Foulproof said.

  When Carnera was knocked out by Joe Louis at Yankee Stadium in 1935, both fighters wore Foulproofs. Four years later, as he stood over the fallen Two Ton Tony Galento, Louis allowed Foulproof’s name to peek above his trunks, visible on the waistband of his jockstrap, an honor Taylor recorded in his autobiography, which set a new high-water mark in jock-sniffing memoirs.

  Despite these successes, Foulproof felt that Farley had sold him out to Everlast, whom he would sue unsuccessfully for patent infringement. But at the same time, he took a perverse personal pride in the rising star of the former boxing commissioner, seeing Farley’s success as his own.

  “Farley saved boxing by okaying my protector and passing the no-foul rule,” Foulproof wrote in 1945 in his self-published autobiography, Prizefight Government. “This made Farley a big man. He got too big to be wasting his time in boxing—right? So he got hold of Roosevelt and managed him into the White House. If Sharkey hadn’t fouled Schmeling and if I hadn’t invented my gadget, this would never have happened—right? I guess you can call me a President-maker as well as a boxing-saver. I’m the guy who did the whole thing but I don’t seem to get any credit for it. They kick me around and it’s a good thing I wear my own invention.”

  Not everybody did. Baseball never mandated cups, and countless examples of agony could not persuade everyone to wear one. Pepper Martin never wore a cup despite his role as the St. Louis Cardinals’ third baseman, a position that placed his groin in terrifying proximity to line drives. Miraculously, in thirteen seasons in the big leagues, Martin suffered no catastrophic groin injuries, prompting Leo Durocher to say of him: “God watches over drunks and third basemen.”

  Durocher played with Martin for fi
ve seasons in the Gashouse Gang infield and noted that the Wild Horse of the Osage invited catastrophe and discomfort. He wore his flannel Cardinals uniform directly over his skin as a hair shirt while going unencumbered by a cup at the hot corner. “He was just a lucky man, I guess,” Durocher said. “But that’s the way Pepper was—never wore a cup, an undershirt, or sanitary socks, neither—just his cap, jersey, pants, stirrups, and shoes. I suppose he was comfortable that way.”

  But even Pepper got religion. In 1943, in Rochester, New York, he managed a young second baseman named Red Schoendienst. As the future Cardinal dressed before a game in Newark, the former Cardinal asked Schoendienst if he was wearing a cup. Schoendienst was not. He didn’t find them comfortable, he said. Martin summoned a cup from a clubhouse attendant and Schoendienst wore it in that day’s game. As a result, when a powerful hitter named Ed Levy smashed a ground ball to second, and it caught the edge of the infield grass and shot into Schoendienst’s groin, it was only the cup that was halved like a walnut shell. “I saved you,” said Martin.

  By then the jockstrap—the simple athletic supporter, not the device that held a protective cup—was advertised as a safety device: “No coach is interested in part-time protection for his athletes. Full protection every playing moment is essential.” Or so went a 1943 ad for the Bike supporter, made with “Lastex, the miracle yarn,” from the Bike Web Manufacturing Company, whose logo remained—to the bafflement of many—a spoked bicycle wheel. Of course, the “Bike Web jockey strap” had long since been pruned in popular parlance to “jockstrap,” and further whittled to “jock,” which became by the late 1950s a synonym for the kind of athlete standing in the batter’s box, adjusting his cup at home plate.

  The sportswriters who covered those jocks were frequently derided as “jock sniffers,” an epithet that wasn’t always wrong. Two days after he beat Jack Dempsey in their second heavyweight title fight, in 1927, Gene Tunney “exhibited” for reporters “a black and blue spot in his groin five inches in diameter where, he said, Dempsey landed low left hooks.”

  Dempsey appeared on the cover of Prizefight Government, whacking Foulproof over the head, which was protected by a newfangled helmet—a protective headgear for fighters—that was also the handiwork of Foulproof Taylor. He had set about creating other fortified devices in the laboratory of his Brooklyn basement, seeking a sport more receptive (and less corrupt) than boxing.

  Among his other products were football headgear and shoulder pads. In 1932, Foulproof and a film crew from Pathé visited the Fordham University campus to demonstrate his new Shockproof Helmet before one of the nation’s most famous football teams. The helmet was constructed of cane reed, steamed and shaped and embedded in foam rubber. In this hat, Foulproof ran headlong into an exterior wall of the Fordham gymnasium. The wall was made of granite blocks, each a yard thick. Foulproof repeated his stunt for the camera fourteen consecutive times.

  Insufficiently impressed, Fordham football officials invited Foulproof back the following season. Again a film crew accompanied him. This time Foulproof wore a lighter helmet—only fifteen ounces—and began by butting heads with Rameses, the live ram mascot of the Fordham Rams. That the inventor did so while wearing a dress shirt was the least absurd feature of the tableau.

  Next, a Fordham back named Bill Curran was handed a black Louisville Slugger and asked to smash Foulproof over the head with it. Curran reluctantly complied. “All I felt was a jar, followed by a momentary flash of light in the eyes at the moment of impact,” said Foulproof. “I was normal immediately after.”

  A still frame of the film recorded the instant when bat met head: The half-inch circular vent holes in the helmet appear as slots three inches long. Foulproof’s nose, in the frame, stretches from ear to ear. And while he said he emerged from this encounter as lucid as any man with a history of running headlong into granite walls could be, Taylor could not close the deal with Fordham.

  “Foulproof, we can’t let our boys run onto the field with home-made looking gear,” coach Jim Crowley told him. “Give it a factory finish and we’ll use them.” But Foulproof couldn’t finance a factory finish on his salary with the French Cable Company, where some of his colleagues had given him a second nickname: Brass Nuts.

  And so it was that three decades after he first set foot in the Polo Grounds for that Giants–Dodgers extra-innings game—and nearly twenty years after Ray Chapman was killed in the same stadium—Foulproof Taylor set out to save baseball with his greatest invention yet: the Beanproof Cap.

  He tested this batting helmet as diligently as he had the Shockproof Helmet and the Foulproof Cup, and in much the same manner. Helmeted, he asked strangers to bang him over the head with a baseball bat. Toward that end, Foulproof wangled his way into the Giants’ clubhouse at the Polo Grounds, where he left prototypes for Carl Hubbell and trainer Bill Schaeffer, without reply. If he was to find an early adopter, Foulproof needed another galvanic moment, a baseball equivalent of the Schmeling–Sharkey fight.

  It came on May 25, 1937, in the fifth inning of a game in the Bronx, when Tigers catcher-manager Mickey Cochrane was struck in the left temple by a pitch from Yankees right-hander Irving (Bump) Hadley. The beanball was an accident: Hadley was pitching with a full count, and he immediately rushed to the side of the supine Cochrane, whose skull was fractured in three places.

  He was thought to be near death. As the catcher fought for his life at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital in upper Manhattan, his wife, Mary, flew to his bedside. And while Cochrane would survive, his career did not. At age thirty-four, and still in the prime of a Hall of Fame career—he was hitting .306 through the first twenty-seven games—Cochrane was finished playing.

  If it could happen to one of the game’s best and most famous players—Cochrane had been on the cover of Time magazine only two seasons earlier—imagine what lay in store for lesser men. In Class A ball, when Des Moines hosted Cedar Rapids that week, both clubs wore helmets borrowed from a local polo team. Players pronounced the devices adequate, if a little top-heavy. “I think some lighter guard can be worked out,” said Cedar Rapids manager Cap Crossley. “After all, the temple facing the pitcher is all that needs protection.”

  In the big leagues, teams began soliciting submissions for a suitable protective cap. Foulproof turned up unbidden at the Giants’ offices, on 42nd Street, but was turned away at reception. A dozen other inventors, he was told, had already come calling.

  That summer, the unsinkable Foulproof Taylor attended the All-Star Game in Washington and buttonholed Senators owner Clark Griffith, imploring him to order foulproof helmets for his players.

  With Cochrane still convalescing in Detroit, Griffith needed little persuading. The man who had dropped a baseball from the Washington Monument in 1894 knew the devastating effects of a speeding ball. Griffith ordered the helmets. “They arrived yesterday,” Shirley Povich wrote in the August 1 edition of the Washington Post. “It is now Griffith vs. his ball club because the players, after taking a look at the lop-sided caps, vowed they wouldn’t wear the dizzy-looking things. They’d rather get hit in the head, they said.”

  Taylor’s helmet, while foulproof, wasn’t foolproof. One flaw in particular was proving too great to overcome. The Foulproof Cup cleaned up boxing, but the Beanproof Cap risked doing the opposite for baseball. Owners feared it could make the game crooked. Griffith told Foulproof of his principal reservation. If the seventh game of the World Series was tied 3–3 with the bases loaded, a hitter only had to lean into a fastball and take one off the coconut to force in the winning run. The Beanproof Cap was, Griffith was very sorry to say, too effective for its own good.

  Two years passed, and as Cochrane’s injury faded from memory, so did the perceived need for a batting helmet. Undaunted, Foulproof sought an audience in 1940 with Dodgers general manager Larry MacPhail, but not before securing a letter of introduction from his friend, the New York Daily Mirror columnist Dan Parker. “Throgmorton Slovinsky MacPhail,” Parker’s lett
er began. “This will introduce Foulproof Taylor, the man whose boxing protector saved boxing from repeal. He has a beanproof baseball cap, which he claims will make baseball as safe as boxing for Democracy.”

  In the Dodgers offices at Ebbets Field, MacPhail declined to see him. Instead, he summoned third-base coach Charlie Dressen to receive Foulproof. On the inventor’s instruction, Dressen took a bat to Foulproof’s head like a mallet to a tent stake. Impressed with Taylor’s impassivity, the former third baseman invited Foulproof to return at one o’clock, this time to the Dodgers’ clubhouse, before the afternoon’s game.

  On Taylor’s return, Dodgers outfielder Joe Medwick and manager Leo Durocher took turns tentatively tapping Foulproof on his Beanproof Cap. Only after trainer Jackie Wilson whanged him with a full swing was Foulproof satisfied that he had successfully demonstrated his handiwork. Medwick had already been hit in the head that season. He tried on the helmet, walked to the mirror, and said: “I guess we’ll be wearing these soon.”

  Medwick was half right. He would soon be wearing protective headgear, but not the Beanproof Cap, which had its insurmountable design flaw. The Beanproof Cap could not be hidden from view. It still sat, misshapen, on top of the head. The Dodgers wouldn’t wear it for the same reason the Senators wouldn’t: human vanity.

  “They wouldn’t wear a thing that was cumbersome and so conspicuous that everybody could see it,” Dodgers president Larry MacPhail explained in 1941, before a spring training game in Havana. There, in front of a contingent of traveling reporters, MacPhail revealed what he called “the biggest thing that has happened to the game since night baseball.”

  MacPhail’s innovation—“a protector for batsmen”—wasn’t just another batting helmet. Designed by Dr. Walter E. Dandy, a brain surgeon at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, and his colleague Dr. George Eli Bennett, this particular “protector” solved the problem of the Beanproof Cap.