by Jack Tunney
“The best way to neutralize his reach advantage is to fight inside. When you’re in close, you’re not in danger from his long-range straight right . . . work on your uppercuts to the body and your hooks.” Willy threw those punches and I did my best to roll with them.
“When he throws a punch, you throw a flurry of punches . . . Never try to potshot him with only one punch. Always string your punches together in combination. You can’t hit him if you don’t throw punches.”
Willy backed off. “Buddy,” he said.
Doyle climbed into the ring.
“Okay,” Willy said, right before Doyle slipped his mouthpiece in. “Let’s see what you got.”
***
The rest of the week continued the same way. Every day, Willy came to spar with me in the ring.
“You’ve seen it in the films,” Willy told me as he acted out the part of Solomon King. “He’s lazy about bringing his jab back, so you’ve got to counterpunch him.”
Willy pulled his jab back in the same motion I’d seen Solomon King do when I watched the films over and over. I flashed in to counterpunch, forcing Willy to cover up and move backward.
“Good! Good!” Pops encouraged from the corner. “You’ve got to make him afraid to commit to the jab . . . Keep parrying the jab.”
“If he over-commits and jumps in with it . . .” Wily again acted out what he was telling me, “. . . Then feint . . . making him throw the jab gives you an instant to step in past his outstretched lead hand and throw a hook to his body . . .”
I followed the instructions and punched through. We did it over and over and over.
Afterward, leaning on the ropes together, Willy kept talking. “The problem you’re going to have is it will be difficult to actually hit King with the overhand right early in a fight because you’re really using it as a distraction. You have to set it up by getting him accustomed to your left hook. From King’s point of view, your overhand right has got to look just like the initial part of your left hook. It’s only a deceptive and deadly punch when he’s expecting the left hook.”
***
Every day, I learned more. Every day, Pops and Willy kept at me. I was exhausted at first, but as the days wore on I felt stronger and stronger.
It was the Monday afternoon before the fight on the coming Saturday, that the first disaster struck.
Pops had been winding down the hard workouts. Everything now was about maintaining speed and staying sharp. The mood in Ten Hawks was positive. Pops had let the reporters in the prior Friday and the boxing writers had been doing their job pumping up the fight on the sports pages. My performance against Haywood had them all buzzing.
Despite Solomon King’s record of devastating opponents, all the articles were being written as if I was going to be a match for him – at least all of the articles Tombstone read to me. I knew there would be naysayers, but he wasn’t going to read those to me and I didn’t want to hear them.
I was untaping my hands when Tina came running into the Gym. “Pops! Pops!” She was highly agitated.
We all looked over at her.
“What is it?” Pops asked, concerned.
“It’s Donovan,” she was out of breath from running. “He went over to Main Street to spar with King and he’s getting killed.”
There was a moment when nobody moved, then Tombstone and I were running out to the detective sedan.
The Main Street Gym was on the second floor at 318½ Main, above a luggage store and a parking garage. A sign above the ground floor entry read, “World rated boxers train here daily.” From the outside, it looked rundown, but inside it was all business with six solid rings set up for training and all the equipment anyone could need.
I had the tape off my hands by the time Tombstone drove the six blocks from Ten Hawks to Main Street Gym, screeching to a halt at the curb on the wrong side of the street. We were out of the car and running toward the entrance before the sedan’s springs stopped rocking.
***
Bursting into the gym, we could see a large crowd hooting and hollering. With Tombstone leading the charge, we started plowing through people until we could get to ringside.
It was an awful sight.
Solomon King had beaten Donovan Hawks silly. He’d done it in such a way that Donovan was barely still on his feet, his face without headgear a bruised, bloodied, pulpy mess. Donovan could barely get his hands up above his waist.
When he saw me coming, King punched Donovan with a straight right to the head. The force of the punch sent Donovan into the ropes and then springing him back into a left right combination that finally put him on the floor – either out or dead.
King was slick with sweat. He spat out his mouthpiece. “Come on, boy,” he said, waving me toward him with his gloves. His voice was surprisingly high, so different than the threatening presence his body projected, so different from Tombstone’s deep basso, which was what I thought should have been coming out of his mouth.
It was this incongruity more than anything else that stopped me from seeing red. Donovan was an arrogant kid, but he had a great future ahead of him with time to mature, if this hadn’t killed him or broken his will.
Donovan was young and immature. He thought he was invincible. He was jealous because he didn’t want to wait for his shot. The Golden Gloves, The Olympics, there were his path to the top, but he hadn’t wanted to wait. He thought he was ready. He thought he could beat me. He thought he could beat King. He was wrong. He was almost dead wrong.
I felt the rage deep inside me, but it was rage at me. My arrogant goading of King had caused him to dupe and beat Donovan. I thought I was getting into his mind, but he had turned it all back on me. I was into the ring, but I was icy enough to kneel down next to Donovan, and not go after King. The crowd had gone silent. The mob mentality which had urged them on to jeer and cheer had fled. The only thing left behind was their shame.
And mine.
Then Tombstone was beside me as I cradled Donovan’s head.
“Ambulance is coming,” he said, and I could hear the wail of the siren in the distance.
I looked up at King who was still standing, smirking. I looked over at his trainer Marvin Stockbridge, who couldn’t hold my gaze. There were various hoods connected to Mickey Cohen outside the ring, but the big man himself was nowhere to be seen. He had let this happen, but he wouldn’t want to be directly connected to it.
However, for me this wasn’t about Cohen any more.
This was about me and King – and there was a war coming.
ROUND 15
The next few days before the fight went by in a concentrated blur. I was turned almost completely inward. I spoke only when spoken to directly, and only then in one or two word answers.
Donovan was stabilized, but still in a light coma. He had come out of it once, but retreated back in again. I felt as if I were encased in ice, yet with a fire so hot at my center it felt as if it were consuming me.
Every day, I was readying myself mentally for the ring. Solomon King had misjudged me badly. He sought to intimidate me, to make me fear him. But I felt no fear. I never had. But I did feel hate.
In the crucible of the ring, I was going to destroy Solomon King. I was Patrick Felony Flynn, and I was a giant killer.
And then the world exploded.
It was late. I was in my room above Ten Hawks Gym, lying on my bed fully clothed except for my shoes. I wanted to sleep, but Morpheus wouldn’t come. Whenever I closed my eyes, I saw King’s fists pounding into Donovan. I’d been through enough close calls to know I wasn’t invincible, but I knew I could beat King. I would beat King.
I heard the phone ringing in the hallway. It rang three times before somebody answered it. A few moments later there was a knock on my door. Tina came in.
“Pat, that was Donovan’s nurse. He’s awake and calling for you. They say he wouldn’t calm down unless somebody called you.”
I sat up on the bed and began putting on my shoes. “Call To
mbstone,” I said.
“I will,” Tina said, “But I’m going with you.”
I couldn’t refuse her. She’d been staying by her brother’s side more than anyone else. She’d earned the right to go.
***
Tombstone was at the hospital when we arrived. Our badges got us past the night nurse, but she insisted Tina stay in the visitor’s waiting room. I quietly promised Tina I’d get her in to see Donovan before we left.
There was another nurse in Donovan’s room. She looked up when we came in. “Are you Patrick Flynn?”
“Yes, ma’am,” I said.
“He’s been insisting on talking with you. The doctor only agreed because it appears to be the only way to get him to calm down.”
I moved past her to the bed. Donovan’s eyes opened. The bruising on his face was changing color as it healed. The swelling was way down.
He reached out and grabbed my arm.
“I’m sorry, Pat.” His voice was soft and sand dry.
I helped him drink some water through a straw.
“There’s nothing to be sorry for,” I told him.
“Yes,” he insisted. “They were here right after I woke up.”
“Who was here?”
“Two men.”
“Doctors?”
“No! No!” He was getting upset.
“Easy,” I said. “Tell it slow.”
“They were thugs . . .”
I looked over at Tombstone.
“Somebody on the hospital staff must have let them know he was awake,” he said.
I turned back to Donovan. “What did they want?”
There was a slick of sweat now on Donovan’s forehead. “They said you have to lose.”
I shook my head. “They’re just trying to scare us.”
“No!” Donovan was insistent. His hand dug into my arm. “They said they were going to take Tina until after the fight.”
“That’s crazy. Tina is with us . . .” My voice trailed off.
Tombstone was out of the room before me.
The waiting room was empty.
The bathroom was empty.
The hallways were empty.
We ran outside, but the parking lot was empty.
Tina was gone.
“They must have been waiting for us to bring her here,” Tombstone said.
“Either that or they had the gym staked out and were planning to take her when we were out of the way,” I said. My stomach jumping in all directions.
“Guess it don’t make no never mind,” Tombstone said. “She’s gone.”
“And Mickey Cohen has her.” I said, finishing the horror for both of us.
ROUND 16
Three hours before the fight, we were still no closer to finding Tina than we were at the hospital the night before. I felt sick. Tombstone and I had been so foolish when we started this – thinking Mickey Cohen couldn’t get to us.
We might not have had wives or girlfriends or blood family he could reach, but everybody has somebody or something they care about. Ugly men like Mickey Cohen knew that and had no compunction about exploiting the knowledge.
I was alone in the main dressing room at the Olympic Auditorium. I’d chased everyone else out. I wasn’t fit company to be around. I was here because I couldn’t think of anywhere else to go. Others were still heavily involved in the search for Tina. Chief Parker had mobilized all of his available assets, but to no avail.
Every known Cohen gunsel had been hauled in and either sweated, bribed, or beaten, but to a man, they knew nothing. Street snitches who would sell out their mother for a sawbuck, could come up with nothing but wild goose chases.
Trying to postpone the fight would have sealed Tina’s death warrant the same as if I refused to take a dive and go in the tank.
The tension at the weigh-in earlier in the day had been palpable. I made weight by two pounds without the aid of Pops’ lead-lined shorts.
King and I simply stared at one another. He had two inches on me in height and outweighed me by ten pounds, but stripped down, muscle for muscle, we looked evenly matched.
I knew the serious training and proper nutrition had changed my body into a brawny, twisted steel sinew of fast, fighting muscle. I felt the power inside me. I’d never before been in this kind of shape. Physically, I felt ready – packed, tamped, and ready to ignite. Mentally, I was a mass of confusion.
I was scared I was going to lose control in the ring, forget what was at stake, forget to go down, and destroy King. I knew it could happen. I’d seen red and lost all control before. I was Patrick Felony Flynn the giant killer because I never stopped coming, I couldn’t stop coming, I’d be throwing fists from my grave – but if I couldn’t stop myself, how could I go down?
King vs. Flynn was at the top of tonight’s fight card – the main event. The boxing writers had been spinning the fight up in the local sports pages, so the audience was expected to be large and frenzied. Word of what King had done to Donovan had spread through the boxing community like a plague, turning what would have been a fairly standard match-up into a grudge match.
It was what Cohen wanted. If King got past me, Willy Stevenson couldn’t dodge him any longer. And King would go through Stevenson and get his shot at Archie Moore and the World Light-Heavyweight Championship. Once that belt was in Cohen’s pocket through King there would be no stopping Cohen from taking over the rest of the fight game – turning a sport already battling accusations of fixing and dirty dealings into a deadly business.
And because Cohen had Tina, I could do nothing to stop it.
The door to the dressing room opened and Tombstone stepped in. I looked up sharply, but the expression on his face was enough to tell me there was no good news.
“How you doing?” he asked.
I blew out a long breath and went back to pacing. I shook my head, but didn’t say anything.
“We’ll find her,” Tombstone said.
I stopped and looked over at him. “No, we won’t. Life doesn’t work that way. Sometimes the bad guys win.”
“Since when?” Tombstone was trying, but I wasn’t buying.
“This whole plan was a stupid idea. Whatever made anyone think I could take down King? I was crazy to take this on.”
It was Tombstone’s turn to shake his head. “That’s just your black cloud talking. If this hadn’t happened, if you could fight King toe to toe, you could take him.”
“But this has happened,” I said. “Donovan is in the hospital, Tina is gone, and all because we were arrogant.”
“This is not our fault. This situation is because of Mickey Cohen – his choices, not ours.”
“If Tina doesn’t come back alive, does it make any difference whose choice it was?”
“Yes,” Tombstone said. His tone had changed and I looked up to see vengeance in his eyes.
We stared at each other, a silent pact being made.
The door to the dressing room opened again, noise from the auditorium louder now than when Tombstone entered. We looked up, expecting to see Pops, and got a big surprise . . .
Anita O’Shay – Eve Talbot – undercover Treasury agent.
She looked upset and emotionally torn. “I know where she is . . .” The words came out in a rush, tumbling over themselves and running together, as if she wouldn’t say them if she didn’t get them out fast enough.
Both Tombstone and I looked at her silently. Her words were a shock, but that the undercover Treasury agent would be the source was even more disorienting.
“What do you mean?” I asked. It was a stupid question. She couldn’t mean anyone else other than Tina, but I didn’t want to get my hopes up by jumping to conclusions.
“The little girl, Tina, of course.”
“Where is she?” Tombstone asked. His whole body was a study in controlled fury.
“Cohen stashed her in the garment district with Verne Chadwick. Cohen has kept the location of this whole counterfeiting operation under heavy wraps exce
pt for a very few trusted lieutenants. I overheard them talking when they thought I had left the room.”
“Why are you telling us and not your boss?” I asked.
“I did tell my boss, but he won’t move on Cohen.”
“What!” Tombstone and I were in harmony.
Anita shook her head. “He doesn’t care about your fight, and he doesn’t think Cohen will kill the girl. We know the counterfeiting operation can’t roll until a load of paper stolen from the mint arrives. My boss wants it all – the plates, the presses, the paper, and Verne Chadwick.”
“And he’d let Cohen keep a kidnapped girl?”
“As I said, he doesn’t think Cohen will kill her – says it would be bad for business.”
“Then why are you here?” It was Tombstone’s turn to ask.
“Because I believe Cohen will kill the girl. I’ve spent enough time with him to know he’ll kill her even if you lose the fight. If anyone gets in his way, he makes them pay, and you’re in his way.”
“So, give already,” I demanded.
ROUND 17