The Red Smith Reader

by Dave Anderson

  Mark Conn is New York’s second-best referee, second to Ruby Goldstein. He is cool and competent and impartial. Frank Forbes and Artie Schwartz are experienced, honest judges. To say they robbed Graham is merely to use the blunt parlance of the fight mob, for they are not robbers. To ridicule or abuse them because of an honest difference of opinion would be outrageously unfair, more unfair than what they did to Graham.

  When, after announcement of the decision, Madison Square Garden boomed with an angry thunder of protest, Artie Schwartz was startled. He had left his ringside seat and walked back through the press rows, and now he returned with a shocked expression and asked a newspaperman: “How did you have it?”

  “I had Graham ahead big,” the reporter said.

  “You did?” Artie asked, amazed, and he spread his palms in a gesture of puzzled resignation. He had scored it for Gavilan, nine rounds to six, and he could not understand how two brace of eyes could see the same fight so differently. There isn’t any understanding it, but there it is. From now on, the record books, which are supposed to reflect what happened, will include a line under Graham’s name reading: “August 29—Kid Gavilan, New York . . . L 15.” There will be no asterisk with a note adding: “Decision smelled.”

  It said here in a line of pulsing prose composed before the fight that no matter who won, there wasn’t going to be any great commotion about it. Like Gavilan, the Delphic oracle retains his title. Lady Godiva could have ridden through the ring without causing such commotion as the decision created.

  In the tunnel beneath the seats on the 50th Street side, somebody belted somebody else. Customers funneled down to ringside, yelling and brandishing fists, and two or three burst into the ring to cuddle and comfort Graham, and in the aisle near his corner cops struggled with a large howling man who threshed and kicked out wildly in their embrace.

  “We’ll take care of you!” a man yelled with his face close to that of Cy Levy, an inspector for the Boxing Commission. “When we get organized, we’ll take care of you!”

  “Me?” Levy protested mildly. “I didn’t vote.”

  When Johnny Addie read the last scorecard, Graham had dropped his head and half covered his features with his gloves. When he took the gloves away, his face was stricken. If he wasn’t crying, he was as close to tears as a tough, game professional prizefighter ever ought to be. In the dressing room afterward he was barely able to choke out thanks to those who crowded up with words of sympathy.

  “You’re still the champ,” some noisy guy in the dressing room kept telling him. “When you walk into a joint they’ll call you ‘Champ.’ “

  That prediction may come true, but Billy Graham fights for money and there’ll be no champion’s percentage in his papers next time he signs for a bout. Even if he meets Gavilan again, it’ll be on a different night in different circumstances, with, maybe, a different result.

  For this was Billy’s night. He made Gavilan look worse than the champion ever looked before from this seat. Contrary to the majority opinion, which held that Gavilan took an early lead and then lost it, Graham always was ahead on this scorecard. As seen here, Graham’s early advantage was a barely perceptible shade achieved largely by defensive skill. After a few rounds he had his man measured, his distance and timing set, and then he was in charge, making Gavilan fight his way.

  Graham would jab, jab, jab and wait for Gavilan’s lead. He would pick off the champion’s left hook or slide inside his swinging right to the body. If Gavilan punched for the head, Graham rode with the blow, taking it above and behind the ear, where it did no harm. He circled slowly to Gavilan’s right, turning his left shoulder in against Gavilan’s chest, and ripping a right to the body. He had all the better of the infighting.

  Billy’s right to the head grew sharper as the fight progressed. Two or three times he dropped punches on the jaw which half spun the champion. They were uncommonly fine punches for Graham, who is no dynamiter.

  The crowd loved the fight, though it wasn’t the greatest ever seen. Today’s welterweights aren’t the greatest who ever lived. Still, they were fighting for the championship of the world, and if Billy had got what he deserved he’d be the champion of the world, and it’s the only world there is.

  PATTERN OF VIOLENCE

  1951

  In the third round Sugar Ray Robinson smashed a straight right stiff to the chin of Randy Turpin, knocking the Englishman halfway across the ring, but when Robinson came plunging after, to punish him on the ropes, he found a fighter there with both hands working.

  That was when the pattern took shape in America’s biggest fight of 1951. The former middleweight champion of the world, fighting to regain the title as Stanley Ketchel and Tony Zale did before him, would land the sharper, cleaner blows. He would go fishing for Turpin’s elusive chin, angling and angling patiently, missing wildly many, many times, looking often inept and sometimes foolish against the champion’s strange but efficient defense.

  He would send Turpin to the floor, dropping him cleanly, while Ruby Goldstein, the referee, tolled the numbers off to nine. But whenever Robinson punched, Turpin would punch him back. When Turpin went down, he would get up. Under the severest punishment he would have his wits about him. He would be a fighting man, ready to take more and give it.

  That was the pattern, but there was no guessing when it might change. Turpin is tremendously strong, and as the rounds rolled away, his youth and strength might overcome the edge the older man had in class. The longer it lasted, the more likely it seemed that Turpin might come on to win.

  He was coming on. By this score he won the eighth and ninth rounds. He broke Robinson’s left eye open as the tenth started—and then it happened.

  It could be that Turpin’s biggest mistake was to open that gash over Robinson’s eye. “When that happened,” Sugar Ray was asked afterward, “did you figure that was the time to go get him?”

  “I figured that was the time to try,” Ray said.

  That’s how it seemed from ringside, down in the sweltering funnel of the Polo Grounds. It seemed that when Robinson saw blood and knew it was his own, he opened the throttle all the way, reasoning that if he didn’t get his man now, his neat face might come all apart soon and he wouldn’t have many more chances.

  He tore after Turpin, scoring well, but still unable to hurt the champion. They were in midring, closing for a rally, when Robinson’s right caught Turpin’s chin. It was a short punch, almost a hook, and it stopped Turpin dead. The Englishman was bent forward at the waist, feet wide, legs rigid, knees seeming locked together.

  Half an instant later, Turpin was in motion again, and though Robinson went after him hungrily, it looked as though Ray might lose his victim. The victim was fighting back. But, fighting, he left another opening. Robinson filled it.

  A straight right to the chin spun Turpin in the first movement of a pirouette. He pitched forward into Robinson’s arms, and Ray had to step back to let him fall. Turpin dropped on his back, but at the count of two or three he rolled over, brought up his head. His eyes were clear, and you knew he was going to get up.

  Robinson knew it, too, of course. And he knew what to do. He was in on his man swiftly, slugging the head with both hands, batting him around the ring. He caught him on the ropes, punching frantically at first, then suddenly changing his tactics.

  It was just as you see it on the screen when the slow-motion camera comes on to show the knockout in detail. Robinson took his time, steadying Turpin’s head, aiming, then letting go. Turpin was defenseless, but neither senseless nor altogether helpless. He couldn’t get his hands up, but he did raise his eyes and you could see them following Robinson’s gloves as he rolled and ducked and bent away from the blows. He was weaving like a cobra dancing to a flute.

  At ringside they were beginning to shout for Goldstein to protect him. Then Robinson brought up a left hook and a right, and as Turpin sagged toward the floor, the referee burst in and stopped it. Ruby was right, though Turpin complained of
his action in the dressing room and there will be louder protests as time goes on.

  As Robinson turned toward his own corner, Turpin straightened, refusing to fall, and lurched after him as though to resume the fight. His handlers leaped into the ring and tackled him, but he wasn’t trying to hit Robinson; he only meant to congratulate him, and he towed his handlers into the corner for that purpose.

  It was a genuine gesture of sportsmanship from a first-class fighting man. There haven’t been many better fighters than Turpin seen around here in a long time. There never has been a pluckier loser.

  In the first row of ringside behind the working press, a woman was standing on a chair, gasping as her companions chafed her hands and fanned her. She seemed near to fainting. This was Ray Robinson’s mother.

  A few seats removed, another woman wept. Her face was wet with tears and she was crying, “The title is his!” Over and over. This was Ray Robinson’s wife.

  HOMECOMING IN THE SLAMMER

  MARION, OHIO, 1977

  For two rounds a Brooklyn heavyweight named Kevin Isaac shuffled, shrugged, feinted and circled warily while huge Stan Ward of Sacramento fixed him with a beady glare of waiting.

  “Come on!” yelled a fan at ringside as the bell rang for the third round. “I’ve only got twenty years!”

  Number 125734 was back in the slammer today, and he got a standing ovation. Up to September 29, 1971, No. 125734 was Don King, now perhaps the most widely known alumnus of the Marion Correctional Institution. Returning to alma mater where he did four years for manslaughter, the least diffident promoter in boxing presented another round in his “United States Championship Tournament” for the edification of his former classmates and the entertainment of the American Broadcasting Company’s viewing audience. “King’s back,” read one placard held high in the bleachers. “We told you so.” Another struck a note of resignation: “Some dudes ya can’t chase away with a club. Welcome back, Don King.”

  The former resident in Room 10, Cellblock 6, stepped into the ring wearing a gold-encrusted jacket and waistcoat, brown pants with a crease that could draw blood, a frilled white evening shirt and fan-wing bow tie. His Afro haircut quivered with pride.

  “I look around and see many familiar faces,” he told the crowd of 1,400. “I am one of you.” They cheered. “It is with mixed emotions that I am coming back to what was a trauma in my life. I am happy and proud to be able to bring back some entertainment for you because you have been part of my life.” They yelled. “Wherever I have gone outside, I have never tried to hide Marion C.I. I never forgot No. 125734.” That was for openers. When he went on to tell them they must “deal with the pragmatic thing realistically,” they howled.

  He introduced the prison chaplain, Father Fred Furey, and got mostly cheers; Pete Perini, the superintendent, who was warmly booed; his own daughter and son, Debbie and Carl, who were politely received; Joe Louis, who brought down the house. There were boos for Walter Hampton, head of the parole board, but Don reminded them: “That’s the dude that sprung me.”

  Gesturing toward a microphone at ringside, he presented “The Mouth of Boxing—Howard Cosell.” Up went placards: “Finally, Howard is where he belongs,” and “Howard got in—will he get out?”

  It was a homecoming to warm every cockle this side of Sing Sing.

  Photographers were waiting when the returning prodigal strode through the big gate at the end of Victory Road. “I used to mow that grass,” he said, pointing. Sure of his way, he walked to Cellblock 6 with the superintendent. Pete Perini was a linebacker at Ohio State, played some pro football with the Cleveland Browns and Chicago Bears and came to this post in 1967, the year Don King matriculated, fresh from command of the numbers racket in Cleveland.

  “And I have to believe Don has done better,” said Irving Rudd of the promoter’s staff, “because he’s out and Pete is still inside.”

  Residents recognized King as he passed. They exchanged greetings. At the door of his old quarters he spoke to the present occupant: “You’re making this room famous.” As he entered with the warden, the occupant, Obie Brooks, stepped out. Brooks said he was doing ten to life for murder, too. He said he had five years in, with two to go before he could apply for parole. “Did it happen in a fight?” he was asked, for it was in a street fight that King killed a man.

  “During an armed robbery,” Obie said.

  The warden and the graduate walked together down the quarter-mile corridor to the gym. “Don didn’t serve time,” Perini has said. “Time served him.”

  Cordiality has been rampant here for days. When King arrived, the Mayor of Marion gave him the key to the city. “Mr. Mayor,” Don said, “when I was here before, nobody gave me a key to anything.”

  Members of the press were frisked courteously on arrival and given a mimeographed sheet of do’s and don’ts. “Keep track of your valuable equipment,” came ahead of “do leave all weapons (knives) and medication outside the main stockade.” Inside they met an old friend, Peter Rademacher, the only man who ever fought for the heavyweight championship of the world as an amateur. That was twenty years ago and Floyd Patterson dropped him seven times. Rademacher, now an Akron businessman, refereed the Isaac-Ward bout. Some of the fights were good, some funny. Mike Dokes, who lost flashily to Cuba’s Teofilo Stephenson when Dokes was a flashy amateur, was in with an oval personage named Charley Jordan. Charley is known as “Big Tuna” but he is built more like an angry blowfish. Ignoring his billowing belly, Dokes aimed for his bobbing head and opened a cut near an eye. The doctor seized the opportunity to stop it, but not before Vic Ziegel of the New York Post had spoken: “This fight belongs here.”

  “Nevertheless,” said Ed Schuyler of the Associated Press, one who survived the street gangs and pickpockets at last fall’s Muhammad Ali-Ken Norton affair. “Nevertheless, the security is better than in Yankee Stadium, and there’s a better class of people.”

  THE ZALE-GRAZIANO WARS

  1980

  In the fight mob they are saying that Saturday night’s match between Pipino Cuevas and Thomas Hearns in Detroit could be another Graziano-Zale number, which is like saying Meade and Lee are hooking up again at Gettysburg. Thomas and Pipino take no prisoners. Cuevas was only nineteen when the World Boxing Association dubbed him welterweight champion of the world, and his left hook has detached ten of his eleven challengers from their intellects. Hearns has fought and won twenty-eight times, leaving two opponents still on their feet.

  Rocky Graziano didn’t box, he threw cobblestones. If permitted, he would cheerfully have used a knife or blackjack or grenade. Tony Zale, called the Man of Steel because he fought out of Gary, Indiana, was a body puncher. One victim said that when he fired a shot to the giblets it felt like a red-hot poker thrust clear through the abdomen. Zale was middleweight champion of the world but his title was frozen while he served in the Navy through World War II. He hadn’t been seen in New York for more than four years, whereas Graziano had been a headliner in Madison Square Garden, knocking out guys like Bummy Davis, Freddie Cochrane, Harold Green, and Marty Servo.

  Servo had just won the welterweight championship when Rocky caught him by the throat, held him against the ropes and, bludgeoning him mercilessly with right hands, hammered him into retirement. Naturally, New York fans made Graziano the favorite over Zale.

  In Yankee Stadium Rocky gave Tony a frightful beating. He knocked him down repeatedly, battered him helpless about the ring. There was no counting the full right hands to the head that Zale took, and somehow kept. Every time the bell rang, you knew he couldn’t possibly last another round, and then the bell would ring again and here came Tony out of his corner, eyes glazed, hollow-cheeked face empty.

  In the sixth Zale somehow summoned the strength to nail Rocky in the solar plexus. Graziano went down, apparently paralyzed, and was counted out. Leaving the ring, he took a swing at a customer who accused him of going in the water. Zale was helped to his dressing room, limp and only half conscious bu
t still champion of the world.

  The dressing rooms presented a striking contrast. The loser sat on a rubbing table, unmarked, unhurt, cheerful. He had lost the fight but had made a good payday and assured himself of a bigger one ahead. He wasn’t breathing hard.

  Sam Pian and Art Winch handled Zale. The winner stood facing the press with Winch behind him, supporting him with both hands under the armpits. Tony kept trying to say something but his words were indistinguishable. Every few seconds he would sag toward the floor and Winch would straighten him up. At long last Tony got four words out. “Clean living did it,” he mumbled.

  That was September 27,1946. About six months later Frank Hogan, the District Attorney, and Eddie Eagan, chairman of the New York State Athletic Commission, ran Rocky out of the boxing business. The charge against him was pure gossamer, never supported with a shred of evidence. He was set down for failure to report a bribe offer that probably had not been made to take a dive in a fight that was never held.

  Banned in New York, he met Zale again in Chicago Stadium July 16,1947. Temperatures were over 100 and the arena’s makeshift cooling system did not work, yet the gate of $422,009 was the richest ever drawn indoors up to that time.

  This time it was Graziano who took the merciless beating. Zale punched him stupid, clubbing the body, cutting up the face. When an eye swelled shut, Rocky’s trainer broke the swelling with a 25-cent piece. Time and again Rocky started to fall and each time he dragged himself erect as if he had seen the face of Frank Hogan or Eddie Eagan on the floor.

  He kept fighting back. The heat drained both men but it seemed to take more out of Zale, who was thirty-four years old to Rocky’s twenty-five. In the sixth round Tony was helpless, and with fifty seconds to go, Johnny Behr, the referee, stopped it.

  Rocky was middleweight champion of the world. “I like Chicago,” he said. ‘They trut me good.” They still trut him as an outcast in New York, though. He and Zale went to Ruppert Stadium in Newark for their third meeting.