Somehow, from some source, Rocky got the notion that he was a boxer with the polished skills of a Ray Robinson or Willie Pep. With the airy grace of a water buffalo, he tried to use the ring, sticking and moving. Zale regarded him with curiosity for a moment, then moved in and slugged at will. He needed less than three rounds to render Rocky a former champion.
Four years passed before Graziano had any more truck with the championship. Meanwhile, the title passed from Zale to Marcel Cerdan to Jake LaMotta to Ray Robinson. By that time Sugar Ray stood elected by acclamation as the finest fighter alive, pound for pound. “I wanta see what makes him tick,” Rocky said, getting a match with Robinson in Chicago.
Leading citizens introduced from the ring before the main event included Zale, retired. He shook hands perfunctorily with Robinson, then strolled over to Rocky’s corner with a smile that lit up his face. When two men have had the sort of fights Tony and Rocky had, there is a bond between them that nobody else in the world can share. The pain and the triumph were theirs and theirs alone.
Beaming, Zale took both of Graziano’s hands in his, leaned over him and spoke. It wasn’t necessary to hear the words. You knew he was saying, “Give him what you gave me, Rock.”
Rocky tried to comply, but in the third round Robinson caught him coming in. One shot to the chin and the fight was over. One more bout and Graziano’s career was over.
If, as they are saying, Cuevas and Hearns are clones of Graziano and Zale, there are interesting times ahead in the welterweight division.
DURAN NO QUITTER
1980
This is the first opportunity for comment on the ending of the Roberto Duran-Sugar Ray Leonard bout since Durán, then the World Boxing Council welterweight champion, told the referee: “No mas, no mas. No more box.” It would require a deal of convincing to shake the conviction here that Durán had to be sick or injured, because Roberto Durán was not, is not, and never could be a quitter.
The Sweet Science is a harsh mistress, and under her cruel rules the deadliest sin is to give up under punishment. The most damning criticism that can be made of a fighter is to say, in the parlance of the fight mob, that he is a bit of a kiyi or that he has a touch of the geezer in him, meaning a streak of cowardice. The fact that no coward walks up the steps and into the ring isn’t good enough for the fight mob. It is further required that when his number comes up, the fighter must endure pain and punishment without complaint as long as he is conscious.
“Do you want me to stop it?” Harry Kessler, the referee, asked when Archie Moore was being slugged senseless by Rocky Marciano.
“No,” Archie said. “I want to be counted out.” He was.
“I’m going to stop this,” Joe Gould, Jim Braddock’s manager, told his fighter when Joe Louis was pounding Jim loose from the heavyweight championship of the world.
“If you do I’ll never speak to you again,” Braddock said.
This is the code. Exceptions are made only if a fighter surrenders for dishonest reasons, as Sonny Liston almost surely did in his two engagements with Cassius Clay-Muhammad Ali. (The name changed between bouts.) In other words, quitting is a disgrace, deeply to be deplored unless it is done to discharge a business obligation.
Liston’s motives have never been made public, but suspicions raised by the first match were confirmed beyond reasonable doubt by the second. Liston was heavyweight champion of the world up to and including his first six peculiar rounds with Clay in Miami Beach. The bell for the seventh found him sitting sullen on his stool while the title changed hands. He said an injury had rendered his left arm useless.
They met again in Lewiston, Maine. In the first round, which was also the last, Liston went in the water with a splash that washed away whatever doubt the first performance had left.
Memory retains only one other case of a champion surrendering his title, and that was strictly on the level. In 1949 Marcel Cerdan was defending the middleweight championship against Jake LaMotta in Detroit when the supraspinatus muscle at the back of his right shoulder came loose. Right arm hanging at his side, he fought on left-handed and LaMotta was having all he could do to beat one side of Cerdan until the tenth round, when the Frenchman’s seconds persuaded him to leave the rest of his fight for a better time.
The better time never arrived. Booked for a rematch, Cerdan died in the crash when the plane bringing him back to the United States flew into a mountain in the Azores.
LaMotta, the Bronx Bull, was as tough as any man of his time, yet he quit in the ring at least twice. One was for business reasons. He had agreed to a barney to ornament the gaudy record of one Blackjack Billy Fox, but Jake had never been off his feet and was too proud to hit the deck. He floundered along the ropes impersonating a carp out of water until a faint-hearted referee stopped the performance. Even when Ray Robinson pounded him loose from the middleweight title in thirteen rounds in Chicago, LaMotta was still on his feet when the referee stepped in. But in his next match he gave up. Irish Bob Murphy, who wasn’t great but could hit, punished Jake until he quit after seven rounds.
That scene was reminiscent of a night in Jersey City when Max Baer, a former champion, hurled invective and righthand shots at Tony Galento until Tony, sick from swallowing his own blood, gave up. Baer didn’t know it, but he had an accomplice. On the eve of the fight, a barfly in Galento’s spa in Orange, New Jersey, had asked Tony for tickets, had received a predictable answer and had shoved a beer glass into Tony’s profile. Several stitches were required to close the wounds before Baer reopened them.
Willie Pep and Sandy Saddler fought for the world featherweight championship four times. All four bouts were memorable and one can’t be forgotten because Willie quit when he was winning. Saddler had knocked him out and taken the title in their first match; in a gallant performance with one brow gaping like a third eye, Willie outfought Saddler to regain the title; Pep lost it back in the third meeting when he did or did not tear a muscle; in their fourth match Willie took an early lead and was winning on all cards when the ninth round ended. “No more,” Willie said.
At least one onlooker who had never before and has not since seen a boxer quit while winning was reminded of Willie’s story of his beginnings in Hartford. As soon as school was out, he said, he would take off on the run. He didn’t have to look back; he knew bigger kids would be chasing him. On his good days he was able to run home and slam the door before his pursuers could lay hands on him. Tiring of this one-sided game, Willie went to a gym to learn boxing. There he came under the tutelage of Bill Gore, and in Gore’s hands he developed into the supreme artist of the ring.
Now in his fourth fight with Saddler, the artist blotted his sketchbook. “Again this night,” an onlooker thought, “he ran home and slammed the door.”
NIGHT FOR JOE LOUIS
1951
Joe Louis lay on his stomach on a rubbing table with his right ear pillowed on a folded towel, his left hand in a bucket of ice on the floor. A handler massaged his left ear with ice. Joe still wore his old dressing gown of blue and red—for the first time, one was aware of how the colors had faded—and a raincoat had been spread on top of that.
This was an hour before midnight of October 26, 1951. It was the evening of a day that dawned July 4, 1934, when Joe Louis became a professional fistfighter and knocked out Jack Kracken in Chicago for a fifty-dollar purse. The night was a long time on the way, but it had to come.
Ordinarily, small space is reserved here for sentimentality about professional fighters. For seventeen years, three months, and twenty-two days Louis fought for money. He collected millions. Now the punch that was launched seventeen years ago had landed. A young man, Rocky Marciano, had knocked the old man out. The story was ended. That was all except—
Well, except that this time he was lying down in his dressing room in the catacombs of Madison Square Garden. Memory retains scores of pictures of Joe in his dressing room, always sitting up, relaxed, answering questions in his slow, thoughtful way.
This time only, he was down.
His face was squashed against the padding of the rubbing table, muffling his words. Newspapermen had to kneel on the floor like supplicants in a tight little semicircle and bring their heads close to his lips to hear him. They heard him say that Marciano was a good puncher, that the best man had won, that he wouldn’t know until Monday whether this had been his last fight.
He said he never lost consciousness when Marciano knocked him through the ropes and Ruby Goldstein, the referee, stopped the fight. He said that if he’d fallen in midring he might have got up inside ten seconds, but he doubted that he could have got back through the ropes in time.
They asked whether Marciano punched harder than Max Schmeling did fifteen years ago, on the only other night when Louis was stopped.
“This kid,” Joe said, “knocked me out with what? Two punches. Schmeling knocked me out with—musta been a hundred punches. But,” Joe said, “I was twenty-two years old. You can take more then than later on.”
“Did age count tonight, Joe?”
Joe’s eyes got sleepy. “Ugh,” he said, and bobbed his head.
The fight mob was filling the room. “How did you feel tonight?” Ezzard Charles was asked. Joe Louis was the hero of Charles’ boyhood. Ezzard never wanted to fight Joe, but finally he did and won. Then and thereafter Louis became just another opponent who sometimes disparaged Charles as a champion.
“Uh,” Charles said, hesitating. “Good fight.”
“You didn’t feel sorry, Ezzard?”
“No,” he said, with a kind of apologetic smile that explained this was just a prize fight in which one man knocked out an opponent.
“How did you feel?” Ray Arcel was asked. For years and years Arcel trained opponents for Joe and tried to help them whip him, and in a decade and a half he dug tons of inert meat out of the resin.
“I felt very bad,” Ray said.
It wasn’t necessary to ask how Marciano felt. He is young and strong and undefeated. He is rather clumsy and probably always will be, because he has had the finest of teachers, Charley Goldman, and Charley hasn’t been able to teach him skill. But he can punch. He can take a punch. It is difficult to see how he can be stopped this side of the heavyweigh c championship.
It is easy to say, and it will be said, that it wouldn’t have been like this with the Louis of ten years ago. It isn’t a surpassingly bright thing to say, though, because this isn’t ten years ago. The Joe Louis of October 26, 1951, couldn’t whip Rocky Marciano, and that’s the only Joe Louis there was in the Garden. That one was going to lose on points in a dreary fight that would have left everything at loose ends. It would have been a clear victory for Marciano, but not conclusive. Joe might not have been convinced.
Then Rocky hit Joe a left hook and knocked him down. Then Rocky hit him another hook and knocked him out. A right to the neck knocked him out of the ring. And out of the fight business. The last wasn’t necessary, but it was neat. It wrapped the package, neat and tidy.
An old man’s dream ended. A young man’s vision of the future opened wide. Young men have visions, old men have dreams. But the place for old men to dream is beside the fire.
10.
Pals, Colleagues, and Himself
FIRST ANNIVERSARY
1940
It is just about a year now since great, living, fearless, human literature started appearing in this space as a regular daily feature. To be sure, it could be eleven months or maybe thirteen, but there’s no point in getting technical about it now, because August 15 has been designated officially as the anniversary of this column’s birth. This was established at 6:30 A.M. daylight time—and we mean daylight—on Thursday. At that hour it suddenly became desirable to have a good story, quick. A question had been asked, rather frostily, we thought.
“And what was it this time, pray tell?” the questioner inquired. “Sitting up with a sick fight manager, perhaps? Or interviewing an insomniac batboy? Or possibly you were celebrating something?”
“That’s it,” we said. “Celebrating. We were celebrating our anniversary.”
“Our anniversary? Our anniversary is in February, and for your information this is—”
“Not your anniversary,” we said haughtily. “Our anniversary. The first anniversary of the day when the product of this observer’s trenchant pen became an indispensable adjunct to the breakfast tables of the land. It was exactly one year ago that American journalism was enriched—”
“If you want breakfast,” this acquaintance of ours said, “you’d better get it now before you go to bed. I’m not going to have anybody messing up my kitchen when it’s time for the children’s lunch.”
That is the true story of how Journalism Enrichment Day came to be instituted as a national holiday.
Now, looking back over the year that led up to this occasion, we are compelled to report that it has been disturbingly undisturbed. Threats of libel action have been few and far between and very few women and children have been killed in the crush around the newsstands when this department reached the street in the Bulldog Edition.
Oh, there have been some letters beginning genially, “Dear Rat: All you knockers make me sick—” and one that we particularly treasure read: “I and many others know you wisht you had some of Joe Louis cash. Dont be jelus. He is only a Negro but he never pick cotton.—(Signed) A friend.”
But reports that Judge Landis always consults us before making World Series plans and that Mike Jacobs wouldn’t dream of scheduling a title fight without our written approval are not more than half true.
And our fearless and forthright predictions that Galento would flatten Baer and the Yankees and Cardinals would win the pennants and that Seabiscuit would lose the Santa Anita Handicap and Bimelech win the Kentucky Derby exerted only a minor influence on the actual contesting of these events.
In short, the public seems able to take us or leave us alone. Sometime during the holiday celebration, we expressed our dissatisfaction with this state of affairs to a gentleman we encountered in a noted spa adjoining a parking lot.
“I’ll give you a tip,” he said. “No columnist ever amounted to anything unless he believed in something, with his whole heart and soul. What do you believe in?”
“The immortality of Connie Mack,” we said. “Let’s you and me drink to good old Connie.”
“That won’t do,” said the man, who is a True Believer himself. For years he has believed, with a faith unsupported by evidence, that two dollars planted with a bookie will bear fruit in riches, happiness and a life free of pain.
“That won’t do. Everybody believes in Connie. You’ve got to believe in something controversial. Something you can write about and make people think about. Now take Heywood Broun—”
“Let’s have a drink to good old Heywood.”
“All right. He believed passionately in the brotherhood of man.”
“Let’s have a drink to the brotherhood of man, on you.”
“All right,” the man said, “now you take Eleanor Roosevelt. She—”
“Good old Eleanor! Let’s have a drink to Eleanor on the house.”
“—believes in Young People. All right, to the Young People then. But you don’t believe in anything.”
At the time we had to confess this was so. But that was a long while ago. We have lived since then, and no longer are we the carefree, superficial wastrel of last Wednesday night.
Now we believe, with passionate sincerity, in abstemiousness, clean living, regular hours, and a healthy, normal home life. With our whole heart and soul, we believe in national prohibition.
HAPPY BIRTHDAY; GRANTLAND RICE
1954
Since it was only Sunday evening when it began, chances are Grant-land Rice’s birthday party will be settling into stride about the time these pages become a shroud for some obsolete haddock. There have been some memorable wingdings in Mr. Toots Shor’s fish and chips hutch, but none topped this and none ever could.
; It wasn’t the people present who made it the best. It was the man who was not there, though he wasn’t really absent, either. What happened more than once since Grant died last July kept happening again and again Sunday night; you found yourself gazing around the merry room in absent-minded questing, expecting to see Granny at the merriest table.
It was amusing to see men who live all their lives in a swarm of autograph-seekers going around this time collecting signatures from others, signatures that would fill the register of a Hall of Fame in any sport or almost any other field from show business to politics.
Yet what else would you expect? Jack Dempsey, Gene Tunney, Earl Sande, Gene Sarazen, Vinnie Richards, the Four Horsemen, Johnny Weismuller, Herman Hickman, Lou Little, Tommy Henrich, Yogi Berra, Eddie Arcaro, Ted Atkinson, Hank Greenberg—where else would they be on a night the clan was lifting a tall one to Granny?
Wherever they were, in Miami or Nashville, Cleveland, Chicago or California, they dropped what they were doing and came on. There wasn’t one among them, however famous, however successful, who doesn’t owe much to Grantland Rice.
It was the biggest haul of debtors this side of Old Bailey, and they were there to pay up in the only coin Granny would ever accept—affection and laughter.
This was the party Granny’s friends had been planning for several years. It didn’t come off earlier because they’d never got together on a date and, anyway, there was grave doubt that Granny would have attended an affair in his honor at gunpoint. This date sort of picked itself; it was the eve of the seventy-fourth anniversary of Grant Rice’s birth and the night before publication of his memoirs, The Tumult and the Shouting.
There was nobody to sing “Happy Birthday” to, but they could have sung it loudly, for it was a happy occasion. Granny is missed but he is not mourned. There was no tear-jerking; that would have embarrassed Granny.
Rube Goldberg thought of this while watching Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., on Ed Sullivan’s television show. (Some of the guests went to the studio before dinner and the others watched from the party.) Fairbanks was giving a graceful reading of Granny’s moving verse “Ghosts of the Argonne”:
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