Speed Kings

by Andy Bull

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  Just as his father had done before him, Godfrey Dewey responded to defeat by turning inward, toward things he felt he could control. He began to focus more of his attention on the bob run. He had always thought that the Olympics, and the future of the resort, depended on its popularity, and, after he had fought so hard to secure it, he became obsessed with ensuring its success. He began to micromanage its every detail. Around him, Lake Placid was alive with workmen. Construction crews were working twenty-four-hour shifts to get the ice arena done. The foreman remembered “men so thick they looked like ants crawling over each other.” At their worst, the shifts stretched for seventy hours straight without sleep, with breaks only for meals. All the while, Dewey worried away at the run, fussing over the sleds, the course, and even the teams that would be riding them. He spent hours working on blueprints for a new type of sled, one with flatter runners and finer steering. He had, of course, a little experience as a bobsledder himself: he had been a reserve on the US team in 1928. He also had some firm ideas about who should be representing the country this time round at what was, he felt, his bob track, in his Olympics. For two years now he had been liaising with officials on the United States Olympic Committee and the Amateur Athletic Union (AAU), whose representative was proving to be particularly recalcitrant. His name was Jay O’Brien.

  Godfrey Dewey knew Jay a little from St. Moritz. He had written to him in 1928, asking for his help in persuading the IOC to award the Games to Lake Placid. “Any influence you can bring to bear will be most welcome.” Jay wasn’t especially inclined to do Dewey’s bidding. Since 1928 he had been running the AAU’s bobsleigh program as a private concern. He paid all their expenses for the 1931 World Championship out of his own pocket. And he didn’t much appreciate Dewey’s interference.

  You could scarcely find two men of such similar station yet more different in manner and mind-set than Dewey and O’Brien. This was the beginning of a delicious rivalry. In February 1930, the International Bobsledding and Tobogganing Federation held a congress in Paris. They met to discuss, among other things, the new style of sledding, in which riders sat upright, and the technical specifications of the sleds and the run to be used in the Lake Placid Olympics. Minor details, these, but important ones—things like the width of the sleds and the rules governing the running order for competition. Of course Dewey had fixed ideas about all of them, and was anxious that he should get his way. The trouble was that the Lake Placid Organizing Committee had no jurisdiction over the federation. “Neither a vote, nor a voice, nor even an assured right to attend,” Dewey complained. “This is a manifest injustice.” So he had the Amateur Athletic Union pass on meticulous orders to O’Brien. He was particularly keen for O’Brien to hammer home the point that there would not be a separate skeleton sled competition in 1932. It had been hard enough to secure money for the bob run; the idea of building another course for a different competition was anathema to him. As, to Jay, was the idea of being Godfrey Dewey’s errand boy. He didn’t just disagree with the instructions; he ignored them. In fact, he didn’t even turn up for the first part of the congress, figuring, presumably, that there were better things for a man to do with his time in Paris than debate bobsled gages.

  When Dewey discovered this, he fired off a series of furious letters, one to his architect, Zentzytzki; another to the head of the United States Olympic Committee, Brigadier General Charles Sherrill; and another to Daniel Ferris, secretary-treasurer of the AAU. They all read the same, more or less. He complained that his instructions “were too explicit to be overridden.” O’Brien, he decided, had been “determined to defeat their purpose, regardless of his official obligations.” It was, Dewey said, “discourteous, dishonorable, and a deliberate betrayal of trust.” Dewey was certain the AAU would be horrified enough to discharge O’Brien. For neither the first nor the last time, he was horribly wrong. The AAU didn’t discharge O’Brien. Instead, it made him chairman of the Olympic Bobsled Committee.

  He and Dewey now stood square in opposition to each other. Dewey was sure of one thing: whoever was going to win the gold and the glory on Mount Van Hoevenberg in 1932, in the United States’ very first Olympic bobsledding competition, it wasn’t going to be Jay O’Brien. He would do everything he could to make sure of that. Jay, of course, had his own ideas. He wasn’t planning on just managing the US bobsled team; he also wanted to be a member of it. He was forty-seven now, and he knew this would likely be his last chance to win a gold medal. In his mind, he was already putting together a crack team to drive the United States’ No. 1 sled. He wanted Billy Fiske to be his driver and Tippy Gray to be the No. 2. He would be the brake himself. Now that bob teams had four men rather than five, he had one spot left to fill. He needed someone strong, to provide power for a running start. And heavy, to provide the weight to haul the team down the mountain. And cool, able to keep his head even as the sled’s speed shot up to 70 mph. In short, he needed someone who knew how to live fast.

  Jay knew just the man.

  Eddie Eagan.

  CHAPTER 8

  THE BOXER

  Eddie saw the punch coming, but that didn’t make him feel any better when it hit. The six-ounce glove, soppy with water and stained with blood, caught him high on his cheek, and a flaming sunset flashed in front of his left eye. Eddie had just enough sense left to make sure he fell forward into his opponent’s chest. He held on in a clinch and waited for the sweet relief of the bell, which he knew was about to sound. When it came, it cut through both the buzzing in his head, and the screams and shouts of the thousand or so fight fans inside the Opera House.

  Eddie staggered off toward his corner and slumped down onto his stool. He could feel his cheek starting to swell. “Hell,” he thought, “what a shot that was.” He sniffed at the smelling salts his brother was waving under his nose, opened his mouth, and sucked in what little good air there was in the smoke-filled room. And he asked himself, again, just what the hell he was doing here in Cripple Creek, a sixteen-year-old kid in the ring against a bigger, older, stronger man.

  The answer, Eddie knew, was foolish pride. He had already beaten Lum Myberg once before, in the welterweight final of the Denver Athletic Club Championship just a few months back. The victory had won Eddie his first amateur title. It had been close—he got it on points, not by a knockout—but Eddie had long since forgotten that. In his mind it had become “a clean-cut and decisive victory.” Ever since that day the local press back in Myberg’s hometown of Victor, just outside Cripple Creek, had been goading Eddie. Longmont, where Eddie lived, was about a hundred miles away but Eddie’s acquaintances made sure he saw those papers. “Did you see what they’re saying about you, Eddie?” It seemed, Eddie remembered, that “almost every issue contained a challenge for me to defend my new-won title. It was a real wrench to ignore those items.” Eventually, he snapped. “Eagan apparently is satisfied to rest on his questionable victory over our champion,” one paper stated. “Eagan is afraid to fight.”

  Eddie never could abide an insult. He was born poor and raised proud. He liked to say that the first blow he ever had was the slap on the bottom from the doctor right after he was born, and that the doctor always joked that the baby Eddie had taken a deep breath and hit him right back. That was in Denver, on April 26, 1898, the day after the United States declared war on Spain. Eddie’s mother, Clara, always believed that her boy was bellicose because he had been born at a time when the public was being whipped up into such a patriotic fervor by the yellow press.

  John Eagan, Eddie’s father, was Irish American, a big, burly man. He died in a railroad accident when his boy was still a baby. His train ran off the track while crossing a trestle and fell thirty feet into a ravine. Clara, a hot-blooded little slip of a lady, raised Eddie and his four brothers by herself. She had emigrated from the Alsace and spoke both French and German. She started working as a language teacher and washed laundry when she couldn’t find any paying pupils.
As soon as he was old enough, Eddie was sent out to start pitching in, running errands, sweeping floors, selling papers, collecting scrap. “Life,” he said, “was a fight for bread.”

  Clara moved her family from Denver to the new town of Longmont, looking for a better life. Longmont had only been founded a couple of decades before she arrived, on the spot where the Cherokee Trail from Denver crossed the St. Vrain Valley. It began to grow when the Colorado Central rail line arrived in 1873, but by the time the Eagans got there, it was still, in the words of its local paper, the Longmont Call, “an overgrown country village” of around three thousand people, “with nothing to support it but agriculture.” As soon as he was old enough, Eddie started working chores on a ranch, under a bruiser of an Irish foreman named “Big” Tim Healey. “He supported his authority,” Eddie said, “with kicks, cuffs, and blistering profanity.” As Eddie remembered it, Healey once made the mistake of picking on a ranch hand named Abe Tobin, a little bowlegged cowpoke who knew how to work a lasso and who, it was said, had done a little prizefighting in the past. “All I recall,” Eddie said, “is Abe’s brown bare arm suddenly lashing out with the speed of a rattlesnake striking. Crack!” Healey got back to his feet, and Tobin skipped around him, hitting him at will. When Healey charged, arms flailing, Tobin took an easy sidestep and shot his right into his gut. Healey lay in the dust, gasping. “Quits! I’m licked.” Healey was a different man after that, and didn’t offer Abe Tobin or the other hands any more trouble.

  Eddie watched, wide-eyed. “To say that I was thrilled by that fight was putting it mildly. In Abe I had seen grace, rhythm, science, music, in action.” He fetched Tobin a bucket of hot saltwater so he could soak his bruised knuckles. Eddie knew then that he wanted to learn to box. He nagged at Tobin to teach him, but the older man insisted that “it was a mug’s game.” Eddie didn’t quit—he never would—and eventually Tobin gave in. So the two of them started training together, boxing barehanded. Tobin would never punch Eddie, just hit him with an open palm, hammering his lessons into his pupil’s head. “After one of his slaps, my cheeks would burn for hours.” As often as not, Eddie would walk away thinking that the pain “wasn’t worth the candle,” that he wouldn’t come back for more the next day. But he always did. Tobin taught him how to duck, weave, and feint, and how to lead with his left hand, sending it in ahead of his right like artillery in front of cavalry. That stuck. It became his signature punch. Years later the great Damon Runyon would call it “Eddie’s steamshovel.”

  Abe Tobin quit Longmont to head south to Mexico in September 1912. His last lesson for Eddie, delivered as he leaned down from the saddle of his horse, was “Eddie, you’re a good scrapper. Don’t be a mug and go pro. You’ll be in high school next year. Stick to your books and get brains. Fighting is fun so long as you take it for just that. With pros money comes easy and goes easy. Eddie, my boy, always just fight for fun.” Then he rode off into the sunset. At least, that’s how Eddie told it.

  It would turn out to be the single most important piece of advice Tobin ever gave him. Eddie did stick to his books. He loved to read and spent the few spare cents he did have on dime novels. His favorites were Gilbert Patten’s Frank Merriwell stories. Patten was one of the best-selling authors of his day. He churned out one twenty-thousand-word story a week. The Merriwell tales, all about the adventures of a clean-living all-star athlete who studied at Yale, sold by the millions. Patten, who drank plenty, smoked more, and got through three marriages, once said that his clean-living hero “had little in common with his creator or his readers.” But then, he never met Eddie. “Frank Merriwell’s superhuman virtues were to me precedents far more impressive than the ten commandments,” Eddie wrote. “To this day I have never used tobacco, because Frank didn’t. My first glass of wine, which I do not care for, was taken under social compulsion in Europe. Frank never drank.”

  With Tobin gone, Eddie took to sparring with a local boy who had just moved to the town, Earl Rice. His family, unlike Eddie’s, was just rich enough to be able to afford a couple of pairs of boxing gloves. The two of them set up a little makeshift gymnasium in an abandoned saloon uptown, across the railroad tracks. They shoved the old bar to one side to make room for a ring, and strung up a punctured tin bucket to use as a shower. Eddie’s first real fight was against Earl. The two of them boxed a three-round bout at a local fund-raising event. The friends knocked each other silly, forgetting the little they’d learned about the art of boxing in the excitement of fighting in front of an audience for the first time. “At the end of the second round,” Eddie remembered, “I was gasping for air. My arms and legs ached in weariness. It didn’t seem possible I could get up for the third round.” Then he heard Abe Tobin’s voice in his head: “If you feel tired in a fight, always remember that the other fellow is just as tired as you are. Smile at him and he’ll think you are fresh and strong.” So Eddie shot Earl a smile, “a lying, hypocritical” grin.

  By the time the bell rang, Eddie had mustered enough energy for one last round. He flailed wildly, planting punches all over Earl, none of them with much force. It was enough. He won the fight. “Gosh, Eddie,” Earl told him later. “I was so darn weak when you smiled at me before the third round! That’s what took the fight out of me.” As Eddie wrote in the Denver Post years later, “Many a battle has been won by a straight back, a grin, and a barrel of American nerve.” That night Eddie accepted the compliments and congratulations offered by the audience, and was more grateful still for the sandwiches, doughnuts, and coffee he was given as a reward for winning.

  He was still living a hardscrabble life. He was fired from a job at the Kuner-Empson pea cannery when he got into a fight with his foreman, a hulking bully of a man by the name of Bolt, who had, Eddie said, “punched his way into his profession.” John Howard Empson liked to claim his factory was the biggest cannery in the world. Certainly he was clearing twenty-five thousand dollars a year, and paying his workers as little as ten cents an hour. The workers were unhappy and, according to the Longmont Call, “agitating the matter of organizing a labor union.” Tensions were high. Eddie said that he had seen Bolt shove a man who was suffering with a hernia. Bolt reckoned that Eddie spent too much time shadowboxing when he should have been working the hulling machine. The two of them got to squabbling. Bolt snapped and slapped Eddie. And Eddie shot that steamshovel left straight back at him, knocking him flat to the floor. “A thrill went through me!” Eddie remembered. “What a punch I had!” Eddie walked away. But word spread. As he said himself, “When a boss has been licked by a worker, the news travels fast.”

  Eddie was now the cannery’s unofficial champion. He was soon challenged to a fight by Kid West, self-proclaimed champ of Longmont’s other major employer, the Great Western sugar beet factory. “Of course I accepted,” he wrote. So a few hundred employees of the two firms packed into the Longmont Armory. “There was little interest in the personalities of the contenders,” Eddie admitted. “The fans were pro-sugar or pro-canned peas.” Until the two of them got into the ring, that is. Eddie was a head shorter and a load lighter than West, and when the fans saw them side by side, there weren’t too many willing to root for him, whether they worked at the cannery or not. “Why does mere size count for so much with fight fans?” Eddie once asked. “It never should.” He knocked West down with an uppercut to the gut in the third round. The punch stupefied West, left him sitting there “with a stupid, pained expression on his face.”

  The victory earned Eddie his first write-up in the Denver Post. “Eagan had his opponent completely outclassed,” the paper said. “Although he was handicapped by twenty pounds in weight.” It was the first of many stories about Eddie’s successes. Six weeks later he won the welterweight championship at the Denver Athletic Club. He fought five times just to get to the final, where he met that man Myberg for the first time. It was, in the words of the Rocky Mountain News, “a hot four round session,” and Eddie’s victory, on points, marked him ou
t as one of the brightest prospects on the local circuit. It wasn’t long, though, before Myberg started hollering for a rematch. Eddie had to bite his tongue for a time and swallow all the insults that came his way, because he was studying for his exams, with his heart set on winning a scholarship to Denver University. Besides, he had already beaten Myberg once; there was no real need to fight him again. Until the papers said Eddie was afraid to fight.

  Eddie took the train to Cripple Creek, having sent word ahead that he was ready to fight Myberg on his turf, in front of his people. The trouble was that Cripple Creek is almost ten thousand feet above sea level, and almost as soon as Eddie stepped off the train, he grew short of breath and his head began to swim in the thin air. He wasn’t helped by his reception committee, who insisted on taking him to the bar for a drink—he made sure to order a root beer—and then showed him to his quarters in the local fire station, where he was sharing a bunkroom with a bunch of firefighters. The night before the fight, Eddie was woken in the early hours when the crew were called out to deal with a fire. He lay awake, hoping that it was the Opera House that was burning, just so he’d have a little more time to acclimatize before the fight. No such luck.

  Everywhere Eddie went in the town he heard whispers. “He’s just a kid! Myberg will kill him.” “It won’t be a fight, it’ll be plain murder.” Myberg was a miner, one of many who had moved to Cripple Creek in the wake of the last Colorado gold rush, in 1890. He was eight years older than Eddie, and eight pounds heavier too. They called him “Blue,” because that was the color of the ribbon he wore around his waist when he fought. He had won that Denver Athletic Club Championship four years straight until Eddie had stopped him in the spring of 1914. He was a slow, powerful fighter whose favorite ploy was to wait for his opponent to walk into his vicious right hook, which Eddie reckoned “had the effect of a hand grenade.”