Speed Kings

by Andy Bull

  It was that same right hook that hit Eddie at the end of the fifth, drawing forth roars from the horde of hostile faces, “weather beaten, hard bitten, there wasn’t a smile in a car-load.” They were all convinced that their man had been robbed when Eddie beat him the first time round and had come to see justice done. Eddie had never felt so lonely in his life as he did in the middle of that ring. Until he heard one friendly voice call out, “Kid, snap into it in this last round!” It belonged, Eddie later learned, to a man named Lenihan, a gambler who had backed him at odds of 2 to 1. His only interest in the fight was a mercenary one, but it made all the difference to Eddie to know there was someone out there rooting for him.

  Eddie did snap into it. Typically he liked to fight light on his feet, to flit around his opponent flicking out his jab. Now, though, he was too spent to move like that. So he and Myberg stood toe-to-toe. When Eddie saw Lum readying that big right of his, he slipped in two quick shots of his own and followed them with a hook left. It was the best punch Eddie had. And it hit Myberg flush on the chin. He dropped, struggled to stand, and sagged back down. When the bell rang for the final time, he was holding himself up on the ropes. After that, there could only be one winner. The ref lifted Eddie’s hand high as he announced the result. “It was well he did,” Eddie said. “I didn’t feel I had the strength to do it myself.”

  In the dressing room after the fight, once the well-wishers had cleared out, Lenihan cornered Eddie. “You’re good,” he told him. “But you need a manager. Why don’t you turn pro? I’ve handled fighters before. Come with me and we’ll clean up.”

  Eddie was tempted. “If I proved a success,” he thought, “it would mean the end of worries for my work-worn little mother, no more manual toil, and good educations for my brothers.” But again he heard Abe Tobin’s voice in his head: “Don’t be a mug and go pro.” Eddie said no. “You see,” he explained to Lenihan, “I’m going to college in September and I have to stay amateur to play in the teams.” Lenihan gave him a pitying look.

  Truth is, Eddie probably protested a touch too much here. He probably came closer to going pro than he ever let on. He fought for serious money on a couple of occasions for the Colorado Athletic Club, under the management of a man named Delaney. And certainly he needed the money, even though his scholarship covered his tuition. He took a job as a physical instructor, just because it offered board and lodging, and another as an athletics teacher at an elementary school. He was, he said, “busier than a flea on a houn’ dog’s ear,” and loving every minute of it. Eddie finally had his Frank Merriwell life. He was studying, running on the university’s track team, dabbling with football, doing teaching and social work in his spare time, and trying to raise money to build a boxing gym for underprivileged kids on the west side. And, of course, he continued to box.

  He entered himself in both the middleweight and heavyweight divisions of the Denver Athletic Club Championship in 1918. He won both titles, beating, as he put it, a bunch of “muscle-bound laborers, boiler makers, plumbers, brick layers, and piano movers.” Eddie reckoned himself to be a class above these part-timers and amused himself by trying to knock out his opponents as quickly as he could. His gung ho fighting style won him a lot of fans. “He’s a hard hitter, game all the way through, and is always after his man from start to finish,” reported the Rocky Mountain News. Ike O’Hara, a copy boy at the Denver Post, said, “This Eddie Eagan is the best fighter I ever saw in a tournament, because he could use his left.” According to the Post, Eddie’s middleweight final, against Tommy Tierson, “was a real thriller and brought out the very best boxing of the tourney.”

  The heavyweight final against George Blossom was harder still, because Eddie was duped into thinking that his opponent’s father had gotten out of his sickbed to come and watch his boy box. “You can lick George with one punch,” Blossom’s manager told Eddie before the fight. “But I am going to ask you not to do it.” He said he was worried that “the shock of seeing his son knocked out might be too much for his weak heart. I’m just appealing to you to spare the old man’s life by not kayoing George.” The truth was that George Blossom’s father had been dead for five years already, but Eddie was so green that he swallowed the story. The plan backfired when Blossom called Eddie “a sentimental sap” during a clinch in the first round. Eddie realized that he had been fooled and, infuriated, “tore into George full throttle.” The Post reckoned that Eddie “fought like a wildcat,” and the News noted that “angered, he boxed with a determination that could not be stopped, his usual smile gone.” Blossom weighed over two hundred pounds, but Eddie knocked him clean through the ropes and out of the ring.

  Well, after that, Eddie was a regular hero. The Post hailed him as “one of the cleanest-cut and best sportsmen Denver has ever boasted,” and it signed him up to write a series of twelve articles all about the art of boxing. They were pretty pompous, mixing as they did advice for aspiring boxers and opinions about the state of modern America. Later in his life Eddie had the good grace to admit that he blushed when he thought about the things he had had written. “The idea that a Christian shall be a pusillanimous backboneless jellyfish is becoming antiquated,” Eddie advised. “Boxing is the perfect sport to take all of the girl-like ways out of boys and make men of them.” This from a kid who hadn’t yet turned twenty. Eddie advocated a life of “constant unending strife” and a regimen of rising at 6 a.m. to run twice around the block while wearing “your father’s biggest boots” followed by a cold bath and a brisk rub with a towel.

  If Eddie had a big head, well, perhaps that was unsurprising. He was the heavyweight champion of the city and hadn’t yet lost a fight, or even come across someone who seriously threatened to be able to beat him. That was about to change. Early in the summer of 1918 Eddie was asked to take part in a three-round exhibition fight as a fund-raising evening for the Red Cross, at the Empress Theater. The organizers were so sure that he would agree that they put a notice in the paper announcing the fight before they had even asked him whether he was free and willing. The opponent, they explained, was an out-of-towner by the name of Jack Dempsey.

  Now, in 1918, Dempsey was still an up-and-comer. Of course Eddie had heard of him, as had most fight fans, but he was just another heavyweight contender, one of many queuing up for a shot at the world champion, Jess Willard. He was still some way away from winning Willard’s title, which he would do the following year, let alone being seen as one of the greatest heavyweights in history, which is what he would become. In 1950 the Associated Press would vote Dempsey the “greatest fighter of the last 50 years,” and even today both the Ring magazine and Sports Illustrated rate him as one of the ten best heavyweights of all time. Back then Dempsey was billed on the vaudeville circuit as the “Coming World’s Champion,” but Eddie reckoned that was just so much baloney. He knew that in 1917 Dempsey had been knocked down in the very first round by “Fireman” Jim Flynn, in a fight many now suspect was fixed by the mob. Eddie himself had watched Flynn box in Denver and been underwhelmed by what he had seen. Besides, he had seen pictures of Dempsey in the papers, and Dempsey wasn’t nearly as big as George Blossom, whom Eddie had licked in that Denver Athletic Club final.

  The fight had been arranged by Otto Floto, a man Eddie generously described as a “famous sportswriter.” Floto did work as the editor of the Denver Post—and had taken on Eddie as a columnist—but even the paper’s co-owner, Harry Tammen, admitted that he had hired him only because he thought Floto was “a beautiful name” and he wanted to use it for a dog-and-pony show that he owned. Which he duly did. Floto, who weighed the best part of three hundred pounds, was, in the words of Post columnist Woody Paige, a “drunk, barely literate loudmouth.” He also dabbled in the fight game, and knew Dempsey from way back when he was growing up in Manassa, down near the border with New Mexico. Floto volunteered to act as referee for the evening.

  Eddie started serious training. As he told his readers, “The l
aw of the boxing life is the law of work. Not the law of idleness, of self-indulgence, or pleasure, merely the law of work.” He ran five miles each morning and spent his afternoons sparring in the gym. This work wasn’t for Dempsey’s benefit—Eddie was convinced he had his measure—but because, for the first time in his life, he was going to be fighting in front of women as well as men. “Several beautiful co-eds from the University were to sell programs,” Eddie remembered. “And one of them was The Girl.” He was tingling with anticipation picturing “her awe at my display of skill, speed, and punching power.”

  The Empress, down on Denver’s old theater row, seated around 1,400, and it was full that night. The fight was at the top of the bill, which meant that Eddie and Jack had to wait until the other acts were over. Eddie stood backstage, quivering with excitement. Finally Jack Kearns, Dempsey’s manager, strolled out into the ring that had been erected on the stage and called the fighters out to join him. Eddie came first, blinking in the bright lights. “And now,” Kearns announced over a drum roll and a flourish of trumpets, “ladies and gentlemen, let me introduce the Mauler from Manassa, Colorado, future heavyweight champion of the world, Jack Dempsey!” A ripple of applause ran around the theater, though the ovation was not so generous, Eddie reckoned, as the one that had been given to him, the hometown champ.

  Floto called the two men to the center of the ring. Jack ran his eyes over Eddie, apparently unconcerned by what he saw. “Now boys,” Floto said, “a nice fast exhibition. And Jack, remember there are women out there, so don’t hit hard.” Eddie wondered why Floto hadn’t given him a similar warning. Irritated at being underestimated, he resolved to hit Dempsey with a straight right at the first opportunity.

  “Knock him stiff as a railroad tie, Eddie!” someone shouted.

  And then the bell went. Eddie rushed out of his corner and, just as he had planned, threw his right fist at Dempsey’s chin. Eddie knew it was a good shot, the kind that had put bigger men flat on the canvas. It caught Dempsey on the jaw. A look of surprise flickered across his face.

  “Keep it up, Eddie!”

  Next, Eddie feinted to throw his left, then shot out another vicious right. That one caught Jack’s jaw too. His head bobbed backward. Trying to knock Dempsey down, Eddie now realized, was as futile “as trying to swim up the Niagara Falls.” He stepped around, looking for another opening. And then he heard something underneath the sound of the crowd. Eddie did a double take, asked himself whether his ears were deceiving him. They weren’t. Dempsey had started to sing to himself, underneath his breath. It was “Everybody Two-step.” He began to shuffle his feet, keeping time with the beat. “Oh my dear, don’t you hear the latest music hit? Oh gee! The orchestra is playing it!”

  Then the roof fell in. A rafter fell on the back of Eddie’s head. At least that’s what he assumed had happened, until he came to. He felt the taut ropes behind him, cutting into his back, and two padded gloves underneath his armpits, holding him up off the canvas. As the ringing in his ears faded and his hearing returned, he heard the cries of the crowd and, below those, the voice of the referee. “Hold him up a little longer, Jack. And for heaven’s sake go easy on your punches.” When Eddie opened his eyes, he saw Dempsey standing there, left eyebrow cocked upward, lips twisted into a wry little grin. Eddie was shoved back into the center of the ring.

  “Let’s two step and dance in old Havana style.”

  Whop—Jack threw out a jab at Eddie’s head.

  “Just act like you were made of rubber, child.”

  Bop—another jab.

  “Glide along the floor and slide your feet a little bit, that’s it!”

  Bang.

  When Eddie came to, he was still on his feet, but only because Dempsey was holding him there and doing his best to make it look like the two of them were locked in a clinch. It was, after all, an exhibition, and he had to make sure the crowd got their money’s worth. Eddie suddenly realized he was in far over his head.

  “If you hit me again, Jack,” he said, “you won’t be able to hold me up.”

  Dempsey smiled. “All right kid, but don’t try any more of your funny rights.”

  A friendship was forged during that fight. Dempsey nursed Eddie through the three remaining rounds, even allowing him to land a few jabs for appearances’ sake. The following year Jess Willard, then the reigning champ, asked Eddie to work as his sparring partner ahead of his title fight with Dempsey, telling him he could “name his price.” Eddie turned him down because he wanted his friend Jack to win the fight, which he did.

  After the exhibition, he and Jack had a chat in Dempsey’s dressing room. He taught Eddie a few of his tricks, showing him how he tucked his chin down into his shoulder, a style Eddie adopted himself. “You’re a good puncher,” Dempsey told him. “You know how to box and you’d be a good professional. But Otto Floto tells me you’re in college. Stick to it, kid. I wish I had your chance. The professional gets darn little money and lots of punches.”

  —

  Eddie didn’t stick to it. He decided to drop out of university and join the army, enlisting as a private in the infantry. He won a commission, funnily enough, after he was challenged to a fight by his drill sergeant, who, just like the foreman at the cannery a few years earlier, made the mistake of picking on the wrong man. The two of them got to arguing after he refused to grant Eddie weekend leave. Of course Eddie knew better than to hit a sergeant. But the man told Eddie to “disregard the stripes on his shoulder” because he was going to “give him the licking of his life.” Eddie promptly knocked the sergeant flat on his back. He assumed he was in for it when he was called in to see the regimental commander a few days later, and was a little surprised when his colonel told him, “Eagan, I’m ordered to send ten privates to officers’ training school. Your captain says that if you can’t command ’em, you can lick ’em. Report there this morning.”

  By the time Eddie finished at artillery school, the war was already over. He was discharged and took up a place in the Officers’ Reserve Corps as a second lieutenant. His brief time in the army broadened his horizons. He met and befriended a couple of men who had studied at Yale. Their descriptions of life in New Haven reawakened his childhood dream of studying there, just like his hero Frank Merriwell had. He resolved to apply, and though he was turned down at first, on the grounds that his “Latin was too weak,” he persuaded Dean Corwin of Sheffield Scientific School to take a chance on “an athlete and a scholar.” It helped that Corwin had played a little football as a young man, something Eddie knew from a photo he spotted on the wall of the dean’s study.

  Eddie was utterly out of his element at Yale. His gauche, garrulous manner was at odds with the “stiffness and restraint” of his fellow students. He couldn’t afford a suit and spent the first semester of his freshman year wearing his old army uniform. People assumed he wanted to show off the badge on his shoulder, but he was just too proud to admit how poor he was. He took a job as a physical instructor at the local YMCA, where he lived in a skinny little room. Struggling to adjust, Eddie got on with what he knew how to do—studying and boxing.

  In April 1919 he decided to compete at the National Amateur Championship. He was too self-effacing to say he was representing Yale, so he entered himself as a member of the Denver Athletic Club. He scraped together his rail fare and traveled alone, without seconds or support, to Boston. Eddie had put himself in for two categories, light heavyweight and heavyweight. That meant he had seven four-round fights in the space of two days. He had grown into quite a fighter now, with a style all his own. He was clever and cunning, using his quick feet to maneuver around the ring. He loved to attack, and was always pressing forward. He looked to fight inside the reach of his opponents, who were invariably bigger than he was. And when he was on the back foot, though he would never admit it, he knew a few dirty tricks that he had picked up back when he was roughhousing around Colorado. There were at least a
couple of occasions when, in a clinch, he wrestled his opponent out of the ring. He did that in his light heavyweight semifinal, against a man named Al Roche, and the crowd booed him because of it. “No more of that rough stuff,” the referee warned him, “or I’ll disqualify you.” He didn’t need to do that: Eddie lost the fight, on points. Even the Denver Post said that he was “decisively beaten,” though Eddie, bullishly confident in his own abilities, said he knew in his heart that he had won.

  Eddie needed to tell himself that, whether it was true or not, because the heavyweight final was scheduled to take place that same night. Only a few hours later he was back in the ring, squaring up against Jim Tully, a policeman from New York who knew a couple of tricks of his own. Tully’s seconds had tried to bring the final forward so that Eddie wouldn’t have any time to recover from his first fight. He saw through that. Then at the start of the fight Tully told the referee, “If you see I’m killing him, stop it, I don’t want to hurt the lad.” Eddie didn’t fret. He could smell whiskey on Tully’s breath, taken for Dutch courage. He knew then that he had the measure of the man. He stepped in close, inside the range of Tully’s long arms, and pummeled his stomach. In the clinch, Eddie whispered, “I must win, I must win, you hear, you big Harp? I will win.” And he did, on points. When Eddie returned to Yale, his eyes were swollen almost shut, both his brow and lips were cut, and his nose was broken. But he had a gold medal in his pocket. He was the amateur champion of the United States. Word soon spread. Eddie, still a freshman, became a hero around the campus.

  The victory won Eddie an invitation to try out for the US team at the 1919 Inter-Allied Games in Paris. He traveled to Europe that spring, after taking a temporary job in the sports and recreation department of the American Expeditionary Force. His first fight came as a surprise. He was attending a Franco-American boxing night at the Palais de Glace and had only just finished his meal—he’d had a bellyful of sole, shrimp, and oysters—when he was asked if he would step in to an empty slot on the card and fight a French middleweight. He won, just, but decided that he’d best start taking his training a little more seriously. After that he spent most of his time running the roads in the Latin Quarter, where “every window framed a girl’s head.” They would call out to him as he passed: “Chéri! Où allez-vous? Restez ici.”