Speed Kings

by Andy Bull

  Eddie was now the Olympic champion and the British champion, and had been, not so long ago, the US champion too. He could fairly claim to be the greatest amateur heavyweight in the world. Inevitably, he received more offers to turn professional, including an especially tempting one from the promoter Tex Rickard, the Don King of his day. Rickard had arranged the first million-dollar fight, between Eddie’s old pal Jack Dempsey and the handsome Frenchman Georges Carpentier. Rickard licked his lips at the prospect of selling a “Rhodes scholar pug” to the punters at Madison Square Garden. There had been a similar ballyhoo when Eddie had made a couple of casual remarks to a reporter from the Tribune about how he would be willing to fight Louis Mbarick Fall, known to all as “Battling Siki,” the Senegalese heavyweight who became champion of the world after he defeated Carpentier in 1922. “Will Rhodes Scholar Go after the Big Money?” asked the Daily Mail. Eddie actually helped train Mike McTigue, the Irish heavyweight who took Siki’s title, but he never did go for the “Big Money.” Instead he went back to Oxford, and his books.

  Douglo did talk Eddie into defending his Olympic title at the 1924 Games in Paris, and Eddie was duly drafted onto the team at late notice. It was a poor decision, and one he regretted. He was out of shape and soon struck down with food poisoning. He lost, on points, in the first round to Arthur Clifton, the very same man he had beaten so easily when he fought him at Hoxton Baths a couple of years earlier. Oddly, Eddie never once successfully defended any of the titles he’d won. He seemed to be too busy looking ahead, for new challenges to conquer, and to find little motivation in the idea of repeating feats he had already accomplished. The defeat in Paris helped Eddie make up his mind. He knew then, at the age of twenty-six, that he never would turn pro. He still dreamed of greater glories, though, of becoming a world champion. He was just going to take a different route to the title.

  —

  In the summer of 1925 Eddie was made an offer he felt was too good to refuse: the Chicago businessman John Pirie asked him to chaperone his two sons, John Jr. and Robert, on a world tour. Eddie decided that his bar exams could wait. He had one more fight before the party left England, an exhibition in Brighton against his old friend Jack Dempsey. When they were done punching, the two of them chewed the fat. Eddie told Jack about his plans. “Ah ha,” Dempsey said, “so you’re going to box the compass? I envy you. Here I am, world champion, and I’ve never been around the world. Keep your eyes open for good scrappers. But don’t send ’em to me. You lick ’em, Eddie.”

  Of course Eddie planned to pack a few pairs of gloves. Boxing would be just one of the things he would teach the two young men on their travels, and besides, he had an idea he might do a little fighting himself along the way. After all, he wrote, “a man can’t live without meat, and a fighter can’t live without scraps.”

  Which is how Eddie ended up in a jail in Naples. His hot head had gotten the better of him again: he had clobbered an Italian policeman who wanted to question him about a jewelry theft in Rome. Once Eddie was out of that fix, with a little help from the US consul, he and his wards quit Italy and hotfooted it to Africa. Not that his luck got much better. He suffered severe food poisoning in Egypt and lost fifteen pounds while he was laid up in hospital. When he was better, he made his way to Nairobi, where he caught malaria. After that, Eddie headed into Tanganyika, then northern Rhodesia, to do some big-game hunting. He bagged a lion or two and a black sable antelope, whose head was hung up in the grillroom of the Yale Club in New York. But he made a mess of his elephant hunt and ended up being chased across the plains by a stampeding herd, angered by the poorly aimed potshots he had taken at their bull. He escaped only when, in the rush, he tumbled head over heels into a river and the elephants lost his scent.

  From Africa it was on to India, where Eddie met up with the Marquis of Clydesdale. The two of them put on a series of boxing exhibitions across the continent, the first as part of a fund-raising evening organized by the governor of Bombay. Eddie fought, and thrashed, the light heavyweight champion from the Indian army. The audience made more of an impression on him than his opponent did. “I had seen many strange fight fan audiences,” Eddie remembered, “but I doubt that ever again I will look out upon such a range of humanity in caste, fortune and races assembled under one roof. The ringside glittered with uniforms of red and gold, the rank of the British Army. Ladies in décolleté were sandwiched between the men. Here and there an opulent, turbaned maharaja sat, bejeweled and immaculate in evening dress. In the background were the olive drab uniforms of Tommies and their native brothers-in-arms. Packed against the walls were Parsees, Hindus, and Muslims in native dress, ranging from loin cloths to tattered rags.” Eddie sent word ahead that he was ready to take on all comers in each city he traveled to. He won fights against the local army champions in Colombo and Bangalore. In Calcutta he beat Milton Kubes, heavyweight champion of India, over four rounds. After that, Eddie struggled to find anyone bold enough to take up his challenge, so he fought a series of exhibitions with Douglo, in Delhi, Kabul, and Jaipur. The Maharaja of Udaipur was so impressed with their display that he offered Eddie a job as a bodyguard.

  In Australia, on the other hand, a suitable opponent was waiting in Sydney. News had made its way from England about Eddie’s deeds against Jack Dempsey. The story had grown in the telling, and by the time he arrived, he was known as the man who had knocked Dempsey down “15 times in the first two rounds” during their fight in Brighton. Eddie, it has to be said, didn’t do anything to disabuse anyone of the idea that he had battered the greatest boxer in the world. His opponent was J. D. Brancourt, who had won the amateur heavyweight championship of Australia in both 1922 and 1923. Brancourt was six foot eleven and weighed 250 pounds, which made him a foot taller and seventy pounds heavier than Eddie, who prepared for the fight by nailing a padded board to the wall of his gym seven feet off the floor. He threw “two or three hundred” left hooks at it each day, until he had a “little knot of muscle in the back of [his] left shoulder blade as hard as steel.”

  In the ring, wrote the correspondent of the Sydney Sporting Sun, “it looked like an encounter between an alarm clock and the Post Office tower.” An attendant had to come out with a stepladder and tie up the strings hanging from the overhead clock because they were brushing against Brancourt’s head. Brancourt stood, almost immobile, in the center of the ring. Eddie threw a feint with his left, and suckered Brancourt into slipping out a straight left of his own. That was as much of an opening as Eddie needed. He slipped in and socked him on the jaw with that hook of his. Brancourt collapsed to the canvas. He got back to his feet, utterly stunned, and Eddie sold him the same trick all over again. Thump. “Mr. Brancourt,” as the Sun put it, “reclined gently on one ear with a look of ineffable peace.” They had to shove him out for the second round. One more blow, and he was done, “down to sleep with an air of determination.” Jack Munro, the man who had organized the fight, later remembered, “They say in boxing that a good big man will always beat a good little man, but boxing axioms are very like the rules of grammar—there are always exceptions.” Brancourt’s father collared Eddie after the fight and told him that he felt the victory was “unfair.” No one had ever had the temerity to hit his boy in the face before. Eddie reckoned the big lump had been entirely overawed by the stories he had heard about all those knockdowns Eddie had scored against Jack Dempsey.

  His next stop was Saigon, then Hong Kong. Eddie beat the local champions he fought in both cities. He took particular satisfaction from the win in Saigon, since his opponent was Amadou Diop, a gangster who had been extorting protection money from the local shopkeepers. And as Eddie said, “If a good fight also presented the prospects of teaching a bully a lesson, that was an added incentive.” He beat Diop so badly that he announced his retirement from boxing in the next day’s papers.

  From there it was on to Manila, Shanghai, Peking, and Tokyo, then across the ocean to Buenos Aires and up through South
and Central America. By the time Eddie and the boys docked in Los Angeles in the summer of 1927, they had been traveling for nearly two years. “I had done what most young men would like to do—explored the world, sailed the seas, and had adventures in all lands.”

  Eddie’s mother didn’t care about any of that. She hadn’t seen him in five years, and she was just happy to see him back safe and sound, even if his cheeks were puffier, his ears thicker, his nose a little more bulbous and broken in the middle. He had changed, and so had the world he came back to. Denver itself seemed to him so small now. The boys he had once taught on the west side were now all working the railroads, like their fathers before them. His Yale classmates had started their careers. And his friend Gene Tunney was the heavyweight champion of the world, having taken the title from Dempsey. Eddie found that especially hard to swallow. He still thought of Tunney as the little kid he had known back in 1919. Now he was readying himself to defend his title in a fight that would earn him a million dollars.

  The money was too much. Eddie found himself wrestling with that old dilemma again, wondering whether he should become a professional boxer. This time it was Tunney who talked him out of it. “It’s not worth it, Eddie,” he said. He told him how long and hard the road to the top would be. “If you were broke with no other talent I’d not only advise you to turn pro, I’d help you get matches. But you’re ready to tackle law.” Instead, Tunney made him an offer: he asked him to be his sparring partner for the upcoming fight and suggested that when it was all over, the two of them should take another trip around the world together.

  The pair headed up to New York together, but Tunney found that he had no privacy there, no rest. So they moved again, up to the small town of Speculator, across the Adirondacks from Lake Placid. There the two of them settled into a routine. They would run in the morning, eight to ten miles, and spar in the afternoons. At lunch and after supper, Eddie would study his law books and revise for his bar exams. At least that’s what Eddie says he was doing.

  On September 22, Eddie had a ringside seat at Tunney’s victory in the rematch with Dempsey, one of the most hyped fights in history. Behind him at Chicago’s Soldier Field stretched row after row of spectators, 145,000 in all, so many, said Hearst papers journalist Westbrook Pegler, “that you couldn’t see them on the last rows, you could only sense that they were there from the combers of sound that came booming down the slope of the stadium out of the darkness.” The New York Times reported that the city’s bookmakers had taken three million in bets. The wise ones had backed Tunney, who won it on points. But the fight was remembered for the long count he was given in the seventh, after Dempsey had knocked him down. The referee, Dave Barry, didn’t start the count to ten until Dempsey had retreated to a neutral corner, as was specified in the rules of the fight. The referee’s count was on eight when Tunney got to his feet, but he had been down for fourteen seconds in all. By standing over Tunney as he lay on the canvas, Dempsey had allowed his opponent a few extra seconds to recover. Eddie felt Jack had penalized himself. He swore that he saw Tunney smile to himself as he lay on the floor. Asked to split his two pals afterward, Eddie diplomatically suggested, “Jack is the greatest fighter and Gene the greatest boxer in ring history.”

  If Eddie stayed out of the ensuing controversy, it was because he had other things on his mind. On his way back from Chicago, he called in at Cleveland, where he met up with Peggy Colgate, whom he had been courting that summer. The two of them drove up to the Adirondacks together and were married in Saranac Lake on October 1. Peggy’s family had a house there, Camp Beachwood. Her brothers Gilbert and Robert had been on the Yale boxing team with Eddie, and her father, Sydney, was the grandson of Samuel Colgate. He and his brothers still ran the family cosmetics company. The papers said that the couple had eloped, but that wasn’t quite right. They had simply kept it quiet. News only broke a fortnight later, when they were holed up in a Fifth Avenue apartment in New York.

  After that, life did begin to settle down. Eddie and Gene never did take that world tour they had planned. Instead, Eddie passed the bar exams and began his career as a lawyer. He still did a little sparring, when work allowed. His first daughter, Caroline, was born in March 1931. By then, Eddie was beginning to feel a little like he was gathering cobwebs. At the age of thirty-three he was starting to itch for another adventure and was considering the idea of making a return to the ring to try to win another title in the following summer’s Olympics when the phone rang.

  Eddie told Peggy he would be out for dinner that night, catching up with an old friend from around and about, Jay O’Brien.

  “That night,” Peggy remembered, “Eddie came rushing home and said, ‘Guess what? I’m on the US bobsled team!’ I thought that was pretty strange, because he had never been on a bobsled before.”

  Hank Homburger and his Red Devils, Lake Placid, 1931.

  CHAPTER 9

  THE NEW US TEAM

  The snows came late to Lake Placid that winter. There was a single heavy fall at the beginning of the season, which was reckoned by many to be a good omen. It wasn’t. November turned to December, Christmas and the New Year came and went, and all the while the few citizens of the small town grew ever more anxious. The land was colored in bleached-out browns and greens—wet mud, dank grass, and bony trees, their brittle branches shorn of leaves. Above, blue skies and bright sun. The few clouds that did come carried rain. No one could remember a winter quite like it. The New York State weather bureau said that it was the warmest they’d recorded in the 147 years they had been taking measurements.

  The athletes began to arrive. They traveled from New York by train up the Hudson Valley. The river was open water all the way up to Albany. The Norwegian team was the first to get to Lake Placid, followed closely by the Japanese. The locals were happy to see them. The Depression had grown so severe that a lot of countries had been having second thoughts about coming. Great Britain was sending only four athletes, all figure skaters; Argentina wasn’t sending anyone at all. Godfrey Dewey had dispatched a special envoy from his organizing committee on a six-month tour of Europe to whip up enthusiasm overseas. Even so, some of the national Olympic committees had even suggested postponing the Olympics until the economy had begun to recover. In the autumn of 1931, using the contacts he’d made through the club, Dewey persuaded the North Atlantic Steamship Line to grant a 20 percent reduction on round-trip tickets and the New York Central Railroad to cut the cost of a return trip from Manhattan to Lake Placid to fifteen dollars. Even Congress got involved: a resolution was passed exempting foreign athletes and officials from the usual visa requirements, waiving an eight-dollar tax, and granting free entry to baggage and equipment. They were extraordinary measures. But then, there was an extraordinary amount at stake. The townspeople were in for around $1.5 million, all told. “The tiny village has gambled in an effort to establish itself as the winter sports capital of America,” wrote Edward J. Neil of the Associated Press. “Every merchant, every citizen, has in one way or another contributed to the total.”

  That January of 1932, the town itself was ready. The streets, Dewey wrote, “were a riot of color,” decorated with flags, colored lights, and sprigs of evergreen. “It was in gala attire. The flags of nations flew everywhere. Great hotels and clubs, cottages and private homes, and business hotels were brave with bunting. There was a tenseness in the air as of something impending.” The one thing they didn’t have was cold weather. The organizing committee actually started to bring in wagonloads of snow from across the Adirondacks so they could spread it around the ski trails.

  Billy Fiske arrived in New York on January 6. He paid for his own ticket across from England on the SS Europa. For Dewey and the residents of Lake Placid, so busy getting ready, the four years since St. Moritz had flown by. But that’s a long time in the life of a young man. Billy had been a boy when he won the gold in St. Moritz. He was only twenty now, but he had changed. He had graduated from C
ambridge University the previous summer, with a degree in history and economics from Trinity College. And he was full of himself, thought he knew best, as only a young man can. His time abroad had given him a different perspective on America. He admired the “bulldog” spirit of the British, and thought the French were “children” because “when they get on top they like to gloat over it.” It was, Billy had decided, “part of their character, just as self-sufficiency is part of an English character.” He hated New York, thought it was “without doubt the most expensive place in the world” and “full of the damnedest snobs, not for anything but money . . . the sort of people one ought to see I can’t stand.” The curious thing is that everyone who knew Billy, however slightly, agreed that he “never had a bad word to say about anybody.” It’s a phrase that occurs over and again in descriptions of him. And it’s wrong. He had plenty of bad words for plenty of people—he was just too polite to share them. He confined his thoughts to his diary. He was, in some ways, a diffident man. “Bashfulness,” he wrote, “gives rise to self-sufficiency in an intelligent person and boredom in a stupid one.”