Although I was raised in the film business – where my father B.P. for many years ran the Paramount Studio – my idols weren’t the movie stars who worked for him: Maurice Chevalier, Fredric March, Cary Grant, Gary Cooper . . . I knew them well but they didn’t get to me as the boxers did. The moviemaking that went on all around me, at the studio and on location, was fascinating. But my most vivid, early memories involved going to the fights with my old man.
He was a passionate boxing fan who went to the fights twice a week. In my mind’s eye I am with him in the first row at the Hollywood Legion every Friday night. Great fighters came to the Legion – the young Archie Moore, Tony Canzoneri, Bud Taylor, Fidel La Barba and Henry Armstrong. Boxing has always been an intensely ethnic sport, and so I must confess we had a special qvell (joy) for the exploits of our Jewish heroes. The 1920s and ’30s into the ’40s were a Golden Age for Jewish boxers, and in Hollywood, my home town, we couldn’t help feeling a surge of pride when the fighters with the six-pointed star on their trunks proved their mettle against the toughest and most skilful of the Italians, Irish and blacks, of whom there were so many stars in those star-studded times.
If not only my father but all of the Paramount ‘family’ were fight fans, they came by their passion honestly, with a sense of Jewish tradition and history. The sturdy and inspired little founder of Paramount (originally Famous Players), Adolph Zukor, had been part of the stream of penniless Jewish immigrants who came to America in the late nineteenth century with their pockets empty and their heads full of dreams. Before he was a low-paid, piecework furrier, young Adolph was hustling to make a dollar here, a dollar there. One of the ways he stumbled into making a buck was to fight for a dollar a round in a neighbourhood boxing club.
By the time my father was working for Zukor as a 20-year-old wunderkind writer and press agent for Famous Players, he was drawn to the pioneer company’s enthusiasm for boxing. There seemed to be a natural connection between the movie game and the fight game: both offering a way out of the stifling ghetto on the lower East Side, where nearly all first-generation Jews were desperately poor.
If Adolph Zukor enjoyed overnight success making hit movies with magical discoveries of movie stars like Mary Pickford (whom B.P. dubbed ‘America’s Sweetheart’), the Jewish community had a fistic star in the ghetto wonder Benjamin Leiner, who fought under the nom de boxe Benny Leonard.
I still think of Benny Leonard as an early century counterpart to the latter-day boxing saint Muhammad Ali. In the early decades of the twentieth century, ambitious young Jews were struggling to break out of the cycle of poverty in which so many saw their parents hopelessly trapped. They became songwriters like Irving Berlin and Billy Rose, budding movie moguls like Zukor and Sam Goldfish (later Goldwyn), furriers and jewellers, and, most notably for me, stellar champions of the prize ring like Joe Choyinski, Abe Attell and my father’s favourite, ‘The Great Benny Leonard.’
That was the only way I ever heard Leonard described in my household. I wish I still had the scrapbook I compiled as a seven year old on The Great Benny Leonard. I remember the picture I had pasted on the cover, with the trim, athletic body, the look of intelligence and the slicked-down hair that – so the boast went – never got messed despite fighting in a division, the lightweight, that offered more than half a dozen gifted contenders. As talented young Jews like my father were moving into mainstream America at the time of my birth, The Great Benny Leonard became their flag bearer, a symbol of their newly found strength and success. The excitement around those early Benny Leonard fights against champion Freddy Welsh, tough Irish Richie Mitchell and Philadelphia Jewish rival Lew Tendler inspired his Jewish fans in the same way Ali reached out to the black ghettos from Harlem to Watts in the l960s and ’70s. Like Ali with young blacks, Benny Leonard, with the six-pointed star he wore so proudly on his trunks, sent a message to Jewish ghettos across America: ‘You may think of us as pushcart peddlers and money grubbers. But we can climb into the ring with you, the best you have to offer, and maybe you can knock us down [as Richie Mitchell floored the Great Benny], but you can’t keep us down. We’ve got the skills and the courage to beat you at your own game. Ready or not, we’re moving up.’ Not just in the prize ring with Leonard and Tendler, Jackie ‘Kid’ Berg, ‘Battling’ Levinsky, Maxie Rosenbloom, Ben Jeby and our host of champions. Their victories in fierce and memorable battles reinforced my father’s generation’s belief in themselves in their battle in what I’ve always thought of as the ring outside the ring.
In Hollywood from the 1920s to the ’40s we responded with unabashed ethnic pride to the exploits of our local Jewish champions. Mushy Callahan (Morris Scheer), Jackie Fields, Newsboy Brown and Maxie Rosenbloom were not only sports heroes but personal friends. When Callahan took the junior welterweight belt from Richie Mitchell’s brother ‘Pinky’, I proudly hung the winning gloves on the wall behind my bed. And even though Jews had come a long way up in the world from the 1910s when Leonard was in his ascendancy to Mushy’s wins over Mitchell and his formidable local rival Ace Hudkins in the 1930s, even though Jews were now leaders in the film industry, the music business, dominant in the arts and even challenging the WASP movers and shakers in banking and Wall Street, there was still a healthy reassurance that ‘some of our boys’ could fight their way to the very top of the hardest and most demanding of all professional sports.
I’ve always thought of boxing not as a mirror but as a magnifying glass of our society. It is hardly accidental that out of the poor Irish immigration of a people being brutalised by their British overlords, we had a wave of great Irish fighters – from John L. Sullivan and Gentleman Jim Corbett to the ‘Toy Bull Dog’ Mickey Walker and the brash, nimble and brave Billy Conn. As the Irish moved up into the mainstream, there was less economic need to use the prize ring as their way out and up. The wave of Jewish boxers followed exactly the same pattern, as did the Italians. The almost total domination of the ring today by African Americans and Hispanics speaks directly to the continued economic deprivation and discrimination of large sections of our inner-city communities.
But the first half of the twentieth century was a Golden Age of Jewish Boxing, with score on score of Jewish champions of the world, not to mention all those fierce and gifted contenders like Allie Stolz, Artie Levine, Maxie Shapiro, Georgie Abrams, Leach Cross . . . the brave boys who made their statement for all of us when boxing was a Jewish sport.
[1997]