It’s half a century ago and I’m living on a farm in New Hope, Pennsylvania, minding my own business, which is writing novels. After an unexpected success with the first one, What Makes Sammy Run?, I’ve had good reviews and a movie sale on the second, The Harder They Fall, and wondering what to do for an encore.
I’ve got a big barn, and no cows in it, so I figure I’ll set up a boxing ring. Going to fights with my old man as a Hollywood kid, I had always liked to box. I had only one serious weakness. I didn’t like being hit on the nose. Make that two weaknesses: I never devised a strategy to avoid being hit on the nose.
At the New Hope post office I always lingered to talk fights with a fellow fan who worked there, Bob McNamara. An ex-amateur boxer, he was ready to train our local Golden Gloves prospects. How about using my ring? Writers are always looking for distractions to help them procrastinate. I couldn’t think of a happier one than having the young boxers training in my barn.
Into our amateur mix came a rugged-looking young black man from Trenton, just under six feet tall and weighing an already well-conditioned one hundred and ninety pounds. Archie McBride pounded hell out of the heavy bag and moved sturdily around the ring. McNamara thought we had a good Golden Glove novice class candidate.
But this serious 18-year-old didn’t want to waste his time fighting for free. He wanted to help his family. So I phoned the little operator who ran the fights in Trenton, Willie Gilzenberg, and told him I had a big, strong kid in the barn and could I get him a four-rounder? Willie asked me how many tickets I’d buy. Buy enough and we’d open the show. I was learning on the job.
Willie was a slippery little guy who ran a low-level, one-man show. He was right there at the ancient ticket window taking the money. The money wasn’t exactly flooding into that hoary Trenton arena, and Willie made sure every nickel of it went into his pocket.
With no experience and the most primitive kind of preparation in the New Hope barn, Archie went in there against a kid who had a few fights and who looked formidably muscular, with a formidable nom de boxe, Babe O’Blinnis. Archie took him out almost as fast as Joe Louis took care of Max Schmeling in their historic second fight. So we got invited back again and knocked out another young Trenton heavyweight. Soon Archie McBride was building a local reputation, with a string of early round KOs.
I was working hard on a book drawing on my ill-fated journey to the Dartmouth Winter Carnival with Scott Fitzgerald, but with Archie training in the barn and all the fights taking place in Trenton or Asbury Park, I was having a lot of fun and excitement without a sense of guilt at taking too much time away from what was still my main line of work.
By this time Archie was fighting local main events, and it got a little more serious when ‘my Archie’ – as I called him to separate him from the venerable Archie Moore – was matched with the much bigger, far more experienced Cuban heavyweight Nino Valdes. Valdes had a reputation as a big puncher, with a dozen knockouts in 19 fights. He had boxed a number of ten-rounders while Archie had never gone beyond six.
I remember the Valdes fight in Reading as a turning point in my managerial career. I was into my novel now, The Disenchanted, but I found myself looking up from that yellow legal pad to worry about Archie. I had always complained about managers bringing their boys along too fast and putting them in over their head, and now I wondered if we shouldn’t have picked up some more six-rounders in Trenton before taking on Valdes in Reading.
But Archie took Valdes that night. It was hard fought, but the pride of New Hope was bobbing and weaving, getting under the long jabs and scoring with body punches in close. That was Archie’s style. Nothing flashy, a very solid performer, especially when he was able to move under punches and stay close without clinching. Every time he got hit, I hurt. Every time the bell rang ending a round and he came back to our corner unscathed, I wished it could end right there. Feeling close to and responsible for a fighter is an indescribable feeling. I had watched good friends, including some champions, in action and always felt nerved up for them. But this was different. If anything happened to Archie, it was my fault. I could have said no. But it might have been the end of Archie’s career, for we were still in the hands of Willie Gilzenberg. In Jersey, wily Willie was the only game in town.
In the dressing-room after the fight, along with a deep swallow of relief, I remember the touching gesture of the defeated Cuban’s coming into Archie’s dressing-room to check a small cut over Archie’s left eye. Like an unbelievable scene in a sentimental movie, Valdes actually took the scissors and cut the tape that was to go over Archie’s eye.
I remember driving back from Reading to my farm with Archie and Bob McNamara that night, realising that we had a pretty good country heavyweight on our hands and wondering how far we could take him. I was also wondering how I was going to get a tough book done if I spent too much time worrying about the future of Archie McBride.
But this managing stuff gets in the blood. When I came out of my little stone writing house for a breather, I could hear the pounding music of the heavy bag, and I couldn’t resist going to the barn to talk things over with Archie and Bob. A good win in Philly finally brought us to New York, not all the way to Madison Square yet, but to Sunny Side Gardens where Archie lost a close one to a more experienced fighter and then came back in the rematch and knocked him out.
Next came a fight with Mickey Carter, who didn’t worry me too much when I checked his record. I didn’t start worrying until I got a call from a stranger in Queens wanting to bet me $2,000 on his boy Carter. That was out of my league, and his confidence worried me. From my friend Jimmy Cannon, the then famous sports columnist, a drinking buddy in those days, I found out that Carter’s guy ran numbers in Queens. He called me again and made me feel like a piker. We settled for 500. He said he’d see me at ringside.
That was the first money I made on Archie. He blew Carter out of there in two. I thought we were ready for the Garden. But the Garden wasn’t ready for us. Archie looked so strong that none of the boys on the way up wanted to take a chance. And none of the names on top wanted to come down to a no-name who might lick them.
My Archie was in a twilight zone that would shadow him through his long and checkered but memorable career. While he kept on training, I was also getting a lesson in practical fight-game politics. Teddy Brenner didn’t come right out and say so, but I got the message. If I wanted to bring Archie into the Garden, I’d need a Managers Guild co-pilot. It was a cozy little closed shop, and most if not all the members would have had to take the Fifth if questioned under oath on their relations to Frankie Carbo, Boxing Commissioner Without Portfolio.
To move to the Garden we took on board one of the in-boys, Sammy Richman, who promised us a fight in the Garden. Writing books seemed unimportant. We were on our way to the Mecca. Our opponent was Floyd Gibson, whose main claim to fame was winning on a foul from the more famous Archie, the ageless Mr Moore.
Sammy lived at the Great Northern Hotel. It seemed as if all the managers on Mike Jacobs’s Beach lived at the Great Northern. The lobby was filled with little Jewish guys with big cigars right out of Guys and Dolls. Some of them had name fighters and some of them wannabes. When they fell behind on their rent, they’d promise the desk to pay it off out of their kid’s next purse. They hung out at Lindy’s, and their other homes were the Garden and St Nick’s. None of them seemed to have wives or even steady girlfriends. It was all broads and ‘hoors’ and one-night stands. The dialogue was almost exclusively fight talk, and when they talked about fighters it was all about money.
I loved the Great Northern and the Edison where Jimmy Cannon and a lot of fight mavens lived, but my home away from home was the Algonquin where the shades of Dorothy Parker, George S. Kaufman and Alexander Woollcott wandered the lobby and where you were apt to bump into Bill Faulkner and Aldous Huxley in the corridors. We checked in the day before the fight, and my bellboy chums, Michael, Earl and Phillip, asked if they could come in and meet Archie. Pulitzer Prize winners were a dime a dozen in the Algonquin, but a real live prizefighter on his way to the Garden brought a new excitement to the old hotel. Next day in the New York Herald-Tribune Red Smith described Archie as ‘the only fighter who ever fought out of the Algonquin . . .’
My entourage was much more Algonquin than Great Northern: my venerable editor Saxe Commins, who brought Eugene O’Neill to Random House and had never seen a prizefight; Harvey Breit from the New York Times Book Review; and Irwin Shaw.
I introduced sensitive, intellectual Saxe Commins to cynical, cigar-smoking fight writer Al Buck and felt as if my two worlds were smashing together. Saxe had already lectured me about neglecting my work for what should be a hobby on the side. I tried to explain that what he was to me, a guide and nourisher, I had become to Archie. Others could teach him in the gym, but I could give him emotional support in the hotel room.
We won the Garden fight big, with a sixth-round knockout, and I was more relieved than when I got thumbs-up reviews on that nervous-making second novel. And let me explain that ‘we’. In my pre-managing days, I had laughed at the managers with their ‘we’re fighting the semi at the Garden Saturday night’; ‘We’re fighting a tough son-of-a-bitch from Youngstown.’ What’s with the ‘we’ shit? I used to think. They’re not doing the bleeding. They’re not taking the shots to the head. But in my managerial mode I actually heard myself saying, ‘We’re going back to Trenton. Willie is paying us more money now that we’ve got a name.’ And, ‘We’re fighting Red Applegate for the Jersey State Heavyweight Championship.’ And, oh what a fight ‘we’ had. They didn’t come tougher than Applegate. He was the only one to go the distance with Rocky Marciano that year. Red may have been nicknamed for the colour of the liquid that oozed from cuts all over his face. But he kept coming. It could have been the fight of the year.
It was heady stuff. We – well Archie helped – were the heavyweight champions of all New Jersey! Until a few months later, when we ran into a nobody from Newark, with a famous name, Jimmy Walker. Archie came out and got stopped by a very hard and very straight right hand. Twenty fights and he had never even been down before. He had chin. But Jimmy Walker had punch. My wife Vicki, in the second row, broke down and sobbed theatrically. The referee came down from the ring and tried to console her. ‘I got knocked out a coupla times,’ he said soothingly. ‘It isn’t that bad.’
He was right. Archie recovered. I asked Willie for a rematch, we lost a close one, but in the third one Archie solved the Jimmy Walker problem. We were champion of the great state of New Jersey again, and ready for prime time.
We were back in the Apple again, back in venerable St Nick’s (Arena), which looked exactly like Thomas Eakins’s painting of it because it was a throwback to the nineteenth century and hadn’t changed. There was a low-slung balcony and an intimacy; the cigar smoke from ringsiders in the ’20s and ’30s still floated through the lovely old place. Damon Runyon’s guys and dolls were all around ringside, and the balcony was full of blue-collar holler guys ready to fight themselves.
I had dearly loved St Nick’s as a spectator, but now I was a participant. The opponent was a comer from Far Rockaway, the original Hurricane, Tommy Jackson. It was the Tortoise and the Hare, Jackson flashing and showboating and Archie landing the solid punches. Jimmy Cannon and Al Buck, the cognoscenti, thought we won. But they gave it to Jackson. I was in the middle of a rewrite on our movie about the waterfront and being pushed by Elia Kazan to get on with it – he even wanted me to move into his home on 72nd Street, but I had Archie working in the barn for an even bigger fight than Hurricane, a rematch with Nino Valdes who had gone up in this world with a win over Ezzard Charles. A top contender for Marciano now. I talked to Sammy Richman about putting it in the Garden, but the money said Havana. Kazan wanted to talk post-production On the Waterfront and Saxe Commins was scolding me for deserting my Waterfront novel. I had a tiger by the tail, and his name was Archie McBride. I wasn’t sure enough to put him in with Rocky Marciano, but even cynical Sammy Richman said McBride could hold his own with the best heavyweights in the world. So I said goodbye to Kazan and Saxe Commins, and on we went to Havana. We had a big welcome, Famous Gringo Writer with his formidable American fighter whose win over Valdes the Cuban heavyweight champion was determined to avenge.
It was in the sold-out Havana sports arena, and the voices of the patriotic rooters sounded like bongo drums. Archie and I had talked about the crowd scene, the deafening ‘Ni-no, Ni-no’ that could get to a fighter before the opening bell. Archie said he wasn’t worried about the crowd, and he thought he could lick Valdes again. He was always very quiet, very self-contained, a lovely man who’s now in his mid-70s. We still stay in touch with each other.
The fight was a rouser, with both men down once, and of course every time Nino landed the crowd went wild, and every time Archie scored, punching Nino to the body, there was dead silence. So the atmosphere said Valdes was winning. But as in the Jackson fight, Archie’s were the more telling punches. The close decision went to Valdes, to the banging of the bongos and impromptu dancing in the aisles. But the truth is, we wuz robbed. Fifty years later I’m telling you, we beat the No. 1 contender that night. I tried to make my case in a radio interview at ringside, throwing in a little fractured Spanish along with a lot of outraged English. I called the judges ladrónes, and you don’t do that in Havana. Dios Mio, I needed the head policia to protect me. It was only a month to the Oscars, our movie was in the running, and Kazan and our producer wanted me to go out there and ask Marlon to stop knocking the Academy or we wouldn’t have a chance. But all that was happening to somebody else on some other planet. That was Tinseltown. This was real, the only reality I knew that bitter night in Havana.
It was a natural rematch, only natural rematches don’t happen too often in boxing when there’s more money with somebody else. In this case the somebody elses were Hurricane Jackson and Archie Moore. Sammy Richman worked all his Garden connections to get Valdes back for us again. But Nino was hoping for a title shot. Archie was dangerous and didn’t sell that many tickets. My entourage was growing, but how many poets and novelists and book editors could I bring? But then we were back in the Algonquin for another rematch we wanted – Hurricane Jackson. Bob McNamara and I both urged Archie to move in on Jackson. It was the Tortoise and the Hare all over again, Hurricane flailing and flashing but inflicting no punishment, Archie taking his time with his solid but not eye-catching style. In the hotel room that afternoon I had been a pale carbon copy Angelo Dundee, urging Archie to match Jackson’s flurry at the end of rounds and to go back to the corner with the body English of winning the round – little tricks I had seen boxers do all my life.
Archie was an honest and solid performer, but that sort of theatrics was not his bag. This was another spirited contest, almost a repeat of the first, with Archie doing by far the heavier punching and even having Jackson in trouble a couple of times. I felt sure we had won it this time, but the decision went to Hurricane again. The crowd booed, the working press saw it almost unanimously our way. The AP had it 5–3–2 for McBride. Robbed again. In a way it was an easy fight for Archie. In the dressing-room he was uncharacteristically upset. ‘They didn’t count punches,’ he said. ‘They counted slaps. Just little pitty-patty slaps. I know I won this fight.’
On his deathbed years later, one of the judges confessed he had had his hand out to slip the fight to Jackson for a miserable 500 bucks. And of course everybody in the game knew the hopped-up Hurricane had the right connections.
As the unofficial winner of the Jackson fight, Archie drew a dangerous assignment, meeting Bob Satterfield on that awesome puncher’s home turf, Chicago. This time I was on a collision course with my writing career. I was locking up my Waterfront novel; I followed a no-nonsense pub-date deadline, and I had to tell Archie I wasn’t going to be able to make the journey to Satterfieldland. I was a nervous wreck for Archie, but I was in the Random House ring now, with demanding editor Saxe Commins as my corner man.
We told Archie to circle clockwise away from that explosive right hand of Satterfield’s for ten rounds non-stop. He followed instructions to a T and came home with an upset decision.
I was back on the farm being pushed by Kazan to get on with our follow-up to the waterfront movie, A Face in the Crowd, when I got a call from matchmaker Teddy Brenner. Off the Satterfield win, Archie was getting a shot in the Garden again. I mentioned Bob Baker, a big guy with a name I figured Archie could take. Archie looked good with big strong guys a little slower than him. No, Teddy said, it’ll be Floyd Patterson.
The name stuck in my throat. Patterson was the current sensation. He had knocked out everybody he faced that year, including the tough Canadian Yvon Durelle. The maestro Cus D’Amato was crafting his masterpiece. When Archie came in from his workout in the barn, I told him who he’d be meeting. He said quietly, ‘Do I have to fight Floyd?’ This wasn’t fear. Archie had pride and heart. Just realism setting in.
It wasn’t easy for me to concentrate on my work after that. I kept fighting the Patterson fight in my sleep. Archie wasn’t just my fighter, he was family. It was like putting my two little boys Steve and Davey in there with D’Amato’s tiger. On the Sunday morning before the fight, a light heavyweight from Trenton with nice moves was due to work out with Archie, to simulate those fast hands of Patterson, Roosevelt LaBord. I’ll never forget his name. He never showed up. Even after 30 pro fights, we were still something of an amateur operation. In my anxiety and guilt, I said I’d get into the ring with him and try to move around with him a little. ‘But, Archie, please don’t hurt me.’ Archie was positively insulted. Me, his mentor? ‘Mr Schulberg,’ he said, ‘Would I hurt you?’
Thirty seconds later Archie held his left hand out to jab me and my old weakness exposed itself. I had never faced a left hand that didn’t find its way to my nose, and Archie’s, not even thrown in earnest, smashed against that prominent part of my physiognomy. I saw a wave of blood in which I felt I was drowning. The next day I was due to speak at a book-and-author luncheon in Philadelphia. I had a bandage across my resculptured beak, from cheek to cheek. I was embarrassed to tell the book people what happened. Too much like Papa Hemingway. So I said car accident and picked up sympathy points.
The butterflies felt more like seagulls beating in my belly the night of the Patterson fight. In there with a prodigy. The fastest hands in the history of the heavyweight division. And Archie held his own for the first five rounds. Holding his own was the stamp of McBride. But in the sixth round the fast hands caught up with him, and Archie was down twice. All over in the seventh. That was the year before Floyd stopped Archie Moore to become champion of the world.
I was rushing back to the dressing-room with a fluttering heart when Jimmy Cannon stopped me. ‘Schulberg the great fight reformer! That was a fixed fight if I ever saw one.’ Until that moment I thought Cannon knew more about fights and fighters than anybody in town. ‘Jimmy, I always thought you were a little crazy. I underestimated you. You’re certifiable.’
It got worse. He repeated this hallucination in his column next morning. We had been such good friends, talking about everything from Joe Louis and Sugar Ray to Hemingway and Fitzgerald. But we never talked again.
Old Man River McBride rolled on. Alex Miteff . . . Willie Besmanoff . . . good names in the ’50s. Then came Ingemar Johansson. In Göteborg, Sweden, Ingemar’s home town, Archie wants me to go. Not so much for the boxing expertise. Just used to having me with him in the room the day of the fight. But I was lost in the Florida Everglades that month, producing with my brother Stuart a film I had written about saving the plume birds from the feather hunters. We’re up to our ears in cypress swamp, with a temperamental Burl Ives, the young and gifted Christopher Plummer in his very first film and director Nick Ray, of Rebel Without a Cause fame but now ruinously junked out on the hard stuff.
But Whitey Bimstein will be with him, I console myself. Best in the business. And a very nice man. When Whitey came back, he was with Ingemar now. That’s the gritty logic of the fight game. ‘Very close fight,’ he says. ‘Archie really won it. He’d have to knock Ingemar out to win it in Göteborg.’ Three fights later, Johansson takes Floyd out in three and he’s champion of the world. Whitey loved Archie, but boxing is a money business and a white heavyweight who could fight a little bit was still gold in America.
When I asked Archie, ‘How good is Johansson?’ he gave me a funny answer. ‘Remember Jimmy Walker, back in Newark? That’s Johansson. All he’s got is that big right hand.’ And, he might have added, the right epidermis.
I thought back to Willy Gilzenberg in Trenton, in what felt like our fistic infancy, when I thought Archie would pick up a few dollars in four-rounders and I’d have a little diversion from sitting at that desk writing words all day.
Thank God Archie came out of it with his mind and dignity intact, a home he bought with his ring earnings, a devoted husband and father who put his sons through college. And as for me, I just write about fighters now, my fight manager days well behind me.
Of course I do talk fights with another fellow fan in the Westhampton Beach Post Office. But if Ted O’Kula, Jr, wants to bring me a likely local prospect, I’ll tell him I’ve been there, done that and gone the distance with Archie McBride. Ring Magazine described him as ‘one of the most dangerous heavyweights in the business’. A long, long way from my barn in New Hope, Pennsylvania, sometimes I rub the bridge of my broken nose and long for the good old days.
[2003]