The winter of 1929 in Bethel had been a hard time. For three months the sullen black mills had been still, the roaring furnaces silent. The great dark town had been gripped with frost, powdered with black snow, its grimy streets as sullen as the striking steel-workers who lived there.
It had been unanimous. Italians, Scots, Poles, Irishmen: all had been part of the forest of arms that had stabbed the winter air when Morgan had finally put the strike to the vote. They had asked for just five cents more an hour, yet they had been rebutted outright. Morgan had been there at the negotiations, amongst the plump, soft-handed men who had never in their lives sweated behind a shovel feeding greedy, belching furnaces.
He had repeated his arguments about sick pay, about insurance, about the injuries suffered in the mills, the appalling infant mortality in the town; but it was no use. These men were not concerned. They listened, but Morgan felt his helplessness even as he spoke. The only answer had been to strike.
Morgan had planned the men’s protest like a battle campaign. Food supplies had been bought months before and were stored in the Mission Hall. A strike fund had been set up in good time and families with special needs had been satisfied. A communications system of telephones and relays of children kept three thousand families in constant touch.
But they had not planned for such a fierce winter, and the owners knew it. By January many children had become sick; by February six of them had died, and by March mothers who had denied themselves food were also beginning to fade.
Morgan watched his men wither, first in their muscles, finally in their minds. Daily he would look in the mirror and see a physique fashioned by years of hard work losing not fat but solid tissue. His body was consuming itself, drawing upon its last reserves, and he could feel his own resolve weaken. After all, even without the five cents extra pay they had lived: perhaps not well, but it had been a life.
Ruth, his wife, though in her early months of pregnancy, had stood with him. The dark days bound them more closely together than all the happy times they had known. When the owners’ strike-breakers – a hundred men drafted in from the slums of New York’s East Side – had finally attacked the Mission she had been there, as had all the women. The men had stood four-deep in the frozen, corrugated mud with nothing but fists and fence-posts. Facing them, a hundred yards away, in front of the buses which had brought them, stood the owners’ men. Each was armed with a night-stick. The battle had been brief and bloody. The first rush on the union lines left twenty thugs stranded on the iron ground between the strikers and the buses. But the union line had been broken, and many of the steel-workers lay unconscious, or groaning on the hard ground.
Morgan looked around him and sucked his bloody knuckles. Up the road the owners’ men had regrouped and had taken three heavy wooden boxes from the trucks. It was impossible at first to see what was in them, but Morgan felt a sickness in the pit of his stomach. This was going to be no stand-up fight to Marquis of Queensberry rules.
A massive Scot, Cameron, his red beard streaked with blood, came up behind him. “Man, we fair bloodied their noses.”
The words had scarcely left his lips when he fell back, his right shoulder shattered by a rifle bullet. The women screamed, begging their men to retreat. At a distance of one hundred yards, a line of the thugs knelt and began to fire a second volley. Morgan’s men started to drop around him, and the strikers’ ordered ranks were pocked by broken, wounded men.
He shouted his men back, away from the line of fire, and he and the survivors dragged their wounded away across the frozen ground, out of the path of the oncoming owners’ men.
The steel-workers wept, the tears freezing on their ridged, stubbled faces, as the thugs strode on past them on to the Mission Hall. It took them only a matter of minutes to burn it down, so destroying the remainder of the strikers’ food supplies.
The strike was over, and Morgan knew it. The rest of the strike fund was soon mopped up in hospital bills, and in a fortnight the walk-out was over and the men back at work – at five cents an hour less than their previous rate.
The owners had the muscle, and even without it they could always afford to wait. For them, time meant loss of money, but no hardship, while for the steel-workers it meant hunger and loss of life. It had all been for nothing.
No, Ruth had said. It is never for nothing. Even when you are beaten. Every time you fight you become stronger, even in defeat. But there must surely be better ways.
Naturally, there was no work for Morgan now at the mill. Every day he had stood hands in jacket pockets at the black iron gates and every day been turned away.
Then, one winter morning, as he turned away from the gates he felt a hand on his shoulder. It belonged to a small, foxy-faced man in an expensive fur coat.
“Sharpe,” he introduced himself, offering Morgan a gloved hand, which Morgan reluctantly accepted. “Saw you in a few tight spots, my friend. You’re real quick. I like the way you handle yourself.”
Sharpe saw that Morgan did not understand. “Cut a long story short, how would you like to earn some real money-folding money?”
“What do I have to do?” said Morgan suspiciously.
“Hit – like you did in that line couple of weeks back.”
“Keep talking,” said Morgan, putting both hands in the pockets of his jacket. They started to walk away from the gates, their breath steaming around them in the sharp, still air.
“Fights,” explained the smaller man, flipping a cigarette into his mouth. “Bare-knuckle fights. Anything goes, except feet.”
Morgan shook his head. “I’ve never fought to hurt,” he said. “Just for what we had coming to us.”
“What you get for it?” said Sharpe, lighting his cigarette. “Your buddies – you fought for them. Now they got work while you freeze your butt off. So what you got now, union man?”
“Keep talking,” said Morgan again, without animosity.
“McGrath’s warehouse, Salem. We have three fights a night, big money in side bets. You come up good, we move round the state circuit. Fancy pickings.”
“How much?”
“Ten bucks, win or lose. A hundred bucks a win. Either way it’s money in the bank.” Sharpe blew smoke into the icy air.
“But what makes you think I can do it?” said Morgan, uncertainly.
“I’ve seen you,” said Sharpe, pressing his arm. “You hit crisp, you hit neat. This ain’t no Golden Gloves, mind.”
“How do I start?” ‘
“First we see Clancy,” said the little man. “Back at Milligan’s speakeasy.”
Morgan knew Milligan’s well, but nothing of Clancy.
“This Clancy – where does he figure?”
“Clancy makes fighters,” said Sharpe in explanation. “Used to work legit at Stillman’s in New York. If he likes you, you got it made.”
They walked slowly through the morning mist to Milligan’s.
Eamonn Clancy hit the seven ball into the middle pocket, put down his cue, and removed a cigarette from his mouth. Like Sharpe, he was a short and squat man, but with a flat, fleshy boxer’s nose.
“Gimme your hands,” he said.
He pressed Morgan’s hands in his and turned them round, looking closely at each knuckle in turn as if they were pieces of fine china. The knuckles were flat, the hands hard and firm.
“Make a fist,” he said. He looked up quickly at Morgan. “Ever bust these on some Polack’s head?”
“No,” said Morgan sharply.
Clancy turned away and picked up his cue. “No bones sticking out – okay, so his hands are made for hitting. But does he have heart?” He leant forward to the edge of the table, made a bridge, slowly withdrew his cue, and slotted the black into the middle pocket.
“I seen him with the mill mob,” said Sharpe, stepping forward and placing both hands on the table. “I seen him, Clancy.”
The other man laid down his cue. “So you told me. So you got me another Dempsey. What you want I should do, phone Tex Rickard? I give him a month with me in the mountains, then we try him out in the warehouse. Okay?”
Sharpe sighed with relief and looked across at Morgan, standing in the darkness away from the pool table.
“What do you say?” he said. “We got a deal?”
Morgan nodded, smiling.
“One more thing,” said Clancy. “Does he cut?”
Sharpe looked at Morgan.
“I don’t know,” said Morgan. “I’ve never been hit.”
Clancy grimaced. “We’ll see.” He nodded at Sharpe. “The last boy Sharpe brought me cut like a tomato taking on a Bowie knife.”
Morgan’s jaw tightened. Clancy walked past him and replaced his cue on the wall-rack. Then he turned, smiled and put out his hand.
By the end of that day Morgan had been bought a new set of clothes, a pair of training boots and a light grey sweatsuit. A week later he set off with Clancy in an old Ford for a log cabin in the Tuscarora mountains, north-west of Harrisburg.
The month of training with Clancy in the Tuscaroras was the hardest Morgan had ever experienced. He had not told Ruth what he was going to do. She had accepted that he had to leave Bethel to look for work, and Sharpe had advanced him twenty dollars to send back to her. He felt lost the first days he was away, but soon the homesickness was submerged in the pain of Clancy’s training. Five miles daily he ran across the mountains, his breath spuming ahead of him. Sweat froze on his face, ice matted his hair, while his body boiled in his thick, fleece-lined tracksuit.
“You gotta die before you can live,” said Clancy, pulling the cork out of a bottle of whiskey with his teeth, as they sat in front of a roaring fire at the end of a day’s training. “Sharpe’s right. You got guts, Morgan. Soon we’ll see if you can take a punch.”
Finally, after a month of running and strenuous exercises, Clancy drove Morgan over to a nearby farm. “Hitting time,” he said without further explanation.
Together they trudged through soft mud and snow to a big wooden barn. The floor of the barn was brown and springy, a mixture of dirt and sawdust. Clancy opened a brown Gladstone bag and gave Morgan a pair of light leather boxing gloves. “Put these on,” he said. “No point in busting up your hands.”
Morgan slipped on the tight, padded gloves. They felt strange. Clancy laced them up for him and pulled the strings tight. “How does that feel now?” he asked. Morgan’s answer was broken by the squeal of a car’s brakes outside the barn.
“That’ll be Fogarty,” said Clancy, still without further explanation, and continued to tighten Morgan’s gloves.
A man in a thick woollen turtleneck sweater entered the barn, carrying on his shoulders boxing gloves similar to those Clancy had provided. He was older than Morgan, in his mid-thirties, but was the same height, though more heavily muscled about the shoulders and chest.
“This is the guy you’re gonna fight,” said Clancy. “Chuck Fogarty.”
Fogarty’s flat face creased into a smile.
“You got another boy for me, Clancy?” he said in a light voice. He bent down, slipped on his gloves with ease and reached out to shake Morgan by the hand. “Real nice to meet ya,” he said taking Morgan’s right hand lightly in his. As he did so, Fogarty’s left fist curved in a long arc and clubbed Morgan viciously on the right side of the face.
Morgan fell heavily to the floor, spitting blood from split, pouting lips. He felt as if he had been hit by a brick.
He looked up at Clancy, to find the trainer watching him intently. Morgan’s head swam and his teeth yielded a bitter gunpowder taste.
Only his instincts kept him in contention in the bitter, spinning moments that followed. At first he stayed down on all fours, gasping, stealing vital seconds as his mind cleared. Then he was ready. He got to his feet, shaking his head. He sensed that Fogarty was standing back from him, confident, ready to set himself up for the final blow. He was right. Fogarty was standing back, smiling, both gloves pressed together and his guard, Morgan noticed, had dropped slightly, ready for what would be the final easy hit.
Morgan made a weak feint with his left. Fogarty pushed it away with his right and closed in for the kill. But Morgan’s right now came over like a whip to land plumb on Fogarty’s nose. There was a small cracking noise and Fogarty went down spurting blood and groaning, his chin furrowing the dirt floor. He slowly raised himself on one knee and then collapsed. The fight was over. Clancy threw a ten-dollar bill to the ground beside the fallen street-fighter and moved towards the door.
“Thanks, champ,” he said. “I’ll buzz you when I got me another likely boy.” He put a thick jersey over Morgan’s shoulders and dabbed his charge’s nose and mouth with a towel. They walked back together through the snow and mud to the car. Once in the Ford, Clancy put the car into gear and looked ahead at the glassy frozen road. “Sharpe told me you could hit. And you proved you could dig deep running out in the hills. But the big yes/ no is always what happens when you get hit. That’s where Fogarty always comes in.”
He moved into top gear, then looked to his side. “You see, this is the way it usually pans out. Nine outa ten guys go back when they get hit. It shocks the hell outa them when they get sight of their own blood. So they wanta get the hell out. Don’t get me wrong: they ain’t cowards. No guy who works twelve hours a day in mills or down a mine is yellow. It’s just they ain’t fighters, that’s all. You are. How do I know? Item one, you came up off the floor. Item two, you came up fighting. Item three, you came up thinking. And item four, you can hit.”
He took his right hand from the wheel and put it around Morgan’s shoulders. “Let that mouth heal up, Morgan. Two weeks from now, next stop Salem warehouse.”
They stayed a final week at the cabin in the mountains to allow Morgan’s mouth to heal. It was only then that Clancy started to open up, to deal with the real meat of street-fighting. This related directly to the game of combat chess which would enable Morgan to survive. Clancy drew upon fighting lore that had been known since the 18th century, when the Englishman Jack Broughton had created the first rules of prize-fighting. Morgan absorbed every word of Clancy’s advice and com-mitted it to memory, and the week in the lonely cabin passed quickly. Soon it was time to travel back to Bethel, to prepare for his first fight.
Salem warehouse, Clairton, had not been used for years. Even the rats, which had fed on the rotted fruit that had been stored there, had long since scuttled off to other feeding-places. As Morgan looked around him he shivered. The warehouse was vast, still and cold. In the darkness, in the centre of its concrete floor under a pool of light, was a dense square of men, the mist from their breath hanging in a cloud above them as they shouted odds at each other.
In the opposite corner to Morgan, stripped to the waist, his back to him, hands on the shoulders of his handlers, was Morgan’s first opponent. He wore black shorts over a pair of black woollen training tights. As his opponent turned to face him Morgan saw that he had a tough, flat-nosed face similar to Fogarty’s. He was glad. Now there would be no room for pity. The man’s white muscular body steamed in the chill dank air of the warehouse. He pressed his fists together as if sharpening them for battle, turned and sank down on his stool. Above him, his handlers stroked and kneaded his neck and pectorals and whispered advice from the corners of their mouths.
The ringmaster, dressed in fur cap, gloves and thick tartan jacket, bellowed for silence, his voice echoing in the high steel rafters. The babble stilled, to be replaced by an expectant hush.
The ringmaster turned towards Morgan’s opponent. “McGuin, Chicago, versus . . .” He turned to Morgan. “. . . Chuck Petrack, the Bronx.” It was the first time that Morgan had heard his ring-name spoken in public. It helped distance him from what he was about to do.
He looked around a further time at the taut, expectant faces in the crowd. He had never before seen such expressions. True, these men had come to bet, but their real desire was to see strong men hit, punished, better men than themselves broken and humiliated.
He was now deep in the underworld of sport, light years from the Olympics, distanced by law even from the seamy but legal world of professional boxing.
Clancy massaged the muscles at the top of Morgan’s neck as he sat on his stool.
“Easy,” said Clancy. “Easy.”
Morgan looked across at his opponent. He felt a still coldness come over him.
There was no gong, but someone in a neutral corner blew a whistle. Morgan got to his feet and came out slow, crouching, as did McGuin. For fully a minute they circled each other, only the sound of their breathing breaking the stillness.
One hit settled it. As with Fogarty, Morgan made a play with his left, then hit his man on the side of the nose with his right. McGuin went down like a stone and lay for a moment, blood flowing from his nose on to the concrete floor. Like Fogarty before him, he raised himself painfully on both arms, then sank to the cold warehouse floor. It was all over.
A hush fell upon the crowd. Morgan turned to Clancy, taking his dressing-gown from him.
“Let’s get out of here,” he said, trembling.
He felt sick as he was driven home, a hundred dollars burning in his pocket. When he reached his own house he spread the money he had earned on the table in front of Ruth. “There you are, honey,” he said.
He saw her amazement.
“Want to know how I got it?” He lifted his right fist and spat on it, then hammered it on the table.
“Hitting a guy,” he said, the tears trickling down his face. “Hitting some poor bum. That’s how I earned it. That’s how I aim to keep you and the baby from now on.”
When he had finished his story of the evening, and what had led up to it, Ruth lifted his head with her hands and looked into his eyes. “Morg,” she said, “you’re the bravest man I ever knew. If street-fighting’s what you got to do, then do it. But do it well.”
He did. Under the name of Petrack, the Bronx Bomber, he had six more fights at Salem warehouse. Then, two months later, it was time to move on to the main East Coast circuit, a street-fighting network spanning the industrial centres of the area.
The world of street-fighting was a subterranean one of empty warehouses, ancient armories and midnight railyards. Of blood and darkness.
Sometimes the fights went longer, but not once did Morgan lose. Clancy helped him develop tactics, taught him how to hit to the body. “Kill the stomach and the head will die,” he explained. And as Morgan won so the greenbacks poured in from the ringside.
During the year that followed the bond between Morgan and Clancy became strong, though both men knew it would not survive for a moment in the world outside. It was a bond created by mutual respect for each other’s skill and knowledge. Clancy’s eyes could pierce the smoke of the tiny cockpits in which the battles were fought, picking out that single flaw in an opponent which might be the difference between success and failure. Morgan’s task was to translate these instincts and insights into explosive action, to live violently through Clancy’s eyes.
But while as a team they prospered, Clancy sensed that Morgan had no real love of street-fighting.
“So it ain’t Madison Square Garden,” he would say. “But then we ain’t beating up any old ladies and we don’t throw no fights, so who loses? A few guys get bust noses – ribs even – but they could do a lot worse. Say an accident at the mill or in a rock fall down the mines. So who loses?”
Morgan would not answer. He could never grow to love what he did, but – he felt himself echo Ruth’s phrase – it was better to do it well than badly. As Clancy would say, “Everyone wants to win, or says they do. But what it’s all about is not wanting to lose.”
Then came the night when his man lay still and had to be carried from the ringside. Morgan was dragged away, looking over his right shoulder at the fallen fighter as Clancy hustled him out of the warehouse and into the Ford. A week later, Morgan learned that his opponent had died. He drifted about the Eastern Seaboard, aching and silent, occasionally sneaking back to Bethel to see Ruth and his son. He took on any work he could, but he knew that his days of street-fighting were over.
He was in New York, working in the docks, when news came of Ruth’s death. She had died over a week before, but the letter had taken six days to reach him. He had never really thought of dying, though always at the back of his mind had been a dim, childlike idea that he and Ruth would walk off towards death hand in hand.
He could stay in Bethel only for a day, after four hours by train from New York. To have stayed any longer might have been dangerous. He stood in front of the grave, while down in the town the mill-hooters blared to signal the end of a day’s work. The town had killed her. The mill had killed her. In a way, in his dogged determination to fight on, he too had been an accomplice. And yet he knew that, were she alive, she would do it again, with him and all the other losers. All he had ever won had been with his body. The day he had left New York he had heard of a race, somewhere out West, a foot-race across America. In his grief he had given it no thought, but now her words came back to him – “You’re the bravest man I ever knew. If that’s what you got to do, then do it. But do it well.”
Then that was what he had to do. It would not be easy, but he had a year to prepare.
Morgan next took his year-old son Michael to his mother’s home in Elmira. A widow, she was glad to have yet another Mike to love and protect. Morgan told her what he planned to do, and a week later set off West.
He took his time making his way to Los Angeles, and had even spent a couple of months booth-fighting in Kansas. But always he made sure that he ran at least ten miles a day and by February 1931, a month before the Trans-America, he could run thirty miles non-stop in just over three hours. He found that he grew to like running, for unlike fist-fighting running hurt no one. You stretched yourself, you dug deep, but you did no one any harm.
Morgan had therefore resolved that he would squeeze the Trans-America for its last dollar and come away with some of the big stage prizes early in the race, for he had no certainty of getting into the frame in New York, and thus picking up the big prizes.
8.30 a.m., 24 March 1931. 1750 runners – 1710 men and 40 women – stood massed just short of the entry to the main road to Barstow, the dismantling of Flanaganville completed. The tension of Los Angeles had gone. The third stage of the race they had completed the day before, and had peeled off over a hundred runners. Already the field was beginning to harden. There had been no real racing yet, though the pace of the leaders had been fast, better than ten minutes a mile. Now, however, there was money on the table, a total of over a thousand dollars for each of the two twenty-mile stages, and there would be those with no hope of winning the Trans-America who would undoubtedly make a bid for these prizes alone.
Morgan looked out into the desert. Five hundred bucks. He would hit the first twenty-mile stage now, when he was still fresh. He would go for the early money.