AMERICANS ARE STILL AN independent and rebellious people—at least in their reaction to signs. Stillman’s gym, up the street from the Garden, offers no exception to our national habit of shrugging off small prohibitions. Hung prominently on the gray, nondescript walls facing the two training rings a poster reads: “No rubbish or spitting on the floor, under penalty of the law.” If you want to see how the boys handle this one, stick around until everybody has left the joint and see what’s left for the janitor to do. The floor is strewn with cigarettes smoked down to their stained ends, cigar butts chewed to soggy pulp, dried spittle, empty match cases, thumbed and trampled copies of the News, Mirror and Journal, open to the latest crime of passion or the race results, wadded gum, stubs of last night’s fight at St. Nick’s (managers comps), a torn-off cover of an Eighth Avenue restaurant menu with the name of a new matchmaker in Cleveland scrawled next to a girl’s phone number. Here on the dirty gray floor of Stillman’s is the tell-tale debris of a world as sufficient unto itself as a walled city of the Middle Ages.
You enter this walled city by means of a dark, grimy stairway that carries you straight up off Eighth Avenue into a large, stuffy, smoke-filled, hopeful, cynical, glistening-bodied world. The smells of this world are sour and pungent, a stale gamey odor blended of sweat and liniment, worn fight gear, cheap cigars and too many bodies, clothed and unclothed, packed into a room with no noticeable means of ventilation. The sounds of this world are multiple and varied, but the longer you listen, the more definitely they work themselves into a pattern, a rhythm that begins to play in your head like a musical score: The trap-drum beating of the light bag, counter-pointing other light bags; the slow thud of punches into heavy bags, the tap-dance tempo of the rope-skippers; the three-minute bell; the footwork of the boys working in the ring, slow, open-gloved, taking it easy; the muffled sound of the flat, high-laced shoes on the canvas as the big name in next week’s show at the Garden takes a sign from his manager and goes to work, crowding his sparring partner into a corner and shaking him up with body punches; the hard-breathing of the boxers, the rush of air through the fighter’s fractured nose, in a staccato timed to his movements; the confidential tones the managers use on the matchmakers from the smaller clubs spotting new talent, Irving, let me assure you my boy loves to fight. He wants none of them easy ones. Sure he looked lousy Thursday night. It’s a question of styles. You know that Ferrara’s style was all wrong for him. Put ’em in with a boy who likes to mix it an’ see the difference; the deals, the arguments, the angles, the appraisals, the muted Greek chorus, muttering out of the corner of its mouth with a nervous cigar between its teeth; the noise from the telephones; the booths “For Out-going Calls Only,” Listen, Joe, I just been talking to Sam and he says okay for two hundred for the semi-final at…the endless ringing of the “Incoming Calls Only”; a guy in dirty slacks and a cheap yellow sports-shirt, cupping his hairy hands together and lifting his voice above the incessant sounds of the place: Whitey Bimstein, call for Whitey Bimstein, anybody seen Whitey…”; the garbage-disposal voice of Stillman himself, a big, authoritative, angry-looking man, growling out the names of the next pair of fighters to enter the ring, loudly but always unrecognizably, like a fierce, adult babytalk; then the bell again, the footwork sounds, the thudding of gloves against hard bodies, the routine fury.
The atmosphere of this world is intense, determined, dedicated. The place swarms with athletes, young men with hard, lithe, quick bodies under white, yellow, brown and blackish skins and serious, concentrated faces, for this is serious business, not just for blood, but for money.
I was sitting in the third row of the spectators’ seats, waiting for Toro to come out. Danny McKeogh was going to have him work a couple of rounds with George Blount, the old Harlem trial-horse. George spent most of his career in the ring as one of those fellows who’s good enough to be worth beating, but just not good enough to be up with the contenders. Tough but not too tough, soft but not too soft—that’s a trial horse. Old George wasn’t a trial-horse any more, just a sparring partner, putting his big, shiny-black porpoise body and his battered, good-natured face up there to be battered some more for five dollars a round. There were sparring partners you could get for less, but George was what Danny called an honest workman; he could take a good stiff belt without quitting. To the best of his ringwise but limited ability he obliged the managers with whatever style of fighting they asked for. He went in; he lay back; he boxed from an orthodox stand-up stance, keeping his man at distance with his left; he fought from out of a crouch and shuffled into a clinch, tying his man up with his club-like arms and giving him a busy time with the in-fighting. Good Old George, with the gold teeth, the easy smile and the old-time politeness, calling everybody mister, black and white alike, humming his slow blues as he climbed through the ropes, letting himself get beaten to his knees, climbing out through the ropes again and picking up the song right where he had left it on the apron of the ring. That was George, a kind of Old Man River of the ring, a John Henry with scar tissue, a human punching bag, who accepted his role with philosophical detachment.
In front of me, sparring in the rings and behind the rings, limbering up, were the fighters, and behind me, the non-belligerent echelons, the managers, trainers, matchmakers, gamblers, minor mobsters, kibitzers, with here and there a sports writer or a shameless tub-thumper like myself. Some of us fall into the trap of generalizing about races: the Jews are this, the Negroes are that, the Irish something else again. But in this place the only true division seemed to be between the flat-bellied, slender-waisted, lively-muscled young men and the men with the paunches, bad postures, fleshy faces and knavish dispositions who fed on the young men, promoted them, matched them, bought and sold them, used them and discarded them. The boxers were of all races, all nationalities, all faiths, though predominantly Negro, Italian, Jewish, Latin-American, Irish. So were the managers. Only those with a bigot’s astigmatism would claim that it was typical for the Irish to fight and Jews to run the business, or vice versa, for each fighting group had its parasitic counterpart. Boxers and managers, those are the two predominant races of Stillman’s world.
I have an old-fashioned theory about fighters. I think they should get paid enough to hang up their gloves before they begin talking to themselves. I wouldn’t even give the managers the 33⅓ percent allowed by the New York Boxing Commission. A fighter only has about six good years and one career. A manager, in terms of the boys he can handle in a lifetime, has several hundred careers. Very few fighters get the consideration of race horses which are put out to pasture when they haven’t got it any more, to grow old in dignity and comfort like Man o’ War. Managers, in the words of my favorite sports writer, “have been known to cheat blinded fighters at cards, robbing them out of the money they lost their eyesight to get.”
I still remember what a jolt it was to walk into a foul-smelling men’s room in a crummy little late spot back in Los Angeles and slowly recognize the blind attendant who handed me the towel as Speedy Sencio, the little Filipino who fought his way to the top of the bantam-weights in the late twenties. Speedy Sencio, with the beautiful footwork who went fifteen rounds without slowing down, an artist who could make a fight look like a ballet, dancing in and out, side to side, weaving, feinting, drawing opponents out of position and shooting short, fast, punches that never looked hard, but suddenly stretched them on the canvas, surprised and pale and beyond power to rise. Little Speedy in those beautiful double-breasted suits and the cocky, jaunty but dignified way he skipped from one corner to the other to shake hands with the participants in a fight to decide his next victim.
Speedy had Danny McKeogh in his corner in those days. Danny looked after his boys. He knew when Speedy’s timing was beginning to falter, when he began running out of gas around the eighth, and when the legs began to go, especially the legs. He was almost thirty, time to go home for a fighting man. One night the best he could get was a draw with a tough young slugger who had no business in the ring with him when Speedy was right. Speedy got back to his corner, just, and oozed down on his stool. Danny had to give him smelling salts to get him out of the ring. Speedy was the only real money-maker in Danny’s stable, but Danny said no to all offers. As far as he was concerned, Speedy had had it. Speedy was on Danny all the time, pressing for a fight. Speedy even promised to give up the white girl he was so proud of if Danny would take him back. With Danny it was strike three, you’re out, no arguments. Danny really loved Speedy. As a term of endearment, he called him “that little yellow son-of-a-bitch.” Danny had an old fighter’s respect for a good boy, and, although it would make him a little nauseous to use a word like dignity, I think that is what he had on his mind when he told Speedy to quit. There are not many things as undignified as seeing an old master chased around the ring, easy to hit, caught flat-footed, old wounds opened, finally belted out. The terrible plunge from dignity is what happened to Speedy Sencio when Danny McKeogh tore up the contract and the jackals and hyenas nosed in to feed on the still-warm corpse.
Strangely enough, it was Vince Vanneman who managed Speedy out of the top ten into the men’s can. Vince had him fighting three and four times a month around the small clubs from San Diego to Bangor, any place where “former bantamweight champion” still sold tickets. Vince chased a dollar with implacable single-mindedness. I caught up with him and Speedy one night several years ago in Newark, when Speedy was fighting a fast little southpaw who knew how to use both hands. He had Speedy’s left eye by the third round and an egg over his right that opened in the fifth. The southpaw was a sharp-shooter and he went for those eyes. He knocked Speedy’s mouthpiece out in the seventh and cut the inside of his mouth with a hard right before he could get it back in place. When the bell ended the round Speedy was going down and Vince and a second had to drag him back to his corner. I was sitting near Speedy’s corner, and though I knew what to expect from Vince I felt I had to make a pitch in the right direction. So I leaned over and said, “For Christ sake, Vince, what do you want to have, a murder? Throw in the towel and stop the slaughter, for Christ’s sweet sake.”
Vince looked down from the ring where he was trying to help the trainer close the cuts over the eyes. “Siddown and min’ your own friggin’ business,” he said while working frantically over Speedy to get him ready to answer the bell.
In the next round Speedy couldn’t see because of the blood and he caught an over-hand right on the temple and went down and rolled over, reaching desperately for the lowest strand of the rope. Slowly he pulled himself up at eight, standing with his feet wide apart and shaking his head to clear the blood out of his eyes and his brain. All the southpaw had to do was measure him and he was down again, flat on his back, but making a convulsive struggle to rise to his feet. That’s when Vince cupped his beefy hands to his big mouth and shouted through the ropes, “Get up. Get up, you son-of-a-bitch.” And he didn’t mean it like Danny McKeogh. For some reason known only to men with hearts like Speedy Sencio’s, he did get up. He got up and clinched and held on and drew on every memory of defense and trickery he had learned in more than 300 fights. Somehow, four knockdowns and six interminable minutes later, he was still on his feet at the final bell, making a grotesque effort to smile through his broken mouth as he slumped into the arms of his victorious opponent in the traditional embrace.
Half an hour later I was having a hamburger across the street, when Vince came in and squeezed his broad buttocks into the opposite booth. He ordered a steak sandwich and a bottle of beer. He was with another guy, and they were both feeling all right. From what Vince said I gathered he had put up five hundred to win two-fifty that Speedy would stay the limit.
When I paid my check I turned to Vince’s booth because I felt I had to protest against the violation of the dignity of Speedy Sencio. I said, “Vince, in my book you are a chintzy, turd-eating butcher!”
That’s a terrible way to talk and I apologize to anybody who might have been in that short-order house and overheard me. The only thing I can say in my defense is that if you are talking to an Eskimo it is no good to speak Arabic. But what I said didn’t even make Vince lose a beat in the rhythmical chewing of his steak.
“Aaah, don’t be an old lady,” Vince said. “Speedy’s never been kayoed, so why should I spoil his record?”
“Sure,” I said, “don’t spoil his record. Just spoil his face, spoil his head, spoil his life for good.”
“Go away,” Vince said, laughing. “You’ll break my frigging heart.”
The bell brought me back from Newark, from Speedy Sencio with his lousy job in that crapper and, I thought, from Vince Vanneman. Then I saw Vince himself coming in. I realized this must have been one of those times when the mind seems to sense someone before the image strikes the eye so that it appears a coincidence when the very man you’re thinking about comes in the door. He was wearing a yellow linen sports-shirt, open at the neck, worn outside his pants. He came up behind Solly Prinz, the matchmaker, and gave him the finger. Solly seemed to rise up off the ground and let out an excited, girlish scream. Everybody knew Solly was very goosey. It got a good laugh from the circle Solly was standing with. With the rest of his fingers bent toward his palm. Vince held the assaultive middle finger lewdly. “See that, girls?” he said. “That’s what a Chicago fag means when he says he’ll put the finger on you.” That got a laugh too. Vince was a funny guy, a great guy for laughs, just a big fun-loving kid who never grew up.
Vince came over and ran his hand over my hair.
“Hello, lover,” he said.
“Balls,” I said.
“Aw, Edsie,” Vince pouted, “don’t be that way. You’ve got it for me, baby.” He threw his head back in an effeminate gesture, flouncing his fat body with grotesque coyness.
It was another Vanneman routine, always good for laughs. Humor was intended to lie in the margin of contrast between the fag act and Vince’s obvious virility. I used to wonder about it.
“Seen him box yet?” Vince said.
“He’ll be out in a minute,” I said. “Danny’s having Doc look him over.”
“When you gonna break somethin’ in the papers about him?”
“When Nick and I figure it’s time,” I said.
“Get him, get him!” Vince said. “What are ya, a goddam primmer-donner? Damon Runyon or something? I got a right to ask. I’m a partner, ain’t I?”
Edwin Dexter Lewis, I mused, born in Harrisburg, Pa., of respectable churchgoing Episcopalians, nearly two years in the Halls of Nassau with First Group in English and a flunk in Greek, the occasional companion, intellectual and otherwise, of a Smith graduate and Life Magazine researcher, an imminent playwright, clearly a man of breeding and distinction—if not of honor. At what point in what I smilingly refer to as my career was it decided that I was to become a business associate of Vincent Vanneman, two hundred and fifteen pounds of Eighth Avenue flotsam, graduate of Blackwell’s Island, egger-onner of beaten fighters, contemporary humorist and practical joker.
“This isn’t a partnership,” I said. “It’s a stock company. Just because we both have a couple of shares of the same stock doesn’t make us brothers.”
“What’sa matter, Eddie, can’t you take a rib any more?” Vince grinned, wanting to be friends. “I just thought maybe when you put something in the paper you c’n drop in a line about me, you know, how it was me discovered the big guy.”
“You mean how you muscled in on Acosta?”
“I don’t like them words,” Vince said.
“Forgive me,” I said. “I didn’t know you were so sensitive.”
“What the hell you got on me?” Vince wanted to know. “Why you always try to give me the business?”
“Take it easy, Vince,” I said. “I’ll give you a nice big write-up some day. All you’ve got to do is drop dead.”
Vince looked at me, spat on the floor, leaned back on his fat rump and opened his Mirror to the double-page spread on the Latin thrush who beat up the band-leader’s wife when she surprised them in a West-Side hotel.
Behind me a familiar voice was saying, “I wouldn’t kid ya, Paul, I’ve got a bum what’ll give yer customers plenty of action. Never made a bad fight in his life.”
I looked around to see Harry Miniff talking to Paul Frank, matchmaker for the Coney Island Club. Harry’s hat was pushed back on his head as usual and a dead cigar hung between his lips as he talked.
“You don’t mean that dog Cowboy Coombs, for Chrisake?” Paul said.
Miniff wiped the perspiration from his lip in a nervous gesture. “Whaddya mean, dog? I’ll bet ya fifty right now Coombs c’n lick that Patsy Kline who’s supposed to be such a draw out at Coney.”
“I need somebody for Kline a week from Monday,” Paul admitted. “But Patsy figures to murder an old man like Coombs.”
“Whaddya mean, old?” Miniff demanded. “Thirty-two! You call that old? That ain’t old. Fer a heavyweight that ain’t old.”
“For Coombs it’s old,” Paul said. “When you been punched around fifteen years, it’s old.”
“I tell ya, Coombs is in shape, Paul,” Miniff insisted, but the desperate way he said it made it sound more like a plea than a statement of fact. “And win or lose, he’s a crowd-pleaser. Ya know that, Paul. Kline’ll know he’s been in a fight.”
“What about that last one up in Worcester?” Frank said.
“T’row that one out,” Miniff dismissed it, reaching quickly into his coat pocket and coming up with a handful of worn newspaper clippings. “Sure, sure, in the record book it’s a TKO for La Grange. But read what they said about us in the Worcester papers. Coombs woulda gone for a win if he hadn’a busted his hand on the other bum’s head. Here you c’n read about it right here!”
He held the clippings up in front of Paul’s face, but the matchmaker waved them away.
“How’s the hand now?” Paul said.
“Good’s new, good’s new,” Miniff assured him. “You don’t think I’d send one of my boys in with a bum duke, do ya?”
“Yes,” Paul said.
Miniff wasn’t hurt. There was too much at stake to be hurt: five hundred dollars if he talked Paul Frank into using the Cowboy with Patsy Kline. One sixty-six for Miniff’s end. And he could improve that a little if he held out a few bucks on Coombs’ share of the purse. Miniff could use that kind of money. The Forrest Hotel, on 49th Street, had put up with Miniff’s explanations for six or seven months.
“I’ll tell you what I’ll do with you, Paul,” Miniff said. “If you want to be absolutely sure that your customers get their money’s worth before Kline puts the crusher on Coombs…” He paused and looked around with a conspirator’s discretion. “Come on out’n the sidewalk,” he said, “where we can talk private.”
“Awright,” Paul agreed, unenthusiastically. “But cut it off short.”
Relaxed and poker-faced, Paul moved toward the wide doorway with the undersized, over-anxious director of the destiny of Cowboy Coombs hanging onto his arm and talking up into his face, sweating to make a buck.
Toro had to duck his head to fit through the doorway from the locker room. Usually the boys were so absorbed in their own work-outs that they hardly looked up. I’ve seen the biggest draws in the business working shoulder to shoulder with some fifty-buck preliminary boy and nobody seeming to know the difference. But when Toro came in, everything seemed to stop for a second. He was dressed in black—long black tights and a black gym shirt which would have reached the ankles of the average Still-man boxer. In his clothes, which had been at best haphazardly fit, he had loomed to elephantine proportions. One felt overawed by a shapeless mass. But stripped down to gym clothes, the mass became molded into an immense but well-proportioned form. The shoulders, growing out of the long, muscular neck, were a yard wide but tapered sharply to a lean, firm waist. The legs were massive, with tremendously developed calves, and biceps the size of cantaloupes stood out in his arms. The short-legged Acosta, Danny, and Doc Zigman, the hunchbacked trainer, coming out of the locker room with Toro, looked like stubby tugs escorting a giant steamer. Danny, the tallest of the three, a man of average height, only reached his shoulder.
Toro moved into the big room slowly, shyly, and again I had the impression of a great beast of burden moving along with an obedient eye on its master. Acosta looked up and said something to Toro, and he began to go through warming-up calisthenics. He bent at the waist and touched his toes. He sat on the floor and raised his enormous torso until his head was between his legs. He was limber and, for a man of his size, surprisingly agile, though he didn’t perform his exercises with the authority, the zip, of the boxers around him. Again I had the image of an elephant that performs its feats in the circus ring. Slowly, mechanically and with a sullen acquiescence, it executes every command its trainer gives it.
When Danny thought he had warmed up enough, Acosta and Doc prepared him for the ring. They fastened around his neck the heavy leather headgear that protected the fighter’s ears and the vulnerable areas of the brain. They fitted over his teeth the hard, red rubberized mouth-piece. With the big sixteen-ounce training gloves on his hands he climbed up to the ring; the bulky headgear and the way the mouth-piece exaggerated the already abnormal size of his mouth gave him the frightening appearance of an ogre from some childhood fairy tale. On the apron, just before climbing through the ropes, he paused a moment and looked over the hundred-odd spectators staring up at him with casual curiosity. He would never face a more critical audience. Some of them were Eighth Avenue aficionados who paid four bits to Curley at the door for the privilege of seeing some favorite scrapper knock his sparring partners silly. But most of Toro’s audience were professional appraisers who chewed their cigars with cold disdain and sized up the newcomers with shrewd eyes.
“Moliner,” Stillman said matter-of-factly, his gravel voice lost in the general hubbub, and Toro climbed into the ring. Toward the ring at a shuffling pace came big, easy-natured George, muttering one of his favorite songs:
“Give me a big fat woman with the meat shakin’ on her bones…
Give me a big fat woman with the meat shakin’ on her bones…
And every time she shakes it some skinny woman loses her home.”
Danny put his hand on George Blount’s heavy black forearm to give him last-minute instructions on how he wanted him to fight Toro, the different points of Toro’s style he wanted George to test. I saw the Negro nod with his warm, good-humored smile. “You get it like you want it, Mr. McCuff,” George said, climbing up into the ring with the businesslike air of a laborer punching in for a hard day’s work.
The bell rang and George shuffled toward Toro amiably. He was a big man himself, six foot two and around two fifteen, but he fought from a crouch, hunching his head down into his thick shoulders to present a difficult, weaving target. He could be a troublesome fighter, though men who knew what they were doing straightened him up with right-hand uppercuts, reached through his short, club-like arms to score with stiff jabs and stopped him with a hard right-hand over the heart every time he flat-footed in for his round-house, haphazard attack. Toro held his long left hand out as Acosta had undoubtedly schooled him and pushed his glove toward George’s face in what was supposed to be a jab. But there was no snap to it. George waded in, telegraphing a looping left, and Toro moved as if to avoid it, but his timing was off and he caught it on the ribs. George walked around Toro, giving him openings and feeling him out, and Toro turned with him awkwardly, holding out that left hand, but not knowing what to do with it. George brushed it aside and threw another left hook. It caught Toro in the pit of the stomach, and he grunted as they went into a clinch.
Acosta was leaning against the ropes just below them, tensed as if this was for the championship of the world and not just the warm-up round of a training workout. He shouted something up to Toro in shrill Spanish. Toro charged in, moving his body with awkward desperation, and hit George with a conventional one-two, a left to the jaw and a right to the body. George just shook them off and smiled. Despite the size of the body from which they came, there was no steam to Toro’s punches. His fists shot out clumsily without the force of his body behind them. George moved around him again, ducking and weaving in the oldtime Langford style, and Toro tried his one-two again, but George easily slipped his head out of reach of the left, caught the slow right on his glove and drew Toro into a clinch again, tying him up with his left hand and his right elbow, but managing to keep his right glove free to work into Toro’s stomach.
The bell rang and Toro walked back to his corner, shaking his head. Acosta jumped into the ring, talking and gesticulating excitedly, jabbing, uppercutting, knocking George down in pantomime. Toro looked at him gravely, nodding slowly and occasionally looking around in bewilderment, as if wondering where he was and what was happening.
The second round was no better for Toro than the first. George was moving around him with more confidence now, cuffing him almost at will with open-gloved lefts and rights. Acosta cupped his hands to his mouth and shouted, “Vente, El Toro, vente!” Toro lunged forward with all his might, swinging so wildly with his huge right arm that he missed George completely and plunged heavily into the ropes. Some of the spectators laughed. It made them feel better.
Just before the round ended, Danny caught George’s eye and nodded. George closed his gloves and crowded Toro into a corner, where he feinted with his left, brought Toro’s guard down and cracked a hard right to the point of Toro’s jaw. Toro’s mouth fell open and his knees sagged. George was going to hit him again when the bell rang. Like a man who drops his hammer at the first sound of the whistle, George automatically lowered his hands, ambled back to his corner, took some water from the bottle, rolled it around in his mouth, spat it out, and, with the same easygoing smile with which he had entered the ring, climbed out again.
Toro leaned back against the ropes and shook his head in a gesture of confusion. For two rounds his giant’s body had floundered as if it had lost all connection with the motor impulses in his brain.
Acosta was at Toro’s side quickly, wiping the sweat from his large, solemn face while Doc Zigman kneaded the long thick neck with his capable fingers. Then, while Acosta held the ropes apart for him, Toro climbed ponderously out of the ring.
“Didja see that big bastard?” a regular behind me said. “Couldn’t lick a postage stamp.”
“From one of them chile-bowl countries,” said his companion. “El Stinkola, if you understan’ Spanish.”
I turned to Vince, who was quiet for a change. “You sure know how to pick them,” I said.
“Don’t jump me,” he said. “Nick’s the brain and he thinks he can build ’im.”
“If we could only get them to decide the championship on form like a beauty contest, Toro would walk away with it. But how can a guy who looks so invincible when he’s standing still turn into such a bum when he starts moving?”
“Danny can teach him plenty,” Vince said.
“Danny’s the best,” I agreed. “But if Danny knows how to make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear, he’s been holding out on us.”
“Why don’t you try talkin’ like everybody else?” Vince said. “All them five-dollar expressions, nobody knows what the futz you’re talkin’ about.”
“In other words, you become nobody by self-appointment,” I said. “You got something there, Vince.”
George was leaning against the wall near the ring, waiting to go another round with a new Irish heavyweight from Newark, just up from the amateurs. I could recognize a couple of lines of the song that seemed to play continually in his head.
“Gimme a fat woman for a pillow where I can rest my head…
Gimme a fat woman for a pillow where I can rest my head…
A fat woman knows how to rock me till my face is cherry red.”
“How do you do, Mr. Lewis?” George said when I came up. He always asked it as if it were really a question.
“How do you feel, George?”
“Ready to go,” George said. I had never known him to give any other answer. The night Gus Lennert banged him out in one round, when Gus still had something, and George hadn’t come to until he was back in his dressing room, that had still been his answer to “How do you feel?”—“Ready to go.”
“What do you think of Molina, George?”
“Big man,” George said.
George never put the knock on anyone. Anger seemed unknown to him and the common expressions of derision and contempt in which nearly all of us indulge were never his way. I’ve often wondered if George hadn’t fought all the meanness and bad temper out of his system, if it hadn’t all been blotted up in the canvas along with his sweat and his blood.
“Think he’ll ever make a fighter, George?”
His black face creased in a wise smile. “Well, I’ll tell you, Mr. Lewis. I’d like to have the job of working out with him all the time. I’d like that fine.”
As I went into the dressing rooms, George was squaring off with the Irish heavyweight. The big Irish kid fought with a set sneer on his face and neither knew how to nor wanted to pull his punches. He tore into George at the bell and whacked him a terrible punch under the right eye. I saw George smile and work his way into a clinch as the door swung closed behind me.
Inside, Toro was stretched out on one of the rubbing tables and Sam, a bald-headed, muscular fat man was working him over. Toro was so oversized for the ordinary rubbing table that his knees reached the end and his legs dangled down over the side. Danny, Doc, Vince and Acosta were standing around. Acosta turned to me and began a long-winded, excitable explanation. “El Toro, today you do not see him on his best. It is perhaps the excitement of his first appearance before such important people. Since the climate is very different from when he fight in Buenos Aires, I think…”
“I theenk,” said Vince, exaggerating Acosta’s accent, “he’s a bum. But don’t worry, chumo. We’ve made a dollar with bums before.”
“All right. Out of here! I want everybody out of here,” Danny said. The only way you could tell he had been at the bottle was that his voice was pitched a little louder than usual. But it wasn’t only the bottle talking. It was Vince, to whom he had given the silent treatment ever since that Sencio affair. It was Acosta, who was getting on Danny’s edgy nerves. It was Toro, this Gargantuan excuse for a fighter.
Nobody moved. Danny became petulant. “You think I’m talking for my health? I want everybody the hell out of here!”
Acosta drew himself up to his full five-feet-five. “Luis Acosta is not accustom to such insult,” he said. “El Toro Molina is my discovery. Wherever El Toro is, I must be also.”
“Nick Latka owns the biggest piece of this boy,” Danny said flatly. “I work for Nick. A boy can only have one manager telling him what to do. I don’t want to hurt no feelings, but I’ll see you outside.”
Acosta puffed up as if he were going to do something, but he only bowed his head stiffly and went out.
“That’s puttin’ the little spic in his place,” Vince said.
“I said I want everybody out,” Danny snapped.
“Listen, I’m one-a the partners, ain’t I?” Vince demanded.
Danny never addressed him directly. “I’m responsible to Nick for his fighters’ condition. I don’t want to have to tell him people are getting in my way.”
The word Nick dropped on Vince like a sand bag. “Okay, okay, the bum is yours,” he said and sauntered out.
“I think I better go take a look at Grazelli’s hand,” Doc Zigman said. He and Danny were old friends. He knew the order hadn’t been for him. “See you later, Danny.”
I started to follow him out, but Danny said, “Stick around, laddie. You handle this boy’s lingo, don’t you?”
I went over to the table and looked down at Toro. “¿Puede usted entenderme en español?” I said.
Toro looked up at me. He had large, liquid, dark-brown eyes. “Si, señor,” he said respectfully.
“Good,” Danny said. “I’ve got a few things I want to tell him about that workout before I forget. But we’ll wait till Sam gets through. A boy’s got to be relaxing completely when he’s being rubbed down. That’s why I ran those guys out of here.”
After Sam finished up, Toro raised himself to a sitting position and looked around. “Where is Luis?” he said in Spanish.
“He is outside,” I said. “You will see him soon.”
“But why is he not here?” Toro said.
I nodded toward Danny. “He is your manager now,” I said. “Danny will take very good care of you.”
Toro shook his head and, with wide, thick lips in a child’s pout, he said, “I want Luis.”
“Luis will continue to stay on with you,” I managed to say. “Luis is not going to leave you. But to be a success here you must have an American manager.”
Toro shook his head sullenly. “I want Luis,” he said. “Luis is my jefe.”
It’s time he heard, I thought. Time for this great hulk of an adopted son to learn the pugilistic facts of life. Better to hear them from me with all the cushion I could give them in my limited Spanish than to pick them up from the gutter-talk of Vince and his brothers, as he was sure to do.
“Luis no longer owns you,” I said, wishing I had more words with which to make the subtle shadings. “Your contract is divided up among a group of North Americans, of whom Mr. Latka has the largest share. You must do everything he says, just as if he were Luis. He knows much more about boxing than Luis or your Lupe Morales, and can teach you many things.”
But Toro just shook his head again. “Luis tells me to fight,” he said. “Luis takes me to this country. When we have enough money to build my big house in Santa Maria, Luis will take me home again.”
I looked at Danny. “Maybe we better get Acosta back in here to straighten him out,” I said.
“Okay,” he said. “Call him in. What I got to tell the boy will still be good tomorrow.”
I found Luis pacing up and down on the spectators’ side of the rings. From the way he looked at me I could see his insides were tied into knots. “Your boy is all mixed up,” I said. “He doesn’t know what’s happening to him. You better go in and get him straightened out.”
“You are all jealous of me,” Acosta said as we walked back toward the dressing rooms. “You are all jealous because it is Luis who has discover El Toro and so you want to separate us. You do not understand that I am the only one who can make El Toro fight.”
“Look, Luis,” I said, “you’re a nice little guy, but you might as well get straightened out yourself. You can’t make Toro fight. There’s nobody in the world who can make Toro fight. If anybody comes close, it’s Danny, because there isn’t a better teacher in the business than Danny McKeogh.”
“But Luis Firpo himself has tol’ me how magnificent is my El Toro,” Acosta said.
“Luis,” I said, “on Sunday I listened to all this crap, because I was trying to be polite. And because I hadn’t seen this overgrown peasant of yours yet. But now you might as well have it between the eyes. Even your Luis Firpo was a bum. All he had was a Sunday punch. He didn’t know enough boxing to get out of his own way.”
Acosta looked at me as if I had insulted his mother. “If you will pardon me,” he said, “how do I know that is not just your North American arrogance? Actually Firpo has knock out the great Dempsey that day, but the judges did not want to let the title go to the Argentine.”
“If you will pardon me,” I said, “that is just pure Argentine horse manure.”
Acosta sighed. “For me this is very sad,” he said. “Always I dream of New York. And from the first moment I see El Toro…”
“I know, I know,” I cut in impatiently. “We’ve had all that.” And then I thought of that epic figure of a man and that big trusting puss being cuffed around by an old pro like George Blount and I was seized by the indignity of it and I said, “Goddamit, Luis, you’ve pulled him out by his roots. You should’ve left him there in Santa Maria, where he belongs.”
Acosta shrugged. “But it was for his own good that…”
“Oh, if you will pardon me,” I said, “balls! All your life you were a little frog in a little pool. A little frog with big dreams. And all of a sudden you saw a chance, saddled yourself on Toro’s back, to make a big splash in a big pool.”
“In my country,” Acosta said pompously, “such a remark can lead to a duel.”
“Don’t take me too seriously, Luis,” I said. “In your country I hear you like to shoot off guns. Here we just like to shoot off our mouths.”
We had reached the door to the rubbing room. “Now go in there and explain to Toro how Danny is the boss,” I said. You could almost hear the air rushing from his deflated ego as he went in. He barely nodded to Danny, who joined me in the hall.
“Luis, ¿qué pasa? What happens? Explain to me. I do not understand,” I could hear Toro saying as the door closed.