If either man falls through weakness or otherwise, he must get up unassisted,…
—The Queensbury Rules,
Number 4
So first of all let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself. Nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror, which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.
Values have shrunken to fantastic levels: taxes have risen, our ability to pay has fallen, government of all kinds is faced by serious curtailment of income.
The means of exchange are frozen in the currents of trade, the withered leaves of industrial enterprise lie on every side, farmers find no market for their produce, the savings of many years in thousands of families are gone. More important, a host of un employed citizens face the grim problem of existence and an equal number toil with little return.
These dark days will be worth all they cost us if they teach us that our true destiny is not to be ministered unto but to minister to ourselves and our fellow men…
The people of the United States have not failed. In their need they have registered a mandate that they want direct, vigorous action. In this dedication of a nation, we humbly ask the blessing of God. May he protect each and every one of us.
Jim sat at the rickety kitchen table in his basement apartment, reading President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s speech aloud from the paper, trying hard to find inspiration from the words. Beside him, Mae counted coins from the rainy-day mason jar, trying equally hard to keep the gas and electric going.
By late fall, Jim’s weeks had become an unending string of dismal gray mornings and sweaty afternoons of manual labor. At the dock, Jim and Mike were paired for strenuous unloading jobs day after day: barrels of molasses, bags of rice or sugar or coffee, boxes of bananas. Jim had learned to ignore the ache beneath his plaster-encased right, forced his left to do the work of two hands.
One afternoon, at the close of a morning shift, Jim was just clearing the dock’s gate when somebody’s daughter ran up to the group.
“They’re hiring extra at the coal yards!”
Jim took off with the others in a sprint.
Now, after his dock shift had ended, Jim shoveled coal—with his left arm, of course. It was another new exercise, another new struggle, but eventually he found a rhythm and a balance to make the one-handed shoveling work.
Every night, Mae waited up for Jim on the lumpy cushions of the family’s worn sofa. She was usually dozing by the time he crept through the door, past midnight. Tonight was no different.
The sound of two quarters clinking into the mason jar stirred Mae from her sleepy state. She glimpsed her husband, black with coal dust, stumbling through the hanging blanket and toward their bed.
Jim wanted nothing more than to fall into the crisp sheets that Mae had turned back for the two of them. The kids were asleep on their own small mattress, and Jim blinked at the sheets on his and Mae’s bed. The flat expanse looked so very white, so very clean, a cloud from heaven. He glanced down at his filthy self, covered with coal dust and dried sweat from head to toe.
He sunk down and lay on the floor.
“Jimmy,” whispered Mae, pushing through the hanging blanket. “We can wash the sheets.”
But Jim was out, already snoring. Mae sighed and pulled the covers off their bed to lay beside her husband on the bare floorboards.
The winter of 1933–34 was one of the coldest in recent memory, with an average temperature hovering around eleven degrees Fahrenheit in the Northeast. The Braddocks hung on to their meager apartment, but just barely.
As the world turned white one morning with a fine dusting of snow, Mae emerged from the basement of their old tenement building. Tramping past closed storefronts and abandoned lots, she traveled to the next neighborhood and dropped off her boys at school.
“Why can’t I go to school yet?” asked Rosy, walking home with Mae. “Is it because I’m a girl?”
“Maybe,” said Mae, struggling to hold her footing on the icy cracks in the broken sidewalk. “I hadn’t thought of that.”
They plodded in silence for a time, through the wet, snowy lots, when Mae was distracted by a brand-new car blasting its radio. It was a rare sight, seeing such a shiny new luxury. Nobody she knew had one.
“Mama, who’s the man at our house?”
Mae followed Rosy’s pointing finger. A man in a public utilities uniform stood at the side of their building, near their electric meter. With her daughter in tow, Mae doubled her strides until she reached the gas and electric man. “Can I help you, sir?”
“I’m sorry, ma’am. You’re past due.”
The man was probably in his mid thirties, but his eyes looked much older. They were sad and tired, and Mae looked into them with naked panic as his words sunk in.
“You can’t,” she said. Maybe if she begged? “There’s kids. Please.”
“I don’t, they’ll let me go. They let two guys go for it already.”
He tried to turn away, but Mae wouldn’t let him. She forced him to stand there and look at her, stand there and hear her. “This apartment, it’s what we got left that keeps us hanging on.”
“Lady. Lady, I got kids too.”
Jim and Mike had been let go early from their Newark dockwork, fifteen cents in their pockets for the six hours of backbreaking labor. As they often did with half days or less, they walked and hitched to nearby towns, trying to find other work—cleaning out lots, shoveling coal, loading and unloading ties at the railroad yards of Weehawken—but there was nothing today. Exhausted, chilled to the bone, they headed home.
“Hey…we got until tomorrow!” cried a loud voice.
Jim’s heavy steps slowed. Across the street, a young man was arguing with two city marshals. The man wore a double-breasted pinstriped suit, tastefully tailored for the 1920s, its sheen dulled by excessive wear, the buttons mismatched, one sleeve slightly unraveling at the shoulder. His wife stood beside him, fighting back tears in a frayed black coat, its thick wool patched with strips of red and blue cloth, its once elegant fur collar in tatters. On the sidewalk around the couple, their furniture was scattered—a mahogany table, matching chairs, a dresser spilling clothes, night table, bed board, mattress turned on its side, lamps standing erect in the slushy snow next to the end tables meant to hold them.
The marshals were hard to miss on the rundown brick streets of Weehawken. Their uniforms were crisp and neatly pressed—the first really clean clothes Jim had seen in weeks—and their thick, warm coats were hardly patched. One officer was young and polite. The other was a gruff old veteran who had heard it all, and was tired of listening. While Jim watched, the young husband caught the edge of an official-looking document the older officer was clutching, tried to yank it out of the marshal’s hand.
“This notice says we got another day,” the young husband insisted.
The older marshal stepped back, stumbling against a small couch on the curb, spilling embroidered pillows onto the stained snow.
“Sons-a-bitches,” the young man cried. “Sons-a-goddamned bitches.” He glanced across the street and exchanged a brief look with Jim.
“Come on,” said Mike, tugging on Jim’s sleeve, steering him toward home. But Jim was already moving across the street, a strange light in his eyes. Mike shrugged, caught up with his partner, then took the lead.
“You can’t do this.” The young woman’s voice was edged with hysteria. “Once we’re out, we’ll never get back in. We’ll never get back on our feet, you see?”
Her husband jumped in front of the marshals as they moved to fit a padlock to the brownstone’s front door. “Please, I got a factory spot I can get next week…”
The officers thrust the young man aside and snapped the padlock in place. The woman winced at the harsh sound. “The notice said we got another day,” she whispered, her tone defeated despite her words. “We’re gonna talk to the landlord tonight. He’ll be okay with us when he finds out we got something coming up. Please, if we make it until next week, we’ll be okay…”
“Excuse me,” Mike said politely. He stood at the curb, tattered hat in hand, Jim Braddock at his shoulder. When nobody paid attention, he spoke again, much louder. “Excuse me!”
The marshals turned to face him, the young officer reaching for the nightstick on his belt. Mike smiled deferentially. “City marshals, right? How are you boys doing?”
Neither officer spoke. The older man just glared.
“Would you mind, Marshal, if I had a quick look at that eviction notice?” Mike asked, stepping closer. “See, eviction notices are public record. Tabulae communium, as it were. And though each is specifically dated, city marshals have been known to try and complete a week’s worth of evictions on a Monday, so they don’t have to keep coming back and forth to shit little towns like Weehawken.”
The older officer’s attention strayed from Mike to Jim Braddock with a mixture of recognition and wariness. The former boxer’s physical presence was hard to ignore, even though his clothes hung from a frame hollowed from too much work and not enough nourishment.
“So,” said Mike. “How about I take a look at the date on that paperwork? The order’s legit, we’ll just walk on.”
Now the younger officer rested one hand on his nightstick. “Or else what?”
Mike just grinned, then turned to his partner. “Hey, Jim, I bet you’d like to see it too, wouldn’t you?” Now both marshals were looking past Mike to the man at his side. “You guys know Jim Braddock, don’t you?”
“Jeez,” said the older officer, suddenly respectful. “I thought it was him. I seen you fight, Jim.”
Mike eased a little closer, glancing at the crinkled document in the older man’s hand. “So what do you say, fellas? Honest mistakes happen all the time.”
The older marshal lowered his eyes. “Maybe we got our days mixed up.”
Mike nodded, his smile forced. “Sure glad we could work this one out. You want to help us move their furniture back in?”
The young officer’s expression hardened. “Don’t push your luck, pal.”
The older man unlatched the padlock and hooked it to his belt. With a respectful nod to Jim, he led his partner away. The young man and woman stood in awe of their rescuers. Mike grabbed a corner of the dresser, then gestured to Jim to grab the other side.
As they lifted the heavy piece, Mike’s grin was sincere. “You know, Braddock, a fellow like you could come in handy.”
The interior of Quincy’s bar was crude and dim—sawdust blanketing an unfinished plank floor, chipped and stained oak bar, grimy mirror on the wall, naked overhead bulbs, most burned out. But the smoke-filled interior was warm and deliciously heady with the aroma of alcohol.
“I’ll get us a cold beer,” said Mike.
Braddock met the bartender’s eyes. “Water for me please, Quincy.”
“All I got today,” the bartender grumbled. “Big spenders.” Quincy dried his hands, his apron soapy, and grabbed two heavy mugs.
“Beer for him too,” said Mike. “I’m buying.”
Jim opened his mouth to protest, but Mike raised his hand. “Don’t hurt my feelings.”
Braddock shrugged, then nodded to Quincy, who filled two glasses to the brim with frothy brew. The two men moved to a table. Braddock raised his glass in salute, then blew off the foam. “So you’re a lawyer?”
Mike shook his head. “Stockbroker. But I hired so many of the bastards, might as well been to law school myself.” Under his tattered coat, Mike’s shoulders fell. “Still, lost it all…’twenty-nine.”
Jim nodded, savored more of the golden liquor. “Me too,” he said, wiping his lips. “Had just about everything I ever earned in stocks. Even had a little taxi company. I mean who loses money on cabs in New York?”
He opened his upturned hand—poof.
“You know,” said Mike, “they got people living in Central Park and eating the sheep. Calling it the Hooverville.” He set his glass down hard on the hardwood table, sloshing foam. “The government’s dropped us flat. We need to organize. Unionize. Fight back.”
“Whoa,” said Braddock. “Fight what? Bad luck? Drought? No use boxing what you can’t see, friend.” He sat back. “I like what FDR says. You gotta trust in essential democracy…”
“Screw FDR,” cried Mike, slapping his palms on the table. “FDR. Hoover. They’re all the same. I come home one day and stand in my living room and somewhere between the mortgage and the market and the goddamned lawyer who was supposed to be working for me it stopped being mine. It all stopped being mine. FDR hasn’t given me my house back yet!” Mike took another swig of beer, then paused before draining half the glass. “In Russia, right now, they’re giving the factories back to the workers.”
Jim Braddock replied with a crooked grin. “In Russia, right now, I’m pretty sure they’re asleep, Mike.”
Mike held up the half-empty mug. “Even this,” he grunted. “You know why they finally repealed prohibition? You think it’s about freedom? It’s about federal revenue collection, plain and simple.”
With that, Mike drained his glass, and slammed the empty mug on the table. Heads turned. “How about another one, Jim?”
Braddock licked his lips, tempted by Mike’s incredibly generous offer. But he shook his head. “Thanks, Mike. But I gotta go.” Jim got to his feet.
“Hey, Braddock, I know I talk too much. But it wasn’t just me.” Mike’s eyes, bright from the booze, met Jim’s. “You did some good out there. You have a good night.” Then Mike was on his feet, too, walking to the bar to order another mug from Quincy. Jim headed the other way, through the door and home to his family.
The wool blanket that once divided the single-room apartment was now wrapped snugly around the children. While Mae, her slight form bulky in two sweaters and a coat, lit candles at the scuffed table, Jim stood over his sleeping children, watching them blow steamy fog as they snored. The dresser gaped, the coat rack stood empty. Every piece of clothing, every scrap of fabric, covered the children in their bed. But even that was not enough to shut out the wind that swirled through cracks in windows and doors, the cold that crept up from the earth to engulf them.
“You think about it, you gotta go to a swanky joint to eat with candles,” said Mae. She lit the single candle on the table, blew out the match, then grabbed the mason jar they used for a bank and sat down, waiting for her husband.
Jim crossed the room to toss a broken scrap of wooden sign—some piece of an advertisement from a failed local business—into the fire in the stove, then warmed his hands for a moment. Mae emptied the contents of the jar onto the table. Nickels and dimes jangled. Jim joined her, added the meager contents of his pockets. They slid the money around for a moment.
“Six bucks seventy,” grunted Jim. “How much to turn it back on?”
“Three months. Thirty-three ten,” whispered Mae, careful not to wake the children.
“If I work twenty-six out of every twenty-four, it still won’t add up. And we got nothing left to sell.” Jim’s body seemed to weaken, his posture waver. He rested his elbows on the table, rubbed his eyes. “All my busted bones, then a piece of paper changes hands and that’s it. It’s all for nothing.”
Mae reached for his hand. Her flesh was cold, but the sentiment was warm, and Jim smiled despite his weariness.
“All the guys you could have married,” he said.
“Yeah,” Mae teased. “What happened to those guys?” Jim looked at her and she laughed, squeezed his hand. “I married the man I love.”
A wet cough across the room interrupted them. Jim glanced at Mae, the question in his eyes.
“Howard,” she told him. “Since this afternoon.”
Mae took back her hand, folded both of them over her heart and began to pray. When she realized she was alone, she paused. “Jim…?”
“I’m all prayed out,” he replied.
It only took a stern glance from his wife to set Jim backpeddling. “Anyway, God’s too busy for me right now. He already gave me you and the kids. He’s answered all my prayers.”
Jim rose and crossed the room, face hidden in the shadows. Mae watched his back, trying to read his thoughts.
“He…He doesn’t owe me anything,” Jim added softly.
Next morning, as the first rays of dawn streamed through the streaked basement windows, Mae woke shivering under piles of clothing to find her husband had already ventured out, into the relentless cold.
The giant face on the billboard—a well-groomed gentleman in evening clothes displaying a Gillette razor—grinned down at the grimy winter street. Mae glanced around her to find empty sidewalks, save for two children even more filthy than her own, gamely washing clothes in the cold runoff beside the curb.
With no one to see her, Mae began snapping off pieces of wooden latticework from around the billboard frame, breaking a fingernail in the process. She handed the first pieces off to her sleepy children, then broke off more. Suddenly, shouting voices echoed down the street.
“Where are you going?” A woman hung out the second-story window of one of the faceless brownstones, her features flushed with rage, her words a desperate cross between accusation and heartbreak. On the ground below, a man walked down the street, his back to the ranting woman. His clothes were shabby and he carried a small suitcase double-wrapped with twine.
“Go ahead, you piece of shit,” the woman wailed. The man walked on without turning, his spine bowed by shame. “Go on then.” She sobbed. “We don’t need you.”
One of the children in the gutter, a small boy, stared after his father. Then the boy locked eyes with Mae, and she saw a tear cutting a canal through the dirt on his cheek.
Mae swept Jay and Rosy in front of her. “Come on, now, let’s go.”
She knew this ugly scene was typical. No longer able to earn a living, thousands of husbands and fathers had simply given up trying. Some of them vanished into the homeless hordes of Central Park or rode the rails to oblivion. Mae shuddered at the thought of losing her husband this way. She tried not to imagine a day when Jim Braddock would give up on his family. And though she told herself that he was not like those other men, Mae knew that her husband was only human, and there was only so much a man could do in the face of such overwhelming odds against him.
Back home again, Mae shook away her gloomy thoughts as she fed latticework chips to the stove’s fire, its warmth failing to reach beyond the corner. Snow caked the windows, frost glazing both sides of the pane. One window was cracked, and the rag stuffed into the hole did little to stop the chill air that poured through the gap.
Mae turned to her youngest boy, still huddled where she’d left him, under a blanket mere inches from the stove. His face was flushed with fever, moist with perspiration that caused him to shiver uncontrollably when the blanket was removed, even for a moment.
“Baby, look at Mommy.”
Eyes glazed, pupils like pinpricks, he looked up. Her voice hardly seemed to penetrate the sickness. She knelt at his side, tucked the blanket tighter around him, and held a glass of water to his trembling lips.
“Drink up now,” she coaxed.
Howard’s cracked lips touched the rim and he managed to take in a few small sips, dribbling some. Again Mae tugged at the blankets, unaware of the tears spilling from her eyes.
“Mommy?”
It was Jay, standing behind her, his fear of his mother’s distress a palpable thing.
“It’s all right, sweetheart,” she said, pushing the hair away from his wide eyes. Suddenly Mae stood. “Mommy’ll be right back,” she said. Eyes blurred by tears, unwilling to let her children see her break, Mae hurried out the door and into the dirty, snow-dusted courtyard, where she stood crying bitterly.
All that mattered in the world was keeping this family together. Jim was killing himself trying to do it, taking as many jobs as he could find. But it wasn’t working. Every week, no matter how many hours Jim toiled, they fell further behind. They had lost their heat and electricity. How long would it be before they were living in the street?
Mae squared her shoulders, deciding for both of them what had to be done. Despite all of her husband’s efforts, Howard was getting sicker from the scarcity of food, the lack of heat. Mae turned and went back inside to dress her children snugly for the trip across town, then across the river to New York City.
The afternoon sun was bright, but provided no warmth as Jim returned home, squinting against the glare while shivering in the wind. He opened the front door. As usual, no electric power meant the basement apartment was veiled in shadow. No gas meant the temperature inside was almost as cold as the sidewalk. Then it struck him, the wall of silence. No childish voice called out to greet him. No tiny body charged forward with open arms.
By the stove, Mae sat alone in her coat, her limbs drawn tightly against herself, her eyes staring into the fading glow of the dying flames. She would not look up as he walked closer. Wouldn’t even meet his eyes.
“Howard’s fever was getting worse. And then Rosy started to sneeze,” she explained before he could ask.
“Where are they, Mae?”
His eyes frantically scanned the tiny space, as if he refused to hear her, as if he could find them hiding among the meager sticks of furniture or inside the spidery cracks in the dingy walls. Mae finally looked up at him, her expression defiant. “We can’t keep them warm, Jim.”
“Where are they, Mae?”
“The boys will sleep on the sofa at my father’s in Brooklyn. Rosy’s going to stay at my sister’s. We can’t keep them, Jim.”
Jim’s emotions were almost too overpowering to express—fear, disappointment, rage. He stabbed his finger. “You don’t decide what happens to our children without me.”
Mae stood, seized his arm with icy hands. “Jimmy, if they get real sick, we don’t have the money for a doctor.”
“You send them away, this has all been for nothing.”
“It’s…It’s only until we can make enough to get back to even, then we can—”
“If it was that easy, why didn’t I just go on relief, get a book and put my feet up?” He was simmering now. His own wife had given up, given in. Hadn’t he been out on the street seven days, looking for work? Hadn’t he been acting like a man? Doing anything and everything he could to support his family? “Every day, out there, it was so we could stay together. What else was it for? If we can’t stay together, it means we lost.”
“Baby, no one has any good choices anymore, we’ll get them—” Mae had tried to embrace him but he shook her off.
“Mae, I promised him, see? I got on my knees, looked him in his eyes and I promised him I would never send him away.” Without another word, Jim turned and strode across the freezing room.
“What are you doing? Where are you going?” Mae demanded, tears falling. But he was already gone, out the door, onto the street. Mae ran after him, suddenly remembering the woman she’d seen earlier, hanging out that brownstone window, sobbing, angry, heartbroken.
“Jimmy, come back!”
But he didn’t stop. He didn’t even turn for one last look. Mae’s steps slowed as her husband continued to walk away, silently, resolutely, down the cold concrete of the broken sidewalk.
At the scarred and battered wooden counter of the Newark relief office, a stern-faced woman counted out twelve dollars and eighty cents, then placed the money in a white envelope with a state seal. Hands shaking, Jim signed the receipt book, trying not to berate himself for what he’d once been, what he’d once believed about himself as a man. He snatched up the cash and thrust it into his coat pocket.
Witnessing his shame, the woman’s hardened expression softened a moment. “I would never have expected to see you here, Jim.”
The words rang like the closing bell of a fifteen-round defeat. With a red-faced nod, Jim pushed through the miserable crowd, eyes downcast, unable to forget the phrase some newspaper columnist had used to describe these unending relief lines: “Worms that walk like men.”
They were professionals and laborers. Teachers and dockworkers, lawyers and janitors, bankers and master builders. Some stood in nothing better than rags, while others were clad in finely tailored suits and overcoats frayed and patched after years of wear. And while some, like Jim, kept their eyes averted in disgrace, others displayed only vacant stares, their faces hollowed by loss and privation. One of the latter had quietly fallen forward the week before, dying on the steps of the very institution set up to provide aid for him. Jim had heard about it on the street. The man either hadn’t known where to go, or hadn’t been willing to go there until hunger and fatigue had done their work.
Jim hurried out of the office and into the street, taking great swallows of fresh air, steadying himself for what had to come next.
On the ferry to Manhattan, he stood at the rail and gazed at the skyline as the chill winds whipped his hair, cut through his threadbare clothing. The ferry terminal was nearly deserted, and in the lengthening shadows of the fading day, Jim walked wearily along Eighth Avenue, passing homeless men lurking in alleyways, shopworn prostitutes with desperate eyes.
Jim continued his endless walk, passing a man in a dusty suit, standing tall while selling bruised apples from a rickety wooden cart. As he trudged by a brightly lit theater, a limousine rolled up beside him on the sidewalk. Two children, about the same ages as his sons, burst from the car, laughing excitedly, their well-heeled parents in tow. Jim paused to watch them, wondering how such carefree joy could exist in the middle of so much degrading misery.
During his walk, Jim had seen one employment office after another, the blocks around each wrapped with unending lines of men. No work to be had. No other way to pay off his debts and reunite his family. He told himself this, over and over, steeling himself for what he was about to do.
When he reached the streets around Madison Square Garden, he recalled the vibrant, glittering scenes of the past. The dazzling lights were gone now, dim as the gloomy winter twilight. No more fashionable fans, tipsy flappers, or Diamond Jim limousines. In their place, vagrants loomed, a sad collection of shabby humanity scavenging old billboards for scrap. A smoky garbage can burned in the alley. The starving panhandlers huddled around it in moth-eaten coats, stretching filthy hands toward meager flames.
Jim went to the familiar side door, below the fire escape. The once clean brick wall was dingy now, no extra pay for a man with a bucket and a brush. He glanced at the billboard above the door. An upcoming fight was advertised, two brawny bodies, stiffly posed, gloves up. He remembered himself up there, sharing one end of the “vs.” with Tuffy Griffiths, remembered the dream of that night, the cheering crowds, the astonished sportswriters, the gleaming bliss of a long-held ambition shimmering within reach.
Then, like a vicious uppercut, a different memory assailed him, shattering the fragile mirage. Yankee Stadium, in the heat of summer. Another fight on another day. It was the bout that had tarnished his golden future, branding him a boxer of “failed promise.” It was the match that, once over, he’d only wanted to forget…
July 1929, four months before the October crash, life was good. Jim Braddock was about to challenge Philadelphia’s Tommy Loughran for the light heavyweight championship of the world.
Although neither boxer was a hometown darling in New York City, where the fight was to take place, Jersey Jim Braddock was the sentimental favorite among local sportswriters, and heavily favored to win.
“Does Braddock not have the kick of the mule with his right hand?” Joe Gould barked at Lud, a sportswriter for Union City’s Hudson Dispatch, before the fight. “Did he not shatter Pete Latzo’s jaw to fragments? Take down Tuffy Griffiths in two rounds and Jimmy Slattery in nine?”
But in the weeks before the opening bell, difficulties plagued both fighters. Loughran and Braddock each had a hard time staying within the weight class—Jim because he couldn’t gain pounds fast enough, Loughran because he couldn’t shed them. Before the fight, the champ from Philly had tortured his body down to 175 pounds while Jersey Jim’s nervous sleeplessness had given him an official weigh-in of 170 pounds, barely enough to qualify.
The fight had hardly begun when Braddock scored with a terrific right. Blood gushed from Loughran’s face like water from an opened hydrant. A technical knockout seemed imminent. He tore at Loughran again and again, but Jim could not lay another glove on the man in that first round.
In the second, Loughran laid a basketful of lefts on Braddock’s chin while dancing around the ring, ducking and jabbing and making Braddock look like the rawest kind of amateur. Jim swung one right after another, missing every time. By the third round, the champ from Philadelphia had gauged Braddock’s major weakness—no left-hand action. He fought accordingly.
In that third round, and in the fourth and fifth, Loughran taunted Braddock, making Jim madder and madder. The angrier he got, the more futile right-hand punches Braddock threw, until he was lurching ludicrously around the ring to boos and catcalls from the capacity crowd. In the opening of the seventh round, however, Braddock was able to connect with a sweeping upward blow that grazed Loughran’s nose and forehead and brought another torrent of blood.
But Tommy Loughran was far from defeated. After that staggering blow, he stepped up and delivered a right cross to Jim Braddock that set his knees wobbling. That was the beginning of the end of Jim’s hopes. During the rest of the bout, Braddock connected one last time—a right-hand wallop in the twelfth round. Unfortunately, by then Braddock’s stamina was at its lowest ebb, and Loughran brushed off the blow and came back swinging.
In the heartbreaking fifteen-round decision, the judges ruled that Jim Braddock had dominated his opponent in only two of them, and champion Tommy Loughran retained his title by unanimous decision. Even worse, Jim Braddock had plodded through the final three rounds, offering one of the worst performances of his career, as taunts and insults were hurled at him from the crowd. Those insults continued in the newspaper accounts the next day, which featured the canonization of Loughran, who was compared to Gene Tunney and would go down in boxing history as one of the greatest, while James J. Braddock was pronounced finished and advised to go back to Cauliflower Alley…
“I don’t know what went wrong.”
Freezing in the shadow of the Garden, Jim whispered the same thoughts he’d confessed to Gould after the Loughran fight.
In Jim’s view, fate had conspired to interrupt his meteoric rise as a boxer, but it was the crash of 1929 that had finished him. Maybe all those losses that came after Loughran would have been wins if those fights hadn’t come in the midst of his losing everything—all his hard-earned savings, his taxicab business, his security, his home. The crash had robbed Jim of more than money; it had robbed him of his optimism and confidence. It had sent his family into poverty and stolen his ability to see himself as golden, to fight like a winner.
Using his good left hand, Jim yanked open the side door of the arena and moved through its deserted corridors. His casted hand ached as he trudged slowly up the flight of stairs. It was the longest, hardest climb of his life.
The boxing club occupied a large private space inside the Garden. Its walls comprised dark wood covered with black-and-white photographs of prominent fighters from the last three decades posed in a variety of stances. Drinks were served from a rich mahogany bar, leather chairs and heavy tables topped with Tiffany lamps were scattered about the polished oak floor, and all of it was burnished by the bloody-gold flames from a massive fireplace.
Two dozen well-dressed managers, promoters, and professional oddsmakers drank, talked, and played cards in the rarified air of this enclave, only a few stories above the street but miles above the ravages of the ongoing Depression. Here they wheeled and dealed, sipped aged scotch, and angled to close prime matchups for their most promising fighters. The tall tales and good-natured insults were flying as thick as the cigar smoke, and at first no one noticed Jim Braddock willing himself to walk to the center of the room.
As two promoters burst into loud guffaws, Jim stepped up to them. “Mr. Allen…Phil…”
The men stared, taking in Braddock’s bedraggled appearance without comment. Others noticed his presence and the conversations slowly died. The once great fighter cleared his throat and said, “Thing is, I can’t afford to pay the heat. Had to farm out my kids…”
Jim’s voice broke just then. He looked down at the floor and swallowed hard.
“They keep cutting shifts at the dock. You don’t get picked every day…Just need enough to catch up.”
The shame was almost too much to bear.
“Went to the relief office. Gave me twelve eighty. I need thirteen sixty more. To pay the bill. Get them back.” Girding himself, he slowly looked up. “It pains me to ask…so much…but I sure would be grateful…”
Jim took off his hat and stretched it out, like the panhandlers on the street below.
The room was speechless now, the men uncomfortable with this specter of defeat among them. Finally, Mr. Allen dug into his pocket. “Sure, Jim, sure,” he said and spilled several coins into Jim’s hat.
“Thank you,” Jim replied, then moved through the room, offering his hat. Every man gave, including the big one, Jimmy Johnston, the very promoter who’d suspended his boxing license and shut down his career.
Braddock completely circled the club. He stopped in front of Joe Gould only when there was no one else left. “I’m sorry, Joe,” Braddock told him sincerely.
“What the hell do you have to be sorry about? Jesus, Jim,” said Gould. “How short are you?”
Jim, who’d been counting as he went, replied in a hoarse whisper. “A buck fifty, I think…”
Gould winced, then reached into his rumpled suit and drew out his wallet, placing the exact amount into Jim’s battered hat.
“Joe…”
But Joe Gould looked away, swallowed his drink. “Don’t…don’t mention it, Jimmy,” he murmured.
With a final nod, Jim departed, his shoulders squared, his spine straight. He descended the long stairs, exited the side door, and passed the vagrants huddling around the trash-can fire.
Night had fallen and streetlights had already flickered on, illuminating the icy sidewalks. A few steps down the avenue, Jim walked by a store that had gone out of business. In the mirrored surface of the darkened glass, he caught a glimpse of his reflection and his steps slowed.
He’d seen that expression before, he realized. Years ago. On men his father’s age, who’d lowered themselves to work those errand-boy jobs he’d held through his teens. It was the look of the man standing tall in his dusty suit to sell apples on Eighth Avenue, the face of the banker, in all his patched finery, waiting on line for hours at the Newark relief office, his hand out for pitiable public charity.
Jim had never before understood what it would take to make a man with such obvious pride willingly lower himself to such shattering depths. Tonight, with the money in his pocket to get his children back, Jim knew. Tonight, he finally understood.
The next night, Mae opened the door to their basement apartment and flicked on a light switch that actually worked. A golden glow finally dispelled the dismal shadows of the tiny space.
The door opened wider and Jay and Howard ran inside, followed by Jim, who was carrying the sleeping Rosy, draped over the cast on his arm. Mae took Rosy from him and put the girl to bed while the boys chased each other around the small space, happy and grateful to be home again.
Jim, dark rings circling his tired eyes, drank in the sight like a thirsty beggar—joyful, relieved, and terrified at the same time. He was happy to see his family united, but now far too aware of how fragile their lives had become, how easily their world could be torn apart.
He couldn’t sleep that night. He burned to change things, but he didn’t know how. He only knew he would, at first opportunity.
The night before the Tuffy Griffiths fight, he’d felt like this too, keyed up and on edge. Jim had nothing real to battle tomorrow, no one he could actually haul off and punch, but he ached sorely for an opponent to face, someone to stand toe to toe with and fight.
Lying quiet and still, Jim listened to his wife’s steady breathing, waited for the endless night to wane. At last, as the first rays of dawn peeked around the basement curtains, Jim rose and dressed silently. Before he left for the day to go to the loading dock, the coal company, the rail yards, or whoever would pay him a day’s wage, he stood at the door and gazed at his family, unable to shake the fear that they would be gone—vanished, like his career and his fortune—by the time he returned home again.
A boxer entered the ring alone. If knocked down, he alone could pick himself up and keep the fight going. As Jim walked out the door and toward the winter sunrise, he grasped in a whole new way why those were the rules of his game.