The Harder They Fall (15 page)

‘I guess this Molina thing is kind of the pay-off,’ I said. ‘She wants me to quit the business. Hell, I know it stinks. Just between us, I know Nick’s deal doesn’t smell like a rose. But at thirty-five you don’t start over so easy. I like to see the ready coming in every week.’

‘How is three?’ Shirley said.

‘I’m dead,’ I said. ‘Twenty-nine. That puts you over, doesn’t it?’

‘A blitzeroo,’ Shirley said. ‘Well, that’s the phone bill. Now I have to go after the rent.’

I thought she wasn’t even listening, but after she made her first discard, she went back to where I had left it, as if there had been no interruption.

‘I’ll tell you one thing, Eddie, love can’t take any kind of a punch at all. If this chick of yours don’t like the fight business and you think the business is for you – well, maybe the girl is smart to knock it on the head right there.’

‘You wouldn’t do that,’ I said.

‘Don’t be too sure. This fight crowd can lead a lady a hell of a chase. Too much of this sitting around with the boys. The wives and the girlfriends don’t get much of a shake. I’d never tell nobody else but you, Eddie, but this town damn near loused up Billy and me. If I hadn’t been with that son-of-a-bitch – God rest his soul – since I was fifteen I sure in hell would have hit out for Oklahoma.’

Like everyone else. I had heard something of the highs and lows in Shirley’s relationship with the Sailor, but she had never brought it up before and I had never pressed her. But my levelling on Beth seemed to have loosened something that had been fastened tight inside her.

‘You know Billy was a wild kid. He drank a lot before he started boxing serious. I guess we both did back in West Liberty. We were a couple of crazy punks. Every time I read of some kid and his babe robbing some guy who picked ’em up on the road, I think that could’ve been Billy and me. Billy wanted things awful bad. And I was so stuck on him I
would’ve done anything he said. If he hadn’t turned out to be able to get things with his fists, God knows what would have happened to us.

‘But one thing I’ll say for Billy in those days, he never played around. It wasn’t till he hit this town and got to be a name at the Garden and fell in with those creeps who have connections with the clubs. I felt like jumping out the window the first time it happened. It was the night of the Coslow fight that everybody said was going to be such a tough hurdle. Billy won it without even getting his hair mussed. I never went to his fights because I didn’t want to see anything happen to him, but I listened on the radio, which was almost as bad. Well, after I hear ’em counting Coslow out I get myself all fixed up because I think maybe Billy wants to celebrate. It turns out he’s got his own ideas about celebrating. He doesn’t come in till around six in the morning. He stinks of whisky and the smell of another woman is still sticking to him. Next evening when he wakes up it’s, Baby forgive me, I’ll never do it again. Six weeks later he takes the championship from Thompson in five, and I get the same shoving business all over again. After a while, I got to dreading Billy’s winning another fight. Finally he’s signed with Hyams and he won’t listen to anybody about training – tells Danny McKeogh to duck himself – thinks he can mix fighting with funning around. I guess you remember the Hyams fight. Hyams busted his nose and cut him bad under both eyes. If the referee hadn’t stopped it, he probably would’ve killed Billy. Billy was almost crazy, he had so much guts. Well, that night Billy comes home right after the fight. I keep him in bed for a week and he won’t let
anybody else come near him but me, not even Danny. And he’s just as sweet and loving as a little baby.

‘After that I swear to Jesus I used to actually pray that Billy would get licked. Because every time he got licked it was the same thing. He’d come home just as meek as a lamb and I’d have my Billy-baby all to myself again. I’d put cold compresses on his swellings and I’d wash the cuts and read the funnies out loud to him. I know it sounds screwy, but I swear I’d hate to see him get up out of bed.’

As she talked, something Willie Faralla told me fell into place. Willie had taken an awful shellacking from Jerry Hyams in the Garden and Willie’s state of mind was even worse than the way he looked. So he decided to drop up to Shirley’s place and have a little fun. As soon as Shirley saw him with that bad eye and his lip split down the middle, she put him right to bed. She doctored him all evening, and at last, when everybody had gone home, she had climbed into bed with Willie and let him sleep with his head on her breast. Willie stayed there for almost a week, he said. ‘And the funny part about it was, it was all for free.’

Willie was a good-looking kid, and he figured that Shirley just went for him in a big way. Well, a couple of weeks later Maxie Slott gets flattened in a semi at the Garden and he has heard about this Shirley deal from Willie. So he decides to try it. Now Maxie is short and chunky and has a face he could rent out to haunt houses, but Shirley takes him right to her bosom just like Willie, waits on him hand and foot and practically lives in bed with him for a week. And this, to Maxie’s amazement, is also for free. After that, any battered, beat-up pugilist who could even crawl up the
three flights checks in at Shirley’s. No matter how busy she is, she always has time to bathe an ear or bring down a swollen eye. And though there isn’t a day goes by that she doesn’t get invited by the best, the only men Shirley ever goes to bed with for love are beaten prizefighters.

Not only for free, as Willie had put it, but really for love, for love of a mean little son-of-a-bitch from West Liberty, Oklahoma, who only belonged to her when he was too bloodied and too ashamed to be seen in public. And Shirley would love him as long as she lived, though sometimes he appeared in the form of the tall, lean Faralla and sometimes in the form of the short, squat Maxie Slott.

‘Hey, look at the time,’ I said. ‘I’ve got a big day tomorrow. I mean today.’

‘You can’t take any more, huh?’

‘I know when I’m licked, chum. I’m throwing in the towel.’

‘Okay, take another beer out of the icebox. I’ll see what this little visit cost you.’

It came to forty-two dollars. ‘I wish you weren’t going to California,’ Shirley said. ‘My favourite pigeon.’

She walked me to the door. ‘This Molina you’re working with, he’s not exactly sensational, is he?’

‘How do you know? Someone up from Stillman’s tell you?’

‘No, nobody told me – not even you. That’s what made me wonder. Usually you sell your boys like you thought I was Uncle Mike.’

‘Well, you’ve got to promise to keep this under your hat or down your neck or wherever you hide your secrets, but
this Molina might give a third-rate lightweight a hell of a battle. But don’t say anything. Because I’m going to have him breathing down the champion’s neck.’

‘All I know is what I read in the
Mirror
,’ Shirley said.

‘Thanks, Shirley, be a good girl.’

‘Not too good or I’ll starve to death.’ She kissed me on the cheek. ‘And stay away from those movie stars.’

I slapped her fondly. ‘I’ll say one thing for us, we have the sexiest platonic relationship in town.’

Usually when you get off a train in LA, you expect that gag about how hard it is raining in sunny California. But this time it was only a light summer drizzle. I would have been glad to get off in a hail storm. Four days and three nights cooped up with this team could seem like a long time. I shared a compartment with Danny; Vince and Doc had another; and Toro and Acosta a third. George Blount, politely Jim Crowed, had an upper out there with the common people. Danny never gave Vince any time at all, and Vince certainly wasn’t a fellow I’d pick to be marooned with, either. Luis studied English and told any strangers who would listen long enough about his great discovery of El Toro Molina. Danny and I stayed in our compartment, nipping most of the time, sleeping as late as we could in the morning to shorten the ride. Among the things we settled was who had the best claim to be called the greatest all-time heavyweight,
an honour we arrived at by a complicated rating system that included points for hitting power, boxing skill, ability to take punishment, fighting spirit and all-around savvy. That is the kind of thing that begins to happen to you on a train. We came out with Jim Corbett on top and Peter Jackson right behind him. The quietest man in the party was Toro, who sat at the window day after day, looking out at the country phlegmatically, never saying anything. Once, as we roared through the great grazing lands of Kansas, I dropped into the seat beside him and said, ‘Well, what do you think of it?’

‘Big,’ Toro said. ‘Like the pampas.’

The day before we got in, when the setting sun was colouring the surrealist southwestern landscape spectacularly, I noticed Toro sitting with a pad propped up on his knees, with his head bent intently toward something he was drawing. I dropped into the seat beside him to see what he was doing. He didn’t even look up. His mind was focused down to the point of his pencil, all the way down to Santa Maria. For the paper was full of rough, half-doodled sketches of village scenes, the bell in the church tower, an uneven row of peasant houses perched on a hillside below a great castle-like mansion that dominated everything below it. And on another hill, on the opposite side of the village, Toro was drawing another great house, even larger. I knew this must be the house Luis had promised him, the dream-castle in Santa Maria. The surprising thing about the drawings was that, although they were the most casual kind of pencil sketches, they were not the childish scribbling I would have suspected. They were three-dimensional and
revealed a definite sense of form. I watched his
heavy-featured
face as he added little finishing touches to the sketch. Like everyone else, I had assumed that Toro was just an overgrown, retarded moron. But the drawings made me wonder.

When we pulled into the station I looked around for the cameras, for I had wired ahead to alert the local press on the arrival of the Giant of the Andes. LA isn’t much of a newspaper town, for all its sprawling size, with only two morning papers, the
Times
and
Examiner
. The
Times
’ sports editor was an old elbow-bending partner of mine, Arch Macail, with whom I had covered lots of fights before that non-understanding ME caught up with me. So I figured Arch would give us a break. Both papers had their men on the platform all right, but we had a little competition from another athlete, with whom we had to share the spotlight, an All-Mid-West high-school quarterback who was coming out to play for Southern Cal, from whom, he had boyishly confided to me on the observation platform one afternoon, he had received the best offer, including a four-year scholarship for his girl.

The photographers got their picture of Toro holding Acosta up on one arm and waving the other hand, with a silly grin on his puss. Then the boys wanted one of Toro carrying Acosta and Danny, but Danny wouldn’t play. ‘Leave me out of this malarkey, laddie,’ Danny protested. Danny didn’t buy this high-pressure stuff.

But Acosta looked into those lenses as if they were the eyes of a long-lost love. It was a big moment for little Luis, his first public recognition. Vince wasn’t exactly camera
shy either. He made sure he got his fat face in there, with his arm around Toro’s waist, grinning up at him, the first time I had seen him throw the boy a friendly glance. Toro seemed neither pleased nor surprised by the reception. He just played it unselfconsciously and deadpan as if being greeted by newspaper photographers happened every day. You had to like the big guy. A man his size behaving as shyly and reticently as a child in a strange house isn’t easy to hate.

‘What’s the pitch on this big joker?’ a young, pudgy-faced reporter asked.

‘He just won the South American heavyweight title,’ I improvised. ‘He’s ready to meet anybody in the world, including the champion.’

‘Who’s he gonna fight here?’

I figured we’d save the Cowboy Coombs announcement and blow that up to another story. So I said, ‘Anybody the local promoters can get to fight him. We bar nobody.’

‘What’re the immediate plans?’

‘To get some of your California sunshine and fresh air. That’s the reason we came here, because Doc Zigman, the trainer, says it’s the healthiest climate in the world.’

That wasn’t Eddie Lewis with his lightest touch, but it couldn’t do us any harm. LA papers always have a little space for visitors loving up their climate.

‘Will he be training in town or …’

‘Ojai,’ I said. ‘But we don’t want the fans to come up there for a while. We know there must be thousands anxious to see him, but I wish you’d tell them we’ll let them know when we’re open to the public. Toro’s just been through
a gruelling South American campaign, and, with all this travelling, he needs a good rest.’

I figured this would keep the sightseers off our necks till Danny had a chance to smarten him up a little.

‘Any chance of Molina’s fighting Buddy Stein out here?’

Stein was the best heavyweight developed on the West Coast since Jeffries. The boys who know had told me he had the hardest left-hook since Dempsey. Nobody in California had been able to stay with him more than five rounds. If there was a heavyweight alive we didn’t want for Toro, it was Buddy Stein.

‘We will fight Stein anywhere, any time,’ I said. ‘In fact, we’re so sure we can take Stein, we’ll fight him winner take all.’

Stein was pistol-hot, so I thought we might as well cut ourselves in on some of his publicity. It wasn’t quite as rash as it sounded because I had it straight from the Garden office that Kewpie Harris, Stein’s manager, didn’t want any part of any more West Coast fights. Stein was ready for New York, where the money is, and Kewpie wanted either a shot at the championship or an outdoor fight with Lennert and a fat guarantee.

The young reporter scribbled our challenge down on the back of an envelope with a weary, sceptical obedience. Suddenly he turned to Toro.

‘You think you can lick Stein?’

‘¿Qué?’
Toro said.

Acosta talked to him quickly. ‘The man asks you if you are sure you like California,’ he said in rapid Spanish.

‘Sí, sí, estoy seguro,’
Toro said.

‘Did you get that?’ I said. ‘Yes, yes, I am sure.’

Toro was beginning to draw a crowd. ‘Hey, lookit, there’s Superman,’ a little kid said.

‘Let’s get out of here,’ Danny said. ‘I want to get up to the hotel and take a bath.’

‘Drop up around six, boys,’ I told the reporters. ‘We’re having a little tea party.’

On our way down the platform we passed the All-Mid-West quarterback. ‘Well, it’s a funny thing how I happened to choose Southern Cal,’ he was telling reporters. ‘Y’see, I want to be an architect, and one of my coaches – I mean my teachers – told me the best school of architecture in the country is out here at Southern Cal.’

When we reached the Biltmore, Vince told George to take the cab down to the Lincoln, on Central Avenue, in LA’s Harlem. I think George was getting the best of it, at that.

‘Sorry we’ve got to break up this way, George,’ I said.

‘Don’t worry about this boy, Mr Lewis,’ George said. His eyes looked as if they were laughing and his whole body shook with a chuckling that came up out of his belly. But I had the uncomfortable feeling that his laugh was on us.

The cocktail party is America’s favourite form of seduction, arranged by press agents, full of gin and bourbon, paying off in news-space. The plot is always the same. Come up to my room and have a drink. And whether the object is physical passion or getting your client’s name into the headlines, the method is standard: to weaken their resistance with let-me-pour-you-another-one, until they open their arms or
their columns to you in an alcoholic daze. Of course there will always be some ladies, and members of the working press, who bounce back regularly after each seduction, holding out their empty glasses eager to sacrifice themselves again. Often the girls are nice girls and the representatives of the press are good men who had some talent and some standards once upon a time.

The little tea party we threw in our suite at the Biltmore to introduce Toro to the local sports fraternity followed all the rules. Columnists who arrived as sceptics were ready to take my word for it after an hour of the amber. There was only one who gave me any trouble, a lank, dyspeptic-looking fellow from the
News
, the afternoon tabloid, Al Leavitt, who ran a column called ‘Levelling with Leavitt’. He took his work seriously. ‘I’ll wait and see this guy before I buy him,’ he told me. ‘I’ve never seen an oversized heavyweight yet who could get out of his own way. Back in the seventies there was a guy called Freeman, seven feet tall and three hundred pounds, and he couldn’t punch his way out of a paper bag.’

A historian yet! In every town you hit, there’s always one jerk like that, the natural enemy of a press agent, the guy with integrity.

‘Write anything you want, Al,’ I said, pouring him a drink, because in this business you’ve got to like everybody. ‘But remember the farther out on a limb you get the sillier you’ll look when Toro comes through the way I know he’s going to.’

Leavitt gave me a slow, knowing smile. But the rest of the boys were willing to play. I latched Acosta onto Joe
O’Sullivan, who ran the
Examiner’
s fight column. Luis gave him the full treatment, the whole 7000 miles from Santa Maria to LA, at three words a mile, and Joe bought it for a Sunday feature. Charlie King, who ran a little weekly magazine for the fight fans called
Kayo
, sold at the arenas on fight nights, promised us a front-page picture and a full-column plug. Lavish Lew Miller, who covered fights for the
Times
, passed out, and I had Toro pick him up like a baby and put him to bed. Everything worked out fine. It was a good party. We were off to a good start.

In the morning we hired a car for the drive up to Ojai, all except Vince who was staying in town to work out details of the match with Nate Starr, the matchmaker for the Hollywood Club.

Ojai turned out to be a long valley, full of fruit trees and lots of other kinds of trees I never learnt the names of. Mountains rose steeply on both ends of the valley, like the head- and foot-boards of a giant bed. If you were a country lover, Ojai had it. Its air was the kind you breathe in deeply and hold in your chest, feeling yourself growing healthier every second. We had a couple of cottages at a rich-man’s health camp which catered chiefly to business executives who took it into their heads to work a couple of inches off their paunches, and motion-picture directors taking four weeks off to get back into shape to start another picture. The layout was just what we needed: a good gym, an indoor and outdoor ring, a steam bath, good rubbers and plenty of room for road work.

After everybody had unpacked, Danny called the group together on the porch of his cottage and laid down the
law. He looked businesslike and athletic in his grey flannel pants, old blue sweater, boxing shoes and baseball cap.

‘From here on,’ he began, ‘we quit kidding around. I’m in charge as of now. You, Acosta, if there’s anything he can’t savvy, tell him in your own lingo. Molina, this is your schedule. Up at seven. Road work, six or eight miles, alternately running and walking as fast as you can take it without getting exhausted. Then a shower and a brisk rub-down. No monkey business on the road. I’ll usually be along with you to show you how I want it. Breakfast at eight sharp, as many eggs as you want, but no pancakes or soft foods. That’s out. After breakfast a long rest. You’ll walk a mile or so before lunch. After a light lunch, you sleep for an hour and then begin to limber up. Shadow-boxing and a couple of rounds of sparring with George come next. Then a session on the light bag and another on the heavy bag, practising the punches I’ll show you. Then about fifteen minutes of rope-skipping and some calisthenics. Doc’ll give you the ones I like best, exercises that’ll loosen you up, get you to move around a little faster. No other kind of exercise is worth a damn. Then you’ll get on the table for a thorough rub-down. You’ll rest from three to five and then take a long walk. Supper will be at six. After supper you can take it easy for a couple of hours. Cards, anything you like. Then a mile walk and lights out at nine-thirty. No liquor. No eating between meals. No women. That’s it. Any questions?’

Only Acosta spoke up. ‘Eight miles a day? I think this is too much for El Toro to run. Since he already is very strong.’

‘Look, Acosta,’ Danny cut in, pronouncing his name with an
r
on the end, ‘get this in your head once and for all. Strength has nothing whatever to do with it, at least the kind of strength Molina’s got. It’s speed, headwork, timing, even with the big fellows. Those big, bulging, weight-lifting muscles of his will just get in the way.’

Acosta said nothing. The eager, glowing face with which he had first told me his story was glum and disappointed now. Only occasionally, as at the station when the cameras were trained on him, did he show any of his previous animation. The big dream of bringing Toro to America in triumph was rapidly losing its quality of personal achievement for him.