The Harder They Fall (19 page)

‘Don’t be so shoving hungry,’ Vince said. ‘You get seven-fifty for the fight and an extra two-five-o for the act. What more d’ya want?’

‘I want it twice,’ Miniff admitted. ‘Twice won’t do you no harm and we c’n use the difference. We ain’t had a fight since Worcester. And the bum has five kids to feed.’

‘Shove the kids,’ Vince said. ‘What does this look like, a
relief office? Coombs goes in two. If it lasts too long they’ll see what a dog we got. Ten rounds and the ref’ll throw ’em out for not trying. Ain’t that right, Eddie?’

‘I’m afraid it is, Harry,’ I said. ‘The longer Toro’s in there, the worse he’s going to look. And Coombs can’t go too many rounds without falling down from force of habit.’

‘Well, anyway I c’n pay up my back rent,’ said Miniff philosophically, chewing on his cigar as if it were nourishment.

A week before the fight, the press came up to have a look at our ‘human skyscraper’, as some of the boys were calling him now. The camp was opened to the public too, and there were a couple of hundred sightseers every day, laying down their buck for a hinge at the freak. There were always a good many women in the crowd. There was something about his brute size that seemed to exert a Stone-Age influence on the girls. I made a mental note of this for future reference. Atavism, I labelled it.

Everybody seemed impressed as Toro bent and stretched that Brobdingnagian torso. While he was shadow-boxing, I went into the dressing room to talk to George, who was lacing up his ring shoes for the last heavy workout he was going to have with Toro before the fight.

‘The two-seventeen took my baby away,’
he was singing under his breath.
‘The two-nineteen will bring her back some day …’

‘George, there’s a lot of reporters out there today,’ I said.

‘I understand, Mr Lewis,’ he said. And he chuckled again in that way he had of making the whole deal seem ridiculous, profoundly ridiculous, foolish and pointless.

‘Toro’s supposed to be a hitter,’ I reminded him.

‘Don’t worry, Mr Lewis,’ George said, ‘I’ll make him look as good as I can.’ And the low-pitched, good-natured laughter rose from his belly again, untainted by meanness, a warm and compassionate but disconcerting laugh.

The sparring looked all right. George cuffed him around a little in the first round and tied him up in clinches that Toro was strong enough to break out of. In the next two rounds George mistimed his slips just enough for Toro to catch him with that looping right. George tossed his head, as if to shake off the effect of the punch, and fell into a clinch. Just before the final bell, after being short with a right hook, George ran out one high on the head and dropped to one knee. It really didn’t look too bad. The only funny thing was that when George rose and touched gloves Toro wanted to make sure George wasn’t hurt before continuing.

‘What the hell’s going on?’ Danny said when Toro hesitated.

‘He does not have the wish to injure George seriously,’ Acosta explained.

‘Now I’ve heard everything,’ Danny said. ‘Tell him to keep fighting, goddam it, until I hit the bell.’

‘Is the big joker kidding?’ asked the young, jowly reporter who had met us at the train.

‘No, he’s just afraid of his own power,’ I ad-libbed. ‘You see, back in Buenos Aires one of the guys he kayoed spent ten weeks in a hospital and damn near died. Ever since then he’s been afraid he might kill somebody.’ It sounded so good I thought I might as well blow it a little louder. ‘In fact, it might be a good idea if you sports writers reminded
the referee as a public service that it’s his responsibility to the citizens of California to stop his fights before Molina inflicts serious injury. We’re out to win as impressively as possible, but we don’t want to kill anybody.’

‘What’s the name of this guy he almost killed?’ the reporter wanted to know.

I called over to Toro, whose face Doc was wiping with a towel while Acosta was pulling off his gloves. ‘Toro,’ I said in Spanish, ‘what was the name of your first opponent before you came up here?’

‘Eduardo Solano,’ Toro said.

‘Got that?’ I said, and I spelt it out for the reporter. The next morning he used that for his lead.

Al Leavitt was up there too. ‘Well, what do you think of him, Al?’ I said.

He just shrugged. ‘I never go by training,’ he said. ‘I’ve seen beautiful gymnasium fighters look like palookas in the ring. And I’ve seen good fighters who always looked lousy in their workouts.’

A wise apple. But he didn’t bother me. You always have to figure on one of those. The rest of the press was fine. My book of clippings was getting fatter each edition. The training camp attendance had built nicely. Toro Molina, Inc., was already in the black. And Nate Starr told me the stadium had been sold out for a week. Five-dollar ringsides were being scalped for two and three times their official price. We were ready to move into town.

The first day back in LA I took Toro out to MGM for some publicity tie-ups. I had an old buddy out there, Teet Carle, opening doors for me. Toro was wearing the new gabardine
Weatherill had cut for him and he looked like a million pesos. He took a child’s delight in this sartorial splendour, with his new specially built two-tone shoes and his size 8½ straw hat that would have made Miniff a nice beach umbrella. The pictures we knocked off were right down the old Graflex groove. There must be something about the chemistry of a press agent and a still camera that makes it impossible for them to produce any other kinds of pictures except the ones I set up at Metro – Toro squaring off with Mickey Rooney standing on a box; Toro with a couple of pretty stock-girls in bathing suits feeling his muscles; Toro on the set with Clark Gable and Spencer Tracy showing off the size of his fist. ‘Two stars see fist that will make Coombs see more stars,’ I captioned that one.

The Main Street gym, where Toro and Coombs were to put in their final workouts, looks like a shabbier twin of Stillman’s in New York. The street is gaudier than Eighth Avenue. It offers cheap burlesque houses and dime movies for adults only, dim and dingy bars with raucous jukeboxes and blousy B-girls, your fortune for a dime, your haircut for a quarter, whisky for fifteen cents, love for a dollar and a five-cent flop.

Outside the entrance to the gym was the usual sidewalk gathering: boxers, managers, old fighters, hangers-on. On the kerb a huge, shabbily dressed, fight-scarred Negro swung good-naturedly at a much smaller Negro who had sneaked up to goose him. ‘Keep away from there, man,’ the big Negro cried, grinning with a mouthful of gold teeth. It was only then, as he raised his large, punished face, that I saw he was blind.

George went up to him and said, ‘Whatcha doin’, Joe?’

The blind Negro cocked his head. ‘What you want, man?’

‘Putcha hands up, brother,’ George said gaily, ‘and see if you can still lick Georgie Blount.’

‘Georgie!’ the blind man said. ‘Where you been, gate? Gimme some skin, man.’

They both laughed as they shook hands. George told him what he was doing out here and then Joe said, cheerfully, ‘Well, we gave ’em some fights, didn’t we, man? We really did it, didn’t we, George?’

‘You’re not kidding,’ said George. ‘I still got a dent where you hit me in the ribs.’

‘Man, oh, man,’ Joe chuckled. ‘Them was the days.’

George looked at Joe and reached into his pocket. ‘Here’s that sawbuck I owe you, boy. Remember that time in KC?’

‘KC?’ Joe said.

‘Yeah,’ George said, and pushed it into his hand.

Joe’s grin disappeared into that curiously dead expression of the blind. ‘Good luck, Georgie,’ he said. ‘See you around.’

Going up the long, grimy stairway that seems to be the standard approach to every fight gym, George said to me, ‘That’s Joe Wilson, Joe the Iceman, they used to call him. He col’cocked so many of ’em. I fought him four times. He sure could hit you a real good punch. Busted two of my ribs one night out at Vernon.’

‘How long you been fighting, George?’ I asked.

George’s eyes narrowed in a private smile. ‘Tell you the truth, Mr Lewis, I lost track.’

‘How old are you, George?’

George shook his head mysteriously. ‘Man, if I ever told you, they’d take me off the payroll and send me straight to the old folks’ home.’

Upstairs were the same dirty grey walls, the same lack of ventilation and sanitation and the same milling activity of concentrated young men with narrow waists and glistening skins, bending, stretching, shadow-boxing, sparring, punching the bags or listening earnestly to the instructions of men with fat bellies, boneless noses, dirty sweatshirts, brown hats pushed back on sweaty foreheads, the trainers, the managers, the experts. Only here on Main Street there were even more dark skins, not only black like those that had come to outnumber the whites in Stillman’s, but the yellow and brown skins of the Filipinos and Mexicans who poured into the gym from the slums of LA. For if racing is the sport of kings, boxing is the vocation of the slum-dwellers who must fight to exist. When were the sons of Erin monopolising the titles and the glory: the Ryans, Sullivans, Donovans, Kilbanes and O’Briens? When waves of Irish immigration were breaking over America. Gradually, as the Irish settled down to being politicians, policemen, judges, the Shamrock had to make room for the Star of David, to the Leonards, Tendlers, and Blooms. And then came the Italians: Genaro, LaBarba, Indrisano, Canzoneri. Now the Negroes press forward, hungry for the money, prestige and opportunity denied them at almost every door. In California the Mexicans, fighting their way up out of their brown ghettos, dominate the light divisions: Ortiz, Chávez, Arizmendi and a seemingly endless row of little brown sluggers by the name of Garcia.

In the centre ring, throwing punches at the air, ducking and weaving as he crowded an imaginary opponent to the ropes, was Arizmendi himself, who seemed to have inherited not only the strong, stoic face of an ancient Aztec, but the courage and endurance as well.

As Toro climbed through the ropes for a light workout with George, a short, plump, brown-skinned guy in a cheap but spotless white linen suit and white shoes came down to a corner of the ring, raised a megaphone to his lips and began to announce in a Spanish accent, made more inarticulate by too many blows on the head, ‘Eeen-tro-ducing, ot two hondreed ond seventy-wan pounds, the beegest heavyweight in the worl’…’

‘Who is this clown?’ I asked a second who was going to help Doc in the fight Friday night.

‘Oh, that’s Pancho, one of our characters,’ the second said. ‘He’s a little punchy. Been around here for years. Thinks he’s an announcer. Nobody pays him but he comes in the same time every day just like he had a job. For practice. The guys throw him a quarter once in a while. And the dope spends every nickel he has keeping himself in them white clothes. He once saw an announcer in a white suit and I guess it kind of stuck in his bean.’

Coombs climbed into the adjoining ring. He was heavily built and seemed ready to wink at anybody who would smile at him. I watched Pancho raise the megaphone to his lips, throw his head back and close his eyes in ecstasy. ‘Een-tro-ducing ot two hondred and seex pounds thot great hovyweight from da yeast, Cowboy Coombs.’

One of the regulars in the place, an unshaven, bald-headed
second with a couple of swab sticks in his mouth, started toward Pancho, and the little Mexican began to back up, half-threatening, ‘Stay ’way from me, you barstid, stay ’way from me.’

‘What goes with him?’ I asked the second.

‘Aw, that’s just a running rib,’ he said. ‘The fellas know what a nut he is about stayin’ so clean. So some of ’em go over and rub their burnt matches down his suit or smudge his white shoes just to hear him holler.’

Pancho kept backing and pleading as he worked his way crabwise until he reached the door and darted out. Some of the boys were amused. ‘Did you see that little greaser run?’ Vince laughed.

The next day, the last training session before the fight, we found Pancho at his regular post, busy making those announcements to which no one paid any attention. I just thought Vince was going over to give him a quarter when he started toward him. I didn’t realise anything was up until Pancho started backing away frantically just as he did the day before. The whole crowd of us, who had come in together, saw how Pancho retreated until he reached a high stool near the entrance. He drew his feet up, wrapped his arms around himself and pulled his head in like a turtle. ‘Stay ’way, you stay ’way,’ he was crying.

‘Don’t be afraid of me,
muchacha
,’ Vince laughed, and drew a long streaky line down the arm of Pancho’s coat. Pancho stared sorrowfully at the smudge.

Toro was bewildered. ‘Why did he do that?’ he asked in Spanish.

‘A joke,’ I said.
‘Un chiste.’

‘
No entiendo
,’ Toro said. He did not understand. Vince’s cruelty was too complex for him. He went over to Pancho, who was still sitting there brooding over the affront.

‘Why did he do that to your fine white suit?’ Toro said in Spanish.

Pancho answered in the bastardised Spanish of California Mexicans. What he called Vince has no satisfactory equivalent in English profanity.

Toro turned to Acosta and said in Spanish, indicating Vince with his head, ‘Tell him to give this man ten pesos.’

‘That is in American money two dollars,’ Acosta said. ‘You wish him to have two dollars?’

‘I mean ten dollar,’ Toro corrected himself.

When Acosta relayed this to Vince, Vince kept his hands in his pockets and said, ‘How does this jerk rate a sawbuck?’

‘You give,’ Toro said.

‘Listen to him. Now he’s a big shot,’ Vince said.

‘Go on, you cheapskate, give ’im ten bucks,’ Danny said. It was the first thing he had said to Vince since we hit California.

‘Aah, you guys make me sick,’ Vince said. But he produced.

When Pancho saw his money, he just shook his head. ‘Go ’way,’ he said. ‘You big barstid.’

‘What’s the matter with you, you punchy?’ Vince said.

For men in Pancho’s condition, that’s the chip on the shoulder. ‘Who ponchy?’ he demanded. ‘I not ponchy. I got job here. I announcer. Maybe you ponchy.’