George Plimpton vs. Archie Moore

The writer George Plimpton pitched a baseball to Willie Mays. He was goalie for a day with the Boston Bruins. He played in a pro-am golf tournament. He tried out for quarterback of the Detroit Lions. He played percussion with the New York Philharmonic. He performed as a trapeze artist in the Clyde Beatty-Cole Brothers Circus.

In 1959 George Plimpton challenged the Old Mongoose, Archie Moore, to three rounds of sparring. Moore was light heavyweight champ from 1952-1962 and a cunning ring presence. His record at the time of Plimpton's challenge was 171-22-9 (123 KOs). Plimpton's record was 0-0-0 (0 KOs).

"There are people who would perhaps call me a dilettante," Plimpton said in an interview several years ago, "because it looks like I'm having too much fun. I have never been convinced there's anything inherently wrong in having fun."

There was precedent for famous writers getting hit by famous fighters. Sportswriter Paul Gallico got dropped by Dempsey in 1922 during an exhibition. "All I knew about boxing was to keep my left arm out," he wrote. "Dempsey came in, bobbing and weaving...There is one photograph in the News...I am bent over and Dempsey's left hook is whistling over my head. I have no recollection of ducking that one. But I didn't duck the next one. I found myself on the floor. Everything went sort of black. I held on to the floor with both hands, because the ring and the audience outside were making a complete clockwise revolution, came to a stop, and went back again counterclockwise."

Despite Plimpton's pluck, the odds of his hurting Moore were slim to none. "I am not properly constituted to fight," wrote Plimpton. "I am built rather like a bird of the stiltlike, wader variety — the avocets, limpkins, and herons. Since boyhood my arms have remained sticklike: I can slide my watch up my arm almost to my elbow. I have a thin, somewhat fragile nose which bleeds easily." In addition to having a nose which bled, Plimpton had eyes that teared.

"I suffer from a condition which the medical profession refers to as 'sympathetic response,' which means that when I am hit or cuffed around, I weep. It is an involuntary response. The tears come and there is nothing I can do except dab at them with a fist."

Skinny guys with noses that bleed and eyes that tear are a dime a dozen in the fight game. The late great trainer Charlie Goldman once said, "You know them fighters with long necks and them long, pointy chins. They cost you more for smellin' salts than they do for food."

To prepare himself for his three rounds with Moore, Plimpton, at the recommendation of Ernest Hemingway, contacted the trainer George Brown to help get him in shape. "Hemingway spoke of his skills with awe," Plimpton wrote, "saying that he could never remember having landed a good punch during a sparring session with Brown."

Plimpton telephoned Brown and asked, "Well, what am I going to do?" Plimpton told Brown that Martin Kane over at Sports Illustrated suggested he go to Stillman's Gym on Eighth Avenue and try to find himself a trainer. Brown was appalled. "Stay out of Stillman's," he said. "You'll get some awful disease fooling around there. Stillman and his people don't know what a mop looks like, much less how to push such a thing through the crud in that place...Listen, if you have to go to Stillman's, go and work on the light bag, the heavy bag, but don't get yourself pushed into the ring if anyone else is fooling around in there. Go into the ring when it's empty — alone — shadowbox, get the feeling of the canvas, and get out if anyone starts climbing through the ropes. I don't care if it's Lou Stillman himself, or someone who looks like your grandmother...get out!'"

Plimpton initially steered clear of Stillman's. But he had to prepare himself for the Old Mongoose, so he "fell back on the theory that I could teach myself what to do from books and a self-imposed training program."

George Brown thought learning to fight by reading a book was the most ridiculous thing he had ever heard, so he agreed to teach Plimpton what he could in the little time allotted.

Plimpton finally made it to "the famous and rickety boxer’s establishment on Eighth Avenue just down from Columbus Circle. A dark stairway led up into a gloomy vaultlike room, rather like the hold of an old galleon. One heard the sound before one’s eyes acclimatized: the slap-slap of the ropes being skipped, the thud of leather into the big heavy bags that squeaked from their chains as they swung, the rattle of the speed bags, the muffled sounds of gym shoes on the canvas (there were two rings), the snuffle of the fighters breathing out through their noses, and, every three minutes, the sharp clang of the ring bell. The atmosphere was a fetid jungle twilight."

The gym's owner was Lou Stillman. His real name was Lou Ingber, but changed his name to Stillman after he won the gym in a game of cards. Stillman was a character and had what Budd Schulberg described as a "garbage-disposal voice." He also had a way with words: "Big or small, champ or bum, I treated 'em all the same way — bad." Plimpton told Stillman that he and the Old Mongoose needed the gym for an hour. "I told him about Archie Moore and what we hoped to do," wrote Plimpton. "Sports Illustrated would pay him a small sum for the inconvenience. He did not seem especially surprised. An eyebrow might have been raised. It turned out that he condoned almost anything that would break the dreary tedium."

Lunching with friends at fancy club a few days before the fight, Plimpton was obsessing about Archie Moore. Meanwhile, across town, Moore was asking Peter Maas, a friend of Plimpton's, what he should expect. Maas had a sense of humor and told Moore that Plimpton was an "intercollegiate boxing champion...He's a gawky sort of guy, but don't let that fool you, Arch! He's got a left jab that sticks, he's fast, and he's got a pole-ax left hook that he can really throw. He's a barnburner of a fighter, and the big thing about him is he wants to be the light-heavyweight champion of the world. Very ambitious. And confident. He doesn't see why he should work his way through all the preliminaries in the tank towns: he reckons he's ready now."

The day of the fight arrived. Plimpton and his trainer arrived at the gym and "Lou Stillman led us through the back area of his place into an arrangement of cubicles as helter-skelter as a Tangier slum."

"Suddenly, Archie Moore himself appeared at the door of my cubicle. He was in his streetclothes. He was carrying a kit bag and a pair of boxing gloves; the long white laces hung down loose. There was a crowd of people behind him, peering in over his shoulders — Miles Davis, the trumpet player, one of them; and I thought I recognized Doc Kearns, Moore's legendary manager, with his great ears soaring up the sides of his head and the slight tang of toilet water sweetening the air of the cubicle (he was known for the aroma of his colognes). But all this was a swift impression," wrote Plimpton, "because I was staring up at Moore from my stool. He looked down and said as follows: 'Hmm.'"

Moore started to undress. He put on his foul-protector. He put on his boxing trunks and shoes. He began taping his hands. Then "he offered us a curious monologue, apparently about a series of victories back in his welterweight days: 'I put that guy in the hospital, didn't I? Yeah, banged him around the eyes so it was a question about whether he could ever see again.' (Moore) looked at me again. 'You do your best, hear?' I nodded vaguely. He went back to his litany. 'Hey, Doc, you remember the guy who couldn't remember his name after we finished with him...just plumb banged that guy's name right out of his skull?'"


The two men met at the center of the ring. Then the bell rang to start the action: "He came at me quite briskly," Plimpton remembered, "and as I poked at him tentatively, his left reached out and thumped me alarmingly. As he moved around the ring he made a curious humming sound in his throat, a sort of peaceful aimless sound one might make pruning a flowerbed, except that from time to time the hum would rise quite abruptly, and bang! He would cuff me alongside the head. I would sense the leaden feeling of being hit, the almost acrid whiff of leather off his gloves, and I would blink through the sympathetic response and try to focus on his face, which looked slightly startled, as if he could scarcely believe he had done such a thing."

Moore had no problem knocking men out. Making them cry was another matter. Plimpton continued: "Halfway through the round Moore slipped — almost to one knee — not because of anything I had done, but his footing had betrayed him somehow. Laughter rose out of the seats, and almost as if in retribution he jabbed and followed with a long lazy left hook that fetched up against my nose and collapsed it slightly. It began to bleed."

"We went into a clinch," continued Plimpton. "I was surprised when I was pushed away and saw the sheen of blood on Moore's T-shirt. Moore looked slightly alarmed. The flow of tears was doubtless disarming. He moved forward and enfolded me in another clinch. He whispered in my ear, 'Hey, breathe, man, breathe.' The bell sounded and I turned from him and headed for my corner, feeling very much like sitting down."

Moore toyed with Plimpton in round two. "In the third round Brown began to feel that Moore had run through as much of a repertoire as he could devise, and that the fighter, wondering how he could finish thing off aesthetically, was getting testy about it."

An early bell ended the "fight."

"That round seemed awfully short," Plimpton remarked to Brown.

Brown said, "I suppose you were getting set to finish him."

James Toback’s "Tyson"

"Who is to blame for this most recent of sports disgraces in America? The culture that flings young athletes like Tyson up out of obscurity, makes millionaires of them and watches them self-destruct?" – Joyce Carol Oates/Rape and the Boxing Ring (1992)

I first met Mike Tyson three years ago at Gleason's Gym in Brooklyn. I'd seen him fight many times, and was in awe of his speed and power, his ambition and success, at the same time as I was troubled at how elemental, how primal he appeared, embodying as he did all the unchecked impulses that have fueled mankind's worst excesses – the killer instinct, the will to win at any cost.

Tyson was in the ring teaching youngsters the rudiments of boxing, fulfilling a public service agreement in lieu of doing more time for one of his many run-ins with the law. He was no longer champion. His glory years were behind him. He'd been in an out of jail more times than anyone could count. And his fortune, the hundreds of millions he earned by scrambling other men's brains, had been squandered or stolen by Don King and other "leeches," as Tyson calls them, supposedly administering to his welfare.

Watching Tyson that afternoon, I was, even though surrounded by all manner of celebrity gawker, able to observe him unmolested. He was not especially tall, but he was exceptionally broad, with a huge head adorned by the now-famous Maori tattoo, and hands and feet that looked more like paws than any known human appendage. And his physical presence – the knowledge that here was Mike Tyson – seemed to electrify the molecules around him. But rather than give off an air of intimidation, he emanated vulnerability.

Tyson and I spoke for half an hour and he couldn't have been more kind. Gentlemanly and polite, he seemed as interested in me as I was interested in him and went out of his way to put me at ease. He was somewhat wary at first, natural under the circumstances, but there was no bluster, no bravado, no hostility, no preening ego or bad attitude. Tyson was humble, down-to-earth, someone who, if not quite at peace, saw himself as just another man, no better or worse than any other. It was a bit of a shock to discover that Tyson wasn't the monster I'd been led to believe. Instead, I discovered that he had been misunderstood, misrepresented, misconstrued.

James Toback's long-awaited documentary, Tyson, is an attempt to set the record straight. Toback has known Tyson since he was a teenager and had already cast him in two of his films, Black and White in 1999 and When Will I Be Loved in 2004. He is also the sort of compassionate interlocutor (although a silent and invisible presence in the film, which is a self-analytical, stream of consciousness monologue) an armored character like Tyson needs to let down his guard.

Toback culls the newsreel archive to show Tyson at different stages of his career, recounting the former champion's storybook rise from the mean streets of Brownsville to Cus D'Amato's gym in the Catskills to the bright lights of the Vegas Strip and beyond. The director hits all the highs (youngest man, at age 20, to win the heavyweight crown) and lows (the Barbara Walters interview, the rape conviction, the Bite of the Century) that are synonymous with Tyson's tale. And Toback, to his credit, and despite the empathy he feels toward his subject, doesn't pull his punches. He simply points his two cameras and lets Mike be Mike. The champ parades his man of a thousand faces, so that we get to see all sides of Tyson, often on split-screen and just as often in rapid succession, as he morphs from the violent Mike to the gracious Mike to the self-aware Mike to the clueless Mike to the self-pitying Mike to, finally, the Mike who is incomprehensible, most of all to himself.

It's easy to view Tyson as the anti-Ali, as someone who seems to have taken perverse pleasure in middle fingering the world, who appears to stand for nothing, to believe in nothing, who appears more at home receiving lap dances from floozies than awards at testimonial dinners. But that dime store analysis does a disservice to Tyson, no less than to Ali, as Toback's revealing documentary makes clear.

Beautifully filmed, Tyson, which runs 88 minutes from opening to closing bell, leaves one with the impression that it's impossible to fully understand another human being (just as it's impossible to fully understand ourselves). We can sit in judgment while lounging in our armchair or rattling around our ivory tower, but Toback's willingness to acknowledge and make allowances for human frailty, writ large in Tyson's story, makes his documentary an intrinsic document, as it also reminds us of the world of possibility, no matter how tenuous, at our fingertips. Or, as Tyson observed when Toback showed him the film for the first time: "It's like a Greek tragedy. The only problem is that I'm the subject."

(This review first appeared in Bright Lights Film Journal)

Pacquiao Decimates Hatton

It didn't take long. After an extensive build-up with all the concurrent hype that accompanies a big pay per-view fight, it took Manny Pacquiao (49-3-2, 37 KOs) a little less than two rounds to flatten Ricky Hatton (45-2-0, 32 KOs) Saturday night before a crowd of 16,262 at the MSG Grand in Las Vegas.

Oddsmakers and a handful of dreamers gave Hatton a fighting chance against the man now universally recognized as the pound-for-pound fighter on the planet. Hatton's last fight, a TKO11 over feather-fisted Paulie Malignaggi last December, convinced some that the old Hatton was back and had the goods to stop Pacquiao in his tracks. At the same time, these same people reasoned that Pacquiao’s recent win over a faded Oscar De La Hoya didn't count for much, since Oscar was on his last legs (and has since retired).

So much for prognostications.

Hatton, having starved himself, as usual, to make weight, (he gained 12 lbs. from the time of the weigh-in to the fight the next day) entered the ring looking like a ghost. Whatever strength he possessed had to have been strength of character, because he appeared severely depleted, despite his chiseled physique, as though he had left what fight he still possessed in the gym; or, perhaps, in the record books.

Pacquiao, by contrast, never looked stronger. He knocked Hatton down twice in round one, always a harbinger of things to come, and continued his assault in the second, before delivering the coup de grace, a picture-perfect left hook at 2:59. Hatton didn’t see the punch coming and crashed to the canvas. Referee Kenny Bayless didn‘t even bother to count. The fight was over.

"This fight was no surprise to me," said Pacquiao’s trainer Freddie Roach after the bout. "I knew him (Hatton) better than my own fighter. Hatton pumps his fist before he throws. We also knew he'd be looking for the left."

"I'm surprised the fight was so easy," Pacquiao said. "I worked hard in training camp and he was open for the right all night. It was nothing personal. I was just doing my job."

And a fine job it was. All that's left now is for Pacquiao to meet, and very likely destroy, Floyd Mayweather Jr.

What’s Up, Doc Kearns?

Jack (Doc) Kearns was one of the most illustrious, and least principled, managers in boxing history. He was born John Leo McKernon in Iron Mountain, Michigan, on August 17, 1882. At the age of one, he and his parents traveled by wagon train to Seattle in the new state of Washington, where they settled in 1886. Young McKernon quit school at 14 and stowed away on a freighter, the Skookum bound for Skagway, Alaska, to stake a claim in the Klondike Gold Rush. Among the 100,000 “stampeders,” as they were known, who completed the arduous trip to the Yukon and back was an indefatigable teenager named John Leo McKernon.

Having failed to strike it rich in the Yukon, but having learned that gamblers, hustlers, grifters, conmen and floozies were his natural constituency, McKernon returned to Washington, where he worked as a dognapper and helped smuggle Chinese laborers across the Canadian border into the US. According to Kearns’ autobiography, “The Million Dollar Gate,” co-authored with co-fabulist Oscar Fraley in 1966, he worked on a whaling ship, in a lumber camp, and as a cattle rustler. He was also a bouncer, barkeep and faro dealer. McKernon went from being a prospector, cowpoke, human smuggler and whatnot to getting his feet wet in the fight game in 1900, when he had his first pro fight in Billings, Montana, under the name "Young Kid Kearns." (When the promoter asked the 18-year-old if he could fight, Kearns said, “Stick out your chin and find out.”)

San Francisco was the Mecca of boxing in those days — Kearns described it as “a rowdy Las Vegas with kerosene lamps, hairier chests and much larger muscles” — so Kearns hightailed it to SF and found a home for himself in the fight game.

Kearns fought as a welterweight and claimed to have had 60 pro bouts, including a loss to Mysterious Billy Smith, about whom Kearns said, “He was always doing something mysterious. Like he would step on your foot, and when you looked down he would bite you on the ear.” Kearns was interested in other sports as well and played semi-pro ball in the Pacific Coast League as a pitcher. But his ultimate calling was as a fight manager, and in 1907 William A. Brady, who had managed Gentleman Jim Corbett and Jim Jeffries, suggested Kearns hang up his gloves and try his hand at managing.

One of Kearns’ first fighters was Louis (Kid) Scaler. There’s not much to read about Scaler’s career, but the March 12, 1909 Tacoma Daily News reported that he and Kearns had been arrested, at Scaler's saloon in Spokane, for selling liquor to a 15-year-old named Pearl Ohman.

Kearns first met Jack Dempsey in 1916, when one of his fighters, Joe Bonds, fought the future champ. A short time later, Dempsey came to Kearns’ aid in a bar fight. At the time Dempsey was, wrote Kearns, “thin, haggard, and run-down… His face was gaunt and hollow-cheeked, and you could have played his ribs like a xylophone.” But Dempsey, however raw, could fight (he had a record of 30-3), so the wily manager fattened up the skinny unknown, taught him all he knew, and added him to his stable. “I got him going,” said Kearns. “But before I came along, he was a bum.” To which Dempsey replied, “Sure I rode the rods. Sure I was a hobo. But Kearns has the facts dead wrong. I was a hobo all right. But I was never a bum.”

Dempsey had his first fight under Kearns’ aegis on July 25, 1917. Kearns kept Dempsey busy with him six more fights in 1917, 21 fights in 1918 and six fights in 1919, leading up to Dempsey’s bout with heavyweight champ Jess Willard on July 4, 1919, in Toledo, Ohio. Dempsey dropped Willard seven times in the first round, and broke his nose, ribs, eye socket and jaw, in addition to busting Willard’s eardrum and knocking out four teeth. The slaughter ended in round three and Dempsey was crowned heavyweight champion of the world.

Dempsey returned to the ring in 1920 to fight Billy Miske and Bill Brennan, which set up a bout with Georges Carpentier at Boyle’s Thirty Acres in Jersey City. Kearns and Tex Ricard, another world-class rascal, co-promoted Dempsey-Carpentier, which was the first title fight to ever be broadcast on radio, and the first million dollar gate.

Dempsey fought once in 1922 and twice in 1923, first against Tommy Gibbons in Shelby, Montana—a town the light-fingered Kearns succeeded in bankrupting. (Thirty years later a reporter told Kearns, “I hear you broke three banks with that one.” “That’s a lie,” objected Kearns. “A contemptible lie. I didn’t break three banks with the Shelby fight. I broke four.”) Then Dempsey fought Luis Angel Firpo at the Polo Grounds, in which there were 11 knockdowns in two rounds, and from which Dempsey emerged victorious.

Dempsey and Kearns parted company after Dempsey-Firpo. The champ and his paramour, the actress Estelle Taylor, accused Kearns of mishandling Dempsey’s finances. Kearns was getting 50% of Dempsey’s purses, which was illegal; the New York State Boxing Commission decreed that a manager’s cut couldn’t exceed one-third of the fighter’s gross. Kearns maintained that he was owed a third of Dempsey’s future earnings, and sued Dempsey three times, for close to a million dollars, albeit unsuccessfully. Many years later Dempsey told Peter Heller in “In This Corner” that “Kearns was a very funny guy. He used to drink a lot and throw all the money away. He never had no money. Never had nothing … He would lie to me all the time. He was handling all the money and the result of it is we never had no money.”

Although Kearns's greatest success was with Dempsey, he also managed and/or promoted over 80 fighters, including Abe Attell, Harry Wills, Mickey Walker, Archie Moore, Joey Maxim, Jackie Fields, Benny Leonard, Battling Nelson, Bob Satterfield, Soldier Barfield, and Dick Hyland.

Seemingly one step ahead of the law for the length of his long and larcenous life, it was reported in the March 23, 1945 Tacoma News Tribune that Kearns had been indicted in New York City for 26 counts of mail fraud. One of his co-defendants was an astrologer known as Princess Zulieka.

Kearns spent five years as matchmaker of the International Boxing Club in the 1950s. When the Kefauver Committee went after the murderous Frankie Carbo, de facto head of the IBC, Doc Kearns was subpoenaed to testify. The 79-year-old Kearns dug deep into his bag of tricks and convinced the senators, by regaling them with stories of Jack London and Wyatt Earp, that he wasn’t in the mob, which was the best that could be said about him under the circumstances.

Kearns remained active as a fight manager until his death on July 17, 1963, and was inducted in the International Boxing Hall of Fame in 1990.

“In more than sixty years of boxing, I have never been involved in a fixed fight — fixed, that is, where I lost a fight. But I will admit this,” wrote Kearns, “I’m a winner, not a loser. I’d do anything to win, but I won’t lose. And you can draw your own conclusions.”

The Ultimate Boxing Archive

Every sport gets the archivist it deserves. The late Hank Kaplan, who passed away last year at the age of 88, was the preeminent boxing archivist in the world. After a middling career fighting as a middleweight (he had one pro bout, which he won), Kaplan hung up his gloves and devoted the rest of his life to collecting everything and anything he could get his hands on that had a connection to the fights.

At the time of his death, Kaplan’s home in Florida was crammed with 2,600 books on boxing; 300 tapes of fights and interviews with fighters; 500,000 photographs; 150 ringed binders of correspondence, telegrams and tickets; and 790 boxes of newspaper clippings dating from 1890 to 2007, that covered every aspect of the sweet science, from the most well-known to the decidedly obscure.

There were also hundreds of talismans in the Kaplan collection, which, by their very nature, bring the magic of the fight game to life: souvenir programs, boxing magazines, boxing licenses and contracts, broadsides, posters, trading cards, boxing trunks, boxing gloves, and punching bags.

There was concern in the boxing community that when Kaplan stopped standing sentry before his voluminous archive — whose estimated value is $2.7 million — his lifework would cease to be. But as foresight would have it, Kaplan, who was born in Williamsburg, bequeathed his collection to Brooklyn College, where it’s now housed for those who want and/or need access to boxing’s arcana.

Anthony M. Cucchiara, professor of archival management at Brooklyn College, told the New York Times, “I suppose some people would want to turn their noses up at a boxing collection. But the story of America is in this archive. Boxing is a prism for our cultural history, and is important for its associations with immigration, ethnicity, class, race and nationalism.”

“Even when I was 16 or 17,” Kaplan told the South Florida Sun-Sentinel in 1995, “I said there’s got to be some way to remember [the fighters]. If someone were to ask me why I keep the archives, I guess that’s what I’d say: Someone has to be charged with remembering them.”

“None of this is for my own glory,” the ever modest and always accessible Kaplan added. “I have no dreams of great rewards. My love of boxing comes first.”

Norman Mailer's "King of the Hill"

The opening words of Norman Mailer’s King of the Hill, Mailer’s treatise on the Fight of the Century between Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier in 1971, raise the bar for those who write about the fights.

“It is the great word of the 20th Century. If there is a single word our century has added to the potentiality of language, it is ego. Everything we have done in this century, from monumental feats to nightmares of human destruction, has been a function of that extraordinary state of the psyche which gives us authority to declare we are sure of ourselves when we are not.”

Although Mailer is writing about last century and not our own, the permutations of ego — his ego, our ego, Ali’s ego — have not lost currency.

Mailer writes: “Ego is driving a point through to a conclusion you are obliged to reach without knowing too much about the ground you cross between. You suffer for a larger point. Every good prizefighter must have a large ego, then, because he is trying to demolish a man he doesn’t know too much about, he is unfeeling — which is the ground floor of the ego; and he is full of techniques — which are the wings of ego. What separates the noble ego of prizefighters from the lesser ego of authors is that the fighter goes through experiences in the ring which are occasionally immense, incommunicable except to fighters who have been as good, or to women who have gone through every minute of an anguish-filled birth, experiences which are finally mysterious.”

Comparing boxing to giving birth is only possible with language, but “There are languages other than words, languages of symbol and languages of nature. There are,” according to Mailer, “languages of the body. And prizefighting is one of them . . . Boxing is a dialogue between bodies. Ignorant men, usually black, and usually next to illiterate, address one another in a set of conversational exchanges which go deep into the heart of each other’s matter.”

Boxing is the game of the underclass. It was for the Irish, Italians and Jews. Now it’s for our beige, brown and tan brothers.

“Ghetto cultures, black, Puerto Rican and Chicano cultures . . . speak to each other with their bodies, they signal with their clothes. They talk with many a silent telepathic intelligence. And doubtless feel the frustration of being unable to express the subtleties of their states in words, just as the average middle-class white will be unable to carry out his dreams of glory by the uses of his body.”

It’s not only athleticism which sets these men apart. They also have balls.

“They are men’s men,” Mailer writes. “Rocky Marciano was one of them. Oscar Bonavena and Jerry Quarry and George Chuvalo and Gene Fullmer and Carmen Basilio, to name a few, have faces which would give a Marine sergeant pause in a bar fight. They look like they could take you out with the knob of bone they have left for a nose.”

The machismo that boxing perpetuates hits the heights when it comes to heavyweights.

“The closer a heavyweight comes to the championship, the more natural it is for him to be a little insane, secretly insane, for the heavyweight champion of the world is either the toughest man in the world or he is not, but there is a real possibility he is. It is like being the big toe of God,” writes Mailer. “You have nothing to measure yourself by.”

Muhammad Ali, the former Cassius Clay, aka The Greatest, fit the bill.

Ali was “well on the way to becoming America’s most unpopular major American. That too was part of the art - to get the public to the point of hating him so much the burden on the other fighter approached the metaphysical — which is where Ali wanted it. White fighters with faces like rock embedded in concrete would trade punch for punch. Ali liked to get the boxing where it belonged - he would trade metaphysic for metaphysic with anyone.”

Metaphysics aside, could Ali trade bombs with Joe Frazier?

“Frazier was the human equivalent of a war machine,” Mailer writes. “He had tremendous firepower. He had a great left hook, a left hook frightening to watch even when it missed, for it seemed to whistle; he had a powerful right. He could knock a man out with either hand — not all fighters can, not even very good fighters.”

Frazier was one the greatest pure punchers in boxing history. Comparing Smokin’ Joe to Rocky Marciano, another bruiser with a killer punch, Mailer speculates: “If those two men had ever met, it would have been like two Mack trucks hitting each other head-on, then backing up to hit each other again - they would have kept it up until the wheels were off the axles and the engines off the chassis.”

Frazier was tough, but it was a game to Ali.

“For the fight, Ali was wearing red velvet trunks, Frazier had green. Before they began, even before they were called together by the referee for instructions, Ali went dancing around the ring and glided past Frazier with a sweet little-boy smile, as if to say, ‘You’re my new playmate. We’re going to have fun.’”

The men and their seconds met at the center of the ring.

Norman Mailer describes the action: “The referee gave his instructions. The bell rang. The first 15 seconds of a fight can be the fight. It is equivalent to the first kiss in a love affair. The first round set a pattern for the fight. Ali won it and would win the next. His jab was landing from time to time and rights and lefts of no great consequence. Frazier was hardly reaching him at all. Yet it looked like Frazier had established that he was fast enough to get in on Ali and so drive him to the ropes and to the corners, and that spoke of a fight which would be determined by the man in better condition rather than in psychic condition, the kind of fight Ali could hardly want for his strength was in his pauses, he nature passed along the curve of every dialectic, he liked, in short, to fight in flurries, and then move out, move away, assess, take his time, fight again. Frazier would not let him.”

Smokin’ Joe was pressing The Greatest, not letting Ali fight his fight.

“Frazier moved in with the snarl of a wolf, his teeth seemed to show through his mouthpiece, he made Ali work. Ali won the first two rounds but it was obvious he could not continue to win if he had to work all the way. And in the third round Frazier began to get to him, caught Ali with a powerful blow to the face at the bell. That was the first moment where it was clear to all that Frazier had won a round. Then he won the next. Ali looked tired and a little depressed.”

He had good reason to be tired and depressed. Frazier was bobbing and weaving will power throwing punches with bad intentions.

“There is an extortion of the will beyond any of our measure in the exhaustion which comes upon a fighter in the early rounds when he is already too tired to lift his arms or take advantage of opening there before him, yet the fight not a third over, there are all those rounds to go, contractions of torture, the lungs screaming into the dungeon of the soul, washing the throat with a hot bile that once belonged to the liver, the legs are going dead, the arms move but their motion is limp, one is straining with another will, breathing into the breath of another will as agonized as one’s own.”

The fight moved into the fifth, sixth, seventh and eighth rounds and Ali was forced to dig deep. Frazier was ahead on two of the three scorecards. If Ali was to win the fight and reclaim the title, he was going to have to try to slow Joe Frazier down.

“Ali had never been a street fighter,” writes Mailer, “and never a whorehouse knock-it-down stud, no, it was more as if a man with the exquisite reflexes of Nureyev had learned to throw a knockout punch with either hand and so had become heavyweight champion of the world without knowing if he was the man of all men or the most delicate of the delicate with special privilege endowed by God.”

Frazier won the first half of the ninth round with a nonstop head and body attack, but Ali turned things around in dramatic fashion: “Now he jabbed Frazier, he snake-licked his face with jabs faster than he had thrown before, he anticipated each attempt at Frazier counterattack and threw it back, he danced on his toes for the first time in rounds, he popped in rights, he hurt him with hooks, it was his biggest round of the night, it was the best round yet of the fight.”

Ali took the tenth, but the eleventh and twelfth were Frazier’s. The thirteenth round could have gone either way, unlike the fourteenth, which was all Ali.

The bell rang for the fifteenth and final round and the heavyweight championship of the world was up for grabs. Ali “came out dancing for the 15th, while Frazier, his own armies of energy finally caught up, his courage ready to spit into the eye of any devil black or white who would steal the work of his life, had equal madness to steal the bolt from Ali. So Frazier reached out to snatch the magic punch from the air, the punch with which Ali topped Bonavena, and found it and thunked Ali a hell and hit Ali a heaven of a shot which dumped Muhammad into 50,000 newspaper photographs - Ali on the floor!”

Frazier landed a left hook for the ages which dropped Ali to the deck. Unconscious when he went down, he was conscious when he rose to beat the count. Ali and Frazier fought to the final bell. Smokin’ Joe retained his coveted crown.

“The world was talking instantly of a rematch,” Mailer writes. “For Ali had shown America what we all had hoped was secretly true. He was a man. He could bear moral and physical torture and he could stand. And if he could beat Frazier in the rematch we would have at last a national hero who was hero of the world as well, and who could bear to wait for the next fight? Joe Frazier, still the champion, and a great champion, said to the press, ‘Fellows, have a heart — I got to live a little. I’ve been working for 10 long years.’ And Ali, through the agency of alter-ego Bundini, said — for Ali was now in the hospital to check on the possible fracture of a jaw — Ali was reported to have said, ‘Get the gun ready - we’re going to set traps.’ Oh, wow. Could America wait for something so great as the Second Ali-Frazier?”

Naming Names

Prizefighters, no matter their religion, change their Christian names, the names they had at birth, into something suited to a hands-on profession. Nicknames, sobriquets, ring monikers, are as commonplace, as everyday, as integral to the game as the uppercut and hook off the jab.

Sometimes changing a name seems the most natural thing on earth. Consider, for example, that champion of champions, Cassius Clay, first known as the Louisville Lip, who changed his name to Cassius X, then to Muhammad Ali, before finally settling on The Greatest.

A prefix to a real name sometimes says it all. Savor this quintet of sweetheart pugilists: Sugar Ray (Robinson), Sugar Ray (Leonard), Sugar Shane (Mosley), Sugar Ramos and Sucra Ray (Olivera). My mouth waters at the thought of all that talent.

The epithets used by boxers in Regency and Victorian England set a high historical tone for nicknames with punch. A Young Ruffian fought. So did an Old Ruffian. For fans that hungered for action, Beef a la Mode was a contender, as were Cabbage, Giblet Pie, Young Rump Steak and Catsmeat. Alongside these gents scuffled such well-named notables as No Neck (Duggan), Gallows Dick, Yokel Brute, The Chelsea Snob, Holy Land Pink, Cripplegate and Death.

And let’s not forget the anomalous Fighting Quaker.

Some of the animals who fought in the ring and whose bite was worse than their bark were the Pit Bull, El Terrier, Mad Dog, The Animal, The Cobra, The Old Mongoose (Archie Moore), Bobcat (Bob Foster) and Big Cat (Cleveland Williams). The Wild Bull of the Pampas (Luis Angel Firpo) gave Jack Dempsey all he could handle in 1923. There were those highflying champs The Hawk (Aaron Pryor) and Game Chicken (Hen Pearce). There was Tiger Flowers.

Sometimes noms-de-guerre were an astute summing up of a fighter’s essence. Consider the Napoleon of the Ring (Jem Belcher), Old Master (Joe Gans), Toy Bulldog (Mickey Walker), Mighty Atom (Jimmy Wilde), Homicide Hank (Henry Armstrong) and Human Windmill (Harry Greb). There are Gentleman Jim (Corbett), Gorgeous George (Carpentier), Terrible Terry (McGovern) and Two Ton Tony (Galento). There’s the rags-to-riches Cinderella Man (James Braddock). There’s the Clown Prince of Boxing (Max Baer). There’s the canvas-loving Fainting Phil (Scott).

Our black brothers, especially in the past, were assigned politically incorrect honorifics. There’s no forgetting the phenomenal Brown Bomber (Joe Louis). One of Joe’s contemporaries was Gorilla Jones. The Black Terror (Bill Richmond) fought in Merry Old England. The Black Panther (Harry Wills) fought in the U.S. and Panama. There was a Young Massa. There was a Kid Chocolate, Little Chocolate, Old Chocolate and Chocolito. The Boston Tar Baby (Sam Langford) was an all-time great, as was The Moor (boxing pioneer Tom Molyneaux), also known as Snowball.

Boxing wouldn’t be boxing without the surname Kid. In addition to the aforementioned Kid Chocolate, aka the Cuban Bonbon, there is Kid Gavilan, Kid Broad, Kid Dixie, Kid Francis, Kid Graves, Kid Goodman, Kid Herman, Kid Kaplan, Kid McCoy, Kid McPartland, Kid Murphy and Kid Williams. There’s also George Kid Lavigne, “Billy the Kid” O’Shea, Hogan Kid Bassey, Jack Kid Berg, Ted Kid Lewis, Benny Kid Paret, The Stringbean Kid and Young Zulu Kid.

Where the fighter was born and raised looms large in the history of the fight game. Some hall of fame fighters who put boxing on the map were the Manassa Mauler (Jack Dempsey), Brockton Blockbuster (Rocky Marciano), Bronx Bull (Jake LaMotta), Boston Strong Boy (John L. Sullivan), Galveston Giant (Jack Johnson) and Michigan Assassin (Stanley Ketchel).

As we bob and weave our way across America we come across a Nebraska Wildcat, St. Paul Phantom, Livermore Larruper, Herkeimer Hurricane, Milwaukee Marvel, Kentucky Rosebud, Kansas Rube and Pottawatomie Giant. There was a Brooklyn Bomber and Brooklyn Billygoat, Harlem Spider and Harlem Harlequin, Astoria Assassin, Bronx Beauty and Brownsville Bum. Jersey Joe (Walcott) and Philadelphia Jack (O’Brien) were terrific champs, as were the Pittsburgh Kid (Billy Conn) and Boston Gob (Jack Sharkey).

Fighters representing foreign lands fought here and overseas. There’s the Light of Israel (English champion Daniel Mendoza) and Croat Comet (low-blow artist Fritzie Zivic), as well as the Tipton Slasher, Bristol Unknown, Belfast Spider, Durable Dane, Barbados Demon, Singular Senegalese, Basque Woodchopper, Scotch Wop, Australian Hard Rock and Elongated Panamanian.

Taking a swing at the former jobs of professional pugilists in Regency England, there were pugs who once were The Gasman, The Coachman, The Bargeman, The Waterman, The Collier, The Nailer and The Tinman. There was also a Master of Rolls and Sailor Boy, a Knight of the Cleaver and Bath Butcher.

Closer to home we had ragamuffins on street corners hawking the daily news: Newsboy Brown, The Fighting Newsboy (Mushy Callahan) and Abe the Newsboy (Hollandersky). There was a Georgia Shoeshine Boy (Beau Jack), Boilermaker and Fighting Marine (heavyweight champs Jim Jeffries and Gene Tunney). Men with nerves of steel were the Man of Steel (Tony Zale from Gary, Indiana), the macho Upstate Onion Farmer (Carmen Basilio from Canastota, NY) and The Fighting Dentist (Leech Cross from the Lower East Side), who knocked out teeth at night and replaced them the next day.

When people say “sticks and stones will break my bones but names will never harm me,” they could not be more wrong.

Ten-Count for Norman Mailer

“They are men’s men. Rocky Marciano was one of them. Oscar Bonavena and Jerry Quarry and George Chuvalo and Gene Fullmer and Carmen Basilio, to name a few, have faces which would give a Marine sergeant pause in a bar fight. They look like they could take you out with the knob of bone they have left for a nose.” — Norman Mailer

When boxing was a writer’s sport, Norman Mailer, who passed away last year at the age of 84, gave writing about boxing a good name. He was never a boxing guy, per se, but his contributions to the canon, although infrequent, challenge that of his illustrious peers. Mailer didn’t only write about boxing. His interests were too wide, his writing too eclectic, for easy categorization. Still, he understood the fights, and his writing bolstered the premise that boxing is, among other things, a thinking man’s art.

As a public figure for a half-century, Mailer made more missteps than most men in his position would have dared. There was, for example, his alarmingly hit or miss oeuvre; his quixotic campaign for mayor of New York City; his six marriages, the second of which ended when he stabbed his wife; his literary spats with the good, bad and ugly writers of his generation; and his Jack Abbott episode, where Mailer finagled the release of a felon with literary gifts from prison, who after six weeks as a free man killed a waiter in a dispute over a restroom.

In addition to those faux pas, Mailer tended, with all the consciousness he could muster, toward the abrasive. He was egotistical, arrogant, pigheaded, pugnacious, a born provocateur, but he fought the power, tried to rouse the sleepy from their slumber, and he wrote like a dream.

Although Mailer’s greatest works—“Armies of the Night” (1968), “Of a Fire on the Moon” (1970), “The Executioner’s Song” (1979)—are not about boxing, it’s his writing about the fight game that concerns us here. An early boxing essay is included in a collection called “The Presidential Papers of Norman Mailer” (1963). It first appeared in Esquire titled “Ten Thousand Words a Minute,” and while it’s a wild and wooly ride through the dense underbrush of Mailer’s erudition, the essay focuses in large part on boxing; the 1962 heavyweight title fight between Sonny Liston and Floyd Patterson; and the ring death of Benny (Kid) Paret at the hands of Emile Griffith at Madison Square Garden in 1964.

Mailer wrote of Floyd Patterson, “I had an affection for Patterson which started early. When he was bad he unbelievably bad, he was Chaplinesque, simple, sheepish, eloquent in his clumsiness, sad like a clown, his knees looked literally to droop. He would seem precisely the sort of shy, stunned, somewhat dreamy Negro kid who never knew the answer in class. But when he was good, he seemed as fast as a jungle cat.”

About Sonny Liston Mailer wrote, “Liston now emerged from the depths of the clubhouse and walked slowly toward us. He was wearing a dark-blue sweat suit, and he moved with the languid pleasure of somebody who is getting the taste out of every step. First his heel went down, then his toe. He could not have enjoyed it more if he had been walking barefoot through a field. One could watch him picking the mood out of his fingertips and toes. His handlers separated before him. He was a Presence.”

The fatal rubber match between Griffith and Paret was broadcast live on national TV. It was terrible on the tube. Norman Mailer was ringside:

“Some part of his death reached out to us. One felt it hover in the air. He was still standing in the ropes, trapped as he had been before, he gave some little half smile of regret, as if he were saying, ‘I didn’t know I was going to die just yet,’ and then, his head leaning back but still erect, his death came to breathe about him, and he sank slowly to the floor. He went down more slowly than any fighter had ever gone down, he went down like a large ship which turns on end and slides second by second into its grave. As he went down, the sound of Griffith’s punches echoed in the mind like a heavy ax in the distance chopping into a wet log.”

Mailer’s “King of the Hill,” his treatise on the Fight of the Century between Ali and Joe Frazier in 1971, is exemplary writing about two great fighters and the first of their three classic bouts.

“The closer a heavyweight comes to the championship,” Mailer wrote, “the more natural it is for him to be a little insane, secretly insane, for the heavyweight champion of the world is either the toughest man in the world or he is not, but there is a real possibility he is. It is like being the big toe of God. You have nothing to measure yourself by.”

Mailer’s greatest accomplishment in the boxing genre, and by consensus one of his finest books, is “The Fight” (1975), his first-person account of the Ali-Foreman Rumble in the Jungle. “The Fight” is a romp of a read from the first page to the last, but if you like your boxing straight no chaser, you might want to drown your sorrows in another tome.

Mailer on Don King: “How he could talk… Once when one of his lesser-known fighters hinted that a contract was unsatisfactory and King could get hurt, Don leaned forward—fond was he of telling this story—and said, ‘Let us not bullshit each other. You can leave here, make a call, and have me killed in half an hour. I can pick up the phone as you leave and have you offed in five minutes.’”

Mailer on Ali: “His master’s assortment leaped forth, jabs with a closed glove, jabs with an open fist, jabs with a twist of the glove to the right, jabs with a turn to the left, then a series of right-hand leads offered like jabs, then uppercuts and easy hooks from a stand-up position, full of speed off both hands. With each punch, the glove did something different, as if the fist and wrist within the glove were also speaking.”

Unlike King and Ali, George Foreman “lived in silence. Flanked by bodyguards to keep…handshakers away, he could stand among a hundred people in the lobby and be in touch with no one. His head was alone. Other champions had a presence larger than themselves. They offered charisma. Foreman had silence.”

Mailer once said about himself, “I seemed to have turned into a slightly punch-drunk and ugly club fighter who can fight clean and fight dirty, but likes to fight.”

Norman Mailer died as he lived, writing and fighting the good fight until the final bell.

Raging Bull Redux

There’s not much harder than being a man, unless one happens to be a woman. If you don’t believe me, take it from Jake La Motta, the subject of Martin Scorsese’s Raging Bull (1980).

“Let me tell ya a little story,” says La Motta in the Special Features section of the 2-DVD boxed set of Raging Bull. “When it came out it was down the block here, a movie, two blocks here in my neighborhood right here where I live now. And I went with my ex-wife Vickie. And we get there, we watched the movie. And when I saw the movie I was a little depressed. I said to her, ‘Was I really like that?’ You know what she said to me? ‘You were worse.’”

Boxing is a sport, but boxing is no game, and the life and death struggles of its participants, in and out of the ring, are an ideal subject for cinema when inspiration is the purpose, or a walk on the wild side is the intent.

Filmdom’s fascination with boxing began with Thomas Edison, who filmed a sparring session between heavyweight champion Gentleman Jim Corbett and Peter Courtney in 1894, and over the years there have been several fine flicks about the fights: Alfred Hitchcock’s The Ring (1927); Body and Soul (1939) starring John Garfield; Robert Wise’s The Set-Up (1949); Champion (1949) starring Kirk Douglas; the Jack Palance TV version of Requiem for a Heavyweight (l956); The Harder They Fall (1956); and John Huston’s Fat City (1972).

At one end of the spectrum is the quintessential boxing fairytale, Rocky (1976), with its many offspring and endless revenue streams. At the other is Raging Bull.

Raging Bull, which the AFI lists as the fourth greatest American film of all time, was nominated for eight Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor (Robert De Niro as La Motta), Best Supporting Actor (Joe Pesci, in his second film, as Jake’s brother Joey), Best Supporting Actress (Cathy Moriarty as La Motta’s long-suffering spouse Vickie), Best Cinematography (Michael Chapman), Best Editing (Thelma Shoonmaker), and Best Sound (Frank Warner).

De Niro’s portrayal of La Motta is a tour de force that is still on tour, and among his many accomplishments in Raging Bull, not least of which was learning how to box, was gaining sixty pounds to portray Jake as he ballooned out of contention.

De Niro told the authors of Inside Oscar: The Unofficial History of the Academy Awards, “I can’t fake acting. I know movies are an illusion, and maybe the first rule is to fake it, but not for me. I’m too curious. I want to deal with all the facts of the character, thin or fat.” Putting on all that weight wasn’t easy. “You have to [eat] three times a day. You have to get up in the morning and just eat. Eat that breakfast, eat those pancakes, eat dinner, even of you’re not hungry. It’s murder.”

It may have been murder, but homicide isn’t to everyone’s taste. Pauline Kael, for example, wrote in The New Yorker on December 8, 1980, “What De Niro does in this picture isn’t acting, exactly. I’m not sure what it is. Though it may at some level be awesome, it definitely isn’t pleasurable . . . what I found myself thinking about wasn’t La Motta or the movie but the metamorphosis of De Niro.”

To which the esteemed British critic, Peter Ackroyd, countered: “The man without a soul has nowhere to go but outward.”

Raging Bull was De Niro’s baby from the start. The film’s producer, Irwin Winkler, recalled, “I constantly saw Bob De Niro walking around with this shopworn-looking book, and he never told me what it was, but he always carried it around. And one day he came over to me and he said, ‘I want you to take a look at this book.’ And I looked at it and it was the book on which Raging Bull ultimately was based.”

“There was something about it,” De Niro told Fred Ferretti in “The Delicate Art of Creating a Brutal Film Hero” (New York Times, November 23, 1980), “a strong thrust, a portrait of a direct man without complications. Something at the center of it was very good for me. I felt I could evolve into the character.”

At first, Scorsese didn’t want to make a film about boxing. When De Niro pressed Scorsese about adapting La Motta’s story into a film, he said, “A boxer? I don’t like boxing.” Scorsese told his biographer Mary Pat Kelly, “The only logical fight I ever saw was a Buster Keaton film. He’s in the ring with this big guy. The guy comes out swinging. Keaton goes to the corner and gets a chair and hits the guy with it. That was the only logical boxing scene I ever witnessed. The idea of ‘Let’s get two guys into the ring and let them hit each other’ was something I didn’t – couldn’t – grasp.”

But Raging Bull is about boxing only in part. It’s also about the crises of masculinity, family, and faith, the limitations of will, and the ambiguity of redemption.

Raging Bull begins in 1941 when Jake is a young up-and-comer and follows his rise and fall with clinical precision. La Motta is a body genius, but he’s an idiot savant, his mind a jumbled mass of confused impulses. It’s hard not to root for Jake at the same time as one despises him, and watching him self-destruct is like watching a train wreck in real time. Jake first spots 15-year-old Vickie, the love of his life and future wife, at a public swimming pool. After a whirlwind courtship, where Jake is at his most touching and vulnerable, they marry. Jake gets what he wants, Vickie gets more than she bargained for, and the middleweight contender and his glamorous bride are the toast of the town . . . as long as he keeps winning.

But at home Jake’s like a caged animal. Always on edge, he’s suspicious, paranoid, distrustful of everyone and everything, especially as it concerns Vickie.

With Jake’s rise in the rankings, the mob wants a piece of the action. Without the mob’s help there’s no way he gets his coveted shot at the crown. There are, however, conditions. At Joey’s urging, Jake agrees to take a dive, to go in the soup against a bum named Billy Fox.

Two years later, La Motta fights for the middleweight title held by Marcel Cerdan. Jake forces Cerdan to quit on his stool and is crowned middleweight champion of the world.

Jake celebrates his success by eating himself out of his weight class. He’s also more convinced than ever that his wife is sleeping around. Jake asks Joey, “Did you fuck Vickie?” Joey can’t believe his ears. “You really let this girl ruin your life,” he says. “Look at you. You’re killing yourself the way you eat, you fat fuck. She really did a job on you. You know how fuckin’ nuts you are?” Again Jake asks, “You fuck my wife?” “How could you ask me a question like that? How could you ask me? I’m your brother. You ask me that? Where do you get the balls big enough to ask me that?” Jake says, “Just tell me.” “I’m not gonna answer that. It’s stupid. You’re a sick bastard. You know what you should do? Try a little more fuckin’ and a little less eatin’. You won’t have troubles upstairs in your bedroom and you won’t take it out on everybody else.”

There’s no reasoning with Jake. His manhood has been established, and is constantly reinforced, by the violence of his surroundings, his profession, his very being, so he goes upstairs to confront Vickie and hurls accusations and punches. But Vickie, despite her black eye, swollen jaw, cut lip and wounded pride, despite her better judgment, decides to stick around.

Jake continues to fight, and has a series of bouts with Sugar Ray Robinson. Their final bout, in Scorsese’s deft hands, is a grotesque pas de deux where Jake, no longer at the top of his game, can only show the world how tough he is by enduring the beating of his life; albeit without going down.

A dozen fights later and Jake calls it quits. He fulfills a lifelong dream and opens a nightclub in Miami where he can play out his skewed ambitions as an overweight master of ceremonies spewing lame jokes (“I haven’t seen so many losers since my last fight at Madison Square Garden”) before a thankless crowd of celebrity gawkers.

La Motta’s fall is as precipitous as his rise. Vickie leaves him. Then he gets busted for introducing a 14-year-old girl to some men at his club. He’s convicted of pandering and thrown in the Dade County Stockade for a year.

“I lived a crazy lifestyle for a couple of years before this movie,” said Scorsese in Untouchable: A Biography of Robert De Niro, “which culminated in Raging Bull. The understanding of why I was doing it found its way into Jake’s character and I was able to deal with it on film . . . and got to the point where Jake was able to sit in front of the mirror and be kind to himself in the end. That was what the lesson of the film was for me.”

In the final scene of Raging Bull, bloated Jake La Motta is sucking on a cigar in his dressing room. He looks at himself admiringly in the mirror, and proceeds to recite Budd Schulberg’s immortal words from On the Waterfront (1954), where Terry Malloy (Marlon Brando/Jake La Motta/Robert De Niro) confronts his older brother Charley (Rod Steiger/Joey La Motta/Joe Pesci) in the backseat of a sedan.

“It wasn’t him, Charley. It was you. You remember that night at the Garden you came down in my dressing room and you said, ‘Kid, this ain’t your night; we're going for the price on Wilson?’ Remember that? ‘This ain’t your night?’ My night. I could’ve taken Wilson apart that night. So what happens? He gets a title shot outdoors in the ballpark, and what do I get? A one-way ticket to Palookaville. I was never no good after that night, Charley. It was like a peak you reach, and then it’s downhill. It was you, Charley. You was my brother. You should’ve looked out for me a little bit. You should’ve taken care of me just a little bit, instead of making me take them dives for the short-end money. You don’t understand. I coulda had class. I coulda been a contender. I coulda been somebody, instead of a bum, which is what I am. Let’s face it. It was you, Charley.”

Raging Bull is a cultural touchstone. It may be the anti-Rocky, the dark side of a crimson parable, but it’s Scorsese’s finest work, a dream ménage of subject, object, and auteur.

Save Us Joe Louis

I’m a tough nut to crack. I don’t like Rocky, love Raging Bull, must be a dark side of the moon kind of guy. I remember drifting through Michael Mann’s Ali almost half asleep, seemingly narcotized by the reverence. And when Mario Van Peebles appeared as Malcolm X like some bronze angel from on high, I flashed on Denzel Washington’s pulsating portrayal of Malcolm in Spike Lee’s X – and that’s when it hit me: Ali had all the right ingredients but one. It had the wrong director. What Ali needed was Spike Lee. So when I heard that the always controversial but all the more fascinating for it Spike Lee was developing a film on former heavyweight champion of the world Joe Louis, called Save Us Joe Louis, I was pleased as punch.

In the May 5, 2005 Variety, Army Archerd reported that “Lee and Budd Schulberg have been working (writing) the Joe Louis project for five years. It’s the story of the two Louis-Max Schmeling championship bouts (1936 and 1938) and the global ramifications. Lee says characters involved in the pic will include FDR, Hitler, Mussolini and Sugar Ray Robinson for starters, adding Schulberg was on hand for the 1938 fight. Lee tells me, ‘Bud (93) is going strong. This is a David Lean caliber film.’”

The film called Save Us Joe Louis (the working title was The War to Come) will focus on the rivalry and eventual friendship between heavyweight champions Joe Louis and Max Schmeling. Their lives and fights intersected while Europe was at war and the rest of the world was about to join in (World War II, 1939-1945), and Joe the American and Max the German became proxies for their rival nations. When Louis visited the White House at the President's request, FDR told him, “Joe, we need muscles like yours to beat the Nazis.” Joseph Goebbels, one of Hitler’s henchmen, wrote to Schmeling after he won the first fight with Louis on June 19, 1936, “I know you fought for Germany, that it was a German victory. We are proud of you. Heil Hitler!”

Such was the heated atmosphere of the Louis and Schmeling fights. After the climactic Louis-Schmeling rematch on June 22, 1938 in Yankee Stadium, the film Save Us Joe Louis will follow the fighters into their postwar and post-boxing lives. Max becomes a Coca-Cola magnate in Germany and lives to a ripe old age, but never shakes the Nazi stigma. Joe loses everything but his shirt and dignity and becomes a greeter at a Vegas casino.

Although the film is not yet in production, funding is where things stand, many big names, in addition to Spike Lee and Budd Schulberg, have been mentioned as possible players in Save Us Joe Louis. Terrence Howard is rumored to be interested in playing the champ, even though Vin Diesel was in the early running. Danny Glover has shown an interest in portraying Joe in his later years, while Samuel L. Jackson sees himself in several roles. Hugh Jackman has been penciled in as a maybe Max Schmeling, with Maximilian Schell possibly playing the German champ in his dotage. There has even been talk of Jodie Foster playing Max’s movie star wife Anny Ondra.

With so many of Hollywood’s heavy hitters warming up in the batter’s box for what to these ears sounds like the best boxing movie since Scorsese’s Raging Bull, I wanted to get the latest scoop and asked Budd Schulberg, Spike Lee’s co-screenwriter on Save Us Joe Louis, for an update.

Budd Schulberg has been around. He was born in New York City on March 27, 1914. His father, B.P. Schulberg, was a film pioneer, a Hollywood insider. Budd went to L.A. High, Deerfield Academy and Dartmouth College. He worked briefly as a screenwriter in Hollywood, before serving in the U.S. Navy during WW II. At war’s end, he was in charge the photographic evidence at the Nuremberg Trials. Schulberg got mired in the HUAC mess, but paid penance with some of the greatest screenplays ever written (and greatest films ever made): The Harder They Fall (1956), a thinly disguised account of the career of one-time heavyweight champion Primo Carnera (1933-1934), starring Humphrey Bogart as sleazy Eddie Willis, a down on his luck ex-sportswriter hired to shill for a promoter and his latest harebrained scheme, a clumsy giant named Toro Moreno; A Face in the Crowd (1957), a redemptive political object lesson starring Andy Griffith as “Lonesome” Rhodes, an Arkansas hillbilly with the gift of gab who plays the guitar and carries a mean tune, a good old boy who slimes his way to the top of the tower of power to become one of the worst bad old boys of all time; and the seminal On the Waterfront (1954), that twilight tale of love and regret, complacency and the mob, the dockside parable of broken promises, broken dreams and broken noses, a timeless noir flush with indelible lines like those spoken by ex-pug Terry Molloy, played to Academy Award winning perfection by Marlon Brando, lines written by screenwriting’s poet laureate, Budd Schulberg:

“It wasn't him, Charley, it was you. Remember that night in the Garden you came down to my dressing room and you said, ‘Kid, this ain't your night. We're going for the price on Wilson.’ You remember that? ‘This ain't your night!’ My night! I coulda taken Wilson apart! So what happens? He gets the title shot outdoors on the ballpark and what do I get? A one-way ticket to Palooka-ville! You was my brother, Charley, you shoulda looked out for me a little bit. You shoulda taken care of me just a little bit so I wouldn't have to take them dives for the short-end money… You don't understand. I coulda had class. I coulda been a contender. I coulda been somebody, instead of a bum, which is what I am, let's face it. It was you, Charley.”

I spoke with Schulberg at the Hammerstein Ballroom at the Manhattan Center in New York City where he was attending a recent Broadway Boxing show and asked about the genesis of the Spike Lee/Budd Schulberg Joe Louis film project. “It began actually at one of those pre-fight dinners at the Garden where we were both were and got to talking about Joe Louis and the Joe Louis film that had never been made,” said Schulberg. “We met again after that dinner and decided to do it. We did extensive research for three or four months. We did nothing but read about Joe Louis, Max Schmeling and so forth. Then for a year we worked on several different drafts.”

For Spike Lee, the director and race man, the life and career of Joe Louis, the anti-Jack Johnson by temperament and design, but no less heroic for it, must have been like manna from heaven.

“When Joe Louis started to make a name for himself in New York after beating Carnera and Baer,” Schulberg told me, “Time magazine had him on the cover with the words: ‘THE BLACK MOSES’ – and that’s the line we take.” The title of the film “Save Us Joe Louis” has an interesting origin. “That is based on the story of a young black kid that’s being executed,” explained Schulberg. “When they strapped him down, attaching all the things to him, he actually cried out, ‘Save me Joe Louis!’ In fact we have that scene in the film. Joe Louis was like a god really.

“One of our problems is that this is a much more costly film than Spike had been in the habit of making. His films have been about $35 to $40 million, and this would be almost twice as much. It’s a huge canvas,” Schulberg said. “Disney likes it and has offered about $35 million, roughly half of what we would need. So we’re looking for someone to match Disney.”

I asked Schulberg if he and Spike Lee had decided on a leading man, someone to play the singular “Brown Bomber.”

“Spike has talked to Terrence Howard about playing Joe Louis. We both agree he would be ideal. We’re aware of the fact that the new generation isn’t aware of Joe Louis in the way they are of Ali,” said Schulberg, “and we’re hoping the chemistry of an upcoming star like Terrence Howard will help us overcome that problem.”

Remembering Da Rock

Former middleweight champion Rocky Graziano personified Nu Yawk. He was born Thomas Rocca Barbella in a Rivington Street tenement in 1922 and came of age on the Lower East Side. Rocky was a rambunctious kid with a rap sheet by the age of ten. Seemingly born to raise hell, he was a truant, punk, thief and hoodlum before he hit adolescence.

In his autobiography Somebody Up There Likes Me, first published in 1954 and turned into a film noir movie about his film noir life two years later, Rocky describes Rocky as only Rocky can: “I was so crooked ya coulda used my arm for a corkscrew. I wasn’t a juvenile delinquent. I was just a kid with an impediment of the reach.”

Rocky wrote about growing up in New York’s slums: “We go from one roach palace to another on Tenth Street and First Avenue. This pad, even though they was supposed to have steam heat, go find it. Here, in the middle of winter, even the janitor banged on the pipes. And if you paid your rent on time, you could be arrested for suspicion of robbery.”

In response to being poor, Barbella hustled reality. “I never stole anything unless it started with ‘A.’ ‘A’ truck. ‘A’ car. ‘A’ payroll.”

Always in and out of trouble, it was Manhattan Island one day/Riker’s Island the next for the recidivist Rocca Barbella. In lieu of a long stretch in the joint, a judge took pity on the repeat offender and forced him into the military. If ever a match was made in hell it was the U.S. Army vs. Da Rock. In no time Rocky was AWOL. In no time Rocky was in the brig.

History was repeating itself and Barbella, as usual, never could do nothing right.

“There was always something I want to say but I never knew how, so I let my fists do the talking for me.”

Rocca Barbella finally saw the light. He loathed following orders and hated khaki and knew the soldier’s life was not for him, so he borrowed another GI’s name — Rocky Graziano — and went absent without leave forever.

“There was still one thing I had to find out for myself. I had to learn that I was only happy when I was fighting.”

Rocky Graziano turned pro on March 31, 1942 in Brooklyn with a second round kayo over Curtis Hightower. Rocky had seven more fights that year, eighteen fights in 1943, and twenty fights in 1944.

“The only time I’m straight about what I’m doing is when I’m in the ring taking punches and giving them.”

Rocky wasn’t a sweet scientist. Nope, not even close. He went for the jugular.

“You can look at my face and you’ll know it’s a tough business.”

Graziano could take a mean punch. He also loved to dish it out. He thought nothing of taking four, five, six shots to land a haymaker of his own.

“I give in to nothing or nobody. Cut me, break my bones, it was all the same.”
Rocky never let his lack of finesse deter him.

“Anybody hurts me gets busted in two and dumped in his own blood.”

Rocky was also, in keeping with a New York tradition, a dirty fighter.

“In a fight it’s the thumb in the eye, the knee in the balls. In pool you cheat on the score. In baseball you rap the base runner sliding in or use your spikes. In poker it’s the marked deck, loaded dice in craps. The important thing is not how you do it,” Graziano wrote. “The important thing is to win.”

His three explosive bouts with Tony Zale — Rocky lost the first in 1946, won the rematch and middleweight title in 1947, and lost the 1948 rubber match — are touchstones in the sweet science of bruising.

“There’s only one way to lick Zale. You gotta kill him.”

Rocky Graziano retired from boxing in 1952 with a 67-10-6 (52 KOs) record and commenced his career in showbiz. He morphed from a granite-chinned pugilist into a solid gold celebrity. He became a TV host and pitchman. He became a bestselling author. He was pals with Presidents and Hollywood stars.

In an amazing turnaround of fortune, Rocky was famous, he was adored, and he was rich.

“You know why I like to hang around millionaires?” he asked. “They never ask you for money.”

Boxing rescued a nowhere man and turned him into something fabulous, and his life, according to Da Rock, was some kinda miracle.

“I once heard a poem with religion in it and there was this line I never forgot: My cup runs over.”