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.

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.”