Shadow Box

CHAPTER 2

I had two months in which to get a quite questionable apparatus ready for the confrontation with Archie Moore. I am not properly constituted to fight. 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 the elbow. I have a thin, somewhat fragile nose which bleeds easily. Once, in my military days, I brought up my hand in a smart salute which banged the tip of my nostrils and started a slight nosebleed there in ranks, a bead of blood quivering at the end of my nose, like a drop at a shot bird's beak, before it fell to the dust of the parade ground. A lieutenant colonel stared at me solemnly. He sighed slightly and went on down the line.

Also, 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 reaction: the tears come and there is nothing I can do except dab at them with a fist.

Charley Goldman, Rocky Marciano's famous, gnomelike trainer, once said of fighters built along my lines, "You know them fighters with long necks and them long, pointy chins. They cost you more for smellin' salts than they do for food."

Yet, I knew the first step in getting ready for Moore was to find a trainer like Charley Goldman willing to take me on. I reached a man named George Brown. I had been introduced to him by Ernest Hemingway, who always spoke of him with highest regard—as a boxer who could have been a champion fighter if he had been able to accept the idea that he was going to be hit once in a while. But having classic features better suited, perhaps, to an Irish dandy sitting astride a hunter, he stayed on the periphery of boxing, as the proprietor of a famous gymnasium on Fifty-seventh Street, where he sparred with a fancy New York clientele, if they were of a mind to try it, and where he taught boxing. Hemingway spoke of his skills with awe, saying that he could never remember having landed a good punch during a sparring session with Brown.

The author, in his corner and as-yet unscathed, enjoys a laugh before the fight. (Herb Scharfman)

So I telephoned Brown. After I had explained what I wished of him, he said no, he was taking a job on the Isle of Pines, off Cuba, and wouldn't be able to help me train for the fight. He admitted that the idea of preparing a "tiger" to go against the light-heavyweight champion intrigued him, but frankly, and he hoped I didn't mind his saying so, he felt that in his future he'd be better off in Cuba—despite the fact that Fidel Castro's forces were beginning to work down from the Sierra Maestra and the place was in a political uproar. He was very polite about it and jocular at the same time.

"Well, what am I going to do, George?" I asked. I told him I had been advised by Martin Kane, of Sports Illustrated, to go down to Stillman's Gym, on Eighth Avenue, and get myself a trainer—I mentioned Charley Goldman and Joe Fariello—and work out in that crowd for at least a month.

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.…"

"How about the trainers?" I asked.

Brown sounded very concerned on the other end of the phone. "Listen," he said, "most of the trainers you'll find in Stillman's don't have the brains God gave a goat. Maybe they'll give you one lesson—how to lace on the gloves—but then they'll get you up there in the ring for their bums to maul you around so you 'learn experience.' You'll get ruined. Listen," Brown said, "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!"

"They'd really tee off on me?" I asked.

"In the ring with those guys you're fair game," Brown said. "Those guys'll hit anything moving—the timekeeper, if he got in there; a handyman sent in to check the ring posts; anybody. And as for a writer, those guys'd smack a writer on the beak just to see what would happen."

Brown heard me whistle softly over the phone; he said, "Don't forget, in the ring friendship ceases; and as for fooling around with Stillman's crowd, you'd be better off jumping into a bear pit. Wouldn't smell as bad."

With George Brown warning me sternly away from physical contact with the trainers in New York's gyms, I fell back on the theory that I could teach myself what to do from books and a self-imposed training program. I paid a visit to the library of the Racquet Club, on Park Avenue, where a small section of the shelves was devoted to boxing. I looked through the titles for a manual and arbitrarily selected one of a number—a thin volume which produced a fine aroma of mold when removed from the shelf. The Art and Practice of English Boxing, the volume was called, first published in 1807. I took it off to one of the library's large leather chairs, settled myself down, arranged a wooden footrest under my feet, reached up then and switched on a reading lamp—all this with a genuine sense of accomplishment, of getting underway. Around me, unaware that a fellow member was starting his preparations to fight the light-heavyweight champion of the world, quite a few members dozed in their chairs. One of them, in an adjoining chair, slept with a thin page of the Wall Street Journal over his face, the paper rising and falling barely perceptibly to his gentle snores. The library is used for sleeping as much as for reading. But it was peaceful that afternoon, some of the leather chairs occupied but quiescent, a fire murmuring in the grate the loudest sound in the room, and so I opened up The Art and Practice of English Boxing and began.

The first paragraph, devoted to some general remarks, included a reassuring sentence: "Both parties," the line read, referring to contestants in the ring, "should keep in the best humours possible." How this was to be done was not specified, but at least the inference was that George Brown's dictum that friendship ceases in the ring was not inflexible. I shifted comfortably in my chair and read on:

"One of the chief studies of a pugilist of character is to know where he can most successfully plant his blows. The parts of the body in which a blow is struck with the greatest probability of terminating the battle, are on the eye, between the eyebrows, on the bridge of the nose, or the temporal artery, beneath the left ear, under the short ribs, and in the pit of the stomach… a blow under the left ear forces back the blood which proceeds from the head to the heart [I shifted uneasily in my chair]… so that the vessels and sinews of the brain are overcharged, particularly the smaller ones, which being of too delicate a texture to resist so great a change of blood, burst… and an effusion of blood succeeding from the aperatures of the head completes his business.…"

My footrest fell over with a crash. In the next chair the member under his Wall Street Journal gasped and came awake; panic seized him under the pale sheet of the paper and he fought for air, batting feebly at the Journal with his hands; a foot flew up and his footrest toppled over. The library stirred and heads came up over the backs of those deep chairs and revolved suspiciously, bridling and haughty, before sinking again from view. Some throats were cleared. I heard the click of a pocket watch being snapped shut. The library began to settle down. My neighbor and I reached for our footrests; I returned somewhat gloomily to my reading.

But I kept to it, afternoons on end. I read everything I could find—manuals, histories, autobiographies. Sometimes in my reading—to my relief—I turned up chronicles which made me feel much more comfortable about the world I was entering; for one thing, it was not entirely occupied by killers: there was "Fainting Phil" Scott, an English heavyweight who survived a twelve-year career in the ring (1919–1931) with very little ability. He was actually the heavyweight champion of England for a while, but writers referred to him as the "'so-called' heavyweight," very often as the "Horizontal Heavyweight," and on occasion as the "Swooning Swan of the Soho." His particular maneuver was to sink to the canvas at the first suggestion of a low blow and cry, "Foul!"—hoping that the referee would award him the fight on a technical ruling. He tried this for nine fights in a row; the referees finally caught on, and after the Jack Sharkey fight in 1930, in which Scott, as usual, claimed from the canvas that he had been hit in the groin, the referee announced, "Scott is the yellowest bum I ever saw. For ten cents I'd take him into any cellar and give him a licking myself."

Even after Scott left the ring he continued to elicit waggish comments. One writer said that the common practice of setting a retired boxer up in his own pub would not have worked with "Fainting Phil," since every time Scott heard the bell on the cash register he would have doubled over and stretched out on the bar. In one of the books I found a picture of him in boxing togs—a thinnish fighter… with a build not unlike mine… with rather elegant, slightly startled features who looked as if he were sniffing something as he peered out over his upraised fists.

There were a few others like him. I kept notes on them, as if they could keep me company. One of my favorites was Jack Doyle, who was known as the Irish Thrush for his habit of singing in his corner before a bout. He was an awful fighter. Once, while he was singing "Mother Machree," a friend sighed, "Ah, if he could only fight her instead of sing her."

Naturally, the books I concentrated on were the manuals, trying to imagine as I sat in the deep leather chairs how I could transpose what I read to my solitary exercises in the club gym. The most arresting of the books was one by Jack Dempsey; its first words were as follows: "What would happen if a year-old baby fell from a fourth-floor apartment onto the head of a burly truckdriver standing on the sidewalk?" As if this stunning opening were not enough, it was accompanied by an illustration: it showed a truckman in uniform, wearing a cloth hat, and striding purposefully along, his features suggesting a personable fellow lost in thought—perhaps what he was going to have for supper that night—thoughts that could not have included an awareness of his imminent and peculiar doom. Two or three feet above his head was the baby, diapered, its mouth ajar, descending from an upstairs fourth-floor apartment at a sharp speed indicated by a broken black arrow pointed violently downward and labeled "gravity."

I cannot recall any book I have read which started off with such panache. I hurried on. "It's practically certain," I read, "that the truckman would be knocked unconscious. He might die of brain concussion or a broken neck. Even an innocent little baby can become a dangerous missile when its bodyweight is set into fast motion."