Sparring With Hemingway: And Other Legends of the Fight Game by Budd Schulberg Read Free Book Online Page A

was really little more than a blown-up middleweight, ludicrously mismatched against a lean and still hungry Dempsey.
    The war was forgotten, prosperity was on every corner, the market was a game you played for fun and profit, and in this carefree swinging atmosphere, Jack Dempsey came into his own, came to be loved, starring in Hollywood, squiring movie stars, marrying sultry Estelle Taylor, building a great white elephant of a hotel-casino on the sunny shores of Lower California—easy come, easy go. And if Dempsey was the twenties of vigorous flamboyance, his successor Gene Tunney was the perfect face for the other side of the coin. He was the Gatsby who got his Daisy behind the orgiastic green light across the sound. The poor, hard-drinking Irish of New York’s Lower West Side might never forgive him (longshoremen on the North River mutter about him to this day), but the suavemarine was a self-made man who won and kept his cool million from the Dempsey rematch of “the long count,” married an heiress, went into big business, and became a dignified member of the Affluency, just as his walking companion Bernard Shaw had unconsciously predicted in that granddaddy of boxing novels, Cashel Byron’s Profession.
    If Jack Dempsey (with his piratical rogue manager Jack Kearns) was the ebullient champion of the Harding Days, Gene Tunney boxed with a careful left and a straight right, coolly handling bullish and bearish situations, in and out of the ring. If he was not a champ for all seasons, he was certainly the right man for the right time. It was Coolidge-and-Hoover time, the economy was fundamentally sound, there was a chicken in every pot—two chickens if you put your shoulder to the wheel or had a hot tip in the market.
    And when it all came down, when the rich cut back on their servants and the middle class found itself pushed down into the working class and the working class could find no work and started selling apples and muttering about stealing bread before they’d let their loved ones starve, why then we had FDR and the alphabet soup of social revolution. The face of America was forever changed; a society that had reared itself on rugged individualism became a welfare state. Naturally we needed a new breed of heavyweight champion and lo, he materialized like the ancient kings of the Hebrews.
    His name was Joe Louis and he was black and he was simply the greatest heavyweight fighter who ever lived. He could defend like Johnson and jab harder than Tunney and punch like Dempsey at Toledo. Maybe the New Deal and hard times had turned our minds around, but all of a sudden it seemed good to have a black champion of the world—what could those know-nothings have been thinking a generation earlier when they had begrudged the great Jack Johnson his hard-earned crown? There had been black fighters before the incomparable Joe L., condescendingly described as “a credit to their race,” butsportswriter Jimmy Cannon said it for all of us when he wrote of Louis, “He’s a credit to his race—the human race.”
    If there is no God, man needs to invent him, and so it would seem with our champions and their antagonists. The God of Boxing is a Machiavelli of social balance. In the thirties, with radicals chanting, “Black and white, unite and fight!” who could better champion our hopes and our needs than the Brown Bomber? Gone was the vicious cheer of Caucasian for Caucasian. Our Bomber quickly changed all that. We were there when our white cousins were rooting him on to topple Primo Carnera and Maxie Baer and Max Schmeling. And what a blow to our democratic hopes when Schmeling, Adolf s darling and Goebbels’s calling card, found the flaw in our young hero’s armor—or call it an Achilles jaw, knocked Louis down in an early round and down for the count in twelve.
    Who in hell pulls these celestial strings? Who decides that just as Der Führer and his self-styled Supermen are bullying their way into the Rhineland, a