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Overview
Once upon a time, of all the memories made in ballparks and arenas from California to New York, there was nothing to rival that magic moment that could grab a heavyweight fight crowd by its collective jugular vein and trigger a tsunami of raw emotion before a single punch had even been thrown.
That’s the way it was when the heavyweight giants danced in the boxing ring during the golden eras of the greats Ali, Frazier, Holmes, and Spinks, to name a few. There will never again be a heavyweight cycle like the one that began when Sonny Liston stopped Floyd Patterson and ended when Mike Tyson bit a slice out of Evander Holyfield’s ear; when no ersatz drama, smoke, mirrors, and noise followed a fighter’s entry into the ring; when the crowds knew that these men were not actors on a stage but rather giants in a ring with a single purpose—to fight other giants.
By the ringside, acclaimed sportswriter Jerry Izenberg watched history as it was being made during those legendary days, witnessing fights like the Thrilla in Manila and the Rumble in the Jungle and preserving them in punchy yet tremendous prose. Delivering both his eyewitness accounts and revelatory back stories of this greatest era of heavyweight boxing, Izenberg invites readers to a place of recollection.
Once There Were Giants is his memorial to this extraordinary time, the likes of which we shall never see again.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781510714755 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Skyhorse |
| Publication date: | 02/07/2017 |
| Sold by: | SIMON & SCHUSTER |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 252 |
| Sales rank: | 740,081 |
| File size: | 4 MB |
About the Author
Jerry Izenberg has been a sportswriter and columnist at the Star-Ledger for fifty-four of his sixty-five years in the business. He has been inducted into the International Boxing Hall of Fame, the National Sportscasters and Sportswriters Hall of Fame, and the Sports Hall of Fame of New Jersey, and he is the only sportswriter to be inducted into the New Jersey Literary Hall of Fame. He won the Associated Press’s Red Smith Award for distinguished contributions to sports journalism as well as the Fleischer Award for Boxing Journalism. Izenberg has covered fifty Kentucky Derbies and is one of the two sports columnists to have covered all fifty Super Bowls. He is married with four children and nine grandchildren. He lives in Henderson, Nevada.
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Tough Guys Have Rules
A friend of mine, Rodger Donahue, a ranked middleweight in the 1950s with a ferocious left hook, used to delight in telling the story of the night Frank Costello, the Murder, Inc. mobster, took his girlfriend to the old Stork Club and invited three world champions to join them. This must have been on a Friday night, because New York mobsters always reserved Saturday night for their wives.
Once they were all seated, Costello demanded each of them dance with his lady. In those days, a request from Costello was tantamount to a request you couldn't refuse.
But the boxer Willie Pep refused. And the mobster wasn't offended, because Pep retorted with an argument Costello couldn't refute: "Tough guys don't dance."
Because it said so much about ersatz machismo, Norman Mailer took it for the title of one of his novels. And in understanding the once verdant relationship between mobsters and boxers, Costello's acceptance of that phrase is more than a notion. It is a road map into the thinking of the obsession that the family of tightly-knit mobsters has always had with the whole business of boxing.
It is why, on that night, Costello, the capo di tutti capi of the Genovese crime family, tolerated what other practitioners of raw power and hired muscle might have considered a direct insult — and he took it from featherweight Willie Pep, who weighed 126 pounds. If Pep, a world champion, said that's what tough guys didn't do, then Costello, who like most mobsters prized his own toughness, understood.
This was how it generally was with those members of the mob who muscled their way in until they controlled most of boxing — that is, until the night Muhammad Ali left the last mob-controlled fighter, Sonny Liston, slumped over on his own stool in abject defeat.
It is probably true that the mob had no influence on the outcome of the famous Cain — Abel fight. After all, even they knew an authority much higher than the Eden Boxing Commission had handled that decision. But we can say that here, in the United States, it was common knowledge that the mob was fixing fights as far back as the start of the twentieth century.
The first boxing godfather arrived in New York City in 1901. He was Liverpool-born Owen "Owney" Vincent Madden, who immigrated here as a teenager with his mother. Their first home was a tenement in Manhattan's Hell's Kitchen, an area of roughly twenty-five blocks between the Hudson River and Eighth Avenue. It was poor, overcrowded, and in the main predominantly populated by Irish and English immigrants. Owney Madden was a ferocious street fighter, but boxing wasn't on his mind. What was, was escape. The poverty of Hell's Kitchen bred more than its share of violence. Much of midtown Manhattan back then was a city of gangs, including the Gophers, whom Madden led as a kind of war counselor, which continually battled the rival Dusters for neighborhood supremacy.
He established the supremacy of his gang, along with his own role as king of the avenue. In record time, Madden was alleged to have killed five of the rival gang members over an extended period. In 1912, he killed another one over a woman's affections. By then, he had acquired the nickname "the Killer." In one of the toughest neighborhoods in a city on the make, Owney Madden was the ultimate player.
Not surprisingly, while the gang wars gave him a fear-tinged aura of respect, they also sharpened another skill that would threaten to destroy him — treachery. Cloaked in the guise of bringing peace to Hell's Kitchen, Madden offered to meet a rival gang leader named Doyle to talk about a definitive truce. He was so publicly committed to it that he went to the meeting well ahead of schedule. That timing enabled him to shoot Doyle in the head on November 28, 1914, from ambush, thereby leaving his rival just a little bit dead. Until then, he had never been convicted of anything because his evil charisma had always enabled him to cast a spell that seemed to render all witnesses deaf, mute, and blind. This time, the magic went out of Madden's smile, and the terror leaked out of his threats. The neighborhood sang like an a cappella chorus of canaries. He was sentenced to twenty years in Sing Sing, served only nine, and came out looking for work.
He found it as a strong arm man for a major bootlegger while he freelanced his own bootlegging gig, founded a profitable "join-or-else" cab driver union, and blossomed among the speakeasies as a man about town. He wound up owning the Cotton Club of Harlem Renaissance fame, where most of the customers were white and all of the performing artists were black.
During this period, he hired his own full-time chauffeur as befits a man with deep pockets and a gigantic ego. The driver was named George Raft, which may explain why Raft later won Hollywood acclaim for his gangster roles in films. Raft had had the perfect teacher.
Madden earned his bones as a bootlegger and saloon keeper of some prominence. He had already earned them as a killer. His favorite Manhattan night spot was a speakeasy known as Billy LaHiff's, a regular hangout for athletes, show business people, socialites, and thugs. By then, in 1931, he had already joined forces with two boxing musclemen, "Broadway" Bill Duffy and George Jean "Big Frenchie" DeMange. Madden was clearly the boss and controlled a number of prominent fighters, including the heavyweight-champ-in-waiting, Max Baer.
What followed was an event that stamped Madden as a mobster who, for a time, was one of the first underworld kings of boxing. The story was told to me in detail by the late Willie "The Beard" Gilzenberg, so-called because his beard was so heavy he shaved twice a day. Gilzenberg ruled boxing in Newark, New Jersey, where he promoted from two fight clubs: a minor league ballpark and the National Guard Armory. This story about Madden was so blatant, and so off the wall, that you couldn't make it up if you tried. Gilzenberg didn't have to try. He had been there.
At that time, Madden was a man in motion. Between his businesses (both legal and illegal), he strode Broadway like a colossus, generally in the company of Duffy and other members of his gang. Shadowing Madden virtually every night was a Broadway character named Walter "Good Time Charley" Friedman.
Friedman was a dreamer and a con man, not necessarily in that order. From Stillman's Gym to Jack and Charlie's 21 Club speakeasy, and up and down Broadway, he tried to sell an opportunistic story of a heavyweight title as yet unborn. Madden, who was the most powerful mark he could find, was his main target.
"Listen," Friedman kept saying. "Like I been telling you, there is a tribe of giants over in China. All we got to do is get the biggest, strongest giant they got, bring him back, and we got the heavyweight champeen of the world."
Madden had heard that pitch a thousand times. One night in LaHiff's, at a table with his colleagues and Gilzenberg, he silently debated whether to break both of Friedman's arms or finally throw him a bone. Finally, as the others rocked the room with their raucous laughter, Madden threw five hundred dollars on the table and said, "Get the hell outta here. Go to fuckin' China and don't show your ugly face to me again until you bring me the giant." And so Friedman disappeared from the Broadway after-dark scene.
Six months later, a cable from London was delivered to LaHiff's after midnight. It was no mystery how Friedman found Madden; he knew that no evening for Madden could possibly end without a slice of LaHiff's cheesecake. The usual suspects were gathered there. The cable read: "Have found the giant. Will arrive in New York City next week."
How did Friedman confuse London for China? Clearly he missed a lot of geography classes. But it is here that two new critical characters enter this narrative: the promoter Frenchman Léon See and Primo Carnera.
Carnera was 6 feet, 6 inches tall and 218 pounds — the biggest man in boxing for more than a decade — so big that the New York Athletic Commission (nicknamed colloquially "the Three Dumb Dukes") tried to create a new boxing weight division, the dreadnought class. It dictated it would approve no fighter as a Carnera opponent weighing fewer than around 200 pounds. As a point of reference, the great Jack Dempsey, the heavyweight champion a decade earlier, had weighed 187 pounds. The plaster of Paris cast of Carnera's hands, once on exhibition at the third Madison Square Garden, is said to be that of the largest fists in boxing history.
Léon See was a hustler and promoter in Paris who learned of Carnera when he was working the circus circuit in France. The deal there was to go two rounds with the giant and win a cash prize. Legend has it that once a guy went into the second round, Carnera would work him across the ring until the mark's back was pinned against a curtain. A fellow behind it would then smite him (unseen, of course) on the back of the head with a 2 × — 4. When Carnera left the circus, both he and the 2 × — 4 retired undefeated. See put Carnera on tour in Italy, Germany, France, Spain, and England. It was in England that Friedman saw him, and the rest became a story in search of a mandatory end.
At this time, Jack Dempsey was retired and America was staggering in the first throes of the Great Depression. For both reasons, boxing needed a drawing card, and with Carnera, Owney Madden now controlled the whole damned deck.
Madden launched his new attraction with just two house rules for potential opponents: One, you had to lose. Two, Carnera's opponents had to agree to allow Friedman in their corner as their chief second so he could enforce the terms of the agreement if necessary. This became known as "the Friedman Rule."
In Philly, against a competent but aging Roy Ace Clark, the Friedman Rule first came into play. When Clark decided between rounds that he could win, Friedman shoved two wads of cotton in Clark's nostril. Pulling cotton out of your nose while wearing boxing gloves is not unlike trying to cross the Gobi Desert on ice skates. Roy opened his mouth to breathe, and Carnera hit him and broke his jaw.
Against a fellow named Bombo Chevalier in the Oakland Oaks ballpark in California, a similar scene transpired — but this time Friedman pulled a large gun out of his cardigan sweater pocket and asked, "What do you think, Bombo?" To which Chevalier replied, "I think I am going to lose."
The fact that Carnera won seventeen straight against willing accomplices by knockout should not be surprising. But perhaps the best anecdote comes certified by the aforementioned Willie Gilzenberg. Gilzenberg booked Carnera into the Newark Armory and sold eight thousand seats. He did so because he came up with the perfect gimmick. Not only had nobody seen Carnera throw many punches with bad intentions at the time, they had also never seen Carnera get hit.
Gilzenberg hired a prominent New York trainer named Dumb Dan Morgan. "You will see Carnera hit by Cowboy Billy Owen. I guarantee it," Dumb Dan trumpeted. So they paid, they came, and this is what they saw.
See had told Carnera that, because of his size, nobody would dare hit him. But when Cowboy Billy hit him on the shoulder, Carnera turned to the Italian-American referee, Gene Roman, and said in his native tongue, "He hit me."
"Well," Roman answered in Italian, "I suggest you hit him back."
Cowboy Billy immediately went in the tank as soon as Carnera figured it out.
However, the game was wearing thin — too many no-punch knockouts, too many unexplained knockdowns, too many skeptical newspaper reporters. Madden, therefore, took another one of his heavyweights, Max Baer, who could fight, and made the Carnera — Baer fight for the title that Carnera had just won from Jack Sharkey, a fight which Sharkey's wife insisted had been thrown.
Baer dropped Carnera a total of eleven times in eleven rounds to win. Madden then cast his giant in the role of opponent. His last major fight was in that billing, and Joe Louis destroyed him.
Meanwhile, like every mobster who had owned a serious piece of the boxing industry, Madden was hurtling toward the fall from grace. A notorious killer named Mad Dog Coll had been extorting money from Madden and his cohorts. Coll was assassinated in a phone booth while talking to on the phone to, well, Madden. Police could prove nothing, but they began to pressure him and so did other Mafia families squeezing his Greenwich Village turf. In 1935, he quit both boxing and the rackets. He never returned to New York.
Madden was gone, but the mob wasn't about to abdicate its stranglehold on boxing. After all, the two biggest sporting events in America were boxing's championship fights and the World Series. The control of boxing — through fixed fights involving fixed fighters, fixed referees, fixed judges, or all three — only tightened that control. Compliant managers who were either mobbed-up themselves or easily extorted, and promoters who needed to pay homage to the mob in order to get fights, were a big part of the story. It would not be until Sonny Liston lost the heavyweight championship to Muhammad Ali in 1964 that the mob lost its last controlled fighter of stature.
The man whose underworld influence would enable him to control an entire professional sport for decades was named Frankie Carbo, who used the alias of Mr. Gray in some of his business dealings. Unlike Owney Madden, he was not a man about town. He did not mix with New York's elite citizens. What he was instead was a Lucchese crime family "button man," or mafia soldier.
Carbo was a cold-blooded murderer and hit man for higher-ups in the mob, who also ran his own fiefdom through a chain of other thugs. His trusted lieutenant was a man named Frank "Blinky" Palermo, an associate of the powerful Frank Bruno crime family in Philadelphia, who had an unsavory boxing background even before he met Carbo. To terrified managers, promoters, and fighters, a "suggestion" from Palermo was clearly a message from Carbo. The names of the pair's criminal associates, who served as front men for the enterprise, made up a list long enough to fill much of the nation's police blotters — which they did.
The most serious ally Carbo had was an entrepreneur named James D. Norris, the son of James E. Norris, a millionaire who owned the National Hockey League's New York Rangers. Since the Rangers was one of the Garden's principal tenants, Norris Senior was the largest stockholder of Madison Square Garden. In 1949, Norris Junior would continue to keep the Garden in the family by taking control of it through his corporation, the International Boxing Club of New York (IBC). Norris made a secret agreement with Carbo. He would provide the building and Carbo would provide the fighters, leading to a nefarious relationship in the boxing scene. With both the mob and Norris's backing, an event occurred that illustrated what had become Carbo's long reach as boxing's master puppeteer.
The most respected trainer in boxing at the time was Ray Arcel. Arcel never wanted to manage fighters because he believed his gift was in developing their talents. The idea, however, of promoting their fights appealed to him. Because of his straight-arrow reputation, honest fighters and managers rushed to join him.
Around this time, Carbo already had two highly lucrative televised fight cards with national sponsors. On Wednesday there were the Pabst Blue Ribbon fights, and on Friday the Gillette Friday night fights. When Arcel reasoned that Saturday night was fair game and made his own national TV contract, Carbo was enraged. One Saturday afternoon in Boston, Arcel prepared for one of his fight cards as usual, unaware that Carbo's contract on Arcel had already been accepted by a hit man.
In September 1953, when Arcel left the nearby Manger Hotel to join a group of managers on the sidewalk outside the Boston Gardens Arena, a Carbo emissary named Bill Daly identified a nearby thug when Arcel joined the group. The thug went straight for him with a lead pipe, striking him twice in the head and nearly crushing his skull. Arcel lay on a hospital bed for nineteen days. So long was Carbo's reach that a lifelong friend of Arcel's slept in his hospital room with a loaded gun. Carbo's message was not lost on the boxing industry.
Carbo was the unchallenged brain who ran both Norris and most of boxing as well. His string of murders (with no convictions) was well-known and feared. He surrounded himself with enough added muscle to solidify his claim as the uncrowned czar of American boxing, against underworld challengers and honest citizens alike. Although he controlled Sonny Liston, who would become the "last mob fighter," Carbo found his take far more lucrative among the lightweights, welterweights, and middleweights.
Although Carbo had already performed multiple killings as a button man for New York's Lucchese family and a freelancer for Murder, Inc., the notorious contract executioners for the mafia during the 1930s, his entry into the boxing business in the 1940s was actually a fortuitous accident.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Once There Were Giants"
by .
Copyright © 2017 Jerry Izenberg.
Excerpted by permission of Skyhorse Publishing.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
PROLOGUE The Accidental Fight Fan,
ONE Tough Guys Have Rules,
TWO The Gatekeeper,
THREE And a Man-Child Shall Lead Them,
FOUR The Man Who Wasn't Ali,
FIVE Under an African Moon,
SIX The Day Nobody Blinked,
SEVEN Is This the End of Muhammad Ali?,
EIGHT The Champion Who Became a Trivia Question,
NINE When Larry Met Gerry: And the Race Card Died,
TEN His Brother's Keeper: The Other Spinks,
ELEVEN An HBO Dream and the Road that Led to Mike Tyson,
TWELVE The Day the Heavyweight Champion Cried,
THIRTEEN The Bite Felt 'Round the World,
FOURTEEN Other Contenders and George's Curtain Call,
EPILOGUE,
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS,
PHOTO INSERT,