Sweet Thunder Page 17

  The sportswriters began referring to Armstrong as “Homicide Hank.” His windmill blows were crushing. He had solidified a reputation that stretched coast to coast. “I lived in Los Angeles when Armstrong was starting out,” says Budd Schulberg. “He was a nonstop fighter. He would go three minutes without stopping—and he was so fast. It was more than a punch a second. He was really remarkable.”

  Joe Louis worshippers might have considered 1938 Joe’s year, inasmuch as he avenged his previous loss to Max Schmeling by knocking him out before those seventy-five thousand screamers at Yankee Stadium. But, in reality, it was Henry Armstrong’s year. First came the announcement of a matchup with the revered Barney Ross. (Joe Louis invited Henry to train at his training camp. Armstrong was a jumpy and excitable youngster still astounded at his own success—nodding, grinning, hanging on the words uttered by Joe’s trainers. Louis liked his disposition.) On the day of the much-publicized bout, thirty thousand showed—Joe Louis among them—at the Madison Square Bowl out on Long Island to watch Armstrong attempt to take Barney Ross’s welterweight crown. Ross was in trouble from the outset. Round after round, Armstrong threw powerful left jabs at Ross’s jaw, connecting time and time again. Ross’s right eye swelled; blood poured from his lips. “Armstrong hooked two lefts to the body and then shot a left and right to the head,” the New York Times account of the fourth round would record. “Ross jabbed a left to the face but Armstrong moved in and pounded the body with both hands. Armstrong shot a left hook to the jaw.” It never eased for Ross. The referee looked toward Ross’s corner at the top of the eleventh, wondering if the champion’s team might want to call it quits, but they did not and Ross battled on. “Like a human tornado,” James Dawson of the Times would write, “Armstrong cut Ross down.” The fight opportunist, Mike Jacobs, was in the crowd, suddenly salivating at the chance to represent Armstrong himself. (He’d make his way toward Armstrong’s camp like a barracuda—albeit a smiling one—in the aftermath.) Dawson added: “In a word, Ross had not a chance, because he was unsuited to the style of the young Negro who hammered him out of his title and because he had not the stamina, the resistance, the reserve, the strength to come on against youth.”

  Henry Armstrong ended the phenomenal career of the Chicagoan Barney Ross that night. Reporters who chased Armstrong to his dressing room were stunned to see he was without a single mark; that he seemed, in fact, not at all exhausted after a bout that went fifteen rounds. They needed quotes. He tried mixing humility with insight: “It was the easiest fight I ever had against a really good fighter,” Armstrong said.

  Ross was the stalwart fallen hero. “This was my last fight,” he promised on the night of his defeat. “I’ve been around a long time, and I’ve been on top most of that time, and I guess I’ll have to step down.” It was rare for a fighter to stay true to such a proclamation, but Barney Ross did. His next fight was against enemy forces during World War II on Guadalcanal as a Marine. He received a medal for his bravery, and sympathy when it was revealed he had become addicted to the morphine that was used to kill the pain of his injuries.

  They toasted Henry after his huge victory at Small’s Paradise nightclub in Harlem. The Ross bout had happened in May. Immediately after, Armstrong turned his sights elsewhere. Already holder of the featherweight title—and having beaten Ross for the welterweight crown—Henry Armstrong squared off against Lou Ambers in New York on August 17 for the lightweight crown. Ambers fought fearlessly, cutting Armstrong above the eye and causing blood to flow in his mouth. Armstrong—the onetime hobo, the child who had had dreams and visions in the Mississippi woods—dispensed with his mouthpiece and swallowed the blood so the fight wouldn’t be stopped. Ambers pounded away, just like Armstrong; fans screamed loudly. In the end the onetime hobo won a split decision, becoming a triple titleholder, and tumbling into boxing history.

  He spent his earnings lavishly. He was an easy touch for a handout. The sight of beggars moved him, and he dug into the pockets of his pleated slacks. (Out of the ring he wore suits and white shirts; the open jacket often revealed suspenders. He dressed like a banker.)

  In future matches, however, the titles began to get away from him.

  October 4, 1940, was Sugar Ray’s first professional bout in New York. He scored a technical knockout against Joe Echevarria in the second round, marking what would be the start of a three-year period of uninterrupted victories. But Robinson would remember that day for another sentimental reason as well: He was on the early part of the same card that featured Fritzie Zivic and Henry Armstrong. There were many who felt Zivic was nothing but a dirty brawler. (Photos of him angling his gloved fist below the midsection of his opponents hardly dispelled that belief.) So there was young Robinson finishing off his opponent Echevarria, his arm being raised, his first thrilling pro victory, compliments of his volley of rocketlike punches—then hurrying to his dressing room, getting dressed, and getting back out to the arena, moving fast through the crowd of well-wishers and breathing with excitement because he was so eager to get a seat where he could see his idol, Henry Armstrong, defend the welterweight championship. He had to sit there and watch, round after round, squirming, as Zivic went for Henry’s eyes, and gasps filled the arena because Henry’s welterweight belt was at stake. Henry complained about Zivic’s low blows to the referee, but it didn’t matter, and at the end, the arms of Fritzie Zivic were raised. Young Robinson’s victorious night had ended with the defeat of Henry Armstrong. He cried to Gainford that Henry had been the victim of a badly called fight. He added to the around-town soliloquies the next day, repeating his belief about the wrong done to his hero. He vowed he wouldn’t forget what he had seen the night before. (One year and three weeks later, Robinson avenged the hurt by delivering a punishing whipping to Zivic in a ten-rounder in New York.)

  The next few years saw Henry Armstrong—who had already relinquished his featherweight title—based back in California. During the war, actor George Raft formed a stateside outfit called George Raft’s Caravan. They provided entertainment for the troops; Raft asked Armstrong to join up, and he did, staging exhibition bouts just as Robinson and Louis were doing. By then Henry had announced his retirement, and his name all but faded from the headlines.

  It turned out to be money woes—of course—that pulled him back in the summer of 1943. He was pounding the pavement one day in Manhattan, on his way to ask promoter Mike Jacobs for a loan. And it just so happened that on that day, Joe Louis and Sugar Ray Robinson were also visiting Jacobs on one of their Army furloughs. But, in a bit of vaudevillian hide-and-seek, Robinson and Louis never came face to face with Armstrong. Jacobs commandeered Robinson and Louis, leading them into his inner office from a small outer office. There were jokes and greetings. Then: “Shhh,” Jacobs said, “be quiet.” Louis asked Jacobs why. Jacobs explained that Henry Armstrong was on his way up. “He’s trying to put a touch on me for five hundred” dollars, he said.

  When Henry knocked, Jacobs refused to answer the door. He eventually went away.

  It was the curse of boxing, and Robinson knew it and understood it in a far sharper way than Louis: Money made a rising, gifted fighter and his cornermen smile; championship belts made the same fighter unreservedly trust his managers. The losses that caught up to the fighter as he aged would eventually send him reaching for money that was gone, that had vanished. Sam Langford—who had once fought Jack Johnson and to whom Johnson denied a rematch after winning the heavyweight title because Langford had skills that frightened even Jack Johnson—was sometimes seen on the streets of New York in the early 1940s. Among those who saw him was Sugar Ray Robinson. Langford was old and blind by then, and he was kept afloat only by the concern of a group of sportswriters who banded together to start a charitable fund for him.

  “Did you see what Mike Jacobs did to Henry Armstrong?” Robinson had said to Louis once they left Jacobs’s office. “Did you see how he treated him?”

  It was hardly lost on Sugar Ray Robinson that the career of
a prizefighter was always sliding toward its end. In Armstrong and Louis, he could see grace and beauty up close, but also the savage timeclock of the sport. To survive as long as he could, he hewed to two particular principles: the need to keep his body well conditioned, and the importance of never underestimating an opponent.

  The cupboard was bare during the war as far as boxing was concerned, because so many pugilists were enlisted. Mike Jacobs loathed the fact he had fewer and fewer big fights to promote.

  In 1942—he had been away from the ring since January of 1941—Henry Armstrong announced he wanted to fight again so he could pocket at least $100,000 in savings before quitting for good. He had a wife and children and assorted relatives he was caring for. The plan was to barnstorm the country—just as, in his youth, he had rumbled around his St. Louis neighborhoods with gloves flung over his shoulders—looking for contests. It was the silly dream of an aging fighter, the dream heightened even more as Armstrong began falling under the spell of alcohol. But he hit the road, fighting in Colorado, Utah, Nevada; he had to have a personal driver at night because his eyes were going bad from all the damage. He fought unknown fighters, sometimes a mere fourteen days apart. He turned his gaze toward the sound of train horns out there in the hinterland, which reminded him of his youth; he thought of poetry but couldn’t get the poems out of his head onto paper. He ate bad food and drank beer and racked up victories against nobodies—save for Fritzie Zivic, whom he fought again, beating him on October 26 in San Francisco. No one seemed to care, though; Zivic wasn’t champion anymore either.

  Just before Christmas 1942, a report floated in the press—obviously planted by members of Armstrong’s camp—that Henry Armstrong was ready to take on none other than Sugar Ray Robinson himself. The ruse upset Gainford. Robinson dismissed it: “I’ll never fight Armstrong.” Gainford’s thinking was businesslike and directed toward the future: His fighter was only two years into his professional career. Though few would have bet on Armstrong beating Robinson, Gainford knew Armstrong was cagey and experienced, and the last thing he needed was for his own fighter to be surprised by a snarling has-been entering the ring on past-glory emotions. There was no upside. Gainford issued a quick dismissal of the Armstrong challenge, insisting that the “rumors” of a matchup stop. “Ray Robinson definitely does not want to box Henry Armstrong,” Gainford said.

  But with his out-of-town victories stacking up and drawing media coverage, it seemed that Armstrong’s trajectory would inevitably cross with Robinson’s anyway. Reporters sniffed the air and sensed something. Dan Burley, writing in the Amsterdam News, felt if Armstrong were to keep winning bouts in his comeback bid that “promoters would be blowing their hot, sweaty breath on Ray’s neck with offers for him to meet the former triple title holder.” Expressing great admiration for both fighters, Burley—obviously building interest in just such a bout—said he believed that fight fans would not wish to see the two clash: “That’s something few real fans want to see. Armstrong has been an idol of Ray and Ray has been dear all along to Armstrong.”

  Nine months after Burley’s words appeared, Robinson agreed to the fight, despite more protests from Gainford. Mike Jacobs said he could bill it at the Garden. He told Robinson the fight would get Armstrong closer to his goal of accumulating a sufficient retirement fund. Jacobs also told Robinson that he was the only fighter with marquee value who could guarantee a handsome amount in gate receipts. Jacobs knew such a contest—former triple titleholder against rising welterweight, hero-worshipper against none other than his hero—would garner publicity.

  Thus the setup of the old man—Henry Armstrong—was arranged.

  It was the inverse, however, of the dive, of criminal skullduggery, of money changing hands. Instead this was mere old-fashioned melodrama, which sometimes hacked its way into the fight game minus menace. Events like these originated in sentimentality, which was the peephole through which Robinson was staring out and over the career of Henry Armstrong.

  Reporters visited both fighters during workout sessions. When Sugar Ray was asked by Hype Igoe of the New York Journal-American if he would be able to hurt Armstrong, who was someone he so obviously admired, Gainford interrupted, his tone sharp. “You remember his first Golden Gloves final, Hype? You remember how he knocked down that Spider Valentine boy? They were pals for years. Shot marbles together. Did everything together. But that didn’t stop Robinson from knocking him down. No room in this business for friendship, Hype.” Robinson hit the bags, imagining himself wily enough to become a great actor—to win but not destroy.

  And yet, Henry Armstrong believed, really believed, he could beat Sugar Ray Robinson. He trained with determination; there was talk of his steely resolve and of the messianic mission he was on before quitting. Reporters took note of his twenty-six bouts in this comeback, and the fact he was victorious twenty-three times.

  He was broke and in need of money. He was dreaming; he was Rat again.

  A Chicago Defender reporter, however, weighed in with an opinion of a Robinson-Armstrong matchup: “God Forbid.”

  In a column in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Armstrong’s hometown newspaper, there was a gentle warning offered to Robinson: “[N]ever before has he met a man of the experience, strength and indomitable will-to-win of Armstrong,” John Wray wrote. Still, Wray conceded that Armstrong was facing a “much younger, faster and more virile” opponent in Robinson.

  On the eve of the fight, Sugar Ray Robinson paid a visit to Armstrong’s Manhattan workout headquarters. Robinson was dressed in his military uniform, and he was smiling that movie-star-in-the-war smile: the armor of glamour. He seemed loose as a jazz drummer. Armstrong himself was in workout attire. He was lacing up his shoes; he still had work to do; he aimed to beat Sugar Ray Robinson; he looked resolute and dead serious. He had no time for smiling or guffawing.

  Mike Jacobs had hustled hard promoting the bout and was able to announce to The New York Times he expected a “near capacity” crowd of around sixteen thousand for the Garden event.

  Jay Gould—a snappy Negro and a syndicated columnist writing from San Francisco—usually covered the horse-racing scene. But he often weighed in on upcoming boxing bouts. The Negro gamblers and bookies around the country knew him, and he tapped them for insights and scuttlebutt about pending fights. “Rooster Hammond of Detroit, biggest sepia bettor around the country on fights,” he wrote, “made Sugar [Ray] Robinson a 1 to 4 favorite in New York to beat Armstrong.”

  They shook hands during the weigh-in as the cameras clicked. Henry was shorter but more muscled, even though Robinson was five pounds heavier. Garden observers wondered if military life had softened Robinson (“never a champion,” the New York Herald Tribune reminded readers), depriving him of the strict regimen of workouts he was able to have in civilian life. Armstrong, as the former featherweight-lightweight-welterweight champion, had his admirers in the Garden crowd, who remembered his great battles—and that hyper trot he’d take around the ring after his victories, sometimes patting his opponent on the cheek with his gloved fist, as if to apologize, then continuing the trot, his arms raised so happily and joyfully.

  The tone was set right after the fight began, with a staccato series of Robinson punches that were followed by a reprieve. It was like a bear begging a cub to stay inside the cave because danger lurked.

  Every time Armstrong approached, a lightning-quick Robinson jab pelted him. He seemed a lost fighter in the ring, a slow-motion tyro up against Robinson’s dancing speed. Robinson stayed back now and then, as if Armstrong might be worn down by exhaustion and fade, but the battler would crouch and charge and then Robinson fired as a form of defense. From high in the stands, Armstrong seemed a blur of caramel against the darkly hued Robinson. The New York Times account allowed as to how Robinson “merely pecked away at his 31-year-old opponent, riddling him with a ceaseless spray of long lefts to the head.” End of the fourth round, over in his corner, Armstrong was rocking his head, that gladiator look in his eyes
an echo of the past and certainly not the current proceedings. Armstrong knew only one way to fight—the windmill motion, the hard charge—but his punches aimed at Robinson landed in the wind. There were those in the stands aghast at Robinson’s domination—the quick movements; striking only when he wanted; all of it like a pro conducting a clinic. By the sixth round, it all struck the Times man as rather repetitious: “Armstrong would snort in leaving his corner, shuffle toward his foe, his head weaving from left to right, then suddenly find his head bobbing back and forth under the force of Ray’s long and sharp left hands.” There were some catcalls from the stands, voices demanding a knockout—that smell of blood, the gaggle of photographers on their elbows at ringside—but Robinson was fighting with sentimentality and caution. He merely wished to keep Armstrong at bay and not hurt him. From the perspective of Jesse Abramson, covering for the New York Herald Tribune, Armstrong was utterly lost. “The man who rose to fistic fame and glory with three championships through the piston-like fury of his two-handed attack could not lay a glove on Robinson,” Abramson observed. “He tried to spear him with a leaping left and always missed. When he got in close, Robinson tossed him around like an empty barrel.”

  At bout’s end, Armstrong retreated to his corner with his usual prideful gait. But Robinson, to no one’s surprise, was named victor in a fight that Joseph Nichols of the Times called a “spectacle” as “tame as a gymnasium workout between father and son.”

  Henry Armstrong had never seen anything like this; never seen someone so fast. His muscles and terrifying reputation meant nothing, absolutely nothing at all, to Robinson. It was as if the boxing gods had been keeping some kind of secret away from Henry and all of a sudden the velvet curtain had been torn back, revealing this specimen before him: feral, blessed with blazing footwork, not so much stalking the ring as dancing around inside it. After every round Henry Armstrong told his corner he’d adapt to Robinson’s style, and then the round would be over and he’d be breathing hard—even the actorly blows from Robinson had a stinging effect.