Sweet Thunder Read online

  Hard times lay over Cleveland in 1947. The city still shivered from its post-Depression blues, which seemed to spill into post–World War II blues. There were industry jobs, just not enough. The shanties in and around the Cleveland Flats were still horrific; the impoverished sought handouts. For years it had been a city more crooked than straight. A hardworking crime fighter, Eliot Ness, had made a name for himself working in the city’s Prohibition Bureau. He got corrupt cops thrown from the force; he staged raids on clubs with his convoy of trench-coated and fedora-wearing men. Crime took a truly bizarre turn in the city beginning in 1935. Bodies, some beheaded, began showing up on roadsides, in parks, and along alleyways. Fear was everywhere. Doors were bolted; mothers gripped the hands of their children, tight. The killing spree went on for at least three years. Suspects were arrested and then released for lack of evidence. Ness never found the killer, whom the press referred to as the Cleveland Torso Murderer. During World War II Eliot Ness left Cleveland to work for the Federal Security Agency. But 1947 found him back in Cleveland, launching a run—many deemed it quixotic; it was on the Independent ticket—for mayor against Thomas A. Burke.

  As Ness went after voters, Larry Atkins went after fight fans. (A good many he simply bumped into at the downtown bar he ran.)

  The New York Times reported in its April 5, 1947, edition that the Robinson-Doyle fight would take place in Cleveland on May 30. That report came two days after Robinson beat Fred Wilson in Akron in a three-round knockout and three days before he dispatched Eddie Finazzo in Kansas City, Missouri. But Robinson’s route to Cleveland had one more scheduled stop, which was back in Manhattan, where he took on George Abrams on May 16. Abrams took Robinson ten rounds before Robinson was declared the victor in a split decision. The cuts above Robinson’s eyes from the Abrams fight made George Gainford a bit nervous; the manager contacted Atkins and asked for a delay in the fight so Robinson’s cuts would have time to heal. June 10 was mentioned, then abandoned. The final date settled upon was June 24.

  The Cleveland Arena, site of the fight, was a twelve-thousand-seat in-the-round arena with the seats stretching for more than sixty rows. Located downtown on Euclid Avenue, it was made of cinder block and was the architectural creation of Al Sutphin. Sutphin owned the Braden-Sutphin Ink Company in town. He loved sports and built an arena that, in time, came to play host to professional basketball and hockey teams, as well as the rodeo, the circus, and bike races. But it was amateur and professional boxing that held a special lure for the local populace.

  The big marquee fronting Euclid Avenue lit up on fight nights.

  The cheap tickets for bouts at the Arena—the “A” was capitalized atop the roof of the place and you could see it at a great distance—went for six dollars; all others were ten and fifteen. But there were some bars out around Euclid Beach where you could get under-the-table tickets for as cheap as a buck. Inside the Arena, you could sit on the floor in chairs, then scoot the chairs up closer, provided there was room and you had the gumption. Sometimes there’d be five ten-round fights in one night. There were a couple of local kids, Carl and Louis Stokes, who heard about the Robinson-Doyle fight and would have loved to get tickets, but they couldn’t afford it. Carl was a young fighter himself and reveled in the attention the city got from the upcoming match. He circled the clubs where he knew both fighters would be sparring and gawked, along with his brother Louis. (The Stokes boys would grow up to make their marks in another arena, that of politics. Carl would become the city’s first black mayor; Louis a U.S. congressman.)

  Ten days before the bout, a report came out of the Greenwood Lake training camp that Robinson was having difficulty getting down to the 147-pound weight limit. Gainford laughed the worry off. Robinson would come in under the limit, proclaimed Gainford, “now that Ray is training seriously.”

  Robinson—“New York’s crack Negro boxer from Harlem,” is how the Times described him—was indeed seven pounds overweight. His challenger, Doyle, who had arrived in Cleveland on Sunday, June 15, a day after Robinson, met the weight limit and looked to be in excellent shape. Robinson’s extra weight seemed to worry everybody except him. In fact, a few days after arriving in town, Sugar Ray Robinson went golfing, ferried out to Highland Park, a local golf course, with all the insouciance of a country gentleman on holiday. He cut a fine figure on the golf course too, the ball flying from the end of his club, up, up, and away. He even sank a twenty-foot putt, which he bragged about to his cornermen and some of the local citizenry. It all felt so good, so wonderful. He returned a day later, under sunny skies: more golfing; more fun times.

  Still, Gainford had respect for Doyle. Locally, Robinson set up workouts at the Fox Hole gymnasium. When fans and admirers could get in to watch the welterweight champ, they’d elbow for better views, rising on tiptoes. At one session there were upwards of three hundred onlookers. The attention finally caused Gainford to threaten—albeit good-naturedly—to conduct his fighter’s remaining workouts in private.

  Three days before the fight—with Larry Atkins whirling about, hoping and praying that Robinson would meet the weight limit test—Robinson stepped up on the scales in his dressing room following a workout. Sweat poured from his brow. All around eyes widened as the dial on the scale came to a stop. Then came the grunts and exclamations of approval from his camp: Gone were the seven extra pounds he had arrived carrying. He weighed exactly 147. He smiled. (One of Gainford’s secret admonitions had been for the champion to take a constant round of steam baths.) “Don’t know what all the fuss is about,” Robinson said coolly. “I knew I could make it all the time. Don’t think Mr. Gainford would let me take two days off this week to play golf if he was worried too.”

  Robinson and Gainford were rebuffed by Atkins, however, in their efforts to reap some of the expected proceeds from the radio broadcast. Far as Atkins was concerned, Robinson and Gainford were arrivistes. And he was not about to grapple with a radio conglomerate over putting more money into their pockets.

  Over at his training headquarters—the old Johnny Papke Gym—Jimmy Doyle was beating the bags like a man on fire. His manager Paul Doyle (no relation) was giving him advice, and sometimes the manager couldn’t tell if the kid heard him because he’d just nod and keep on punching. When the welterweight challenger heard that Robinson had made his weight limit, he simply shrugged. “Not that I ever suspected for a second that he wouldn’t make that welterweight limit,” Doyle offered from his base. “He’d make it if he had to cut a leg off, I hear—or get a haircut, anyway.”

  During photo sessions for the Cleveland media, Robinson and Doyle faced each other with gentle grins on their faces, extending their arms, softly tapping each other about the shoulders as the flashbulbs went off. Robinson’s grin seemed light and easy and wide; he was sporting a lovely tweed jacket at one session. Jimmy Doyle’s grin had a little peculiarity to it. One couldn’t tell if he was grinning because he was half in awe of Robinson—or because he was secretly feeling insulted about the way the newshounds had been dismissing him. Or even perhaps because of those tales of Sugar Ray out at Highland Park, golfing and horsing around. There were fighters that Jimmy Doyle had put on their backs with his gloved fists. He’d fought beneath the lights at fabled Madison Square Garden, same as Sugar Ray. He boasted a record of forty-six wins against five losses. Jimmy Doyle did not come to Cleveland to be disrespected. Yet it had been that way all his life—fighting for respect, fighting to be taken seriously. No one ever called Jimmy Doyle pretty. He had a fighter’s face, as lined as Dempsey’s. But there were folk around Cleveland who knew not to dismiss him. “Doyle could fight,” remembers Jimmy Bivens, a Cleveland heavyweight who watched Doyle work out at the time. “These guys would think they could get in the ring with him and beat him up while sparring. And Doyle would end up beating them up!” Decades later, Bivens could still cackle at the memory. “He wasn’t afraid of nothing.”

  Jimmy Doyle didn’t come to Cleveland to play golf. He had no time or incli
nation to play golf. In fact, if Jimmy Doyle had been asked to putt a golf ball into a hole—even just several feet away—he’d likely pick the thing up and ram it right down the hole with his bare hands.

  The city of Los Angeles was not known for producing boxers. The sport simply had too much to contend with, not least Hollywood and the allure of acting and entertainment and the magic of movies. But there were fighters who emerged from the palmy sunshine of that city. In the beginning, if they were good enough, they got on fight cards at the Olympic Auditorium. They had to make a name for themselves before they got that prized invite: a ticket to the East Coast, the epicenter of the fight game.

  Jimmy Doyle was born James Delaney but took the name Doyle in homage to a onetime welterweight star. Jimmy Doyle had all the hard luck of the Irish in America: He was poor, he dreamed, and those dreams often got smashed. But he kept dreaming. As an amateur, Doyle impressed his trainers Duke Holloway and George Tolson. Eventually he landed with Tony Palazola. Palazola liked the fierceness of the kid and pointed him out to fighters and boxing legends alike who found themselves passing through Los Angeles. When boxer Jack Johnson, the former heavyweight champion, was rumbling around Los Angeles in the 1940s and took an interest in Doyle, it was an unimaginable boost to the young fighter’s confidence. Johnson’s interest was matched by that of Jim Jeffries, another heavyweight. But not just any heavyweight. Jim Jeffries was the white heavyweight who came out of retirement in 1910 to take the championship belt from Jack Johnson. The fight was staged in Reno, Nevada. It had the dramatic weight of racism circling it: Jack London, the writer, had been pleading with Jeffries to come take the title from Johnson. The outcome brought tears to the eyes of white men and women alike. “Once again,” Jack London was forced to write from Nevada, “has Johnson sent down to defeat the chosen representative of the white race and this time the greatest of them. And as of old, it was play for Johnson.” Now these two champs, race-laden and history-soaked, were watching the young Doyle and seeing much to admire.

  Jimmy Doyle—curly-haired, his nose flattened from so many bouts already—turned pro at the end of 1941. He was single and he still lived at home. He was determined to make money to support his mother.

  He acquired a reputation of ferocity and impressive technical skills. Patrons were aghast when one of his fights turned into a brawl with another fighter, and both men tumbled out of the ring—because Jimmy wouldn’t let go. He simply kept fighting, kept swinging. It was as if he were seized by something otherworldly.

  On July 7, 1944, Doyle beat Nick Moran in Los Angeles. Then he and his manager got the invitation they’d been waiting for: Jimmy Doyle got booked for a series of fights on the East Coast. And he dazzled.

  On November 30 he beat Sammy Daniels in a ten-round fight in Baltimore. For his first fight at Madison Square Garden on January 12—by now some were calling him Irish Jimmy, by now he had amassed six East Coast victories and many followers—Doyle was matched against Frankie Terry. More than twelve thousand fans packed into the Garden that night, among them former mayor Jimmy Walker. Walker—so beautifully turned out in suit and jewelry that he fairly glowed—was beloved by fight fans for restoring legalized boxing to the city. He waved around to his fellow New Yorkers, then enjoyed the bout. In the next day’s New York Times, James Dawson, the Times’s estimable boxing writer, gave Doyle plenty of credit for a fight that resembled a kind of clinic, with Terry, Doyle’s opponent, on the losing end. “A right to the body in the fourth round staggered Terry,” Dawson wrote, “and in the fifth a left hook opened a cut over Terry’s right eye and he fought the rest of the battle blinded somewhat.” Terry outweighed Doyle by eight pounds. Dawson added: “Doyle was too good a boxer, too smart a ring general, for Terry to make even the faintest impression.”

  A little less than three weeks later Doyle tossed off his robe inside the Broadway Arena in Brooklyn and beat Pittsburgh native Johnny Jones. The New York Times described Jones as “rugged.” It mattered little to Doyle. “Jimmy Doyle last night chalked up his eighth straight victory since he came to this section of the country five months ago,” the morning-after Times account noted.

  In December, in a much-publicized fight, Doyle found himself in Cleveland in a scheduled ten-rounder against Lew Jenkins, a former lightweight champion. Jenkins’s career had been bewildering: He was a gifted fighter—whose first wife, Katie, often took a stool inside the ring between rounds, dispensing advice to him while in frilly attire and pretty hat—but he could never pull himself away from the bottle. He was known to step into the ring inebriated. He joined the Navy during World War II, and, once out, convinced himself he could regain his boxing title.

  One of the few writers enamored of the Los Angeles fight game was Budd Schulberg. Schulberg’s father, B. P. Schulberg, was a much-admired Paramount studio executive. His son, Budd, educated at Dartmouth, liked to write poems and short stories and hang out in fight gyms. (Budd’s novel What Makes Sammy Run? created a sensation with its portrait of Hollywood insiders and won acclaim in the literary season of 1941.) The young novelist, who would go on to write gritty screenplays, saw Jimmy Doyle in Los Angeles early in the fighter’s career. “He was a good little fighter,” remembers Schulberg. “A big gamer. He took a punch. He usually won on points. He wasn’t going to knock you out. He was not easy to beat.”

  It was two years earlier when Robinson and Doyle first began appearing in the same newspaper stories. In 1945, the Boxing Writers Association released their yearly rankings. Freddie “Red” Cochrane was the reigning welterweight champion. The number-one contender in that class was voted to be Sugar Ray Robinson, followed by Marty Servo. There was a tie for the number-three contender: Tippy Larkin, and Jimmy Doyle.

  On the eve of their Cleveland fight, both Robinson and Doyle were quiet. “We hope to put Doyle away inside of six rounds,” pronounced Gainford. “That, we think, would be much the smartest thing to do.”

  Tommy Dorsey and his brother Jimmy were in downtown Cleveland that week with their big band, playing their sweet syncopated music. Their “Marie” and “Boogie Woogie” were big hits. It was summertime indeed in Cleveland: Over at B. B. Baker, one of the finer stores in the city—located right down the street from the Arena—snappy Panama hats were going for $10. The swells who lived out in Shaker Heights were already plotting weekend getaways to their nearby summer cottages.

  When Clevelanders awoke on the morning of June 21, they awoke to front-page headline news about the California murder of gangster Bugsy Siegel. Siegel had been sitting at home, reading the newspaper, when the bullets slammed into his skull. (A photographer wielding a Speed Graphic got a gruesome photo: Bugsy, in a light-colored suit, slumped back on the sofa, his face covered in blood, his right eye still open, as if he were looking at something across the room. The glass ashtray on the end table was sparkly clean.) Authorities quickly concluded it was a professional hit: Bugsy was said to have angered mob insiders because of cost overruns in the Flamingo hotel, whose construction he had overseen in the Nevada desert.

  Meanwhile, Larry Atkins was predicting a full Arena—and it would prove to be so. Just prior to the fight, he let it be known that should young Jimmy Doyle win, there was already a contract drawn up for a rematch to take place in—where else?—Cleveland, on July 22. Fight promoters thought it was quite a savvy move on the part of Atkins.

  Those who were backing Irish Jimmy Doyle had already imagined in their minds how he could win: “They insist the Californian will be the champion if he survives eight rounds,” wrote Dawson of The New York Times.

  The local writers, however, were a little more wary, a little more circumspect.

  A ghost hovered at the door of the the Robinson-Doyle matchup, a ghost by the name of Artie Levine.

  Levine, a Brooklynite and former Marine, was a vicious puncher who had fought Robinson here in Cleveland on November 6, 1946—six weeks before Robinson won the welterweight crown by defeating Tommy Bell. Levine landed a punch in the fourth
round of that bout—bringing Larry Atkins, who had promoted the fight, and so many others, up out of their seats—that floored Robinson. The confused Robinson struggled up off the mat from a nine-count knockdown, eventually pulled himself together, and went on to knock out Levine at the end of the tenth round. He’d never forget Levine, though, and would often comment upon the impact of his punches. Earlier that year—March 1946—Levine had been here in Cleveland matched against Jimmy Doyle. At 160 pounds, Levine approached the middleweight limit, but the welterweight Doyle was indeed a gamer, unbothered by the weight disadvantage. Doyle fought that night without his trainer Tony Palazola in his corner; Palazola was gravely ill in a hospital back in New York. Doyle was matching the hard-hitting Levine punch for punch, thrilling the Cleveland fans. Judges had Doyle leading on points well into the fight, but then Levine “rallied from way behind”—as one sports-writer put it—to land a flurry of dangerous punches to Doyle’s head, knocking him unconscious. Doyle suffered a concussion in the bout and had to be carried from the ring on a stretcher. There were examinations and consultations. Doyle was young and doctors saw no need to risk further injury. The doctors suggested he quit fighting, owing to the indeterminate severity of the concussion.

  After that fight, and all the post-fight sentiments expressed, a sullen Jimmy Doyle retreated to his Los Angeles home. He didn’t fight for nine months. He grew itchy, couldn’t stand the idleness, told family members he missed the ring. So he started a comeback—though Los Angeles boxing commissioners were too nervous to allow him to fight there. He hit the road, amassing several victories before his arrival in Cleveland to face Robinson. Franklin Lewis, the respected boxing writer for The Cleveland Press, spoke to Doyle a week before the bout. “You see, Levine had hit me all through the fight. Look at this face now. It’s been hit.” Young Doyle possessed wit—and also a seeming need to prove himself again: “I fought against the fear I might be punch-shy,” he said of the bouts that preceded the Robinson match.