Читать книгу Jacobs Beach: The Mob, the Garden and the Golden Age of Boxing - Kevin Mitchell J. - Страница 7

When I set out to write a biography of Rocky Marciano, I wanted to do more than just tell the remarkable story of history's only unbeaten heavyweight champion. I wanted to capture the sights and the sounds of a faded era, the smell and the grit of the ring in the 1950s, when Rocky reigned.

I wanted readers to feel the adrenaline rush of a title fight at Madison Square Garden—to breathe the smoke, see the droplets of sweat frozen by the popping flashbulbs, hear the smack of leather against skin, join the swells and celebrities, mobsters and politicians, factory workers and tradesmen in a throaty tribute to a bygone time.

I wanted them to sense the backroom intrigue when a decision went funny, to glance knowingly at regal Frankie Carbo sitting quietly off to one side, fedora in hand, the underworld commissioner of boxing on his throne. I wanted them to rush with excitement into the cold night air, streaming down into the subways or mingling around the bar at Toots Shor's to relive the action and settle up their bets.

For my journey into this past—boxing's last golden age before television and Mafia corruption knocked out the golden goose—I had a welcome companion in Kevin Mitchell's atmospheric book Jacobs Beach. The subtitle says it all: The Mob, the Garden, and the Golden Age of Boxing. Mitchell is an engaging tour guide through what Jimmy Cannon famously called “the red-light district of sports.” Mitchell takes us through the history and a Damon Runyon cast of characters—starting with Damon Runyon himself. It was Runyon who defined Broadway and its denizens, its Guys and Dolls. One day, looking over a group of boxing managers sunning themselves in brightly colored chairs on the sidewalk outside Mike Jacobs's ticket office on West 49th Street, Runyon christened it “Jacobs Beach.”

One block south of the Garden and down the block from Jack Dempsey's Broadway restaurant, Jacobs Beach was a real place but also the spiritual center of boxing. Across the street was the Forrest Hotel, where Bob Hope joked that the maids changed the rats once a day, Runyon once lived in the penthouse. Carbo had the 15th floor to himself, entertaining mob heavyweights like Frank Costello and Lucky Luciano. Of the lobby, where prostitutes and other dubious characters lurked, Westbrook Pegler wrote, “There was always some hungry heavyweight sitting in the big fat chair in the corner, squinting down the street at the clock to see if it was time to eat yet. Sometimes it would be an old, gnarly heavyweight with a dried apple ear and a husky voice from getting punched in the neck. Sometimes it would be a young pink one with the dumb, polite expression that young heavyweights have.”

A young Rocky Marciano stayed at the Forrest when he came to New York for the first time in 1948 to audition for the men who would take him to the heavyweight title—manager Al Weill and trainer Charley Goldman. Later, Rocky and his friend Allie Colombo hitched rides from Brockton, Massachusetts, on overnight produce trucks bound for Manhattan to train at the CYO gym on West 17th Street. Climbing, rumpled, out of the truck in the predawn hours, Rocky and his friend would walk the streets for hours, wandering up and down Broadway and dreaming of the rich life. Once, they spied the middleweight champion Rocky Graziano hanging out on Jacobs Beach, members of the fight crowd greeting him and slapping him on the back.

Wandering through Manhattan's glittering canyons today, past its tony shops and luxury high-rises, it's easy to forget that New York was once a working-class city and not just a Disneyfied playground for the ultrarich—hedge-fund pirates and international financial outlaws snapping up real estate with money looted from the treasuries of impoverished third-world countries. Mitchell vividly brings back to life that old, romantic, nostalgic, gritty, forgotten New York. He gives us the rich voices of characters like Al Certo, the boxing lifer who later took over his father's tailoring business in New Jersey, where he remained close to fighters like Jersey Joe Walcott and Marciano. Poignantly and proudly, Certo relates how he made the sport jacket that Marciano was wearing when he was killed in a plane crash in 1969. When I visited Certo at his apartment above his old tailor shop, I brought along my copy of Jacobs Beach, and he eagerly signed it.

Mitchell also spends time with Lou Duva, who started hanging around the Garden when his brother fought a four-rounder there in 1940, then quit his job as a truck driver to hang around Stillman's Gym on Eighth Avenue and devote his life to boxing. Duva learned from one of the best, Charley Goldman, becoming close friends with Marciano and going on to a hall-of-fame career as a trainer and promoter in which he handled nineteen champions. Duva cried when Rocky died, vowing that one day he would bring a heavyweight to the title and point up to Rocky in heaven and say, “Rocky, I'm dedicating this here to you. This is your fight. You're still champion of the world.” Duva's moment came on October 25, 1990, in Las Vegas, when Evander Holyfield knocked out Buster Douglas.

Duva's experience highlights the bloodlines of boxing. The value of Mitchell's book lies not only in bringing back to life a lost era. He also shows us how the blood, sweat, and toil of the ring has been distilled into hard-won wisdom passed down through the generations—the connective tissue of the sweet science.

The inestimable Budd Schulberg, who wrote The Harder They Fall and On the Waterfront, tells Mitchell, “You can see why boxing appeals to so many, many writers: Conan Doyle and Bernard Shaw, up to Jack London and Hemingway and Nelson Algren and all the rest. The reason is a very simple one: boxing is the most dramatic, one-on-one of all sports.”

We can be grateful that Kevin Mitchell has joined their ranks.

Mike StantonProvidence, Rhode IslandDecember 2018