Free Sparring With Hemingway: And Other Legends of the Fight Game by Budd Schulberg

supervising boxing in the navy, Benny Leonard would be in the ring refereeing a fight in the wonderfully decrepit St. Nicholas Arena when he received a knockout blow more deadly than anything Richie Mitchell or Jimmy McLarnin could inflict. Felled by a heart attack, he died there in the ring he had dominated throughout my childhood. To this day I can still hear that guardian of the turnstiles who stopped me from seeing The Great Benny Leonard in his glory years.
    [May 1980]

Stillman’s Gym
    S TILLMAN’S GYM, NOW defunct, was once the important hangout for fight promoters, managers, trainers, seconds, and—oh, yes—the fighters themselves. A grubby, seedy place, it seemed an aberration of the society at large. But was it? This recall suggests otherwise.
    A MERICANS ARE STILL an independent and rebellious people—at least in their reaction to signs. Stillman’s gym, up the street from the Garden, offers no exception to our national habit of shrugging off small prohibitions. Hung prominently on the grey, nondescript walls facing the two training rings a poster reads: “No rubbish or spitting on the floor, under penalty of the law.” If you want to see how the boys handle this one, stick around until everybody has left the joint and see what’s left for the janitor to do. The floor is strewn with cigarettes smoked down to their stained ends, cigar butts chewed to soggy pulp, dried spittle, empty match cases, thumbed and trampled copies of the News, Mirror, and Journal, open to the latest crime of passion or the race results, wadded gum, stubs of last night’s fight at St. Nick’s (manager’s comps), a torn-off cover of an Eighth Avenue restaurant menu with the name of a new matchmaker in Cleveland scrawled next to a girl’s phone number. Here on the dirty grey floor of Stillman’s is the telltale debris of a world as sufficient unto itself as a walled city of the Middle Ages.
    You enter this walled city by means of a dark, grimy stairway that carries you straight up off Eighth Avenue into a large, stuffy, smoke-filled, hopeful, cynical, glistening-bodied world. The smells of this world are sour and pungent, a stale gamy odor blended of sweat and liniment, worn fight gear, cheap cigars, and too many bodies, clothed and unclothed, packed into a room with no noticeable means of ventilation. The sounds of this world are multiple and varied, but the longer you listen, the more definitely they work themselves into a pattern, a rhythm that begins to play in your head like a musical score: The trap-drum beating of the light bag, counterpointing other light bags; the slow thud of punches into heavy bags, the tap-dance tempo of the rope-skippers; the three-minute bell; the footwork of the boys working in the ring, slow, open-gloved, taking it easy; the muffled sound of the flat, high-laced shoes on the canvas as the big name in next week’s show at the Garden takes a sign from his manager and goes to work, crowding his sparring partner into a corner and shaking him up with body punches; the hard breathing of the boxers, the rush of air through the fighter’s fractured nose, in a staccato timed to his movements; the confidential tones the managers use on the matchmakers from the smaller clubs spotting new talent, Irving, let me assure you my boy loves to fight. He wants none of them easy ones. Sure, he looked lousy Thursday night. It’s a question of styles. You know that Ferrara’s style was all wrong for him. Put ’em in with a boy who likes to mix it an’ see the difference; the deals, the arguments, the angles, the appraisals, the muted Greek chorus, muttering out of the corner of its mouth with a nervous cigar between its teeth; the noise from the telephones; the booths “For Outgoing Calls Only,” Listen, Joe, I just been talking to Sam and he says okay for two hundred for the semifinal at … the endless ringing of the “Incoming Calls Only”; a guy in dirty slacks and a cheap yellow sport shirt, cupping his