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

hairy hands together and lifting hisvoice above the incessant sounds of the place: Whitey Bimstein, call for Whitey Bimstein, anybody seen Whitey … ; the garbage-disposal voice of Stillman himself, a big, authoritative, angry-looking man, growling out the names of the next pair of fighters to enter the ring, loudly but always unrecognizably, like a fierce, adult baby talk; then the bell again, the footwork sounds, the thudding of gloves against hard bodies, the routine fury.
    The atmosphere of this world is intense, determined, dedicated. The place swarms with athletes, young men with hard, lithe, quick bodies under white, yellow, brown, and blackish skins and serious, concentrated faces, for this is serious business, not just for blood but for money.
    I was sitting in the third row of the spectators’ seats, waiting for Toro to come out. Danny McKeogh was going to have him work a couple of rounds with George Blount, the old Harlem trial horse. George spent most of his career in the ring as one of those fellows who’s good enough to be worth beating, but just not good enough to be up with the contenders. Tough but not too tough, soft but not too soft—that’s a trial horse. Old George wasn’t a trial horse anymore, just a sparring partner, putting his big, shiny-black porpoise body and his battered, good-natured face up there to be battered some more for five dollars a round. There were sparring partners you could get for less, but George was what Danny called an honest workman; he could take a good stiff belt without quitting. To the best of his ring-wise but limited ability he obliged the managers with whatever style of fighting they asked for. He went in; he lay back; he boxed from an orthodox stand-up stance, keeping his man at a distance with his left; he fought from out of a crouch and shuffled into a clinch, tying his man up with his club-like arms and giving him a busy time with the infighting. Good Old George, with the gold teeth, the easy smile, and the old-time politeness, calling everybody mister, black and white alike, humming his slow blues as he climbed through the ropes, letting himself get beaten to his knees, climbing out through the ropes again and picking up the song right where he had left it on the apron of the ring. That was George, a kind of Old Man River of the ring, a John Henry with scar tissue, a human punching bag, who accepted his role with philosophical detachment.
    In front of me, sparring in the rings and behind the rings, limbering up, were the fighters, and behind me, the nonbelligerent echelons, the managers, trainers, matchmakers, gamblers, minor mobsters, kibitzers, with here and there a sportswriter or a shameless tub-thumper like myself. Some of us fall into the trap of generalizing about races: the Jews are this, the Negroes are that, the Irish something else again. But in this place the only true division seemed to be between the flat-bellied, slenderwaisted, lively muscled young men and the men with the paunches, bad postures, fleshy faces, and knavish dispositions who fed on the young men, promoted them, matched them, bought and sold them, used them, and discarded them. The boxers were of all races, all nationalities, all faiths, though predominantly Negro, Italian, Jewish, Latin-American, Irish. So were the managers. Only those with a bigot’s astigmatism would claim that it was typical for the Irish to fight and Jews to run the business, or vice versa, for each fighting group had its parasitic counterpart. Boxers and managers—those are the two predominant races of Stillman’s world.
    I have an old-fashioned theory about fighters. I think they should get paid enough to hang up their gloves before they begin talking to themselves. I wouldn’t even give the managers the 33½ percent allowed by the New York Boxing Commission. A fighter has only about six good years and one career. A manager, in terms of the boys he can handle in a lifetime, has several hundred careers. Very