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

few fighters get the consideration of racehorses, which are put out to pasture when they haven’t got it anymore, to grow old in dignity and comfort like Man o’ War. Managers, in the words of my favorite sportswriter, “have been known to cheat blinded fighters at cards, robbing them out of the money they lost their eyesight to get.”
    I still remember what a jolt it was to walk into a foul-smelling men’s room in a crummy little late spot back in Los Angeles and slowly recognize the blind attendant who handed me the towel as Speedy Sencio, the little Filipino who fought his way to the top of the bantamweights in the late twenties. Speedy Sencio, with the beautiful footwork, who went fifteen rounds without slowing down, an artist who could make a fight look like a ballet, dancing in and out, side to side, weaving, feinting, drawing opponents out of position, and shooting short, fast punches that never looked hard, but suddenly stretched them on the canvas, surprised and pale and beyond power to rise. Little Speedy in those beautiful double-breasted suits and the cocky, jaunty, but dignified way he skipped from one corner to the other to shake hands with the participants in a fight to decide his next victim.
    Speedy had Danny McKeogh in his corner in those days. Danny looked after his boys. He knew when Speedy’s timing was beginning to falter, when he began running out of gas around the eighth, and when the legs began to go, especially the legs. He was almost thirty, time to go home for a fighting man. One night the best he could get was a draw with a tough young slugger who had no business in the ring with him when Speedy was right. Speedy got back to his corner, just, and oozed down on his stool. Danny had to give him smelling salts to get him out of the ring. Speedy was the only real moneymaker in Danny’s stable, but Danny said no to all offers. As far as he was concerned, Speedy had had it. Speedy was on Danny all the time, pressing for a fight. Speedy even promised to give up the white girl he was so proud of if Danny would take him back. With Danny it was strike three, you’re out, no arguments. Danny really loved Speedy. As a term of endearment, he called him “that little yellow son-of-a-bitch.” Danny had an old fighter’s respect for a good boy, and although it would make him a little nauseous to use a word like “dignity,” I think that is what he had on his mind when he told Speedy to quit. There are not many things as undignified as seeing an old masterchased around the ring, easy to hit, caught flatfooted, old wounds opened, finally belted out. The terrible plunge from dignity is what happened to Speedy Sencio when Danny McKeogh tore up the contract and the jackals and hyenas nosed in to feed on the still-warm corpse.
    Strangely enough, it was Vince Vanneman who managed Speedy out of the top ten into the men’s can. Vince had him fighting three and four times a month around the small clubs from San Diego to Bangor, anyplace where “former bantamweight champion” still sold tickets. Vince chased a dollar with implacable single-mindedness. I caught up with him and Speedy one night several years ago in Newark, when Speedy was fighting a fast little southpaw who knew how to use both hands. He had Speedy’s left eye by the third round and an egg over his right that opened in the fifth. The southpaw was a sharpshooter, and he went for those eyes. He knocked Speedy’s mouthpiece out in the seventh and cut the inside of his mouth with a hard right before he could get it back in place. When the bell ended the round, Speedy was going down, and Vince and a second had to drag him back to his corner. I was sitting near Speedy’s corner, and though I knew what to expect from Vince, I felt I had to make a pitch in the right direction. So I leaned over and said, “For Christ’s sake, Vince, what do you want to have, a murder? Throw in the towel and stop the slaughter, for Christ’s sweet sake.”
    Vince