29/9/89

Pickled Pugilist

THE JEWISH BOXERS' HALL OF FAME by Ken Blady. New York, Shapolsky Publishers. 325 pp. $14.95.

This is not one of the world's thinnest books. Despite the title's apparent oxymoron, Jews box, and Jews box their way into halls of fame.
    Blacks, and before them the Irish, are more associated with the anguished art of fisticuffs. But yidn? We have what to do for a living that doesn't involve getting a broken nose. Better a no-good shlemiel in heder than a famous goilem in a bloodthirsty goyish boxing ring, no?
    But boxing had its great Jewish eras and, in fact, some of the greatest boxers in history would pound the crap out of their adversaries and then scurry on home to their devoutly Orthodox homes, where unsuspecting parents believed their yingele had spent all day immersed in the Talmud. In the words of belligerent Itche Ben-David: "In San Francisco ya learned to use your left hook as part of your bar mitzva instructions."
    "The United States today is the greatest fistic nation in the world," boxing spokesman Joe Humphries said around 1930, "and a close examination of its 4,000 or more fighters shows that the cream of its talent is Jewish." At about the same time, Bill Miller wrote in Ring magazine that "It is a widely recognized fact that the best fight fans in any town are Jewish. Glance around at ringside, and you'll find that many of the schnozzolas have that unmistakable Durante curve."
    If Jewish Boxers were just one more Jewish Who's Who fleshed out with a flood of dry statistics, it would have had to find a different reviewer who likes boxing. I don't. But Blady's book is an appealing read for its colourful and witty tour of the ghetto, illustrating the cultural conditions that could spawn an undergrowth of pugnacious pisherkes.    

JEWISH BOXING flourished in London from the 1760s to the 1820s and again around the turn of the 19th century; in San Francisco for a couple of decades up to World War One, and in New York from the 1880s to World War Two. In every instance, Jewish boxing thrived as a direct result of the extraordinary social pressures of the times.
    In 1771, three men burgled a home in Chelsea, in the process killing a butler, for which they were hanged. The fact that they were Jews inflamed London and, of course, it was again open season on the Chosen People. But along came a Jew named Daniel Mendoza preaching self-defence, and by 1810, a magazine commented that "of late, the Jews are becoming the bullies of the people of London." The lower classes developed a grudging admiration for the "despised" Jew who was now making muscles for money, and making a proud name for himself in a machismo arena.
    Liberated times they must have been: in 1795, a boxing magazine reported a bruising match between a Mary Anne Fielding and "a noted Jewess of Wentworth Road." The Walloping Woman of Wentworth must have been noted for things other than boxing, as she was knocked down more than 70 times in the 80-minute fight.
    The father of scientific boxing, Mendoza was the most celebrated pugilist of his time. He once drew 10,000 shivering, drenched spectators to a fight; they included the Prince of Wales and the Duke of York. Thousands more waited anxiously for the outcome, which was announced across London by carrier pigeon.
    Mendoza became the first Jew in modern English history to speak to a king when he was granted an audience with George III, says Blady.

IN THE LEGENDARY Mendoza's wake came a string of fine Jewish boxers, most notably Sam Elias, "The Terrible Jew," a racy character who trained on three glasses of gin, three times a day. "Dutch Sam," a scrupulously honest lightweight in an era of vicious sadists, didn't have to resort to dirty fighting. He won each of his 100-plus bouts except for the last, using a wily punch he is said to have invented: the uppercut.
    Virtually every weight class has had its Jewish world champions - except the heavyweights. The best Jewish heavy ever was a blond San Franciscan known as Chrysanthemum Joe Choynski, a riproaring walloper who in 1890 delivered what is regarded as one of the hardest punches in boxing history. A year earlier, Choynski engaged in "one of the epics of pugilism. For duration of savagery it perhaps never had its equal," according to one boxing historian. Choynski invented the left hook, with which he once broke the jaw of Jawbreaker Fogerty. In 16 years of hard punching, Choynski never hurt his hands, which he attributed to a secret he learned from his Chinese friends: he used to pickle his fists for hours at a time.
    Featherweight champion of the world Abe Attell grew up in an Irish neighbourhood, the 16th of 19 little Attells. Born on George Washington's birthday, he was named after Abraham Lincoln. He was a street brawler who was arrested at the age of seven for punching a policeman. Attell would later boast that "a little of my blood stained every street in 'Frisco."
    Attell had the biggest battle of his life in 1900, at the age of 16. His formidable opponent - his ma - had just found out that her little Abie was a buxfyteh, and she forbade him ever to fight again. But the newly turned pro exacted a compromise: his mother allowed him to go through with a scheduled fight, which he promised would be his very last. The youngster knocked out his opponent in the second round and came home to his deathly worried mother, handing her his $15 take.
    "Here, ma, buy yourself something," he said. She stared at the money, examined his face and, finding no cuts or bruises, patted little Abie on the head and in a slow voice asked, "Abie, when are you going to fight again?"
    Author Blady revels in telling such anecdotes, and the book is packed with them. Jewish Boxers is further farbessert by a liberal use of Yiddish.
    Lightweight Leach Cross fought 26 pro bouts before his father found him out. Coming home from shul one Friday night, the elder Cross was greeted by an acquaintance who wished him a gut shabbes and a mazel tov. Why a mazel tov? his father asked. "For your son. He knocked out Joe Bernstein." The kid was supposed to be a dental student, and his father was furious.
    A few years later, Cross floored one K.O. Brown with a tremendous uppercut to the jaw, loosening most of K.O.'s front teeth. The following morning in the dentist's chair, K.O. looked up into the eyes of the dentist - none other than Leach Cross.
    As Itche Ben-David said, "Ya earn more respect by breaking a nose than fixin' one."
    The man who taught Rocky Marciano to box was Charley Goldman, another ghetto kid for whom pugilism was the ticket out. "The kids called you a Jew bastard, so you punched them in the nose. I got to love it. Every time somebody called me a name, it meant I could have a fight without picking one."

THE STORY OF Abe "Newsboy" Hollandersky began with the assassination of Czar Alexander and swiftly moved from the Pale of Settlement to the U.S. Navy where, as a penniless waif, he sold newspapers to sailors, who in turn adopted him and taught him to box. His first bout of note was on a summer day in 1906 with President Teddy Roosevelt. The old Rough Rider had come to review the fleet and came across a little runt who, he was told, was a Jewish boxer. Playfully grabbing Abe by the ears, Roosevelt allegedly teased him by saying that lots of people believed "a Jew won't fight."
    Enraged, Abe promptly pummelled the president in the ribs. Returning to the White House, Roosevelt, utterly taken by this skinny Jewish scrapper, created a new post for Hollandersky: Newsboy of the Navy.
    Conducting a tour through the squalid ghettos, The Jewish Boxers' Hall of Fame paints a black and blue picture of yingeles - Talmudic scholars and street-corner troublemakers alike - who turned to professional boxing for a living. The trick in most cases was keeping their profession a secret from usually Orthodox parents.
    Many of these youngsters became experts in the art of defensive boxing, fending off the chmalyeh (haymaker), so that when they came home from a bout there would be no injuries to explain away to stern parents. Many of the best Jewish boxers of that era also took to fighting under assumed names.
    Yonkel Finkelstein, twice world welterweight champion and at the time the youngest-ever Olympic gold medal winner, fought under the name Jackie Fields; Moishele Scheer adopted the Irish name Mushy Callahan; Beryl Lebrowitz took on the name Williams until his Irish manager convinced him he would do better to promote himself as a Jew, and they settled on Battling Levinsky. Hershel Krakow became Hogan and then Reilly, until he too "went Jewish" with Kingfish Levinsky.
    Alex Rudolph - alias Al McCoy - was another closet Jew whose remarkable career had to make do without parental kvelling. McCoy became the first lefty to win a world championship in what at the time was called a "sensational accident." Not unlike the story of Rocky, McCoy was an unknown inserted as a last-minute substitute against the fearsome middleweight champ George Chip. The nobody from Brooklyn threw one punch, and Chip went out like a light. McCoy won the world title in a record 54 seconds, going on to defend his title a record 42 times.
    And, of course, there was Benjamin Leiner, who became the idol of a generation as the fabulous Benny Leonard and "did more to conquer anti-Semitism than 1,000 textbooks," according to a journalist. So great was "Bennah" and such a winner, that, according to a boxing writer, "when he fought, the cards were reduced to betting only on whether he would knock out his opponent."
    Even from the age of 11, Benny was championing Jewish pride. He took on all toughs and bullies on his turf in Manhattan, especially delighting in thrashing punks who preyed on old Jewish women and desecrated synagogues.
    When Benny fought in the ring, every Jew in America sweated it out with him - even when he took on a co-religionist. In 1923, Lew Tendler challenged Bennah for his lightweight title at Yankee Stadium in front of 58,000 fight fans, an all-time record for a lightweight bout.
    One of Leonard's toughest matches came in his prime, when Jack Bernstein scored a no-decision against him. It was only Bernstein's third pro fight: he was all of 14 at the time.
(Bernstein didn't do very well financially for a junior lightweight champion of the world: in one fight, his take was half a salami. )

THE SCHOOL OF Jewish hard knocks often took the place of a regular education, but for some of these fellows, it was no great loss. Lightweight Joe Benjamin chose fighting over learning at a tender age because "I felt there was little I could do in school to contribute to the Einstein theory." Kingfish Levinsky believed blocking a punch was something you did with your face. He would attack an opponent's fists with a blunt instrument - his head. He never bothered learning the rudimentary arts of boxing, and once in 1930 succinctly explained how he managed to beat a craftier opponent: "I hitted him where it hoit da most."
    His first wife divorced him because he ate herring in bed and the bones tickled her. Kingfish is today an aggressive tie salesman in Miami Beach, the sort of hawker to whom you don't say no.
    A more popular second career for retired American Jewish pugilists in the 1930s and '40s was in the emerging film industry. As boxing instructors in Hollywood, Jack Silver taught Ronald Reagan and James Cagney how to fight; Mushy Callahan instructed Elvis Presley, Errol Flynn and Montgomery Clift, and Joe Benjamin counted among his students Douglas Fairbanks and Charlie Chaplin. Maxie Rosenbloom, who appeared in over 100 films as a stock mug, says he got into acting when Carole Lombard asked him to teach her how to box, to help her in fights with her husband Clark Gable.
    On the other hand, the fabulous Barney Ross (Beryl Rossofsky), who held world titles in three different weights, only got into boxing after being turned down for employment by his buddy Al Capone, who told the young Beryl that his line of work was unsuitable for the son of a rabbi. ("Beryl the Terrible" apparently did not feel the need to keep his boxing career from his Orthodox mother, who used to walk five miles to the stadium whenever a bout was scheduled for Shabbat. )
    Rosenbloom was another of Blady's great dummies. The light heavyweight world champ from 1930 to 1935 quit school in grade three because "My fadda was in da fourt' grade and I didn't wanna pass him."
    Rosenbloom's successful defence of his light heavyweight world title in 1933 against Adolf Heuser, a German, called Aryan superiority into question, according to Robert Slater in Great Jews in Sports, and "was considered an important factor in Germany's decision to prohibit its athletes from competing with Jewish athletes."
    A decade later, Nazi policy took its toll on another Jewish world champion, Victor Perez of Tunisia. In 1943, it is believed, Perez was murdered in Auschwitz.
    From 1900 to 1940, there were 27 Jewish world champions or legitimate claimants in every division except for the heavyweight. The only Jew to fight for the heavyweight title, a six-foot-four-inch, 255-pound giant named Abe Simon, flattened the great Jersey Joe Walcott in three rounds for a shot at Joe Louis, but couldn't do much against the Brown Bomber. (Another Jewish heavy, Natie Brown, was one of only 14 boxers to go the distance with Louis. )
    There were three North African Jewish world champions, most recently Algerian Alphonse Halimi in 1961. Even the blacks had their own Jewish champ in Sweet Saoul Mamby, the World Boxing Council world welterweight title holder in 1980-82. Mamby was born in the South Bronx (also known as "Fort Apache") to a Spanish mother who converted to Judaism, and a Jamaican father. He went to Hebrew school and a shul for blacks, and had to learn to defend himself against all sides.
    Perhaps the strangest of all Magen David-bedecked boxers was a big palooka named King Solomon, widely promoted in the '20s as the greatest Jewish heavyweight since Choynski. But Solomon compiled a disastrous record of eight wins in 31 bouts and, to add insult to injury, was exposed as a Panamanian of Syrian origin.