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

hero was neither the new cowboy star Tom Mix nor the acrobatic Doug Fairbanks. I didn’t trade face cards of the current baseball stars like the other kids on Riverside Drive. Babe Ruth could hit fifty-four homers that year (when no one else had ever hit more than sixteen in the history of the league) and I really didn’t care. The legendary Ty Cobb could break a batting record almost every time he came to the plate but no chill came to my skin at the mention of his name. That sensation was reserved for Benny Leonard.
    He was doing with his fists what the Adolph Zukors and William Foxes, and soon the L. B. Mayers and the B. P. Schulbergs, were doing in their studios and their theaters, proving the advantage of brain over brawn, fighting the united efforts of the goyim establishment to keep them in their ghettos.
    Jewish boys on their way to schule on the Sabbath had tasted the fists and felt the shoe-leather of the righteous Irish and Italian Christian children who crowded them, shouted“You killed our Christ!” and avenged their gentle Savior with blows and kicks. But sometimes the young victim surprised his enemies by fighting back, like Abe Attell, who won the featherweight championship of the world at the turn of the century, or Abe Goldstein, who beat up a small army of Irish contenders on his way to the bantamweight title. But our superhero was Benny Leonard. “The Great Benny Leonard.” That’s how he was always referred to in our household. There was The Great Houdini. The Great Caruso. And The Great Benny Leonard.
    My father gave me a scrapbook, with a picture of Benny in a fighting stance on the cover, and I recognized his face and could spell out his name even before I was able to read. In 1920 he was only twenty-four years old, just four years younger than my hero-worshiping old man, but he had been undefeated lightweight champion of the world ever since he knocked out the former champion, Freddie Welsh, in the Madison Square Garden.
    B.P. knew Benny Leonard personally. All up-and-coming young Jews in New York knew Benny Leonard personally. They would take time off from their lunch hour or their afternoon activities to watch him train. They bet hundreds and often thousands of dollars on him in stirring contests against Rocky Kansas, Ever Hammer, Willie Ritchie, Johnny Dundee, Pal Moran, Joe Welling. … He was only five-foot-six, and his best fighting weight was a few pounds over 130, but he was one of those picture-book fighters who come along once or twice in a generation, a master boxer with a knockout punch, a poised technician who came into the ring with his hair plastered down and combed back with a part in the middle, in the approved style of the day, and whose boast was that no matter whom he fought, “I never even get my hair mussed!” After his hand was raised in victory, he would run his hand back over his sleek black hair, and my father, and Al Kaufman, and Al Lichtman, and the rest of the triumphant Jewish rooting section would roar in delight, as half a century later Ali’s fans would raise the decibel level at the sight of the Ali Shuffle. Toshare in his invincibility. To see him climb into the ring sporting the six-pointed Jewish star on his fighting trunks was to anticipate sweet revenge for all the bloody noses, split lips, and mocking laughter at pale little Jewish boys who had run the neighborhood gauntlet.
    One of my old man’s pals practically cornered the market on the early motion-picture insurance business. But all through his life he would be singled out as the unique amateur boxer who not only had sparred with Benny Leonard but had actually knocked Great Benny down! Every time Artie Stebbins came to our house, my father prefaced his arrival by describing that historic event. Artie Stebbins had a slightly flattened nose and looked like a fighter. He would have gone on to a brilliant professional career—B.P. had convinced himself—except for an unfortunate accident in which