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

his opponent had died in the ring. No matter how modestly he dismissed the legendary knockdown of Benny Leonard—“I think Benny slipped …” or “I just happened to tag him right”—that knockdown remained with him as a badge of honor. My father would say with a note of awe, “He might have been another Benny Leonard!”
    But when I was going on seven, there was only one Benny Leonard; my scrapbook fattened on his victories. In those days fighters fought three or four times in a single month. Benny had been an undernourished fifteen-year-old when he first climbed into the professional ring, getting himself knocked out by one Mickey Finnegan in three rounds. A year later he was knocked out again by the veteran Joe Shugrue. But from the time he reached the seasoned age of eighteen, he had gone on to win more than 150 fights, in an era in which the lightweight division was known for its class. The Great Benny Leonard had gone to the post twenty-six times in 1919 alone, and almost every one of his opponents was a name known to the cognoscenti. As for me, I had only one ambition, to become a world champion like The Great Benny Leonard. Or rather, two ambitions, for the second was to see The Great Benny in action.
    When I asked my father if he could take me to the Joe Welling fight, he said he thought I was a little young to stay up so late. Instead he promised to tell me all about it when he came home. That night I waited for Father to bring news of the victory. In what round had our Star of the Ghetto vanquished the dangerous Joe Welling? How I wished I were in Madison Square Garden—old enough to smoke big cigars and go to the fights like my father!
    I have no idea what time Daddy got home that night. Probably three or four in the morning. Where had he gone with his pals after the fight? The Screen Club? The Astor? “21”? A dozen other speaks? The apartment of a friendly young extra girl who hoped to become a Preferred feature player? When my father finally gave me the blow-by-blow next evening, he admitted that our hero had underestimated Welling’s appetite for punishment. B.P. and the rest of the young Jewish fancy had bet that Welling would fall in ten, as Leonard had predicted. But Welling was nobody’s pushover, and he had even fought the referee who finally stopped the fight. B.P. was out five hundred smackers. He and his pals had gone back to the dressing room to see the triumphant Benny, and the fistic Star of David, still proud of his hair-comb, apologized for leading his rooters astray. B.P. told Benny about my scrapbook, and the Great B.L. promised to autograph it for me. Then the boys went out on the town to celebrate Jewish power.
    When Father told me about the Joe Welling fight and helped me paste the clippings into my bulging scrapbook, I begged him to take me with him to the next Great Benny Leonard fight. “When you’re a little older,” he promised.
    In the early weeks of 1921, he brought me the news. Great Benny had just signed to defend his title against Richie Mitchell in the Garden! Now Richie Mitchell was no ordinary contender. He was a better boxer than Joe Welling, and a harder puncher. He was three inches taller than Benny Leonard, in the prime of his youth, strength, and ability at twenty-five, and had more than held his own against all thegood ones and some of the great ones: Wolgast, Kilbane, Tendler, Dundee, Charlie White, Joe Rivers. … Only once in his impressive nine-year career had Richie Mitchell been knocked out. The Great Benny Leonard had turned the trick when I was three years old. My old man had taken the train to Milwaukee to see it, and had come back flushed with victory and victory’s rewards.
    Now it was time for the rematch, and Richie Mitchell had come to New York confident of reversing the only loss on his record. The day of the fight I boasted to my classmates, “I’m g-g-going to M-M-Madison Square Garden tonight t-to s-see the G-G-Great B-B-Benny Leonard!”