The Harder They Fall by Budd Schulberg Page B

was such an animal.’
    As we walked along the volcanic career of Danny McKeogh registered its peaks and valleys in my mind.
    He never took a drink until the night he fought Leonard. Danny was a beautiful gymnasium fighter, a real cutie from way back. He never made a wrong move in a gym. He wasn’t a cocky kid ordinarily, but he was sure he could take Leonard. Nobody had done it yet, not even Lew Tendler, but Danny felt sure. He studied Leonard in all his fights and even went to see movies of him. Kind of a nut on the subject, like Tunney with Dempsey, only with a different ending. After all the build-up, Leonard knocked him cold in one minute and twenty-three seconds of the first round. Got his nose busted in the bargain. That was curtains forDanny as a fighter. Almost curtains in other ways too. For the next couple of years he gave a convincing imitation of a man who was trying to drink up all the liquor there was in New York.
    Then, one day, hanging around the gym with a bad breath and a three-day growth – it was up on 59th Street at the time – he happened to see a skinny little East-Side Jewish boy working out with another kid. Right away Danny decided to get a shave and sober up. It was love at first sight. The boy was Izzy Greenberg, just a punk skinny sixteen-year-old kid then, training for a newsboy tournament. Danny must have seen himself all over again in that kid. Anyway he stayed on the wagon. He worked with Izzy every day for a year or more, boxing with him, showing him, very patient, showing him again – and there’s no better teacher in the world than Danny when he’s sober. Even drunk he still makes more sense than almost anybody around.
    Danny brought Izzy right to the top. He looked like another Leonard, one of those classy Jewish lightweights that keep coming up out of the East Side. Three years of consistent wins and they’ve got the championship. They travel around the world, picking up easy dough, meeting the Australian champion, the Champion of England, the Champion of Europe, which is not as much trouble for Izzy as slicing matzoh balls with a hot knife. Then they come back to the big town, and Izzy defends his title in the old Garden against Art Hudson, a slugger from out West. Danny, who always backed his fighters heavily old-fashioned that way – had his friends cover all the Hudsonmoney they could find. They only found ten thousand dollars. Sixty thousand if Danny lost. But Danny liked the bet, called it easy money.
    The first round looked like curtains for Hudson. Izzy left-handed him to death, and that jab of his wasn’t just scoring points; it could carve you up like a steak knife. Thirty seconds before the end of the round Hudson went down. Izzy danced back to his corner, winking at Danny, nodding to friends around the ring, waving a glove at the large Jewish following that was letting itself go. He’s all ready to go in and get dressed. And Danny’s already thinking of how to parlay the ten grand. But somehow or other Hudson was on his feet at nine and rushing across the ring. He was really a throwback to Ketchell and Papke. All he knew about boxing was to keep getting up and keep banging away. Izzy turned toward him coolly, did a little fancy footwork and snapped out that fast left to keep Hudson away. But Hudson just brushed it aside and banged a wild left to the body and a hard roundhouse right to the jaw.
    Izzy was out for twenty minutes. His jaw had been broken in two places. A reporter who was there in the dressing room told me Danny was crying like a baby. He rode with Izzy up to the hospital and then he went out and had a drink. That time he stayed drunk for almost three years.
    Then one day at the Main Street gym out in LA, where Danny looks like any other flea-bitten bum, he spots another little kid, Speedy Sencio. Same thing all over again. On the wagon. Fills the little Filipino full of everything he knows. Cops the bantamweight crown and everything’s copaseticuntil