The Hurricane
“I don’t like it here,” Jackson said. “I want to go back to the mountains, shoot a mouse. No mouses here.” “You can’t go back now,” Freddie Brown said in a soothing voice. Then he turned to me. “Hurricane found a new interest,” he said. “He shoots rats with a twenty-two. He calls them mice.” “Mouses,” the fighter corrected him. “I shoot them between the eyes.” He seemed depressed. “He finds them on the dump,” Freddie said. When Jackson saw that Freddie wasn’t going to take him back to the mountains, he wandered away and sat down, staring at his feet.
“I don’t know where he gets the energy,” said Freddie, who looked underweight. “The hardest worker I ever seen before him is Marciano, but Marciano works steady and then he rests good. Also he eats good. Jackson don’t sleep enough and he don’t eat enough. These boys that ain’t used to good food, it don’t agree with them.” “What kind of food is he used to?” I asked. “He wants hot dogs,” Freddie said. “And also ice cream and pie. We got him to accept hamburgers as a substitute, but you got to watch him all the time. He fell out of a canoe which I had told him not to get into it, and he can’t swim good. He wants to ride a horse, he thinks he is Eddie Arcaro. And he could easy shoot himself instead of them rats.” Freddie shuddered.
14th July, 1954 -
Whitey Bimstein, Freddie Brown, and Lippy Breidbart all came into the ring with their primitive. Jackson weighed a hundred and ninety and a half, which indicated that he had overdone his self-induced training sessions. Nino Valdes’s weight was announced as two hundred and four, which showed that he had done more work than customary, but not too much. In the first round Valdes, boxing straight up, moved forward methodically and punched at Jackson’s body. Jackson, fidgeting about, did not accomplish anything.
Jackson stood up in his corner halfway through the one-minute rest period and did what gym teachers call “running in place,” at the same time waving his arms. When the bell rang, he rushed out to meet Valdes, dabbing and slapping. Valdes took aim like a bowler and knocked him through the ropes, at which point, since Jackson’s body was very nearly horizontal, the referee should have started a count, in my opinion, even though the lower strand prevented the animal’s body from touching the canvas. Valdes—“mucho nice boy,” as he would have said—turned and went to a neutral corner. The referee disentangled Jackson and upended him, and Valdes knocked him down again a couple of times. Each time Jackson fell—he did even that grotesquely, landing once sitting, once kneeling—he bounced up at the count of two or three. But the referee, because of a fairly new rule of the New York State Athletic Commission, had to stand in front of him and count eight before permitting the opponents to resume action. According to a collateral rule, if one boxer knocks the other down three times in one round, the referee has to stop the fight.
By my reckoning—and I was not alone—the second knockdown was really the third, and the referee, Al Berl, should consequently have stopped the fight there if he was going to be a precisionist. But Berl let them go to it again. Jackson was fluttering like a winged bird, making a difficult though harmless target, and Valdes, conscious of the three-knockdown rule, was following him about, eager to bring him down, even for a half second, before the round ended. Valdes has had many fights, has always finished strong, and was in good condition, but he seemed at this point to be heaving. Perhaps it was merely emotion, for he could not have anticipated a chance to knock off work so early. Several times he aimed as deliberately as if he were about to hurl a sack of sugar at a toad but missed. Finally he missed Jackson’s head with his right fist and, in recovering, hit him on the back of the neck with his forearm, as big around as a normal collar. He may simply have been trying to keep himself from falling. Anyway, Jackson’s knees hit the floor, and Berl, perhaps to compensate for the time he hadn’t counted, flung his arms wide in token of a technical knockout. Jackson promptly jumped up. In Pierce Egan’s time the victor might have offered to knock the loser out again to satisfy him, but that was before the Athletic Commission. (I know an old boxer who was awarded a fight on a foul because the other fellow was biting him. My friend was enjoying himself, so he said he would go on with the match if the fellow would promise to stop biting. The opponent promised, but he didn’t keep his word. “Maybe he hadn’t ate lately,” my man says.) They towed Valdes into the corner of the ring farthest from Jackson and, snuggling against his flank, make him hold up his right hand for the benefit of the photographers, who got a picture like one of those circus shots taken under the elephant’s trunk. From the way Valdes was grinning, he had a pretty good program lined up for the rest of the evening. Meanwhile Jackson was standing in his corner, shaking his head and refusing to leave the ring. He demanded the privilege of being hit some more. I could see Whitey and Freddie and a policeman arguing with him. At last they persuaded him to leave.
The show had drawn forty-five hundred cash customers—possibly six thousand in all, including deadheads, but even that is only a third of the Garden’s capacity, and there was no trouble getting around. The evening seemed so incomplete that I decided to visit Jackson’s dressing room, off the corridor on the north side of the arena, to hear the losing faction’s story. There were perhaps twenty colored people outside the door, including several attractive girls. As I approached, the door flew open, and Jackson, dressed and carrying a suitcase, dashed through the group and ran up the stairs that lead to an exit on 50th Street, about midway between Eighth and Ninth Avenues. “Tommy, come back!” one of the girls yelled. I followed Jackson out, not knowing quite what he might do, and ran slap into a storm, of which I had been unaware. It was a short, intense squall that had just hit the city, and it seemed to me an exaggerated reaction to the defeat of Tommy Jackson. To him, however, marching off into the rain, it may have seemed a fitting recognition of the occasion. He turned south on Ninth, and my curiosity was not strong enough to draw me more than a short distance into the rain after him. Then I began working my way back toward Eighth, taking advantage of intervening marquees and saloons for cover. At Muller’s, on the north side of the street, they have Münchner beer on tap, and I sheltered there longer than at any other place. By the time I got around to the main entrance of the Garden the storm had died to a drizzle, but there were still a couple of dozen fight people under the big marquee talking about the night’s events. I saw a second named Izzy Blanc, who had worked a pair of the minor bouts, and asked him if he knew what had happened to Jackson. “He’s walking around the Garden in the rain,” he said. “He’s been around ten times since I’ve been standing here.” We waited, and within a minute Jackson swung by—silent, head forward, looking like a priest who has found he has no vocation or like an actor hissed from the stage. I asked Izzy if he had seen the disputed knockdown, but he, a diplomat, offered a good alibi. “After the second knockdown I was on my way to the dressing room,” he said. “I had the emergency.” He meant he had been engaged to second one of the boxers in the final four-rounder, and he had sensed that it was going to be needed earlier than anybody had expected. “I had my back to the ring,” he said. The rain was easy to ignore now, and Izzy said he was going to walk up Eighth, stopping by a couple of bars where he might meet other fight people. “We’ll probably find Whitey at the Neutral Corner,” he said. The Neutral is a bar on the southwest corner of 55th and Eighth, and when we got there, Whitey was on a stool smoking a cigar and having a glass of beer. “If they want to rune boxing,” he said, “that’s the way to do it. He wrastled him to the ground just when the kid was hitting his stride.” “His what?” I said “Sure,” Bimstein said. “He was just beginning to come on good.” “How about the first three knockdowns?” I asked. “There was only one knockdown,” Whitey said. He rejected my proposition that Berl had let the animal off the time he got knocked through the ropes. “And the second thing he called a knockdown, that was a push, too,” Whitey said. He appeared calm, not bitter, and acted as if it were a matter of little moment to him if the Commission wanted to take the bread out of its own mouth. “He was just sizing the fellow up,” he said. “And the fellow trips him, and boom, Berl stops the fight.” I began to suspect we hadn’t seen the same fight that evening.
(A.J. Liebling)
