NOBODY LIKES A FAT JOCKEY

The thing I remember the most is the smell of his cigar. All the way down the hallway. Long before I reached his office.

The door was open and I walked inside.

He was sitting there behind a desk, silver-haired, wearing a tattered, off-the-rack suit and the cigar was planted smack in the middle of his mouth. He had maybe the coldest eyes I had ever seen in my life. I don’t remember any color to them. They were just cold, cold steel.

There was an old-timer in a chair next to the desk. He was small and frail and white-haired and had a soft-brimmed hat sitting on the back of his head. He was just then lighting his cigar.

“My name is Rocky Scarpati, I called you,” I said to the guy behind the desk.

The three of us looked like we could have spilled out of a Norman Rockwell painting, the guy behind the desk, the old-timer and me. There I was standing in the doorway, wearing a Navy blue beret that didn’t have one of those little tassels on the top. My best friend’s dog had chewed it off, so there was just a hole where the tassel should be. Besides that, I was wearing a Navy P-coat, white Levi’s and low-cut tennis sneakers.

“So you wanna be a fighter,” the guy with the steel eyes said. The cigar was still stuck in the middle of his mouth. He didn’t take it out to talk. He just talked around it. He sounded like a real thug.

“Yeah, I wanna be a fighter,” I answered, imitating the dude’s thug talk.

You remember all that stuff Shakespeare used to write about the world being a stage and all of us are playing parts? Well, I kind of believed it. And I was getting a real rush out of the part I was playing that day. You see, the guy behind the desk was Sam Silverman, Subway Sam Silverman. He was a fight promoter. I guess he got the nickname because he did business in Boston. I mean, if there’s one thing Boston is known for, besides beans and the Tea Party, it’s the subway. Hey, they even wrote a song about it. You remember, Charlie gets on the MTA and he doesn’t have the fare to get off, so he spends the rest of his life riding ’neath the streets of Boston. And did he ever return? No, he never returned. His fate is still unlearned. . . Good stuff. The Kingston Trio did it.

I’m sure there was another reason old Sam Silverman got the nickname Subway, though. He never did anything above board in his life. So Subway was a real good nickname for him.

Well, anyway, as I’m sure you’ve got the impression by now, I was there to talk to Subway Sam Silverman about becoming a prizefighter. And that’s the part I was playing, a tough kid from the hood who was lured to the violence of the ring. That was the reason for the beret and the P-coat, to look tough.

“Have a seat, kid,” Sam said, gesturing to one of two hard-wood chairs in front of his desk. They were the kind with the rounded arms on the sides.

“How old are you?” Silverman asked.

“Nineteen.”

Silverman’s office was in Boston’s North end. I was from Brockton, 20 miles south, known for its shoe factories and Rocky Marciano. Rocky was born and brought up in Brockton and was the only retired, undefeated heavyweight champ in the history of the fight game. I guess Brockton didn’t have so much to be proud of by the time I went to see Silverman in the winter of 1967, though. Both the shoe factories and Rocky Marciano had gone south by that time. The shoe factories left to go where the labor was cheaper and Marciano had retired to a sunnier climate. By 1967, Brockton wasn’t much more than a bedroom for Boston and, as far as the fight game was concerned in Brockton, it was dead. Brockton didn’t even have a gymnasium for boxers.

If you were going to make a fight movie, Boston’s North End was the perfect setting. It was the Italian section. When I was young, they had a commercial on television where a little kid, Anthony, was shown running through the streets of Boston’s North End, while his fat, old Italian mama called: “Anthony!” It was time for dinner.

“Wednesday is Prince Spaghetti day,” the announcer would say.

Years later, this Italian restaurant in the North End – the North End was full of Italian restaurants and bakeries and push carts selling vegetables and stuff – did a take-off of the Prince Spaghetti commercial. Anthony was all grown up at this point and they said he was eating his spaghetti at Poccari’s Restaurant. Only, at Poccari’s, it was spaghetti day every day, not just Wednesday.

Besides Anthony; his fat, old Italian mama and Pocarri’s, the North End had the Boston Garden. They’ve torn down the original Garden since, but it was there that the Boston Celtics won all kinds of championships on the parquet floor. The legendary parquet floor, everybody always called it. It’s also where Bobby Orr scored his famous goal flying through the air to win a Stanley Cup for the Boston Bruins and it’s where Paul Pender won a Boston decision over the one-and-only Sugar Ray Robinson. Twice. It happened twice. A Boston decision is when a fighter from Boston wins a decision not because he out-boxed the other guy, but because he was fighting in Boston. Subway Sam had promoted both those fights. I guess old Sugar Ray found out the hard way what it was like to do business with The Subway.

Well, anyway, Boston Garden was right down there in the North End. I had parked my old, beat-up Fairlane 500 in a parking lot and walked across Causeway Street and down Canal Street. It was raw, cold and dark. Even if it wasn’t a dreary day, it still would have been dark. There were overhead train tracks and a highway overpass blocking the sun in that neighborhood. It was always dank there, even on a sunny day. I walked down Canal Street, which was not a very long street. About half way down, there was a sign in a second-floor window: Sam Silverman Boxing Enterprises.

“How much to you weigh?” Silverman asked me.

“One hundred forty-seven pounds.”

Silverman kind of grunted and said: “Good welterweight.”

I knew what he meant; 147 pounds is a good weight for a boxer to be if he’s going to be a welterweight. That was back in the days when they had only eight weight divisions. It was before they came up with junior-middleweight and super-middleweight and cruiserweight and all of those half-assed divisions. So it was good in those days for a fighter to be at the top of his weight class. A hundred and forty-seven pounds was the limit for a welterweight. I mean, you could be 136 pounds and still be fighting welterweight.

“Where you from?” Silverman asked.

“Brockton.”

Silverman kind of chuckled and said, “Another Rock from Brockton, huh?”

He chuckled, but his eyes didn’t change. They remained the same cold steel.

I nodded.

“Scarpati,” Silverman said as if he were trying to place the name. “There was a Tony Scarpati, a heavyweight, fought a ways back. I think he mighta been from Brockton, too. He your old man?”

“Yeah, he was my father.”

“How’s he doing?” Silverman asked.

“He passed away a long time ago, heart attack.”

“Sorry to hear that. He was a good puncher.”

You’d never guess Anthony Scarpati was my old man by looking at us. I had a very pronounced chin, not his square jaw. Actually, my looks came from my mother. She had a very prominent chin. It worked for her though. I have no idea how much my nose looked like my father’s. I never saw my old man’s nose before it was broken three or four times. But I’m sure it was never like mine. I had one of those aquiline noses, you hardly ever see a fighter with an aquiline nose. You know, it had a very prominent bridge. And my eyes were blue. My old man’s were dark brown.

It didn’t bother me so much that I didn’t look so much like a prize fighter. Hell, in the movies you saw actors playing fighters all the time who didn’t look much like one. There was John Garfield in Body and Soul and Paul Newman in Someone up There Likes Me.

“You got a job, do you work?” Silverman asked.

Sometime during the conversation, he had the cigar in his hand, but nothing changed. He still sounded like a real thug.

“Yeah.”

“Where do you work?”

“The Herald-Traveler.”

I thought maybe I detected those colder-than-steel eyes light up a little bit, sort of dance. I thought maybe Sam figured I might have some influence on the paper’s Sports Department and I could get publicity for his boxing shows. Shit, I was a general clerk in the Classified Advertising Department. Very big deal. I couldn’t do anything for him.

“Oh, yeah, what do you do there?” he asked.

“I’m a general clerk in the Classified Advertising Department.”

It didn’t seem to bother him, my only being a general clerk. His eyes still had a hint of a sparkle.

“Good job,” he said. “Good place to work.”

It was just about that time that another guy appeared in the doorway. He was a heavy-set greasy looking dude wearing a dark blue pin-striped suit with one of those jerseys that have three buttons on the top. The buttons were undone exposing a field of dark chest hairs climbing through the jersey. His suit pants were pulled up very high, somewhere in the vicinity of his chest. There was a huge stogie, even bigger than Sam’s, planted in the middle of his mouth. I was feeling out of place. It seemed like smoking a cigar was a prerequisite for Sam’s office.

“This is Johnny Dunn,” Sam said. “He’s gonna be your trainer. Johnny just flew in from Philly this morning. He was there with Tommy Wilkins to fight Curtis Cokes.”

I was no great boxing fan, but I had at least heard of Tommy Wilkins. I knew the name Curtis Cokes very well. He was the welterweight champ of the world. It was pretty impressive that Johnny Dunn trained a dude who just fought Curtis Cokes. I had seen Cokes on television. He could box. I mean, really box. He could hit a little bit, too. I kind of wondered, but didn’t ask, why Subway Sam was hooking me up with such a big-time trainer.

Besides the pin-striped suit, the jersey with the three buttons and all, Johnny Dunn had a very phony looking hairpiece. I don’t know what it is about fight trainers; the ones who wear rugs wear the worst rugs in the world. And the biggest fight trainers, the ones who have the big-time fighters and ought to be able to afford the best hairpieces, wear the phoniest rugs of all. I’ll tell you, it’s as if fight trainers are so cheap they don’t want to invest money to look like they have hair unless everybody knows they’ve invested money to look like they have hair. Anyhow, Johnny Dunn hadn’t invested his money without everyone knowing it. There wasn’t any doubt Johnny Dunn was wearing a rug.

When Sam introduced us, I stood to shake Johnny Dunn’s hand and told him it was a pleasure meeting him. He responded with a fairly firm handshake and a grunt. We both sat down there in front of the Subway’s desk.

Johnny Dunn had a way of making you not like him right away.

“So what happened to Tommy?” Sam asked Johnny.

“I couldn’t get the nigger to the gym and I couldn’t keep him in his room,” Johnny exploded. “All he wanted to do run around and pick up broads. I never saw a guy pick up so many fucking broads in my life.”

See what I mean about Johnny having that way about him?

Johnny went on cursing about Tommy Wilkins for two or three minutes straight without giving it a rest. Hell, he practically didn’t take time to breathe. Two or three minutes might not seem very long, but you try it. Try cursing about someone for two or three minutes without stopping. It’s hard to think of enough bad things to say about somebody for so long.

Johnny was making such a big deal about being angry at Tommy Wilkins; I wondered he was in trouble with Sam because of the loss. Silverman probably would have come up with some very hot-shit promotions if Wilkins had whipped Cokes’ ass. Tommy’s losing probably cost Subway a bundle. Anyhow, it didn’t seem fair to me that Johnny was coming down so hard on Tommy Wilkins. It must have taken a lot of wins for Wilkins to get a fight with the champ. The fight against Curtis Cokes was probably the biggest payday Johnny Dunn ever had working a corner. Johnny should have shown a little more respect for Tommy Wilkins.

When Johnny got through bad-mouthing Wilkins, Silverman said to him, “Rocky here is the kid I told you about. We’ve been sitting here chatting. He wants to be a fighter. I want you to train him.”

Johnny turned to me and said, “So you wanna be a fighter.”

I felt like telling him I had already done this dance with Sam, but I said, “Yeah. I wanna be a fighter.”

Then Johnny told me how easy it was going to be. No shit, it blew my mind, too.

“There’s a lot of money to be made in the fight game, kid, and it’s easy money. I’ll show you. You’ll never go in there slugging. You win fights by boxing. . .”

Johnny was out of the chair and on his feet now. His fists were up in front of him.

“. . .Pop, pop, pop,” he said as he boxed an imaginary opponent. He threw a jab, another jab and then another one and then a right cross and a left hook, all in slow motion.

“There won’t be any reason to get hurt,” he said. “Hell, there won’t even be any reason to get hit. The first thing I’ll teach you is defense.”

Johnny was handing out the-best-offense-is-a-good-defense crap! Not what I wanted to hear!

“The fight game is eassssy,” Johnny said.

It wasn’t the kind of pep talk I wanted. It wasn’t in my script, the one in my head. I didn’t want Johnny telling me it was going to be easy. I wanted to hear the kind of pep talk Kirk Douglas’s trainer gave him in The Champion. There was another actor who didn’t look like a fighter, but played a fighter in the movies; Kirk Douglas in The Champion. He had a pronounced chin like I did. Except I didn’t have a cleft on my chin the way old Kirk did. Anyhow, I wanted to hear the pep talk about how I’d sweat and suffer and about how I’d get my nose bloodied and maybe broken and how I’d get fast and strong and in shape and then I’d have my first fight. About how I’d keep working and sweating and suffering, but I’d put together a string of victories in a string of cities, fighting for peanuts, and then I’d get my big chance against a name fighter. That would be the test and, if I passed it, I’d get a shot at the title. But, no, Johnny didn’t tell me any of that suffering stuff. He had to say it was going to be easy.

If there was so much money in the fight game and it was so easy, I wanted to ask, how come everybody wasn’t a fighter? And was it so easy for Tommy Wilkins when he was getting the shit kicked out of him in Philly, was it? But I didn’t ask either of those things.

After Johnny’s pep talk and his shadow boxing, he said he’d meet me at the New Garden Gym the next day at 2 o’clock. The New Garden Gym was just a block away on Friend Street.

Before I left the office, the old-timer who had been sitting next to Subway’s desk took me around the room, showing me all the pictures of all the fighters that cluttered Silverman’s walls.

The old-timer had a story about every one of them, too. He made it sound like every one of them could have been a great fighter. But each guy’s career came to an abrupt end when this dude or that one beat the hell out of him. The fighter in the picture lost heart after being knocked out or getting the shit kicked out of him. I kind of wondered why Sam didn’t have a picture of Rocky Marciano up there. You know; a guy who never lost heart because he never was beaten.

I guess Sam just wanted losers on his wall.