Ghosts of Manila - Mark Kram [35]
For certain, Joe wasn’t ready for bronze. His left hook looped, and his feet did not talk to each other. “You’re fuckin’ hopeless,” Durham shouted. “I’m losing my voice with you. Go home, get some rest, come back and show me why anybody should be backin’ you with their money.” Slowly, Joe began to gain some definition as a puncher. And he could handle severe punishment. The best workmen in Philly drilled him with shot after shot, and he absorbed them like a heavy bag. Yank never had to tell him to stay in on a guy; the ring was a phone booth to him. “That’s it!” Yank would yell. “Stick to him like chewin’ gum. But, hey, cocksucker, throw punches. This is your life. You’re gonna live or die on his chest. You wanna be a catcher, join a baseball team!” So it went, day after day, in the early days in the gym and through his first tentative fights; ten knockouts, one TKO. “We’re gonna step you up,” Yank said.
It was a risky step, given that the opponent was Oscar Bonavena, who fancied himself the next Luis Firpo of the Argentine, the Wild Bull of the Pampas. All agreed that Oscar was wild, certainly a bull. Where they split was whether or not he was a fighter, or even human. His punches were an abomination, slung out as if attached to barbells. He didn’t move, burdened by an ample belly and ankles as big as softballs; his specialty was, with jaw sticking out, the collision rush. In street clothes, though, he could pass for a frayed Italian tenor. In and out of the ring, he was a bane to owners, an untutored oaf whose only desire was to leave the United States with 14 million pesos and enough left over for five estancias just like Firpo. After a fight, Oscar liked to scratch figures on an envelope, rather than talk about the fight he had just made. What was that about? “He’s a banker,” Charlie Goldman, the little man who had trained Marciano, said. “He doesn’t care about sense, just cents.”
But Bonavena had unlimited stamina and never quit. He was twenty pounds heavier than Joe, and he used it. This was Joe’s first big fight, a Garden affair that was supposed to be an escalator to the marquee. Bonavena dropped him twice in the second round, and shareholders back in Philly were ready to call their brokers. The two early knockdowns prefigured what would be a problem for Joe through his career, extreme vulnerability to punches early on until he could segue into a pulsating rhythm; he needed time, sweat. For a while, it looked as if Oscar were just one big horn flipping, then playing with an object. Joe steadily regained his composure, built up volleys through the fight and dug home the hardest shots, causing Oscar to wince and brake his rushes. Joe survived—that’s all you ever did against Oscar—to take a split decision.
“You did fine,” Yank told him.
“Is that all?” Joe asked.
“What? You want a bonus.”
“I thought I was pretty good.”
“You did good to stay off your ass,” Yank said.
Durham was tickled by his resilience; now the sculpture had a face, a big puncher with a chin. Joe knocked out Doug Jones, retired him, then went on to the Canadian-Croatian George Chuvalo, with a jutting rock of a jaw, a face with heavy bones and a nose that told you what he had been doing too long. Before a larger Garden crowd, George came away with a face split like a cantaloupe that had been too long in the sun. Joe burrowed in and took George apart piece by piece, and what was left of him was stretched on his dressing room table, his chest heaving while blood flowed from the sponge going over him. The doctor worked on a cut, shaped like a scimitar, below his right eye, just a slit ready to burst; later the cheekbone was found to be fractured and needed surgery. A gash was slashed on his scalp, and another cut was outside his other eye.
“He didn’t take all that much punishment,” his manager Irv Ungerman, said, looking down on him.
“What the hell you call this?” George mumbled.
“George’s gonna be rich,” he said. “A trail horse. Every kid on