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By Root 393 0

the unit’s organized boxing squad, and as a muscular young athlete in good shape, he began fighting in service bouts as a 160-pound middleweight. He was now nineteen, and thanks to being physically more mature, a year older, and with regular workouts, conditioning, and better chow, had soon grown into and was fighting as a light heavyweight (175 pounds). He soon caught on to the racket. “Once I started winning I started getting steaks and pork chops stolen from the Officers’ Club. My fellow soldiers began to see me as a money-making enterprise.”

Soldiers, and especially other gunners and his buddies, not only backed him with cash in side bets but volunteered as sparring partners, medics as cut men, others as corner men, trainers, managers, and cheering squads. Gambling picked up and money changed hands. Basilone was becoming a popular local character on whom a man might make a buck.

There were organized bouts twice a month, and Basilone won them. Never lazy, he trained hard, running up hills or in the soft, yielding sand of the shoreline of Manila Bay. Parallels to the much later and fictional Rocky Balboa are irresistible. For all Basilone’s casual, card-playing ways, there is an impressive discipline about the slimly educated youngster, the newly minted soldier. One weekend when a fellow soldier named Smits was arrested for being intoxicated, Basilone and some buddies conjured up a scheme to break him out of the drunk tank of a Filipino police station by ramming a stolen truck into the prison wall early on a Sunday morning, the clever reasoning being that the cops, being Roman Catholics, would be at their devotions and attending mass. Whether the Sunday-morning ploy was Basilone’s or a group decision, they got Smits out and weren’t caught themselves. The plan worked.

Following two knockouts in Basilone’s first three winning formal bouts, the brass began coming by to see him fight, even MacArthur on one occasion stopping by to wish him luck. He eventually ran his record to eighteen wins, no losses. According to Cutter and Proser, the adulation went slightly to Basilone’s head, and he started thinking of his undefeated record and himself as a sort of “mascot” for the general, someone to whom MacArthur, with his ego, could justifiably point in an otherwise unimpressive little command. Reputedly, word of Basilone’s ability trickled back to the States, and offers to turn professional came in from New York fight managers and promoters, though no one I spoke with in Raritan could provide any names or details about what probably was just wishful thinking. But a fighting nickname, “Manila John,” seems to have stuck. And MacArthur was pleased as the kid’s perfect ring record improved, with a big possible fight against a Navy boxer coming up.

It was always an occasion, the whores and the saloons especially rejoicing, when the fleet sailed into Manila, and with Army and Navy rivalry heightening, officers trading boasts and placing bets, they staged Basilone’s last Army bout, matching him as a soldier against a formidable American Navy tar, “Sailor Burt,” a tough machinist’s mate, “a fucking Dane . . . a shoveler of shit,” as the troops rudely put it. Manila John’s buddies placed their own bets, warning him he’d “better win” or they’d be broke till next payday. He tried, prudently, to warn them off. Sailor Burt was tough and Manila John could guarantee nothing. But the soldiers didn’t listen.

The day of the big fight arrived, and with it a lunch that wasn’t the usual dreary mess hall chow for the gladiator, but a steak, French fries, sliced Bermuda onion, topped off by apple pie, and steaming black coffee. With a cheering, foot-stamping audience of sailors and soldiers, including the brass from both services, Basilone and Burt went at it, trading knockdowns, both men nearly out. In the end it was a twelve-rounder and yet another knockout, as “Manila John” won again, running his record to 19-0. His commanding officer was jubilant, and even the disappointed admiral came back to the lockers to congratulate the foe, the Army boy who