Hit Man - Brian Hughes [5]
Lois was a worker. She held down two jobs, working as a beautician and a store clerk to support her brood. “I’d come home and I’d sit down and say, ‘Lord, I’m so tired,’ and little Tommy would come up to me and hug me and kiss me and say, ‘I’m sorry, mama,’” she told Sports Illustrated. “He said some day he’d buy me all the things I never had – a house of my own and nice clothes. ‘I’m going to fill your lap up with money,’ he told me.”
That was unlikely. The American Dream seemed to have passed by inner-city Detroit, where black unemployment stood at around sixteen per cent. In the summer of 1967, the city erupted in five days of bloody rioting, sparked by a police raid on an illegal drinking dive on the west side. At the end of the carnage, forty-three people were dead, 467 were injured and more than 2,000 buildings had been burned to the ground. The “white flight” from Detroit became a stampede, businessmen and investors turned away in terror and the city slumped further into economic decline.
One of the few options open to black youths was to join a neighbourhood street gang, which at least offered some solidarity amid the menace of the ghetto. The most infamous in young Thomas Hearns’s area were the Errol Flynns and the Latin Dogs, but eventually he joined a smaller clique who called themselves the Helen Hoods, after Helen Street. Strict local codes dictated that gang members could not encroach on another’s patch. Hearns struggled to understand this logic and, after a number of near misses when chased by rivals for trespassing, gang membership quickly lost its appeal.
Some of his friends had already taken up boxing. So one day after school, ten-year-old Hearns came home and asked Lois for her permission to join the King Solomon Recreation Center’s boxing gymnasium, which was near their home. Her heart sank. Boxing summoned up nightmare visions of broken noses, swollen eyes and slurred speech. But Thomas went along with his friends Elijah and Phil Hannah and Ricky and Lester Hill and was instantly hooked. “When I walked in the gym on that first night,” he later reflected, “I fell in love with boxing.” Hearns’ nascent love affair blossomed for the next three years and he became part of the gym furniture. The confidence which the sport gave him surged into all parts of his life and helped him to settle into the city environment.
“Mom told me not to be a fighter,” Hearns later told an interviewer. “But I was the oldest boy and I would holler and carry on something awful. And when that didn’t work, I’d just stand around looking all sad-eyed until I got my way. But the thing is, man, what my mama didn’t realise, what nobody felt but me, was that I always knew I would make it to the top. I knew it. It came to me in a dream while I was sitting on a playground swing.” His education fizzled out and he never completed school. But boxing drew his full attention. “I worked and studied it. If I got beat up or did something sloppy in the gym, I’d go home and work on it until I got it right. Man, it was hard work. It’s got to become – um, something you do without thinking about it – instinct.”
If Detroit was a gang town, it was also a boxing town. Two of the greatest champions the sport had ever produced – some would say the greatest – had perfected their trade there. First came Joe Louis, the great “Brown Bomber,” like Hearns a country boy whose family fled north to escape rural poverty. His flashing fists cut a swathe to the heavyweight title, which he went on to defend twenty-five times, a record that may never be surpassed. Louis was succeeded, perhaps even superseded, by Sugar Ray Robinson, whose name became a byword for boxing brilliance. Robinson had it all: grace, courage, power, speed, and the looks of a movie star. Any young boxer had only to ask, and his elders would bore him for hours with stories of the prowess of these two legends of the ring.
After a couple of years, however, Frank Hill, the trainer at King Solomon and a man young Thomas liked and respected, retired, and so Hearns