The Telephone Booth Indian - Abbott Joseph Liebling [16]
George was born in Mantua, where his father was a teamster. Later his family moved to Yonkers, and there he played tackle on the highschool football team. His parents have moved back to Mantua since George left school, but he has a brother who still lives in Yonkers, “a govament man,” he says, “WPA.” One of George's earliest ambitions was to be a prize fighter, because he was always reading about boxing in the newspapers. The beginning of his true career was delayed, though. At Yonkers High he got to thinking he might be a lawyer. He abandoned this project for a peculiar reason. “I got out of the habit of trying to study law,” he says, “on account of I saw I couldn't talk fast enough.” For a few years he was bemused. He had got to thinking of himself as a professional man and he couldn't seem to readjust. Even today most of his associates believe he is a college graduate. The misconception, based upon his polished manner, is strengthened by the fact that he played for three seasons on a colored professional football team called the AllSouthern Collegians. The Collegians accepted him without a diploma, George explains now. He quit his books after the third year of high school and took a job as porter in a hospital, playing professional football on autumn Sundays. He got the boxing fever again when he was twentythree, an unusually advanced age for a debut.
George then weighed 243 pounds, which was far too much for his height. “I was so fat that one time I missed and fell right down,” he says. “But I always throwed a good right hand anyway.” He won two amateur bouts at smokers, both on knockouts, and then lost a decision to a fellow named Moe Levine in a big amateur show in Madison Square Garden. “I bounced him around, but I didn't know enough to finish him,” George says now with a hint of cultured regret. A strange accident removed him from the ranks of the amateurs. He entered the 1934 Daily News Golden Gloves Tournament and was rejected because of a heart murmur. Soon after, he went up to Stillman's Gymnasium, where he met a matchmaker and got himself a preliminary bout on a card at a small professional club. The State Athletic Commission doctor found his heart action normal. Once he had fought this professional bout, he was no longer an amateur and after the fight, for which he got twentyfive dollars, he hit a long spell of unemployment. “I was so broke I didn't have no money,” he says.
It is much easier for an amateur boxer to make a living than it is for a professional. Almost every night of the week several amateur shows are held in the city. Like bingo games and raffles, they are a recognized means of raising money for fraternal organizations. In most shows there are four competitors in each class. They meet in threeround bouts, with the winners competing in a final match later in the evening. There is a standard scale of remuneration. The winner of the final receives a seventeenjewel watch, which may be sold in the open market for fifteen dollars. The runnerup gets a sevenjewel model, for which he can obtain five or six dollars. The two losers in the first bouts receive cheap timepieces known in amateurboxing circles as “consolations.” They have a sale value of two dollars. A preliminary boy “in the professionals” gets forty dollars for a bout, but opportunities for employment are much more limited. Moreover, a State Athletic Commission rule restricts a professional to one bout every five days, whereas an amateur is free to compete every night.
Jim Howell, a Negro who is a frequent colleague of Nicholson as a sparring mate in the Louis camp, had a long career as an amateur. He remembers one week when he won four seventeenjewel watches. “And it's funny,” Howell says, “there's very few even