The Telephone Booth Indian - Abbott Joseph Liebling [17]
Unemployment among professional boxers antedates the Hoover depression. There are about a thousand active prize fighters in Greater New York. At the height of the winter season seven boxing clubs operate, with from six to eight bouts on the average weekly card. Only about a hundred fighters out of the available thousand can possibly hope for weekly employment. When they do work most of them get from forty to seventyfive dollars, minus one third for their managers. The average boxer lives from one fight to the next on small loans. When he gets a match, he often owes his entire purse before he enters the ring. Colored boys have even bleaker prospects than their white competitors, but there is a high percentage of Negroes in any training gym. This is because their disadvantage, staggering as it is in the boxing world, is less than in ordinary industry. Even when they cannot get a match, they sometimes have a chance to spar with a white boy in the gymnasium, being paid from three to ten dollars for their trouble.
The plight of a starving boxer is particularly cruel because by his daily exertions he increases his appetite beyond ordinary human bounds. Worse than hunger is the fear of not being able to get up his dues, the dollar a week he must pay for the privilege of using the gymnasium and showers. There are other minuscular expenses which seem huge in the eyes of a boy with no match in sight: he uses ninety cents' worth of gauze and twentyfive cents' worth of tape a week to wrap his fists for sparring matches; he buys rubbing alcohol and Omega Oil, which he applies himself if he cannot afford a dollar for a professional rubdown. In order to avoid cuts he must buy a leather headguard.
Plunged into this athletic slum, Nicholson felt sad and lonely. He was about to go back to his job at the hospital when, in the fall of 1934, his solid frame and large white smile attracted the attention of Jim Braddock, at that time making his comeback, who also trained at Stillman's. Braddock had not yet got back to the point where he could pay experienced sparring partners. He noticed that the big colored boy “took a very good punch,” a quality which Jim admired, and he offered to teach George some of the inner mysteries of the craft. Braddock got free workouts and Nicholson got free boxing lessons. Within six months Braddock was again in the big money, training for the fight in which he was to win the championship from Max Baer, and Nicholson had learned so fast that he qualified as one of Jim's paid sparring partners. Surprisingly enough, the heavyset, oldish novice had innate style. He was a natural boxer with a willingness to take punishment when it was necessary. This is not the same as being a natural fighter, which calls for a certain streak of cruelty
Nicholson still uses Stillman's as a business headquarters when he has no camp job and is running short of money. He loafs for three or four weeks after a training camp breaks up, then makes his appearance at the gymnasium, which is on Eighth Avenue between Fiftyfourth and Fiftyfifth. “More business transacts there than anyplace in the world,” he explains. Trainers and managers are always glad to see him.
“George is a good boy,” says Mannie Seamon, who is a sort of personnel director for training camps. “Some sparring partners will throw a head [butt] or throw an elbow and maybe give a man a cut so the fight will have to be postponed, but George don't cross nobody up. He boxes quick so the fighter can't stay lazy, and he keeps throwing punches so the fighter can't make lax. A good boy.”
When there is no camp job in sight George will sometimes box with a heavyweight training for a minor bout, receiving five or ten dollars for his afternoon's work, according to the fighter's prosperity. He can usually pick up fifteen or twenty dollars a week,