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Overview
An “exceptional” account of underdog boxer Tony Galento’s surprising 1939 victory against renowned heavyweight champion Joe Louis (The Boston Globe)
Beetle-browed, nearly bald, a head that rode his collarbones like a bowling ball returning on rails, his waist size more than half his five-foot-eight height, Two Ton Tony Galento resembled “a taxi driving away with its top down.” By all measures he stood no chance when he stepped into the ring against the Brown Bomber, Joe Louis, the finest heavyweight of his generation. But in Yankee Stadium on a June night in 1939, he entered the record books as one of the few men to put the great Louis down. For two splendid seconds he stood on the mat as the Joe Louis lay before him, champ of the world, the toughest man alive—the mythical hero of a nation little more than a year away from war. “I’ll moida da bum,” he had predicted. And though Louis was no bum, Galento was almost as good as his word.
Joe Monninger’s spellbinding portrait of a man, a moment, and an era reminds us that sometimes it is through effort—and not the end result—that people most enduringly define themselves.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781586422097 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Steerforth Press |
| Publication date: | 08/21/2012 |
| Sold by: | Penguin Random House Publisher Services |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 208 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Two Ton
One Fight, One Night
By Joseph Monninger
Steerforth Press
Copyright © 2006 Joseph MonningerAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-58642-209-7
CHAPTER 1
"FETCH" IS THE DISTANCE over which wind works on water: the longer the fetch, the greater the wave-building action. On a typical New Jersey summer day, the fetch stirs from the Carolinas, blowing northward along the coast, bringing humidity and coolness off the ocean for a mile or two inland. On certain days in June, a marine layer, extending halfway across the state, keeps the ocean counties of New Jersey cool while the inland cities and boroughs swelter. By eleven o'clock most mornings a sea breeze begins, fueled by the cooler ocean air streaming inland to replace the rapidly rising heated air over the land. When the two small fronts meet and neutralize one another, the day can become unbearably cloying, a glued heat touching everything, the air trapped in the small leaves of garden hosta and Japanese maples, the roadways turning to tar and shimmering waves of lilac gasoline spills.
* * *
ON WEDNESDAY, June 28, 1939, the weather hung close to the ground. Clouds stalled and turned the sun soft. With little wind, the sound of bees and blue jays seemed louder than usual. Later in the day, when the heat began to lift, forty million people around the United States tuned in to listen as Joe Louis, the Brown Bomber, defended his title against Tony Galento, tavernkeeper from Orange, New Jersey. Most of the nation, and a good portion of the world, halted for eleven minutes. The sound of the fight would play in sausage palaces in Orange and Asbury Park, in groceries throughout Harlem and along Lennox Street. It would play beside the 1,216-acre ash pile in Flushing Meadows that was reclaimed for the 1939 World's Fair, and it would play beside the slender, 610-foot Trylon, a triangular male phallus, and its companion, the 200-foot-wide Perisphere, global and ripe, as they declared the fair open to technology, to hope, to the future. Without intended irony, Henry Dreyfuss, a visionary architect, exhibited in Perisphere a municipal plan labeled "Democracity," a business and cultural hub called "Centertron," both entities surrounded by bedroom communities of ten thousand called "Pleasantvilles" — and the fight found people there. Exhibits of RCA's first commercial television, and the 1940 Crosley, a small, sixty-miles-to-the-gallon automobile, underlined the fair's Dawn of a New Day theme. To demonstrate the materials that would go into the "house of tomorrow," a building crew constructed a residence each day and tore it down at night, the better to reveal the modern materials-used to create a new building scheme. The foreman, reporters joked, faced firing if he ever completed the job. As he worked with the night crew, he listened to the fight.
Girls carrying cotton candy along the Jersey shore would pull their boyfriend's hands to keep going, to get away from the radio, to stop listening and pay attention. It was just a fight, the girls said. But the sound of the fight proved inescapable; it stretched from one block to the next, from one grab to the next, spreading the fight from ear to ear with painful intermissions as one released one broadcast to catch the next.
Black men arranged on front stoops listened to the announcer's description pushing through into the open street, into the night, and into their memories. Joe Louis fought for them, they understood, and for every damn sharecropping nigger in the country. King Joe had already defeated Max Schmeling, his sorest test. They sometimes raised their fists as they listened and fought beside Joe Louis, their shoulders dipping and rising for leverage like teeter-totters.
IN THE New York Times on the morning of the fight, Eleanor Roosevelt answered Miss Florence Birmingham, "a slender, somber-dressed president of the Massachusetts Women's Political Club," who had sponsored legislation aimed at keeping women out of Massachusetts public posts. Miss Birmingham felt women should not hold jobs outside the home, but Mrs. Roosevelt asked, "Do you want us to become a fascist nation which tells one when to work and how? As soon as you discriminate against one group that discrimination very often cannot be controlled and spreads to others." Miss Birmingham had charged that childless working wives formed a new plutocracy and posed a grave threat to the American system of government.
In the same edition, the real estate listings carried an ad for seasonal rentals on Lake Waramug, Connecticut, consisting of a five-room lodge with fieldstone fireplaces, two hours from Manhattan for $400. A summer cabin rental on Ossippee Lake, Maine, went for $20 a week. For $18,000 one could purchase in the heart of a lovely New England village a "genuine Colonial, 9 rooms, 3 baths, open fireplaces, oil burner, electric refrigerator, barn, garage, nearly four acres, fruit trees, and a brook."
A REPORTER for the Times wrote on the day of the fight that the massive crowds visiting the fair each day naturally moved to the right after passing through the turnstiles. The reporter had responded to claims by vendors who set up on the left of the turnstiles that their business receipts totaled half of what their neighbors on the opposite side of the turnstiles tallied. One concessionaire sought to prove his point by checking the totals on a right and left turnstile. Right: 146,688. Left: 101,696. While fair psychologists had difficulty explaining the phenomena, an old time showman saw nothing remarkable in the discrepancy. "No reason," the old showman said, "why they shouldn't use both sides, but they just won't." He labeled it human instinct, one that any good showman uses to his advantage. The reporter watched the turnstiles for an hour and asserted the fair worker had known his business.
Foot traffic at the World's Fair remained a concern, especially given that Fair Corporation president, Grover Whalen, warned that sixty thousand children under the age of twelve would get lost while visiting. He based his estimate on fifty million tourists attending the fair, and extrapolated from past statistics on fair-going. The same fifty million, translated to dollars, represented the value of the concessions program, a deal cornered by Coca-Cola. The soft drink company planned to sell its drinks for five cents a bottle.
LOUIS ARMSTRONG'S "Jeepers Creepers" played on the radio, brought into people's homes on the new FM airwaves, a development put into place a few months earlier. Radios played "South of the Border, Down Mexico Way," by Jimmy Kennedy, and "Three Little Fishies (Itty Bitty Poo)" by Saxie Dowell, and "I Get Along Without You Very Well (Except Sometimes)" by Hoagie Carmichael, lyrics by Jane Brown Thompson. The music played around the soft spill of sprinklers coming on and around the hiss of hoses spraying asphalt and white walls. Kids played buck-buck, and stoopball, and cops and robbers. After dinner people sat on screen porches and watched the fireflies, or turned on a light and read Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep, or John P. Marquand's Wickford Point, or Henry Miller's Tropic of Capricorn, or Katherine Porter's Pale Horse, Pale Rider, or Dalton Trumbo's Johnny Got His Gun, or Nathaniel West's Day of the Locust, or Thomas Wolfe's The Web and the Rock, or John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath. The kids scanned the new comic strip Superman, which had debuted in January.
If they decided to take in a movie, as ninety million citizens did each week, they could travel to the local Rialto to see Edmund Goulding direct Bette Davis in Dark Victory; James Stewart and Marlene Dietrich in Destry Rides Again; Henry Fonda and Claudette Colbert in John Ford's Drums along the Mohawk; Robert Donat and Greer Garson in Goodbye, Mr. Chips; Vivien Leigh, Clark Gable, Leslie Howard and Olivia de Havilland in Gone With the Wind; Cary Grant, Victor McLaglen, Douglas Fairbanks Jr., Joan Fontaine, and Sam Jaffe in Gunga Din; Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce in The Hound of the Baskervilles; Charles Laughton in The Hunchback of Notre Dame; Irene Dunne and Charles Boyer in Love Affair; James Stewart and Jean Arthur in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington; Cary Grant and Jean Arthur in Only Angels Have Wings; John Wayne and Claire Trevor in Stagecoach; and Judy Garland, Ray Bolger, Bert Lahr, Jack Haley, and Frank Morgan in The Wizard of Oz.
IN THE 1938 January edition of Women's Home Companion, the following brands placed ads: Swift's Premium ham and bacon, Campbell's soups, Del Monte vegetables. Del Monte dried fruits, Franco-American spaghetti, Sunkist lemons, Heinz vinegar, Wheatena, Wesson Oil, Royal Baking Powder, Jelke's Good Luck Vegetable Oleomargarine, Junket Rennet Powder, Crisco.
* * *
SOMEWHERE NEAR seven o'clock Tony Galento left Orange, New Jersey, and drove two dozen or so miles to Yankee Stadium. The main event had a ten o'clock start time. He wore a beige sports shirt, open at the collar, beneath a dove sports jacket. He resembled a dad on an evening trip to the ballyard, or a fellow stopping at the neighborhood tavern before dropping his coat and playing a game of nine ball. Cameras clicked and popped as he climbed the few steps to the stadium entrance, his tread not a fat man's though he was fleshy at 240 pounds and only five-foot-eight, his mouth working a piece of chewing gum. Muscles in his forehead flexed to the movement of his jaw. He wore no hat.
OF THE TWO fighters, Galento appeared rooted and dense, while the lighter Louis skimmed into the ballpark surrounded by his usual entourage: Chappie Blackburn, Julian Black, and John Roxborough. They comprised an all-black management team that was, perhaps, an even greater marvel than the fighter himself. They had successfully guided Louis to a championship, had brought him where only one other black man, Jack Johnson, had ever gone, and they had massaged his reputation in America with infinite care.
One of the seven rules established by Julian Black and John Roxborough when they took over Louis's contract was never to be seen gloating over the sunken body of a white man. Jack Johnson had ignored such social injunctions and had paid a heavy price as a result. After winning the crown from James Braddock in 1937, black people called to Louis, "We're depending on you," "We got another chance," and "Don't be another Jack Johnson." By referring to Jack Johnson, known to the black community as L'il Artha, they warned him not to be uppity, not to be arrogant, not to be prideful like the former heavyweight champion.
Implicit in the shouts was a warning to stay away from white women. That had been part of Jack Johnson's downfall. Though the crowd didn't know it, the warning came too late for Joe Louis, who had already been entangled with several white women, even accepting an automobile — a black Buick with a mahogany bar in the back seat and whitewall tires — from one in exchange for two ringside seats, and whatever else they settled on, for the Max Baer fight a few years earlier. The public didn't know about the liaisons, not even about the one with Olympic gold medal skater Sonja Henie, or, by some rumors, with Mae West. Louis stood before the crowd without moral stain, representing, as one pastor from a small southern church wrote in a letter to him, the ideal of complete assimilation: "Some day I feel you will be the champion, and should this come to pass, try always to be the champion of your people, so that when you are no longer champion, the world will say of you — he was a black man outside, but a white man inside, most of all in his heart."
Blacks remained careful not to "jump at the sun," a common admonition against taking too much pleasure in accomplishments, and Louis, who had accomplished more than most, proved a devoted student.
In newsreels the day after the Galento fight, Joe Louis's entrance to Yankee Stadium revealed nothing more than a snap brim hat, elegant straw, disappearing down a long funnel of men lining the way for him to the locker room. One could hardly discern a man beneath the hat; it could have been carried by a breeze. In the foreground, in the streets and in the glow of car headlights pressing around the steel edifice, countless men strained to see him, all of them in hats, all of them in suit coats and hard-soled shoes.
YANKEE STADIUM was the first ballyard to be called a "stadium" — an acknowledgment of baseball's new urban identity. Built on the model of the Yale Bowl in New Haven, it it took less than an hour to get there by subway from Times Square, just across from the old Polo Grounds. It opened in the spring of 1923, but by the mid 1930s, the time of the major Louis bouts, the bleachers had been extended. The first fight held in Yankee Stadium, Leonard v. Tendler, brought in receipts of $452,648. The fight took place on a ring erected over second base.
The construction of the stadium had been a marvel. Built on farmland granted by the British to John Lion Gardiner prior to the Revolutionary War, the stadium held sixty thousand patrons, approximately the same number as the Roman Colosseum. Yankee owner Colonel Ruppert paid $600,000 to the William Waldorf Astor estate for what had been a rough lumberyard, and the final price tag ran to $2.5 million. The stadium consumed 45,000 cubic yards of earth, one million feet of Pacific Coast fir, 20,000 cubic yards of concrete, 800 tons of reinforcing steel, 2,200 tons of structural steel, 135,000 steel casings, 400,000 pieces of maple lumber, and one million brass screws. The White Construction Company commenced work in May 1922 and finished two hundred and eighty-four workdays later. The country's first electric scoreboard kept track of the lineups and out-of-town scores. The opening day program, Yankees v. Red Sox, cost fifteen cents.
The Yankee teams of that period are legendary. Ruth, Gehrig, and later DiMaggio played all summer long. Ballgame seats in the balcony sold for $2.50. As a boxing venue, Yankee Stadium proved difficult. Not only were fights subject to weather cancellation, but they could also be difficult to see.
As Galento and Louis made their way to the stadium, scalpers worked the crowd. Face value for a prime ringside ticket stood at $27.50. The cheapest bleacher seats, unreserved, went for $5.75. A smart ticket speculator could easily double his investment. Fifteen hundred foot patrolman, seven mounted sergeants in charge of seventy mounted men, and three motorcycle sergeants with thirty-nine motorcycle patrolmen and between one hundred and two hundred plainclothesmen, a public address truck, four patrol wagons, two emergency trucks, two ambulances, and two two-way radio cars surged around Yankee Stadium. Nine captains, seven lieutenants, and 128 sergeants signed on to direct the staff, all of them working under the command of Chief Inspector Louis F. Costuma and Deputy Chief Inspector James McGoey of the Bronx. Local authorities confirmed it as the most comprehensive police precaution ever taken in connection with a local fight. For the Primo Carnera–Joe Louis fight several years before, fifteen hundred patrolmen had remained on duty throughout the night, but the Galento bout promised to be bigger.
THE CONTESTANTS entered the stadium at about the same time, their schedule prescribed by a photo shoot arranged for the fifteen hundred members of the press in attendance. Stripped to shorts — Louis in dark trunks with a gold line down his hip, and Galento in a black pair, wide and cinched up his commodious gut like a paper sack around a loaf of bread — they posed for photos in mock combat, their fists inches away from one another's chin. The difference between the men was stark: Galento, still working his gum, held his arms cocked, his right coming up in a can opener, Louis fending him away with his greater reach. Tony's belly looked, according to one reporter, "like a tidal wave of mud." His hairy chest, another said, merely needed the word WELCOME shaved in it to make a perfect doormat.
These men, who are perhaps an hour away from releasing these punches, hold still so as not to blur the photos being snapped all around them. They don't smile. Men crowd around them, circle them, frame them. The still photos misrepresent the event. Only the newsreel, with its rolling celluloid, captures the tension in the positioning of their arms, the steady beat of Galento's forehead muscles as he gnashes nervously on his gum. Like watching two fighting cocks being dangled upside down and swung together in forced intimacy, you can feel their blood rise.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Two Ton by Joseph Monninger. Copyright © 2006 Joseph Monninger. Excerpted by permission of Steerforth Press.
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