Cinderella Man (5 page)

Gould barely heard the bell over the booing.

 

“An embarrassment! That's what it was. An embarrassment.”

Gritting his teeth, Joe Gould forced himself to stand quietly and listen to the rantings of Jimmy Johnston, the big-suit promoter whose balls he'd squeezed to get Braddock that Tuffy Griffiths shot, not to mention the world title match against Tommy Loughran in Yankee Stadium.

Barely thirty minutes ago, the referee had stopped the fight. Announcing “enough was enough,” he'd declared it a “no contest,” and threw any further rulings into the hands of the state boxing commissioners, which meant Joe Gould's worst-case scenario had just come true.

“Where's the purse?” asked Gould, trying like hell to hold his temper in front of this makeshift tribunal, which included Johnston, the ref from tonight's bout, and two state commissioners who'd been in the audience.

“I wouldn't have to tell you that if you gave a shit about your fighter,” Johnston said.

Sitting behind the table with his fellow commissioners, Johnston sucked on his cigar and blew out a fat white puff, like Zeus making clouds for the mortals below him. It joined the smoke already hanging in the armory's backroom office. Mount Olympus on the cheap.

“Okay,” said Gould. Time to beg. He opened his fists, held his palms to the gods. “So he's fighting hurt. Maybe you got fighters who can afford to rest a month between fights.”

“Christ, he hardly gets a punch in anymore. Fights getting stopped by referees…He's pathetic.”

Gould closed his open palms, made two angry fists. Johnston had always thought Braddock was a bum, that he'd never amount to much. Now the prick had his validation. With his own eyes, Johnston had witnessed the lowest moment in Jim's career. That still didn't give him the right to call his friend pathetic. Gould was about to tell the promoter to shove the purse right up his ass when Johnston told Gould to wait outside the room for their decision. Ten minutes later, Johnston came out. Gould held his breath.

“He was no draw tonight,” said Johnston, walking with Gould down the dingy hallway. “And you watch. Next week the gate will be down by half. A fighter like that keeps people away.”

Gould stopped at the door to the locker room. Braddock was inside showering off blood.

“We're revoking his license, Joe,” said Johnston, just like that. “Whatever Braddock was gonna do in boxing, I guess he's done it.”

 

Outside the Armory, a single dim lightbulb cast the parking lot in deep shadows. By now, all the jeering fight fans had cleared out and the paved lot was all but abandoned by a few isolated cars. The ref and the two boxing commissioners moved toward those vehicles and climbed inside. Johnston was the last to leave.

With a bang, the amory's weathered back door swung open, bouncing off the dirty brick wall. Jim Braddock strode swiftly across the parking lot, Joe Gould struggling to keep up.

“Mr. Johnston,” called Braddock. He stepped up to Johnston and planted himself.

Johnston turned. “Jim.”

“What's going on?”

The big man frowned at Braddock then turned his eyes to Gould's round face. “You didn't tell him?”

“Yeah. I told him,” said Gould. “But he wanted to hear it from you.”

Johnston's eyes went back to Braddock. The boxer looked like a walking bruise, his right hand hanging by his side a sickly purple color, swelled and deformed and probably six months away from being able to open a pickle jar, let alone deliver a professional-level punch. One pathetic look from Johnston said it all.
It's over, Jimmy. Get it through your head.

But Braddock refused. “I broke my hand, okay? You don't see me crying about it. I don't know what you got to complain about. We did that boondock circuit for you. I didn't quit on you.” Braddock's desperate look turned deadly serious. “I didn't always lose. And I won't always lose again.”

Johnston said nothing.

“I can still fight.”

When Johnston spoke again, his bluster was gone, his voice quiet. “Go home.”

“I can still fight.”

“Go home to Mae and the kids, Jim.”

Then Johnston climbed into his car and drove away. Braddock stood there and watched, wondering why the parking lot had suddenly turned into quicksand. For some reason, he couldn't move his legs and his lungs had trouble taking in air.

Then a firm hand grasped his shoulder. The usually garrulous Joe Gould guided Jim back inside without a word. The locker room was a stink hole, so Gould led his boxer to the armory's arena, where the low house-
lights cast long shadows over the empty ring. Gould sat Jim down amid the deserted bleachers and searched for a sturdy piece of wood. When he found a section of broken fence board, he sat next to Jim and began taping the board to Jim's smashed and shattered hand.

“We'll splint it with this until you get to the hospital,” said Gould.

Jim said nothing, just stared at the floor.

Gould tried to concentrate on the wrapping, but he couldn't keep his mind from racing—or his mouth from running. “Maybe I shouldn't have pushed you so hard,” he muttered. “We shouldn't have gone to California that time…”

Jim didn't answer. He didn't look up.

Gould kept wrapping, and the memories started coming, crashing over him in waves…all the fights, all the crowds, all the dreams and hopes…

“Joe Gould, you listen now, I am going to hold you responsible for the development of this fighter…”

William Muldoon, 1928. His words had come with a sternly pointed finger. The distinguished, gray-haired boxing commissioner had seen Braddock knock Griffiths out in two at the Garden and had ordered Gould to appear before him with Jimmy in tow.

“He must not be rushed along too rapidly. But with a little weight on him, I predict he'll some day win the world's heavyweight championship…”

The eighty-three-year-old had grabbed Braddock's hand and shook it vigorously that day. But that day had been a long time ago. Too long. Muldoon now rested in a windswept grave in Tarrytown, New York—as dead and buried as his golden prediction about Braddock's future.

Gould cleared his hoarse throat. “Jimmy, listen, your legs are heavy, the body lets you know…”

“Don't.”

Gould's insides twisted. He hated this. The commissioners were forcing him to KO his own fighter, but he knew they were right. He couldn't put a washed-up boxer in the ring with a real contender—not if he wanted his man to come out alive. He had to get Jim to understand—

“We're not fighting for the championship anymore. Hell, we're not even fighting for cash. And now you don't even tell me when your hand's broken before going into a fight. I'm telling
you
, Jim, not them, I'm telling you, you're too slow…It's over.”

Jim said nothing, so Gould kept talking. “You'd change things, sure, who wouldn't, but sometimes you just can't, you know, end of story.”

Joe paused, waited for Jim to say something—to yell, scream, stamp his feet, give some kind of reaction. After a full silent minute, the manager asked, “You waiting to see how long I can keep quiet again?” Gould tried to smile, until Jim looked up. He finally got his boxer's reaction. Jim's cheeks were streaked with tears…

“Hey, you! Wanna earn a couple of dollars?”

“Yeah, sure, mister.”

For a flashing moment, Gould had gone back to 1926, when he'd called over a lanky kid shadowboxing in a corner of Joe Jeannette's gym.

“Listen, kid, how about you climb into that ring and spar a few with my fighter?”

Gould's top-ranked welterweight, Harry Galfund, was supposed to have knocked the kid's block off—a
little pre-sale show for the Hoboken beer barons who'd offered to buy Galfund's contract. Only Galfund couldn't get near the kid, who kept buzzing around the ring like an annoying little bee, landing stinging jabs and crosses that made Gould's welterweight fume.

“You got a manager, kid?” Gould had asked the kid at the end of the humiliating match.

“No. My brother does my business. He's a plumber. Hey, aren't you Joe Gould?”

“Yeah, and if your brother agrees, maybe I can take over the job…”

Even now, seven years later, Gould didn't regret taking on the job of managing Jimmy Braddock. Even now, as he looked into Jim's devastated face.

“Get me another one, Joe.”

“Jimmy—”

“Got to have it. We're down to our last buck.”

“What's done is done.”

“Not always.”

“No. Not always…but this time. I'm sorry, Jimmy.”

After all they'd been through together, from that Saturday in 1926 when they'd signed their first contract to getting a shot at the world title; from headlining Madison Square Garden to being jeered at in the stale air of this low-rent dump, Gould really was sorry. They'd weathered the cheers and boos, the praise and accusations in the best possible way—as the best of friends.

That's when it hit Gould. The boxing commissioners hadn't just ended Jim's career, they'd ended a seven-year partnership. Right now. Tonight. It was over. This really was good-bye.

For a few moments, the manager couldn't find his voice. “I'll get the car,” he finally said.

Jim didn't even look up as his manager walked off, leaving him on the bleachers beside the dark ring, in a vast, empty space. Alone.

“Oh, dear Lord. Baby…”

Jim met Mae at the front door. As the scarred plywood creaked open, he glimpsed the tender, attentive expression on his wife's face and knew in an instant how much he was going to miss seeing her look at him this way—like he was some kind of returning soldier who'd been in harm's way, a fighting man who, win or lose, would always come home to steadfast devotion. With his boxing career over, Jim realized, Mae would never have cause to look at him like this again, and he was more than a little uneasy what failing her would do to him. To them.

“I haven't got the money,” he told her straight. He was too tired and in too much pain to break it any easier. “They wouldn't pay me. Called it a no contest. Said the fight was an embarrassment.”

Mae's fretful gaze went from the blue and purple
bruises on Jim's battered face to his golden right hand, now caged in a fresh white cast. Her small fist reached out, unfurled like a flower. Soft fingers brushed the hardening surface.

“What happened?” she asked.

“Mr. Johnston made a decision…” He shrugged. “They decommissioned me.”

Fear in Mae's eyes flared to anger. What did she care about boxing commissioners' edicts or violated fight rules? She cared only about her husband. “Jimmy, what
happened
to your
hand
!?”

Jim sighed. “It's broke in three places.”

With one blink, Mae's face went blank. Her gaze lost focus. “Mercy…I'm so sorry.”

Jim stared at his wife. Her words had come out strangely distant, like she'd read them off a Western Union telegram. Deciding she must not have understood what he'd just told her, he tried again—

“Said I'm
through
, is what they said. Said I'm not a boxer anymore.”

But Mae Braddock had moved past this already. Chewing the edge of her thumbnail, she began to pace the small front room. “Well, okay,” she said, “if you can't work, we ain't gonna be able to pay the electric or the heat—”

With the gas and electric already overdue, Mae had taken to keeping the heat and all the lights off, save a small lamp in the corner. As she walked back and forth, a shadow flickered across the dingy wall, haunting her every step.

“—and we're out of credit at the grocery,” she added, “so we need to pack the kids, they can stay at my sister's temporary, I'll take in more sewing—”

“Mae—”

“Then that way we can make two or three breadlines a day and then—”

“I'll get doubles, triple shifts where I can find them,” Jim told her. “I'll get work wherever I can.”

“Jim, you can't work, your hand's broken—”

She was pacing faster now, her steps going nowhere, just trapped in a repetitive activity in their confined space. Jim could see she was still fretting, her eyes still refusing to look at him.

“Mae!”

The strength in Jim's voice finally broke through. She stopped.

“I can still work,” he told her.

Mae swallowed hard, said nothing.

“Get the shoe polish out of the cabinet,” he told his wife, clear and firm. “Go on. If they see me lugging this around, they won't pick me will they?”

Mae stifled her response and did as he asked.

“So, we'll cover it up with the shoe polish,” Jim continued as he sat down at the table and extended his hard, white liability. Mae sat next to him and looked down at the cast.

“Baby, it's going to be okay,” he said, then, for a long minute, he waited. But Mae didn't say a word, and she refused to look at him. Jim sighed. His left hand still worked, didn't it? So he took a deep breath, reached down, and used it to lift her small, pointed chin. He forced himself to see the fear reflected in his wife's eyes, forced his wife to see the truth in his own.

“We still haven't seen anything we can't face down,” he reminded her. Tonight, people had told Jim that he
was through as a boxer, but he'd be damned if he let anyone tell him he was done fighting.

Finally, Mae saw it, right there in her husband's eyes—Jim's resolve as a man to never give up, never let himself be beaten, and her hard doubts began to soften. The world fell away then. Nothing existed, not Mae's bills or Jim's bruises, not the anger or the dread—nothing but Jim and Mae and the one look between them that held their new vow to each other. A vow to stay steady, a pledge to hold fast.

“I'll cut the hem out of your coat sleeve. Fabric will help cover it,” Mae finally said, turning her attention to the black shoe polish. She opened the tin and began to spread it over the white.

Jim kissed her head, and she nearly found a laugh.

“All we need now is a nice piece of steak for your face, Jim Braddock, fix you right up.”

“That's a good idea.” Jim pounded the table with his good hand. “Steak. Get me a steak out of the ice box. Porterhouse!”

Peeking around the hanging blanket's threadbare fabric, a curious pair of eyes widened. While her older brothers Jay and Howard remained asleep on the kids' shared mattress, six-year-old Rose Marie watched her parents with inquisitive interest.

Jim winked at his spying daughter, then touched his wife's cheek, deciding, not for the first time, that having Mae Theresa Fox as his wife made him about the luckiest man there ever was.

 

Elevated on a landfill, the road Jim walked to the Newark docks before dawn every morning took a
straight course through a congested industrial area. Along the route were some of the city's poorer residential districts. Running parallel were the freight tracks of the Pennsylvania Railroad, and on both sides of the road was an old dumping ground that destitute families had taken over.

Homemade huts, built of materials salvaged from junk piles, served as shelters for men, women, and children. Neatly tended garden patches sat beside them. In summer, the huts were brightly decorated with flowers, flags, and latticework. With the cold mist of fall came oil drum fires and a dependence on breadlines and root vegetables.

Jim moved through the salvage-yard neighborhood and toward the once desolate marsh that had become the complex of warehouses and docks called Port Newark. A chilly wind whipped across the murky water of Newark Bay and Jim braced himself against it as he strode across the gravel lot toward the familiar locked gate.

Doctors had pronounced his right hand useless for many months, and he had no illusions what the fate of his family would be if he got no work today. Keeping the blackened cast low and slightly behind his back, Jim approached the huddling group of sleepy, stone-faced men with rock-hard resolve.

This morning's dawn seemed brighter than days' past. As rays of red-stained gold broke through the horizon's low clouds, Jake, the gaunt-faced, middle-aged foreman, approached the gate from the other side. Jim shoved his shattered hand farther behind him and pushed forward, holding onto hope.

“One, two, three…”

Jake walked along the group, looking over the men, moving his finger one way then another. Half steps and half inches, thought Jim, just like the ring, nerve and chance determining life-changing outcomes.

“…five, six, seven…”

Jim straightened his boxer's built-up shoulders, focused on Jake with a fighter's eyes, willing himself to be seen.

“…eight…”

Jake's appraising gaze fell on Jim. Braddock moved a half step closer. The foreman's finger moved a half inch. He pointed directly at Jim.

“Nine.”

A win.
With profound relief, Jim's eyes closed, his lungs expelled the air they'd been holding. For a split-second, he almost heard the crazy roar of the crowd, felt the jolt of little Joe Gould jumping on his back.

Behind him, the huddle of men began to break up. Dissipating like ghosts into the gloom, they moved away from the docks, murmuring to each other about where to go next. Jim moved east, toward the rising light of the breaking dawn and the hard physical labor of shift work, counting himself one of the lucky few.

 

“What the hell happened to you?”

Jim's work partner eyed the black-and-blue bruises on Jim's face with a mixture of curiosity and wariness.

“I got into a fight,” Jim told the man.

“What would you go and do that for?”

“Good question.”

Jim could easily see why his partner had been chosen for shift work today. The man's handsome face was young and clean-shaven, his bright eyes displayed
enough alertness to assure the foreman his orders would be understood and followed, and his lanky body appeared to have the kind of longitudinal strength that could bear a lot of stress before tearing apart.

“Mike Wilson.”

“Jim Braddock.”

The two had just started moving a mountain of flour sacks from a docked steamer's immense loading net to a line of waiting shipping pallets. The flour sacks had the weight and bulkiness of body bags, and one man alone couldn't lift them. It took two, one on each side, wielding large bailing hooks, to complete the job. It was difficult, awkward labor.

Jim had never before employed his left hand to do much of anything. Trying to operate the hook with it was a struggle, especially while attempting to keep the blackened cast on his broken right hidden behind his back. Sweat broke out on his forehead as he willed his muscles into achieving some kind of workable balance.

“Jim Braddock,” Mike repeated. “Used to follow a fighter with that name on the radio.”

Jim simply nodded, continuing to manage his clumsy left. He nervously glanced at Jake, hoping the man would keep his distance.

“There's another guy going around using that name now,” Mike continued. “Can't fight for shit. A gambling man could lose a lot of money on him.
Twice.
”

Jim wasn't sure how to take that last comment until he saw the amused expression on Mike's face. The man's smile was so infectious, Jim almost laughed. Suddenly the bag of flour they were carrying slipped from his hook. Jim's end dropped to the weathered planks of the dock and the jolt of it caused Mike to lose
his grip, too. As Jim bent quickly toward his end, he forgot about his right coming forward.

“Jesus,” said Mike, spying the cast. “This ain't gonna work. You're a cripple. You can't slow me down. I need this job.”

“Look,” said Jim, spearing Mike with an expression sharper than the iron bailing hook. “I can hold up my end.”

Before Mike could respond, another voice interrupted. “What the hell is this?” The foreman had come up behind them. Now he stood glowering at Jim's casted hand.

Jim didn't bother explaining. What good were words anyway, when actions got the job done? With a sweeping arc, his left hand sunk the heavy hook into the flour sack. Jim stilled and waited. His gesture was meaningless unless his partner did the same.

Mike Wilson glanced from the foreman to Jim. After a terrible few seconds, Mike followed Jim's lead, sinking his own hook into his end of the sack. With a determined heave, the two men lifted the dead weight together.

They carried the bulk across the dock and pitched it onto the pallet, then they moved to the loading net for another. Working together the two quickly speared and moved a second sack.

“You see us falling behind, Jake?” asked Mike. They hoisted a third and a fourth onto the pallet. “He's all right.”

They continued hooking and hauling, bag after bag. Jake stood there with arms crossed, watching every move. Finally, the foreman uncrossed his arms, shook his head, and walked away.

Sweat burning his eyes, Braddock lifted his face to Mike.

“Appreciate it.”

Two simple words. A life span of gratitude.

 

The bright dawn didn't last. By midday, clouds had moved in to drench the city of Newark in sheets of stinging rain. Five years ago, Mae Braddock would have run squealing from the wet, holding her pocketbook over her head as she sought shelter in a corner drugstore, where she'd sit at the counter and warm up with a nice, hot cup of tea.

But this wasn't five years ago, and her place on the endless, snaking soup line was too precious. Her children were hungry and they had no food. So Mae wasn't moving for anything, least of all a little water.

At the head of the line, women in raincoats ladled soup and handed out soaked bread from the open back of a truck. Ahead of Mae were hundreds of men, women, and children. Some were sad, some embarrassed, some just hollowed-out shells, emptied by the relentless years of numbing loss.

While the rain fell, Mae held her six-year-old daughter close to her body. She tried her best to curl around the little girl and keep her dry, but it did no good. Rose Marie ended up as soaking wet as all of them.

After the downpour finally subsided, Mae continued to cradle her daughter in her exhausted arms. Her two boys, bored with all the waiting, began to race around her, shooting finger guns.

“Got you!” shouted Jay.

“No, you don't! Got you!” cried Howard.

For the life of her, Mae didn't know where they got
the energy. “Boys, settle down please.” Mae's voice sounded as drained as she felt.

The boys listened and stopped shooting, but less than a minute later they found a pair of puddles—and a whole new form of ammunition.

“Got you!” shouted Jay, splashing his brother.

“No, you don't! Got you!”

“Lady, watch your kids!” complained a man behind them after Jay splashed him with a reckless volley.

“Boys, come here now!” Mae cried. She turned to the man. “I'm so sorry.” Then she looked down at the six-year-old in her arms. “You need to stand for a little while, honey.”

Mae lowered Rosy to the street's cracked concrete. She hated to do it, but her arms were about to fall off.

“I don't want to,” cried Rosy. Her shoes were old, with holes, and as they hit the pavement, the dampness seeped through her socks. “It's wet.”