Gatti-Ward, Virginia Woolf? It’s all there in this intriguing piece by Sergio De La Pava over at Triple Canopy.

[Photograph By Devin Yalkin]

If you’ve never read “The Boxer and the Blonde” by Frank Deford, well, here’s a reminder. It’s a good one:

The boxer and the blonde are together, downstairs in the club cellar. At some point, club cellars went out, and they became family rooms instead. This is, however, very definitely a club cellar. Why, the grandchildren of the boxer and the blonde could sleep soundly upstairs, clear through the big Christmas party they gave, when everybody came and stayed late and loud down here. The boxer and the blonde are sitting next to each other, laughing about the old times, about when they fell hopelessly in love almost half a century ago in New Jersey, at the beach. Down the Jersey shore is the way everyone in Pennsylvania says it. This club cellar is in Pittsburgh.

The boxer is going on 67, except in The Ring record book, where he is going on 68. But he has all his marbles; and he has his looks (except for the fighter’s mashed nose); and he has the blonde; and they have the same house, the one with the club cellar, that they bought in the summer of 1941. A great deal of this is about that bright ripe summer, the last one before the forlorn simplicity of a Depression was buried in the thick-braided rubble of blood and Spam. What a fight the boxer had that June! It might have been the best in the history of the ring. Certainly, it was the most dramatic, alltime, any way you look at it. The boxer lost, though. Probably he would have won, except for the blonde—whom he loved so much, and wanted so much to make proud of him. And later, it was the blonde’s old man, the boxer’s father-in-law (if you can believe this), who cost him a rematch for the heavyweight championship of the world. Those were some kind of times.

The boxer and the blonde laugh again, together, remembering how they fell in love. “Actually, you sort of forced me into it,” she says.

“I did you a favor,” he snaps back, smirking at his comeback. After a couple of belts, he has been known to confess that although he fought 21 times against world champions, he has never yet won a decision over the blonde—never yet, as they say in boxing, outpointed her. But you can sure see why he keeps on trying. He still has his looks? Hey, you should see her. The blonde is past 60 now, and she’s still cute as a button. Not merely beautiful, you understand, but schoolgirl cute, just like she was when the boxer first flirted with her down the Jersey shore. There is a picture of them on the wall. Pictures cover the walls of the club cellar. This particular picture was featured in a magazine, the boxer and the blonde running, hand in hand, out of the surf. Never in your life did you see two better-looking kids. She was Miss Ocean City, and Alfred Lunt called him “a Celtic god,” and Hollywood had a part for him that Errol Flynn himself wound up with after the boxer said no thanks and went back to Pittsburgh.

R.I.P. Bert Sugar.

[Photo Credit: Alexander Hellner]

Angelo Dundee passed away yesterday. He was 90.  Robert Lipsyte remembers the legendary trainer today in the New York Times.

Over at Grantland, here’s a terrific piece by Dave Kindred.

And at SI, dig what Richard Hoffer has to say:

Lest you think Dundee was merely a stagehand, a lucky accomplice, somebody fortunate enough to latch onto a rising star, consider the rest of his career. Having taken Ali to the top, in the middle of that ruckus for 21 years, he then joined another Olympic phenom, Sugar Ray Leonard, and helped pilot him to multiple championships. Once more, Dundee adapted himself to the fighter’s natural abilities, allowing Leonard’s stardom to develop. But in at least one fight, just as he had with Ali, it was Dundee who may have saved the day. With Leonard flagging in his back-and-forth fight with Tommy Hearns, Dundee got in Leonard’s face after the 12th round and, in no uncertain terms, called him out. “You’re blowing it, son.” Leonard famously rallied.

There were others as well: De La Hoya for a while, and even George Foreman when the big man regained his heavyweight title in his comeback. There was always somebody, though. Dundee was a boxing man, destined to carry a bucket, happiest when he was swabbing cuts or taping hands. Long after the line of champions had ended, he was still in his gym, his bubbling optimism creating contenders out of anybody who walked through his doors. He was training until the end.

But it was those years with Ali, that incandescent time when boxing was last important, that we remember him for. What a time. What a pair! They would have been an odd couple in any case, the young fighter’s flamboyance and braggadocio in outlandish contrast to Dundee’s puckish demeanor. But they were more simpatico than most would have guessed, sharing their love of boxing, but also a capacity for hijinks. Ali recognized in Dundee a kindred spirit, after all, and was not above rigging the hotel curtains with a long rope, pulling them back and forth in a spectral fashion, until the little trainer exploded from his room in fright. They were a pair.

Would Ali have been The Greatest without Dundee? Maybe, though probably not. Would he have been as much fun without Dundee, certainly an enabler, if not quite a co-conspirator? Absolutely not. Ali’s tendency toward meanness, his inexcusable treatment of men like Floyd Patterson or Frazier, was an innate and probably important part of his personality. But that meanness was alloyed by Dundee’s presence, had to have been. Dundee’s influence, his unabashed sweetness, was its own kind of smelling salt in Ali’s career, the sort of freshener that cleared his head from time to time, restored his goodness, if not his greatness.

Click here for an interview with Dundee at East Side Boxing.

From a wonderful, in-depth interview with our man Schulian by Pete Croatto, who runs a great site:

Yes, Ali was unspeakably cruel to Frazier in the build-up to their fights, calling him “a gorilla” and, worse, an Uncle Tom. But no one ever said Ali was perfect. He was as flawed and complicated as any other human being, with his mean streak and his public philandering and, for all I know, his snoring. He may not have been a Rhodes scholar, either, which was a point Kram hammered relentlessly. But somehow Ali always managed to find his better self when the occasion demanded it. Rising out of a business in which men are paid to destroy each other—Ali-Frazier III is a classic example—he performed acts of charity, bravery, and self-sacrifice. Some were high profile—opposing the war in Vietnam, championing black pride—while others were small personal gestures, like financing soup kitchens or building homes for poor families. Ali may have been acting on instinct instead of intellect in some cases; in others he may have seen his selfishness morph into something good. Who knows what was going on inside his head? All I can say is that I saw him do far more good than bad, and when he was done, he had become far more than a heavyweight champion. He had become a great man.

It seems anticlimactic to say he was great to cover, too. A writer’s dream. He was funny and irreverent and brash and, when the occasion called for it, humble and sensitive. There weren’t many people in the sports media whose names he remembered—Howard Cosell, naturally, and Dick Young and George Plimpton, whom he called “Kennedy”—and yet the media flocked to him because they knew that when he was around, something was going to happen. He might trade insults with Bundini Brown, the shaman of his entourage, or back up a prediction with a goofy poem. When he took a vow of silence before his first fight with Leon Spinks, he slapped a piece of tape across his mouth—and even then he was more interesting than anyone who was talking.

I could go on and on, but you get my drift. Ali was a once-in-a-lifetime subject for a sports writer, maybe for any kind of writer. I know he was that way for me, and I always prided myself in saying the story came first. But he made me care about him in a way no other athlete did. It was his charm, his courage, his audacity, his greatness in the ring. When I saw Larry Holmes destroy him in Las Vegas, it was like watching an execution. It was the worst night of my life as a sports writer, and I’m sure I’m not the only one who feels that way. I felt bad for myself, of course, because I knew I wouldn’t be writing about him for much longer. But I felt worse for Ali because of the way he’d been beaten. Even though Holmes did what he could to hold back, he had to keep fighting until Ali’s craven manager, Herbert Muhammad, told Angelo Dundee to stop it. By then Ali had been damaged in a way he will never get past. All these years later, the memory still haunts me. Maybe that’s the measure of just how special he was.

[Photo Credit: Thomas Hoepker]

Dig this long piece on Love, Boxing, and Hunter Thompson by the screenwriter John Kaye in the Los Angeles Review of Books:

In the spring of 1971, I was co-producing and writing a 90-minute, live, late-night television show on KNBC, the local NBC affiliate in Los Angeles. A precursor to Saturday Night Live, this satirical program was hosted by Al Lohman and Roger Barkley, two extremely popular and sweet-natured (when sober) morning disc jockeys. The writers and sketch performers we hired had never worked on television, and among the long list of people who got their start on the show were Barry Levinson, Craig T. Nelson, and John Amos. Amos, who later appeared in Roots and as a regular cast member on the Norman Lear sitcom Good Times, was an ex-pro football player and a huge boxing fan, and he idolized Muhammad Ali.

Johnny and I became close friends, and when the first Ali-Frazier fight rolled around — this was only Ali’s second fight since he was unjustly stripped of his title and denied a license for refusing to be drafted into the military — we made plans to go together. Because the Fox Wilshire theater was located in the heart of Beverly Hills, the seats around us were filled with a glittering dazzle of industry movers and shakers, laughing and talking at the tops of their voices. Along with big-time producers and studio executives — none of whom I knew, but whose names I recognized from the trades — I spotted actors Warren Beatty and Jack Nicholson seated in our row. Sitting next to them were two beautiful young women in see-through blouses and skin-tight bell-bottom jeans, their eyes a little frantic as they tried to project an air of remote amusement.

The fight, while exciting and hard-fought, did not quite live up to its inescapable hype. The crowd in the theater was clearly for Ali, but as the rounds passed with Frazier methodically and dogmatically gaining command, their confident anticipation of an Ali victory began to dissipate. If he lost, it would be his first, and the thought, once impossible to imagine — his mastery in the ring was so complete — now became a real possibility. Johnny, his vocal support of Ali beginning to wither, became unnervingly dispirited, and at one point, around the 12th round, he even suggested that we leave. “No way,” I told him. “All it takes is one punch.”

“He ain’t gonna win, pal. It’s over.”

Johnny was right, but there was a moment, in either that round or the next, when Ali seemed to rally, the speed and potency of his punches unexpectedly reappearing. In the theater there was a sea of noise, and I remember that after one brutal exchange Johnny suddenly jumped to his feet, his voice rising above the crowd, as he screamed, “ICE THE MOTHERFUCKER! ICE THE MOTHERFUCKER!”

Comedians Milton Berle and Buddy Hackett were seated in front of us. When they turned and looked up at Johnny’s face — a face that was black and menacing — their expressions went from sympathy to incomprehension to almost pure terror. The change was swift and almost imperceptible. Unlike Bill Cosby and Sidney Poitier, both fervent supporters of Ali who were also in attendance, basking in the infatuated glances of their fans, they mistakenly saw in John Amos a man who represented danger and assault: a genuine nihilism. At least that’s the way it seemed to me.

In the 14th round, when Ali was knocked down for the first time in his career, the silence in the theater was clear and startling. Ali survived that round and the 15th, but we left before the decision was announced. On the ride back to his house Johnny was utterly miserable, his mood plummeting into an abysmal despair. I tried to cheer him up by talking about our upcoming show and a sketch I was working on, but he remained silent, inconsolable, and I worried that the bond between us had become strained. Then, suddenly, he looked over at me and burst out laughing.

“Did you see Uncle Miltie’s face?” he said, almost doubled over. “Man, when I went off, his eyes got all big and he looked at me like I was Nat Turner or something. Fuck Ali! He fought his ass off. He’ll be back.”

[Picture by Lucas Leibholz]

Bronx Banter: Your father was a career military man and you grew up all over the world. Did you follow boxing at all as a kid?

George Kimball: Aha, so this is going to be one of those psychological-minded interviews. My wife Marge would like that. She’s a shrink and says I’m the least psychological-minded person she knows. Sure, I watched the fights on TV with my father (and with his father) from the mid 50s on. It was a revelation to me at the live readings we did on each coast last year for The Fighter Still Remains to learn how just many of the people involved in that book had initially come to boxing the same way, as a sort of connection to their fathers at a time when there might not have been much else that did connect them.

Beginning in late ’57, which is when we moved to Germany, I followed boxing quite avidly in the papers, or really, paper. (There was an English-language weekly called The Overseas Family that covered our high school games but not much on a global scale.) Stars and Stripes, on the other hand, was a daily that carried pretty extensive coverage of both the important professional bouts (Robinson’s and Patterson’s in particular) as well as the military ones that took place in Europe, which were considered a pretty big deal, particularly as we edged toward the ’60 Olympics, which were going to be in Rome. So I’d have certainly known who all the professional champions and most of the contenders were, as well as the top Europeans (like Laszlo Papp, for instance). I don’t recall that we attended any of the bouts on the bases where we were (my father was stationed at Bamberg and Bayreuth, and I went away to the American school in Nurnberg), none of which harbored any of the really promising service amateurs, but I monitored the progress of “our” boxers – the Army guys stationed elsewhere in Europe – as they all fell by the wayside on the road to Rome with one notable exception, Sgt. Eddie Crook, who wound up being one of three U.S. boxing gold medalists in Rome. (Cassius Clay and Skeeter McClure were the others.) I liked Clay even then, since he was from Louisville, my mother’s hometown.

I don’t know that I regarded it as crushing at the time, but the Rome Olympics actually coincided with our move back to the states. I watched a lot of the Games at the home of one grandparent or another as we spent a few weeks visiting both after having been out of the country for three years. I don’t know that I’d have been able to attend had we stayed in Europe even a few weeks longer, but I had gone to Rome the previous summer, so it wouldn’t have been out of the question.

I played football and basketball at Nurnberg, and ran track in the spring. Summers I played in an AYA baseball league made up of towns that had bases. The football away games were same-day trips, but in basketball every other weekend there’d be a road trip – like you’d play a game in Munich or Heidelberg on Friday night, stay overnight, and then play in Augsburg or Mannheim on Saturday afternoon and bus back to Nurnberg on Saturday night.

The Army also had a really top-flight league of post teams that played a regular schedule, mostly, I think, on Sunday afternoons. The teams were open to everybody stationed there, so what you wound up with at a relatively large post like Bamberg was virtually a college all-star team. Everybody used to turn out to watch the home games, and I watched a lot of those on weekends when I went home. (They even used to broadcast a game of the week on AFN.) Eddie Crook, by the way, was the quarterback for the Berlin team, which was all the more unusual because most of the guys in his huddle would have been officers. He was the first black quarterback I’d ever seen, at any level.

BB: What was it like following sports when you moved around so much?

GK: My father followed the NFL avidly, or at least he did after we came back to the states in 1960 when there was football on television every Sunday no matter where you lived. We were in San Antonio my senior year, and also got the AFL games on TV. My old man had played both football and baseball at UMass (when it was still Mass State) and followed both sports. I remember sitting up with a couple of my classmates in the dorm in Nurnberg, charting the Colts-Giants overtime game off the radio broadcast. That was pretty exciting even on the radio, believe it or not.

Even moving around, you maintained your allegiances. I was a Red Sox and Cardinals fan and religiously followed both teams, even though in some cases the news and box scores were two days old.

That year in San Antonio I was working for nights 75 cents an hour, first sacking groceries and then, once I got my license, delivering prescriptions for a pharmacy, and without telling anyone saved up enough to buy two tickets to the first AFL championship game in Houston. Once the tickets came in the mail I still had a problem, because Houston was three hours away and I needed the family car to drive there with my date. When I finally worked up the nerve to ask my father his solution was that sure, I could borrow his car – as long as he got to use the other ticket. So I ended up at Jeppesen Stadium in Houston watching that game with my father.

BB: Were you tight with your siblings?

GK: Probably less so than would have been the case with an average family, simply because of the circumstances in which I grew up. My brother Tim, who is just a year and a half younger, only spent one year at Nurnberg when I was going there, and apart from my senior year in Texas I really didn’t live year-round with my family after my freshman year in high school. I was quite a bit older – six years older than the next-closest sibling – and my youngest brother wasn’t even born until I was in my second year of college. The age gap tends to shrink with the passage of time, so I’m probably more in contact with, and closer to, most of them now than I was when we were growing up.

BB: Did you read any sports writers as a kid?

GK: I think one of the early sportswriters I read avidly must have been Earl Ruby, of the Louisville Courier Journal. I also came across a collection of Furman Bisher’s pretty early on. I was reading constantly, absolutely haunted the library, but probably didn’t read a hell of a lot of sports books per se, and wasn’t much exposed to the great ones unless they were already dead and collected, like maybe Grantland Rice or Ring Lardner. I couldn’t have been more than ten or eleven when I read a collection of Irvin S. Cobb that my mother owned. But I don’t think I even began to form an idea that great sports writing could also be great writing until I started to pay attention to Sports Illustrated, which would have been the fall of 1960. I don’t know that we ever saw SI in Germany.

BB: Sounds like sports played an important part of your childhood. What about the arts? Was their music in your house as a kid? Movies, radio? What about books?

GK: That was always pretty important to me. When we were in Bayreuth I used to go to the Wagner festival with my mother because my father hated opera. I think my parents liked musicals even as much as I did, so that was there from an early age. I played the trumpet for a while and liked a lot of jazz. My parents had some jazz records, but I was the one, at probably age 15, who brought Charlie Parker into the house, and who introduced them to Miles Davis, Gerry Mulligan, and Chet Baker. Of course I listened to early rock, as did my contemporaries. Everybody listened to that, but only a few of my contemporaries were as into jazz as I was, and the number that listened to Broadway musical scores was even smaller, so when I listened to Rogers and Hammerstein or Mario Lanza, a lot of times it was alone in my room. Didn’t listen to much radio at all, that I can remember, apart from in the car.

I pretty much lived in the library, even in Germany. I’d even take dates there. No matter what else I was doing I was probably reading at least a couple of books a week for almost as long as I can remember. Movies were important during the years I lived in Germany. The new films would eventually get there, so we didn’t feel cheated that they’d been out for a few months in the states, and I can’t remember whether they cost 15 cents or a quarter, but they were certainly affordable. We had one night a week in Nurnberg where you could sign out for an early film, and then on weekends I’d usually see one too.

BB: I know you are a fan of musicals. I think Kiss Me, Kate was the first long-playing record my dad ever bought—he was six or seven years older than you.

GK: I first saw Kiss Me, Kate performed at Garmisch-Partenkirchen, in the Alps, in 1959. Went with my mother because my father didn’t want to go. I think we had all of the early Rogers and Hammerstein cast recordings at the house when I was growing up – Carousel, Oklahoma, South Pacific and The King and I, and I eventually saw all of those done in New York, in London, in regional theatre, what have you. Even saw Kiss Me, Kate on Broadway about ten years ago. I think the Rogers and Hammerstein led me back to their earlier collaborators like Lorenz Hart and Jerome Kern and their spiritual descendants like Lerner and Loewe, or Frank Loesser. I think there was a definable Golden Age that began in the late ‘20s with Show Boat and ended probably fifty years ago which was marked by a greatness that’s never been achieved since, which is why I enjoy the revivals more than most new musicals. I saw the Lincoln Center South Pacific nine times in three years, I think (and a few weeks ago I took Danny Burstein to DiBella’s boxing card at B.B. King’s.). At their best there were others in this era like Cole Porter and Irving Berlin who could be great but I thought both inconsistent. Annie Get Your Gun, for instance, is brilliant (despite a notably dumb book), and right up there with the best of Rogers and Hammerstein, but Berlin wrote some shows I wouldn’t want to even sit through. I think the symbiosis of great lyricists and composers is what defined these. I love West Side Story, for instance, but never warmed to some of Bernstein’s film scores, and I think Sondheim did his best work on that one when he was a lyricist, period. I like some of his stuff, and hope to go see Danny and Bernadette Peters do Follies at the Kennedy Center in May, but I don’t see Sondheim as an heir to the tradition.

BB: What about Gilbert and Sullivan?

GK: Gilbert and Sullivan is an acquired taste I guess I never acquired. It’s cute, but I don’t think especially good musically, and it makes you work to get the lyrics, which isn’t the way it’s supposed to be. I don’t think I’ve ever walked around with a Gilbert and Sullivan song in my head, for instance, but with some of these other classics, especially Rogers and Hammerstein, it happens all the time. Some of the movie recordings of Rogers and Hammerstein were quite good even if the movies themselves weren’t. John Raitt was the original Billy in Carousel, around the time I was born, and I met him years later when I had dinner with him and Bonnie.

BB: You would have been a teenager when Lenny Bruce and Mort Sahl and Nichols and May were hitting the scene. Did you follow any comedians?

GK: Comedy? Being in Germany from 1957-1960 was like a time warp in that respect. The PX didn’t stock Lenny Bruce or even Mort Sahl, so for my friends and me they might as well not have existed. Nichols and May I read about in Time magazine, I think, but never heard them till I came back to the states. Hell, I think it was 1962 or 63 before I ever heard Lord Buckley. If I listened to any comedy at all overseas I think it was Stan Freberg or Victor Borge, and Newhart came along about ‘60, I think. I probably read Sahl before I ever heard him, and was way late in coming to Lenny Bruce.

BB: At what time did you find yourself starting to rebel against your father, and right-wing politics in general?

GK: I’d say the first conflicts that were plainly philosophical and political (as opposed to just generational) came my freshman year in college at Kansas. Almost from the moment I got to KU I was hanging with the “beatniks,” the painters and poets and musicians and actors, even though I was a clean-cut ROTC Midshipman who had to wear my uniform to class a couple of days a week. I liked Lawrence but intensely disliked the discipline and even the curriculum. (I had a few electives but was required to take physics and calculus, both of which I absolutely hated and still don’t understand the first thing about.) So the battle lines were first probably drawn even then. Before the year was out I’d dropped out of school (and ROTC) and wound up back in Massachusetts, living on my own and working at an amusement park in Hull; my grandparents lived in the adjacent town.

What remained of getting an education was pretty much up to me from then on. My father’s thinking was that since I’d been the one who fucked up the free ride, I was on my own, and he followed pretty much the same guidelines with all my brothers and sisters if they dropped out or changed curriculums or whatever, and surprisingly, most of them did. My brother Tim quit the University of Louisville and joined the Army; my sister Jennifer had a full ride at Hollins, but after her junior year at the Sorbonne decided to stay on in Paris, and I think my two youngest brothers both wound up on academic probation at Alabama, which really takes some doing. Even my sister Becky blew up at band scholarship at the University of Kentucky when she switched from music to a journalism major. With me as with them he’d have still been willing to help out with college if I’d been willing to live at home and commute. That of course was unthinkable to me, though a few of the others did that after frittering away their scholarships; the closest I came was that one summer, when my father was in Laos, I stayed at their house and took classes at St. Mary’s while driving a taxi in Leavenworth on the night shift; in one of the high points of my academic career I wound up getting an A in a ‘Philosophy of Communism’ course taught by a Sister of Charity with whom I had verbally jousted every single day that summer.

By then there were lots of times when my father and I barely spoke, but I distinctly remember at the end of spring break 1963, the night before I was taking off again, leaving at the crack of dawn to thumb back to Boston and Massachusetts Bay Community College, which he considered a total waste of time on my part – he was probably right, but it was one of the few places where I could afford the tuition and still keep 1,500 miles between me and my parents – we watched the fatal Emile Griffith-Benny Paret fight together.

BB: Tell me about going to school at KU with Gayle Sayers and Bill James. Did you know either of them at all?

GK: The first time I saw Sayers touch a football I knew that if what he was playing was football, I’d been playing a game that should have had a different name. He was that much better than not just me, but everybody else, too. As freshmen we lived on the same floor in the same dorm, but he was pretty distant and intimidating, so there wasn’t a lot of conversation between us even when we’d find ourselves watching TV together. (Somebody once warned me that he didn’t like white people, and another guy corrected him and said, “He doesn’t like ANYBODY.”) It was years later that we talked about this and he said that his attitude at that time had really been a defense mechanism, because he was afraid he didn’t belong in college at all and was basically terrified by his circumstances.

I didn’t actually meet Bill James until much later, I think in the very early ‘80s, just after I’d started at the Herald, at Fenway Park. Glenn Stout brought Bill to Opening Day, and knew I’d be sitting in the bleachers as I always did on Opening Day back then, so it was really Glenn who introduced us. Bill told me on that occasion that he had voted for me when I ran for sheriff in 1970. Of course if everyone who’s told me that in the years since actually had voted for me, I’d have won the fucking election. It’s really too bad that Bill and Susan moved to Boston at pretty much exactly the same time I moved to New York, because I’d liked to have seen more of them. As it is, we cross paths occasionally in Lawrence now but even then only rarely.

BB: Did growing up in a military family fuel your rebellious nature? And even when you weren’t on speaking terms with your father did you seek his approval?

GK: I don’t know that it fueled any rebellious nature, though it obviously ended up that way on my part, as it did with some of the guys I’d gone to school with. But an amazing preponderance of my classmates ended up in the military themselves, or married career soldiers, and a lot of those that didn’t wound up Republicans, so I don’t think I was part of any identifiable trend. Best way I can answer that was that however strained everything else got, sports was always a common ground, and we could always get through a football game without an argument.

BB: How did you lose your eye?

GK: Short answer is that I was the runner-up in a dispute with a guy who broke a quart beer bottle over my face at a party on Beacon Hill in early ‘64. (He thought I was laughing at him; I wasn’t) He was a pretty paranoid black guy. I’d just walked back from the liquor store with a case of beer when his girlfriend introduced us, and when I then shouted across the room to a friend asking for a church key he grabbed me and said “Hey man, you going for a blade?” I thought he was kidding and kind of shook my arm free and started to walk away. He hit me full-force from behind, cut up my face but more importantly the eye just exploded.

BB: And so when did you meet Hunter S. Thompson?

GK: Met Hunter in ‘67 or ‘68 in New York. I was working for his agent at the time Hell’s Angels book was published, and subletting my apartment from Paul Blackburn, whose wife Sara had been the editor who brought Hunter to Random House.

BB: And you got a piece in the Paris Review, right?

GK: My Paris Review publication was poetry, as was most of what I published in various little magazines beginning about 1965. I was pretty much a fixture around the St. Mark’s poetry project back then, and half the poets in the country must have lived within a few blocks of me when I lived first on Avenue C and then on East 7th Street, next door to McSorley’s. I did do a book review (of Ishmael Reed’s The Freelance Pallbearers for a soft-core mag called Escapade, one of several Playboy knockoffs that were going at the time. (Ishmael claimed that I’d been the only white reviewer who understood his book.) These mags were supporting quite a few people back then – Baldwin covered the Liston-Patterson fight for Nugget, for instance.

BB: Who were you reading in those days? Was Terry Southern an influence at all?

GK: There were a lot of people besides poets hanging around the St. Mark’s scene then—folk singers, painters, etc. were also plentiful, and Terry Southern was one of them. I think when I first met him I’d read only Candy (which Girodias re-issued, along with Donleavy’s The Ginger Man, when he set up shop in New York; those books had exactly the same cover as Only Skin Deep, so I always made sure bookshops in places like Iowa City ordered all three titles. Not quite by coincidence Hamill and I are going to the Tibor de Nagy gallery today to see this poets and painters show from that era, and I imagine I’ll see a lot of collaborations between friends of mine from the ’60s.

I was still reading anything and everything, but during the decade of the ’60s read pretty much everything Kerouac, Donleavy, Baldwin, etc. had written. But I also managed to read Liebling, Budd Schulberg, et al too. I read most of Mailer but wasn’t bowled over even by his best – and I was working for his agent from late ’66 to ’68. And of course even when I was spending my nights at poetry readings and gatherings I was reading the New York sports pages religiously. By ’68 or so I’d met Larry Merchant and Vic Ziegel and Lenny Shecter at the Lions Head, and about the same time became friends with Hamill and Joe Flaherty. Only Skin Deep, which was published in September of ’68, mentions Merchant and Jim Carroll’s Basketball Diaries, which made it pretty unique in the world of international porn. The publication party was at the Lions Head the night before I left for Iowa, and when Andy Warhol showed up it was the first time he’d gone out in public since he got shot by Valerie Solanis earlier in the year.

BB: I ate dinner with Vic once before he passed away and he told me about worshipping at the altar of Lenny Shecter, who is tragically overlooked these days. I think Shecter’s hard cynicism is close to some of the Deadspin sensibility. Do you think he would have eventually quit writing about sports altogether if he had stayed alive? His collection The Jocks showed that he had much contempt for big time sports.

GK: Odd thing about Lenny was that for all the humor he evinced in his writing he really didn’t have a great sense of humor, or at least didn’t really seem to enjoy himself the way his acolytes like Vic and Larry did. Lenny was, of course, the original “chipmunk,” but while it was easy to picture Larry and Vic and Stan Isaacs as “chipmunks,” the term seemed misapplied when applied to Lenny. I think you’re right that he was really sick and tired of sports, and given the financial cushion that came with Ball Four he probably would have completely moved on. But he could be almost nasty when he thought he was right and you were wrong. I remember being in New York and at the head a week or so after I’d gone up to see Jim Bouton, who was plotting some sort of comeback, pitch a few innings, I think it was, in a minor league game out in Pittsfield, and I’d described the way some 20 year-old hitter had almost gone into contortions over a knuckler. Lenny says, “Couldn’t have happened. Jim told me he only threw smoke that day,” and I say, “Lenny, I was there. He didn’t throw a lot of them, but he threw one to that batter.” “Maybe it was just a change-up you saw,” he says. I finally said “Lenny, give me a little credit here. I know a fucking knuckleball when I see one.” Really odd because he always had to get the last word in, and this time wanted to argue something I’d seen and he hadn’t.

Another night I was in the head with Leigh Montville and this doll about 25 appears at the bar. Leigh wants to know what her story was and I told him. “She’s a sportswriter groupie.” He of course refuses to believe that there is such a thing, let alone one this good looking. He finally tries to strike up a conversation and she says, “Have you guys seen Lenny Shecter? I’m supposed to meet him here tonight.” Lenny was twice her age and didn’t exactly have movie star looks, so Montville was really impressed that he had groupies.

BB: Did you guys all admire Jimmy Breslin?

GK: Sure, everybody admired Breslin. I’d read him religiously long before I met him. He wasn’t around the bar a lot but his column was a topic of conversation almost any day it ran.

BB: Did most of the Lion’s Head guys stick to booze or did they smoke a lot of weed and take harder drugs too?

GK: Most were strictly drinkers, a few guys smoked weed but more at parties or at home. The most obvious exception was Wes Joice, the owner. Even back in the ‘60s it was a running joke that he was perpetually stoned the way some drunks never sober up. Pretty much as soon as he finished his first cup of coffee he’d go down to the office to smoke a joint. He often invited me down, but got so I rarely went because the shit he was smoking was so powerful it would leave me catatonic.

By the ‘80s Wes, along with most of the American and National Leagues, had graduated to coke. Now I usually would accept if he invited me down to the inner sanctum. One night Bob Arum was with me when he did and Bob did one of those numbers straight out of Annie Hall, not knowing what he was doing, exhaled when he should have inhaled and blew a couple hundred dollars worth of cocaine all over the office. Sometimes this would be decent stuff, more often not. There was a dealer (later immortalized as “the Weasel” in Kinky Friedman’s Greenwich Killing Time), you could have set your watch by. Six o’clock every evening, rain or shine, he’d walk down the steps, and for a couple of hours he’d conduct a lively business out of the men’s room at the Lions Head. It got so sometimes you’d walk in to take a piss and on right top of the toilet paper dispenser there’d be a couple of lines just sitting there that somebody had laid out and then been so fucked up that they forgot to snort it. His shit was quite mediocre and the standard line was that if John Belushi had only known the Weasel he’d have been alive today.

BB: How big of a deal was Harpers magazine during those years, the Willie Morris time? And were guys like David Halberstam and Gay Talese widely admired in your downtown scene?

GK: Harpers was a bigger deal in some circles that I was really more on the fringe of, like George Plimpton’s, but not so much among the people I hung out with regularly. I don’t know that it’s accurate, but my impression was always that Willie Morris seemed to think of himself as much more important and influential, or maybe just relevant, than he and it actually were, at least to most people I’d have hung out with. I don’t even mean that disparagingly; it’s just that Harpers rarely even crossed my mind and I couldn’t imagine that there were actually people who spent much time thinking about its place in the literary firmament.

I had lunch with Hamill today after we toured the poets and painters show at the Tibor de Nagy. The curator came out and introduced himself and gave us each a hardbound catalogue ($40) when we left. I was mainly trying to get some stuff for the profile for the Boxing Writers Dinner program but as usual Pete had all kinds of mots to offer. Not sure you can use this in your Cannon project but Pete recalled that Cannon said of James Baldwin’s status as a double-minority something along the lines of “the poor guy wants to ride in the front of the bus–and do it wearing a dress!”

And some great Mailer stories: Apparently Mailer and Bruce Jay Friedman came to blows at a party in Brooklyn that wound up on the sidewalk below, and Friedman kicked the shit out of Norman by the time their friends moved in to stop it. Friedman, who apparently didn’t want to be responsible for diminishing the future of American letters: “I was doing everything I could to keep from hitting him in the head!”

Pete also remembered covering the Democratic convention in ‘64 when his wife went into labor. Pete didn’t have a car and didn’t even drive then, but Mailer drove him from Atlantic City to St. Vincent’s for the birth of his first daughter. “People remember all the crazy shit Mailer did but rarely mention kindnesses like that.” When Norman was drinking said Pete you always knew that danger was right around the corner when he started talking in a faux Texas accent.

He also told me about this building Mailer purchased in upper Manhattan, maybe Inwood or someplace, as both an abode and as an investment. Over the years every time he’d get divorced he’d have to sell off two floors of the building, one to pay the divorce lawyer and another to pay the ex. Eventually he owned only the top floor. The one he lived in.

Never knew Talese back then. At Super Bowl VII I was in LA for the Phoenix and since we were really pinching pennies I was staying with Bill and Susan Cardoso in Hollywood, I think it was. Hunter Thompson was there and had a room at the press hotel but also spent a lot of time out at the house. Apparently a few months earlier Talese had been out there doing his initial research for what eventually must have become Thy Neighbor’s Wife and each evening would come back to Cardoso’s with a detailed report of how many blowjobs he’d gotten that day in the name of research.

BB: My old man was a big drinker but not much of a village guy. He knew Elaine Kaufman when she managed a place in the village and then was a regular during her early years on the Upper East Side. But then he got a job at ABC and mostly drank at Herb Evans until The Ginger Man became his favorite spot. Did you ever go uptown?

GK: I didn’t spend much time in Elaine’s and when I went there it was usually with Pete. I remember going over there after a day game at Yankee Stadium in late ‘79, with this ravishing young thing I’d imported from Newport, Pete (who was driving, the first time I’d ever known him to do that) and Jose Torres and his son. They ushered us straight to a table adjacent to Woody Allen’s. Pete has a great story about the decline of Elaine’s, which he traces to this crash diet and sentence to a fat farm Elaine undertook sometime in the early ’80s. Up until then she’d personally tasted everything the place served, but her diet guru forbade that, so when the chefs started cutting corners and getting sloppy there was nobody to notice, and eventually the food got so bad people stopped going there, or at least stopped eating there, altogether. Elaine eventually started tasting (and got fat) again but it never fully recovered.

I never hung out a lot at the O’Neal/O’Connor bars in NY, but there was one Super Bowl out in LA—maybe the Redskins-Dolphins game—where the Ginger Man in Beverly Hills was sportswriter central, and we were all in there pretty much every night. I’d run into people from Boston and New York I hadn’t seen in ages who were now fully realized Californians. I was in O’Neal’s at Lincoln Center quite a few times in its last couple of years. Including with most of the other speakers (e.g. Quincy Troupe, Ben Stiller, and Jo Loesser) after Budd Schulberg’s Memorial service, and after a South Pacific performance just a few nights before it closed for good.

BB: Was Frederick Exley a regular at the Head?

GK: The thing about Exley was that the guy I knew and drank with in bars, chiefly the Lion’s Head, was almost irreconcilable with the guy who could write something as touching as A Fan’s Notes. I’d come back to New York and Fred had taken up residence at the Head in my absence; I believe David Markson was the original conduit but especially Flaherty and Jeanine were talking him up big time. I’d drunk with him for probably several weeks before I finally got around to reading the book. I was knocked out, not just by how good it was but was stunned to realize that Fred could have written it.

You also ought to try to chase down “The Last Great Saloon,” a piece Fred wrote for GQ about the Lion’s Head in December of either ’91 or ’92.

BB: That was a good one, but how much of it was true?

GK: Fred’s description of me with great danes and bullwhips was a product of his imagination and had nothing to do with my book, Only Skin Deep. Fred was a terrific novelist but had his shortcomings as a reporter. I’m surprised that GQ didn’t have a fact-checker, or at least run some of that stuff by me.

BB: I also read Joe Flaherty’s piece on you for the Village Voice around the time you ran for sheriff. Did you really take your glass eye out and leave it people’s drinks?

GK: In my younger days I did get some mileage out of that. I did some pretty outrageous stuff, but obviously Joe embellished somewhat—though not as much as Fred, who created tales out of whole cloth.

BB: Did you really call Mayor Lindsay a tight-assed WASP and bless his forehead with ashes from an ashtray?

GK: Evidently.

BB: Do you think the tendency is to print the legend instead of the truth?

GK: Partly, but that would be speculation. There was a lot of that around the Lion’s Head in the late ‘60s, Fred and David Markson and others, and I’d include myself in that category, who did a lot more sitting around the bar talking about writing than actual writing (this would be the ‘69 and ‘70 interludes when I was in New York after Iowa and then in early ‘70 before I went back to Lawrence).

BB: Why did you leave New York?

GK: Combination of a lot of things. My marriage had ended, and while it was a pretty eventful and enjoyable summer, I could sense that things were winding down for me in NYC and that nothing really promising loomed on the horizon. Paul Blackburn, from whom I’d sublet the apartment on East 7th St., was returning from his Guggenheim in September, and I’d have had to find new digs anyway. Ted Berrigan, one of my friends in New York, was headed out to Iowa to teach, as was Anselm Hollo, who had come over from England and hung out with me for a time that summer, was too. After a decidedly undistinguished academic career Iowa seemed to offer a fast track to Master’s Degree, no heavy lifting, so I decided to make a clean break. Got a driveway car, a new VW an army officer returning from Germany had shipped over (big savings on duty); I was supposed pick it up in Brooklyn and take it to him in Omaha. Loaded all my stuff into a U-Haul trailer with a hitch, put the dog (and a cat, a last-minute acquisition from McSorleys, where they said they were going to drown it if nobody had taken it by last call), and lit out for Iowa City. Dropped my stuff there and then proceeded to Nebraska to face the music – the weight of the trailer hitch had ripped open a pretty conspicuous gash in the rear bumper, which the Captain didn’t much appreciate at all, but there wasn’t a lot he could do about it.

BB: Did you have any concrete notion that you wanted to be a writer yet?

GK: I was scuffling to sell some freelance work, most notably my DB, Only Skin Deep, which was one of the first Girodias bought when he fled Paris and set up here. Even though I was short a bachelor’s degree they got me conditionally accepted and even the promise of funding at the Workshop, where I was one of the few actually doing both fiction and poetry. Most people had to pick one or the other. I shared a house with Hollo, and Berrigan taught my poetry section. Bob Bolles was my fiction teacher, and I think he was almost intimidated by some of the talent in that room – not just me but Tom McHale and Asa Baber and Eddie Gubar. Robert Coover was my thesis adviser, but we didn’t really see eye to eye so I didn’t consult him a lot. I always knew I would earn my living writing something. And while I’d written sports for newspapers before I wrote anything else, the idea that I’d do it for 35 years had yet to occur to me then.

BB: You then had a memorable summer running for sheriff in Lawrence, Kansas. What inspired that?

GK: The original plan was that it would provide a format for guerrilla-type street theatre that would last through the summer (my platform included subsidies for marijuana farmers etc.). Although Hunter Thompson ran for sheriff in Aspen and Stew Albert in Oakland, none of us had discussed it with the others beforehand and none knew the others were even going to run, although I did later visit Hunter for a ‘summit’ conference in Aspen after I’d won the primary. The only ones I discussed the sheriff campaign with before returning to Lawrence from New York in the spring of 1970 were Ed Sanders and Jerry Rubin, both of whom encouraged it.

In Lawrence I had announced I was running under the Youth International Party banner, so it didn’t make a lot of waves. The incumbent Republican sheriff, who had arrested me at an antiwar demonstration in 1965, routinely ran unopposed. I waited until 30 minutes before the filing deadline and then walked into the courthouse, paid a $100 filing fee to run as a Democrat. I knew if I gave them an hour they’d have found somebody to run against me. I was consequently unopposed on the primary ballot and won the Democratic nomination, much to the chagrin of the Democratic Party. At a rally at the state house a few days before the election I wound up in conversation with the governor and someone took a picture of us together. This was after the state party leadership had publicly denounced me. We printed the picture up in hundreds of flyers with the headline “Vote Democratic on Nov. (whatever the date was) Docking for Governor/Kimball for Sheriff.”

In practice things got quite ugly that summer – cops killed two kids, one black and one white, and it turned into open warfare for a while. Because of my visibility I became the go-to guy as a spokesman, and got blamed for everything that happed, much of which I knew nothing about and still don’t. There are some more detailed accounts, as in Rusty Mulholland’s book, available, including online. The Lawrence Journal World and University Daily Kansan both ran lengthy recaps of the summer of ’70 last year, the 40th anniversary.

BB: How did you parents handle the news of your numerous arrests?

GK: My mother still dislikes any mention the arrests; I don’t think she likes having to explain that to her redneck friends. Last time it came up I seem to recall her going into complete denial about it, in fact. The one in Lawrence in ‘65 she actually came from Colorado and was involved in the negotiation with my lawyer. The judge had originally sentenced me to six months, I guess to teach me a lesson, and let me sweat it out for a couple of days before he paroled me in my father’s custody. (He was a reserve JAG colonel himself and knew my old man.) That’s how I wound up spending that winter in Colorado Springs. Ran the ski lift at the Broadmoor until the snow melted and then worked in the hotel PR department for a month or two before my tolerance (and theirs) became exhausted. Finally bolted under the cover of darkness one night in a ‘54 Ford I’d bought from Peggy Fleming’s father, drove to Lawrence and then New York.

Anyway, the point being that because that was the only one she was personally involved in, my mother has over the years persuaded herself that it must have been the only arrest. There were actually a few others, including one in Wichita in 1970 that was on the front page of the paper, since the asshole who personally arrested me, Vern Miller, was the Sedgwick County sheriff who was running for Attorney General the same year I ran for sheriff in Douglas County. The headline in the Wichita paper the next morning read “George Kimball Arrested,” over a picture of me being led away in cuffs. I’d been speaking at a rally protesting the presence of Spiro Agnew, who’d flown in to stump for the incumbent attorney general, Kent Frizell, who was running for governor in another tight race. (He lost.) When Miller busted me, I just shook my head and told him, quietly, “Vern, you’re going to start a riot here,” and he did. I sat there in jail that night thinking to myself, “You stupid bastard. You just got that motherfucker elected,” which turned out to be the case.

Besides personally leading several drug raids in Lawrence, one of Vern’s first acts in office was to board an Amtrak train traveling through Kansas with an armed posse and take the bartender in the bar car into custody for serving liquor by the drink inside the borders of Kansas. (It was still illegal at the time for bars to serve anything but 3.2 beer.) He then wanted to put undercover agents on planes and bust the stewardess’ for serving drinks in Kansas airspace, but wiser heads prevailed. A few years later I met a guy in Boston – he phoned me up and arranged a meeting – who, actually – no shit – wrote an opera about all of this. Vern and I were the leads. I don’t think it ever got performed.

BB: That’s hilarious. Wasn’t there a confrontation with a cop in there? Didn’t you throw a punch at an officer?

GK: The ‘65 arrest was for carrying a “Fuck the Draft” sign at an antiwar rally in Lawrence. I don’t know that I’d describe it as a punch; I swung but it was more of a forearm shiver. He’d thrown me up against a car while the woman he claimed wasn’t in need of medical attention was collapsing to the sidewalk behind him. I was charged with assaulting an officer, but when it came to trial not even the cop’s own partner would testify for him so it got tossed. I don’t know when or if they expunge those things; there might be a record of it but I wouldn’t want to go nosing around since I think there might still be a hot possession of marijuana charge floating around down there, though for instance when I’ve gotten stopped on a couple of motor violations nothing popped up when they phoned me in.

(The most recent of those I was driving around the block at about 15 mph during street cleaning, and got stopped for no seat belt. I thought it was really chickenshit, but then I realized the real reason for it. It was during the ‘04 playoffs, and I had a Massachusetts car with Herald on the license plate.)

BB: When Miller arrested you, you told him that he was going to incite a riot when he arrested you. What kind of riot was there, if any?

GK: I’ve been in better riots, but considering there was no trouble until he arrested me, any riot there was plainly his doing. I was only in the Wichita jail overnight. By early light I’d been bailed out and was on my way back to Lawrence.

BB: How long was it before the election?

GK: I think it was November. It was just before the election, anyway.

BB: When did you leave Kansas?

GK: We left within a matter of days, not in response to Vern’s threats, but because I’d promised my wife we were going to move back East and that I’d start writing and earning a living. It had been a fun six months or so but we were awfully poor. The grand I got from Scanlan’s monthly was the only real money I’d earned, and the only thing I’d written. If I stayed in Kansas the only way to earn a decent living would have been on some level of the dope harvest, and I was way too paranoid to make a good criminal.

BB: When you too off, did you think “Well, that was fun?” Now, time to get serious and make some money?

GK: Yes and no. I didn’t want to trivialize the experience by looking like I was cashing in on it right away, so I pretty consistently resisted entreaties to write a book about the campaign. Ed Sanders, for one, really pushed me to do that. I did write the piece for the Realist (mainly because I needed the dough, $300 I think). Paul had asked me, Hunter, and Stew Albert to do separate pieces. Stew and I did ours and Hunter never did, so he finally just ran ours.

BB: So it wasn’t just theater?

GK: I wouldn’t say that. I didn’t want the guys who had gotten killed, and the people who had worked on the campaign, to suddenly look like they’d been bit players in a scheme to get me a book contract.1970 was in that respect the tail end of the 60s. What was mine was yours and what was yours was mine, that sort of stuff. We didn’t stay very much out at the A-Frame (for one thing it would have been dangerous; somebody would have had to stay up as an armed guard against a redneck attack). From Sept onward we shared a house with another couple in Lawrence. She was a grad student, he a dope dealer, and since nobody had any discernible income they (and I think maybe we, eventually) discovered they were eligible for food stamps.

I also had sort of an arrangement at the Gaslight Tavern. If I was around and it got busy (which it did at lunchtime almost any day during the week) I’d jump behind the bar and tend bar while he cooked and the other bartender worked the tables. He might or might not throw me a few bucks but in any case I didn’t have to pay for food, and rarely even for beer, there. It worked pretty well, since he didn’t have to bring in somebody to work a whole shift, which I had no interest in doing anyway. I’d worked at the bookstore next door several years earlier and knew these guys pretty well. Also next door was a barber shop. Obviously they didn’t cut any hippies’ hair, but I used to go in and shoot the shit with the barbers, talk baseball and football, so they knew I was OK.

BB: How did your father handle all of this?

GK: Like my mother, he had firsthand knowledge only of the Lawrence one, though he had clearance and could have viewed my file. Army intelligence also had one on me. I don’t recall ever asked me about the other arrests, though we weren’t talking a lot in those days. Like my mother he was sort of delusional about a lot of this stuff. When my brother Tim returned from Vietnam, got involved with Veterans against the War and participating in protests, for instance, he convinced himself and told people that he must have been doing it as a plant by Army intelligence, which was of course absurd.

By the way, he’d never in a million years have publicly agreed with me about the war, but his enthusiasm for it dampened considerably the second time he was over there, this time as Military Attaché at the embassy in Laos (read: spy.) My uncle Bill, my father’s older brother, thinks he must have witnessed, or had to participate in, some stuff he found so morally abhorrent over there that he began to question in his own mind whether it had all been worth it. He’d never have criticized the U.S., even after he retired, but he plainly no longer wanted to talk about it.

BB: So after all of this craziness in Kansas, how did you wind up in the Boston at the Boston Phoenix?

GK: I’d lived in and gone to school in Boston earlier; my grandparents lived there. Harper Barnes, who went to KU, was editor of the Phoenix; I’d also planned several freelance gigs but once I started at the Phoenix that sort of pushed everything else out of the way as the role grew. Depends on which sport you mean. The Celtics were still rebuilding but extremely accommodating. The Patriots weren’t at first but eventually came around. The Red Sox constantly battled me over access and credentials. Their PR guy, Bill Crowley, was an asshole. Covered lots of things besides sports in those days, especially politics and music.

BB: How Mike Lupica did come to the Phoenix?

GK: Lupica I’d met through Bob Ryan in 1971, I believe, when he was still at BC. I hired him to do some freelance pieces for a special section we did in ‘72 and they were so good I wound up talking the publisher into hiring him to constitute a full-time sports staff. Then not long after he graduated I think it was the Post hired him. What I didn’t realize was that it was some kind of probationary deal. A couple of months after he went to New York I got a call from somebody in personnel at the Post saying they were considering hiring him full time and asking my opinion, and I said “You mean I can have him back?” She laughed and said that sounded like an endorsement to her.

BB: What about Charlie Pierce?

GK: I met Charlie out in Worcester. I was working on some story and somebody suggested I look him up; he was writing for Worcester magazine, I think. I was the one who introduced him to Bob Sales, who was then the editor of the Phoenix, and Bob hired him, though not to do sports since Michael Gee was already working as my backup, sort of in Lupica’s place. Then I left for the Herald in early 1980, and Charlie did some sports after that. Bob was by then at the Herald, first as managing editor and later as sports editor. He and Don Forst hired me initially, over the objections of the sports editor, who shortly quit. A few years later when he was sports editor Bob hired both Michael and Charlie at the Herald.

BB: What was it like moving from a weekly like the Phoenix to a daily tabloid like the Herald? I assume part of the reason was financial. Did you enjoy the move? What new challenges did it present? Did you write anything but sports at the Herald?

GK: It was only financial in that I took a while negotiating the terms because I didn’t want to sell myself cheap, but mainly it had come time to move on. I’d actually left the Phoenix in November of ‘79, the week Kennedy announced his candidacy, and spent several months freelancing and working with the campaign. I did a few pieces for the Herald in that time, but didn’t actually sign a contract until February.

BB: Were you ever frustrated as a columnist for the Herald? In that you weren’t their number-one columnist?

GK: For about eight years I was the number-one columnist. Once Charlie Pierce arrived he started getting some of the better assignments but I was still the guy who’d go to Super Bowls, playoffs, world series, etc., so that wasn’t frustrating. Even after guys like Callahan and Buckley arrived and pretty much knocked me off most baseball coverage I probably could have lived with it, but for the last ten years after Bob Sales was let go the new sports editor wanted to assign all columns – you had no leeway in choosing what to write about, and in some cases he wanted to dictate point of view even. It got pretty tiresome and frustrating. I had also gotten old enough that since the Post in ‘92 there weren’t any job offers coming in, so I was kind of trapped there. If someone had come along with a buyout offer remotely as good as what I got in ‘05 I’d have jumped at it, but with a wife and two kids in school I wasn’t in a position to make a move.

BB: Did you have a good relationship with your editor Bob Sales when you were at the Herald?

GK: Yes. Like most any writer-editor relationship that lasts nearly 20 years we had our moments of strain, but I enjoyed working with him more than any other sports editor there — particularly his successor.

BB: How long did you work for him at the Herald?

GK: Twice at the Herald. He was the managing editor when I got there in ‘80, then in early ‘82 I think left right after Murdoch takeover. Then came back as sports editor from ‘86-‘95 or so. He and Forst hired me initially.

BB: I just watched a screener copy of a new HBO doc on Borg-McEnroe. They show footage of Charlie Steiner getting into a fight with a Brit in the press room at the ’81 Wimbledon and who should I see in the background?

GK: Yeah, that footage is everywhere — also on a video Not Great Moments in sports. I was the peacemaker. I might have been the only one in the room who knew both guys and figured if I didn’t break them up nobody would, even though neither one wanted to fight very badly. After the third Leonard Duran fight Charlie sat down with me and Stephen Stills at the Mirage and we got to talking about it and Stills was cracking up. I said if you ever want to feel ridiculous try standing in the middle of the Wimbledon press room pleading “Stop it, Nigel!” I believe I kept them apart without ever putting my briefcase down.

BB: I talked to Bill Lee. Said you’d be proud of him, he’s finally become a logger. Said he’s wanted to be one his whole life. That, and a wino. Do you still keep in touch with him?

GK: Last time I saw Bill was in Burlington more than a year ago. My daughter was meeting me there and we were driving up to Montreal for a fight, and Bill drove over and met us at my friends’ house. I’d taken a spill on the train to Newark Airport and broke a couple of ribs, it turned out. He had a deal with the owners at Jay Peak (where Darcy and Sam teach in he ski school) to make bats out of all the hickory they were clearing in their new expansion. He’d just started, and gave me one of the earlier prototypes, basically a mistake. They’d milled it to the precise dimensions of another bat he was using, and hickory being much denser, it was so heavy King Kong would have had trouble getting around on a fastball with it. We took it up to Montreal, but of course I can’t get on a plane with a bat, so Darcy kept it in the car. Later in the summer Teddy went up and spent a week doing trail work for them, and Darcy gave him the Spaceman bat to bring back. He stopped in Boston to see some of his friends, got stoned and fell asleep under a tree in the Boston Common, and walked off and left it. He went back half an hour later but of course by then it was gone.

BB: I was listening to “Boom Boom Mancini” by Warren Zevon. You must have run into him during the course of your travels, right?

GK: During the ‘70s Bill Lee, Dennis Eckersley, and I along with our wives went to see him at the Berklee Performance Center, and Zevon later wrote his song about Bill. I didn’t know him well, though obviously Carl Hiassen did. When we had to clear the permissions for “The Fighter Still Remains” I wound up corresponding with his widow, Crystal (who lived in Vermont but since moved to Western Mass) and his kids and son (who lives in LA). I also have “Werewolves of London” as a ringtone on my phone but can’t remember for who now.

BB: Did you ever miss New York at all in those Herald years?

GK: A bit, but I traveled there a lot on assignments. In ‘92 I came down and worked for the Post for six months, right after Murdoch bought it for the second time, on kind of a lend-lease basis. They wanted me to stay and I would have but for a couple of things. One is that my family was very much against it, the other was that the labor strife was looming, and the editor, Ken Chandler, who was a friend, warned me that if I took the deal they were offering I’d be obligated to cross a picket line. That was a pretty good deal while it lasted. They put me up in hotels, the Herald paid my salary and the Post my expenses, and at the first of every month they handed me a fist full of round-trip shuttle tickets I could use to fly to and from Boston at my discretion, so I could arrange my schedule to be in New York for, say, five days, and then in Boston for five.

BB: Who are some of your favorite athletes that you covered?

GK: There were lots of them: Bill Lee, Jim Willoughby, and Dennis Eckersley remain friends. Ray Leonard, Marvin Hagler, and of course Ali was a joy to cover. Dave Cowens and Kevin McHale were lots of fun to cover, as were guys in the earlier era of the Celtics – John Havlicek, Don Nelson, Don Chaney, and Jo Jo White, whom I had known at KU. I’ve also stayed close to some KU guys. Bud Stallworth I knew (and occasionally played pickup games with) when he was a freshman at KU, and then often got together with him when he was through town in his NBA days. I still see him pretty often and will in Lawrence this week. He and I went to the KU-Va Tech Orange Bowl together a few years ago, and then to the Final Four in San Antonio that April, as did Al Lopes, who was the “other” guard with Jo Jo at KU. Jo Jo got drafted by the Celtics and Al by Uncle Sam. After Vietnam Al went back to law school on the GI Bill and now practices in Lawrence.

BB: Do you ever feel that you didn’t write as much in early years because you were drinking and getting loaded?

GK: I don’t think the drinking and drugging slowed me down when it came to writing. In some cases it probably made the writing better, though I practically never drank till I was done writing and really didn’t do much drugs beyond getting a bit of an edge. But both before and after I was drinking, writing a daily column was extremely taxing mentally, in addition to having to travel to and from events, even home games. It took so much out of me that I’d never have been able to summon the discipline or the energy to write books while I was still doing that. For most of that time I was also playing a lot of golf, which was much more relaxing and didn’t tax you in the same way work did.

BB: When did you quit drinking?

GK: November 1991. As Malachy McCourt likes to say, I’d had enough.

BB: You have such a wide variety of friends and your life seems to be connected by those friendships. For writing, which is such a solitary profession, you seem to have a real need for human relationships.

GK: It’s a real cross-section of people, and it’s kind of fun getting people from those various worlds together who otherwise might never meet. But if there’s anything unique about it, it’s that there’s almost as wide a variation in age as well: Arlen Snyder is 78, and Tom Paxton is over 70 now. Niall Toibin, an actor friend in Dublin, is in his 80s. Some of my New York friends, mostly Lions Head survivors, go back more than 40 years. Pete Hamill and I don’t see each other that often – it probably averages out to once a week – but we email or talk on the phone several times a week. There are guys in Kansas like Jim McCrary I’ve known even longer, and I’ve got younger friends, too – Benn Schulberg and I go to and watch a lot of fights and ball games together; he’s barely into his 30s but then when his father and I used to do the same things, Budd was in his 90s. Lou DiBella is 50 now, but that’s a lot younger than I am, and Anne Tangeman is 45. Mark Horgan, who went out to Kansas with me last week, is only 29, and my godson Kidd Dorn is in his 30s. I’m talking here about people you might walk into my home and see hanging out. Rosalie Sorrels (who introduced me and Marge and is now 78 herself) said when people used to ask her mother why she didn’t hang out with people her own age, she’d reply “People my own age are dead.” I find that’s increasingly true, too. In the last couple of years a bunch of people from the Lions Head started dying in profusion (Jose Torres, Frank McCourt, David Markson, Paul Schiffman).

BB: Were you disappointed or angry when you heard that Hunter S. Thompson had killed himself?

GK: Both, but if I had to choose one I’d say angry.

BB: Did you feel freed up to write more once you retired from the Herald? I read in an interview that you said you feel guilty when you don’t write.

GK: Yes, I obviously had much more time to write. I was already working on Eamonn Coghlan’s book pretty much at time of retirement, and while that experience ended somewhat unhappily I think the discipline and work habits helped in all the other projects. Even though I was writing once a week for the Irish Times and covering things for websites I had a solid block of several hours I’d devote to those each day, and yes, it got so I felt guilty if I didn’t write.

BB: Even though it is difficult now, does writing give you a sense of purpose and identity?

GK: Writers write, although what I find myself doing these days is almost more secretarial work – doing all these interviews, arranging book tour stuff on the limited energy I have doesn’t leave me a lot of time for actual writing. I know I’m not going to have time to write another book (though there will be at least one more new cover, the reissue of Only Skin Deep), but I’m hoping to cover a few more fights, and I’d like to get this play (Bloodsong) finished even though there’s not a chance I’d live long enough to ever see it produced.

BB: Do you have any sense of how you’d like to be remembered?

GK: Why do you think there have been half a dozen books in the past four years?

[Pictures of George were provided by the Kimball family.]

There is a nice interview with Larry Merchant over at The Ring. I wish that Joseph Santoliquito, the interviewer, went deeper into Merchant’s memorable career as a newspaperman, but hey, at least he touched on it. Good job:

The Ring: What led you to journalism?

LM: My parents didn’t understand why I went to journalism school, and they tried to figure how you make a living out of that (laughs). But what I think helped me was my senior year at Oklahoma, I was sports editor and editor of the school daily. My senior year, I wrote a piece for Sport Magazine on Billy Vessels, who was becoming the Heisman Trophy award winner. I got paid $250, which was a lot of money at that time, and my parents took a deep breath and maybe they thought I could make it (laughs). But my first job was as sports editor of the Wilmington News, in Wilmington, N.C. I wrote a lot about fishing, what they caught and what they caught it with. I’d go fishing with Captain Eddie for sailfish. That sort of stuff (laughs).

I was 23, a one-man sports staff. I have vivid recollections of that time. Then an interesting thing happened. I was there for just three or four months, because I used a photo of a black second baseman in the sports section. When I picked up the newspaper later that day, where that photo had been was a blank space. When I went into the office the next morning, the managing editor took me aside and said, “If Jackie Robinson hits five home runs in a game, you can put his photo in the paper, otherwise we do not have photos of Negroes in the newspaper.” When I went back to my apartment, I got a big jar and started to fill it with my change every night. When it was filled a few weeks later, I bought a tank of gas and left town. That was it. I went back home and got a job at The Associated Press, and went from there to the Philadelphia Daily News as an assistant photo editor around 1955.

The Ring: Your big break came soon afterward, right?

LM: There was a lot of transition going on at The Daily News. I was in the generation that looked at sports differently. The Daily News was housecleaning for financial reasons, and they made me sports editor. I was 26 and reflected a newish sensibility, heightened by TV — we assumed that fans knew the score when they picked up the newspaper. We wrote about the sports scene and what was behind it, about the athletes as personalities and people as well as athletes. My column was called “Fun and Games” to convey the idea that it isn’t life and death for us, that it’s entertainment we are passionate about.

Over at Deadspin, I profile the late George Kimball:

George Kimball hung upside down some 70 feet in the cold Manhattan air, still in need of a cigarette. Well, the doctors had said smoking would kill him, hadn’t they? The previous autumn, they had found an inoperable cancerous tumor the size of a golf ball in his throat and given him six months to live. Five months had passed. He’d finished his latest round of chemotherapy, and now George, 62 years old and recently retired from the Boston Herald, was at the Manhattan Center Grand Ballroom in 2006, to cover a night of boxing for a website called The Sweet Science.

He’d never set foot in the place before. He didn’t even know what floor he was on when he went for a smoke between fights. There was a long line at the elevator so he went looking for a backstage exit and stepped out into the winter night, onto a tiny platform seven stories over the sidewalk. And then, as George would later tell the story, he plunged into darkness.

His leg caught between the fire ladder and the wall. He knew right away it was broken. He dangled from the fire escape like a bat—except bats can let go. He tried calling for help but his voice was too weak from the cancer treatments; he could barely whisper. Also, he wanted that fucking cigarette. A security guard, ducking out for his own smoke, found him, and it took another 20 minutes before the paramedics could get George on his feet. They wanted him to go to the hospital for X-rays but George talked them out of it. His wife was a doctor, he explained, and with all the chemo, he had more than enough painkillers at home.

He went back to his seat to watch the last two fights. Afterward, he hobbled to a drug store and bought a knee brace, an ice pack, a large quantity of bandages, and a lighter to replace the Zippo he lost in the fall. Two days later George would go to a hospital to set his broken leg. But that night, he went home. His wife Marge cleaned the scrapes on George’s arms, and he took a big hit of OxyContin. Then he filed his story on the fight.

* * *
George was a large man with one good eye, a red beard, a gap between his two front teeth, and a huge gut. He was a literate, two-fisted drinker who never missed a deadline and never passed up an argument. One night, when he was 21 and partying in Beacon Hill, he was struck on the side of the face with a beer bottle. That’s how George got his glass eye.

It became his favorite prop. “You’d be amazed,” he said, “by how many people ask you to keep an eye on their drink.”

George began his career when Red Smith and Dick Young were the lords of the press box. On the night he fell out of the Manhattan sky, he had been a sports columnist for close to 40 years, “the last of his kind,” according to Michael Katz, the longtime boxing reporter for The New York Times. He drank one-eyed with Pete Hamill and Frank McCourt, smoked dope with Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin, and did with William Burroughs and Hunter S. Thompson whatever was in their heads to do at the time. George covered Wimbledon and the Masters, the World Series and the Super Bowl and more than 300 championship fights. He golfed with Michael Jordan and sat in a sauna with Joe DiMaggio. “He’d show up with Neil Young,” Katz said, “and get drugs from the Allman Brothers. Mention a name and he’d somehow know the person.”

Check it out if you get a chance. I’m proud of the effort I put into this one.

Richard Hoffer is one of the best writers to ever cover sports in this country, first at the L.A. Times and then at Sports Illustrated. His prose is graceful and precise, he’s understated and funny.

Here is he on Joe Frazier and Muhammad Ali in the current issue of SI:

It was no wonder Joe Frazier was so bitter. He was made to seem the foil, a mere accomplice in mythology, consigned to a supporting role in Muhammad Ali’s extravagant, ego-driven drama. It is a harsh truth that if you participate in the most exciting rivalry of a century, it does you little good even to win one of its three bouts. The verdict of history is decisive, and it is permanent, and men like Frazier, who stumble at the precipice, are forever remaindered on the heap of losers, their vinegary claims to justice lost in the courts of public opinion. It was no wonder, then, that when Ali lit the Olympic torch in 1996, his trembling hands viewed as a physical artifact of heroism by an adoring world, Frazier allowed that if he’d had his way, he’d have pitched Ali into the fire.

…In 1975—Ali now 33, Frazier 31—they met again in the near-death experience that would ever after be known as the Thrilla in Manila. Ali was even crueler in his prefight taunts, exploiting the fact that gorilla rhymed with the venue. Frazier, by turns mystified and hurt, was provoked beyond the requirements of the bout. While Ali would always say he was only boosting the box office, Frazier could never accept any explanation for attacks that might affect his children’s impression of him. “Look at my beautiful kids,” he’d say. “How can I be a gorilla?”

But not even animus could account for what happened that morning in the Philippines. It was such a violent affair—recklessness tilting it first Ali’s way, then Frazier’s way and then Ali’s again—that it seemed less a boxing match than an exploration of man’s capacities, a test of his will to win or at least survive. But once it turned Ali’s way again in the 12th round, too much had gone before for yet another reversal. There wasn’t anything left in either man. Before the 15th and final round Frazier’s trainer, Eddie Futch, called it quits, saving his fighter from certain ruin, even as Ali was instructing his corner to cut his gloves off. It was victory, but by attrition.

Ali called it “the closest thing to dying I know of,” and he didn’t know the half of it. Their careers were essentially over that day, their 41 rounds of shared agony making any further discoveries in the ring unnecessary, or even possible. Frazier lost a rematch to Foreman and called it quits. Ali managed to dominate the game for several years more, but only on the basis of his personality—he was spent. Even then he was beginning a slow and ironic decline, Parkinson’s eventually rendering him rigid and mute, the final price for all those wars.

Ali’s respect for Frazier was enormous, and he apologized for his name-calling on several occasions. “I couldn’t have done what I did without him,” he once said.

Frazier repaid the compliment: “We were gladiators. I didn’t ask no favors of him, and he didn’t ask none of me.” They recognized that their destinies were entwined, that neither would have achieved his greatness without the other. But Ali could afford to concede the point, being the most popular athlete, even personality, in the world. Frazier, who spent the rest of his life living above his gym in Philadelphia, did not have the comfort of the world’s goodwill—he lived in an age that would reward style over substance every time—and so maintained his half of the blood feud as vigorously as possible, even seeming to take a grim satisfaction in Ali’s poor health, proof of who really won that day in Manila.

That a feel-good reconciliation would elude the two men who shaped such a magnificent rivalry is apt. Even if they were more like brothers than foes—who else could understand the kind of pride that forced them through those three battles?—fighters like them could never really enjoy a cease-fire, could never drop their hands, as if they alone knew what man was truly capable of.

Smokin’ Joe Frazier, a great heavyweight champion, died yesterday. He was 67.

Thinking about Frazier this morning I wished there was some way to remember him without bringing Ali into the conversation. As a final tribute to Frazier. But I don’t think it can be done. Still, let’s turn to Rick Hoffer, for clarity.

And while we are at SI, go directly to this piece by Mark Kram, and another fine profile by Bill Nack.

Here’s a good one for you fight fans out there, an oral history of the controversial Hagler-Leonard fight.

Nice job by Eric Raskin and Grantland.

By John Schulian

The fact that I lived through my experience at “L.A. Law” and had an on-screen writing credit to show for it gave me a seal of approval: “You worked for Steven Bochco? You’re just the guy we’ve been looking for.” It didn’t seem to matter that I’d just hit town and barely knew my hip pocket from a teakettle when it came to screenwriting. That’s how much clout the man had.

Steven made the call that got me in the door with his mentor, Bill Sackheim, at Universal. Sackheim was an embraceable curmudgeon who’d been through the wars in both TV and movies, writing westerns for Audie Murphy and Joel McCrea, producing and co-writing “Rambo,” and dealing with the nightmare that was Sally Field in her “Gidget” days. It didn’t take long for me to realize that time spent with him would be an education, and believe me, I needed educating, especially in the art of constructing a story for the screen.

But while I was trying to develop an idea for a Sackheim project about newspaper reporters, I got a call from a young “Miami Vice” writer named Mike Duggan. I’d met him at Jacob Epstein’s 30th birthday part, and here he was not three weeks later, telling me his boss was looking for someone to help write a two-parter about boxing. Once again the stars were aligned.

In less than two hours, I was in “Vice’s” offices–Building 69 on the Universal lot–meeting Dick Wolf, who was running the writing staff. The very same Dick Wolf who would go on to create “Law & Order” and all its spinoffs. He’d come over from “Hill Street Blues,” where he had clashed famously with the brilliant but erratic David Milch. In his spare time, he was producing two movies he’d written. I don’t know when he slept, but he always walked around grinning like the kid who got the most toys at Christmas.

I shook hands with Dick, and then he introduced me to an amiable, prematurely gray guy who was just about to leave: Kerry McCluggage. Kerry was “Vice’s” supervising producer that afternoon; two days later he was named president of Universal Television. Just like that, I was on a first-name basis with one of the most powerful people in the business. When I’d bump into him on the lot, he’d always say hello and ask about the show, as if I really knew anything about what was going on.

On that first Saturday, however, all that mattered was making a good impression and getting the assignment. I spun a couple yarns about Muhammad Ali and then a few about Don King, and I knew I had scored when Dick showed me the story for the first of the two boxing episodes and asked what I thought of it. I pointed out a few things he had wrong and he didn’t try to debate me, didn’t even flinch; he just fixed them. Then he said, “Okay, we need the script by Tuesday.”

Dick looked at me, still grinning, but there was a question in his eyes that I have to believe involved whether or not I would run out of his office screaming when I heard the deadline. He was asking me to do a rush job, but I’d spent 16 years in newspapers doing rush jobs. This would simply be one for higher stakes.

“Fine,” I said.

“Then you do acts two and three. I’ll do one and four.”

The race was on. I hustled back to Le Parc, where I was staying again, and started hammering away on my Olivetti. I didn’t stop until Tuesday morning when Dick swung by the hotel and I ran out the front door to hand him what I had written. A couple of hours later, he called to say I had passed my trial by fire.

I should point out that the script Dick and I lashed together in three days wouldn’t be the one we shot. It would simply be something the production team in Miami could work off for casting, location scouting, and that sort of thing. While all that was being taken care of, Dick and I went to work on a rewrite that was a far better piece of work.

“Miami Vice” was in its third season when I showed up, and no longer had the heat it did when its stars, Don Johnson and Phillip Michael Thomas, made the cover of Time and established Crockett and Tubbs in the national lexicon. But I was still in tall clover. I didn’t even mind that I was working in a spare office full of the empty cardboard boxes that signified the previous occupant’s failure. Every time I finished rewriting a scene, I’d trot it down to Dick’s office. Halfway through the process, he looked at me (grinning, of course) and said, “I don’t know where you learned to do it, but you know how to get into a scene and out of a scene.” All those years of reading W.C. Heinz, Jimmy Breslin and Gay Talese, the masters of the scene in journalistic form, were paying off. They had always relied on the tools of drama–character, dialogue, the kinetic energy of the moment–and just as I had followed their lead in my newspaper and magazine work, now I was doing it in a medium where the scene was everything.

There were other links to my not-so-distant past as well. Our cast featured rowdy heavyweight Tex Cobb, Olympic champion Mark Breland, and the one and only Don King. I put words I’d heard King say in his character’s mouth, and he made a hash of them. Stuff like “afoxanado” and “low and scurrilous cad.” I even had him say someone was “matriculating on the veranda.” Everything was set up to make King look great. And he whiffed, the big goof.

Cobb was an infinitely better thespian, which should come as no surprise to anyone who remembers him in the Coen brothers’ “Raising Arizona.” My fondest memory of him, of course, is that he was the first man I killed on TV. But far more thrilling than that was hearing Crockett and Tubbs saying my words, and seeing the stylized shot of three killers swaggering through a gymnasium door with bad intentions, lit perfectly, with clouds of man-made fog wafting in for atmosphere. It was pure “Miami Vice.”

I got all those mental keepsakes, and a full-time job, too. Dick hired me as a staff writer, and then he and I set to work on the second of the boxing episodes. Or maybe we wrote part two first. Things were moving so fast that they blur in my memory. The one thing I’m absolutely certain of is how lucky I was as I sat in my office, now clear of boxes, and banged out my half of the next script. Without realizing it, I had hopscotched past thousands of writers who would have sold body parts and family members to be where I was.

Click here for the full “From Ali to Xena” archives.

The Apprenticeship of Randall Cobb: The Late-Booming Karate Fighter From Abilene Wants to Be The Baddest Ass In Boxing

By Pete Dexter

The face suggests more than 21 fights, but that’s how many there have been. Counting the two as an amateur. There is a scar over the left eye, a missing tooth. The nose is flat and soft, without cartilage.

Apart from that, it’s a face that’s been hurt.

On March 22, a 26-year-old fighter named Randall Cobb lost a majority decision on national television to Michael Dokes. Two of the judges gave the fight to Dokes, one called it a draw.

Dokes was supposed to win. He is the fastest fighter in the division, maybe the most talented. He was schooled through a long amateur career and brought carefully through 20 fights as a professional. The only problem Dokes ever had was a lack of size, and in the last year he has grown two inches to 6-2 and filled out to 218 pounds, and there is a feeling among some people that after Larry Holmes retires, Dokes doesn’t have any problems at all.

Given all that, there are people who like the other guy’s chances.

At 22 years old—a long time after most professionals were polished fighters—Randall Cobb had his first amateur fight. He had a second and then turned professional, saying he was going to be the heavyweight champion of the world. Ali was the champion then. Cobb would have had trouble naming five other men in the division.

He spent three years knocking out people like Chebo Hernandez (the former heavyweight champion of Mexico) and then, with 18 lifetime fights and 18 days to get ready, he crawled into the ring with Earnie Shavers and won on a TKO in the eighth.

He lost a split decision to Ken Norton and then dropped the fight to Dokes. In each of the fights he got better, and he is still just learning. He has the best chin in boxing and in the Dokes fight—when he caught much of what Dokes threw on his gloves and arms—the people who have watched Cobb got their first sign that he wasn’t going to be proving it the rest of his life.

After the fight Cobb sat with ABC’s Keith Jackson, who asked if he had been surprised Dokes hadn’t run more. Cobb said, “I don’t know how it looked from here, but to me it looked like I was running my ass all over the ring trying to catch him.”

As he said that Dokes dropped into the chair next to him. Cobb smiled. “We’ll have to do this again, Mike.”

Dokes shook his head. “Oh, no,” he said. “No, I don’t think so.”

“I’m going to go back and start all over,” Cobb said later. “I’ll do whatever I got to do and I’m going to keep doin’ it until it’s right.”

His mother heard that and nodded. “Some day that dog’s going to lie in the sun,” she said.

Randall Cobb is my friend. I know him, he won’t cheat himself. And after it’s over—it doesn’t matter how many times he’s hit in the face—he’ll be able to look in the mirror and not be afraid of what he sees.

PHILADELPHIA, 1976

Saturday night they called the police. He was killing the girl. The crazy Irish who was supposed to be a fighter, they’d seen him take her into his place. Now they could hear her moaning.

The cop didn’t know. He got out of the car and listened. Nothing, then a scream that wasn’t exactly a scream. Nothing again. A moan that was a moan. The cop leaned back in the car and called for a back-up, then he rang the bell and waited.

The man who came down the stairs was Randall Cobb, and there was nothing about the way he looked to say he wasn’t a killer. Four years later, in fact, after he’d ended Shavers’ career with a broken jaw and was getting ready to fight Norton, he would briefly consider “The Sun City Assassin” as a ring name.

This was the first year in Philadelphia, though, so Randall came to the door with a nosebleed. That was because twice a week they were breaking his nose at Joe Frazier’s gym. “Of course they’re breaking my nose,” he once said. “I’m the white boy, I’m a redneck, sissy-ass kick fighter from Texas and I don’t know enough about boxing to break their noses back.”

Even Duane Bobick broke it. He’d been the white boy before Randall showed up. “I can understand Bobick’s position,” he said. “I walked in off the street and could hit harder than he could.”

Randall came down the stairs blotting the nose with a brassiere. He was wearing a black hat and Wrangler jeans that collected in puddles around his boots. Randall wears a hat because when he doesn’t you can see his hair, which has a way of matting together and growing toward sunlight. He opened the door.

The cop looked at Randall. Six-three, 230 pounds, sniffing a bloody brassiere. And there was something in his eyes…. It isn’t like looking at Darryl Dawkins, but you want to be polite. “Excuse me,” the cop said, “we’ve got a report of a disturbance….”

Randall said, “Don’t worry, partner, it’s just a dance instructor.” He noticed the cop looking at his hand, then he noticed the hand himself and what was in it. He’d picked the brassiere up in the dark when he’d gotten up and felt his nose start to leak, and if he didn’t know anything about living in the city yet, he knew enough not to try to explain that. “They’re responsive people….”

The cop nodded yes, he knew about dance instructors. He couldn’t keep his eyes off the brassiere. “It’s good, knowing how to dance,” he said.

A woman’s voice came from upstairs. “What is it, Randall?”

“There’s a cop here wants to know if I’m killing you.”

“Oh.” There was a pause. “Well, tell him no.”

Randall said, “I’m not killin’ her.”

Fifteen minutes later the cop was back. “Sorry, but we got another call. They say you’re doing it again.”

“I haven’t done it once yet,” Randall said. He stepped outside and looked down the narrow street. Rowhouses, parallel parking, snow. “These people beat their wives in the street, in broad daylight, with table legs,” he said, “and nobody even looks out the window.”

The next morning, one of the old women from the street stopped a friend of Randall’s to apologize for the police. “It wasn’t me,” she said, “told on him for what he was doin’ to that girl.” She thought a minute. “Hey, you think he’d talk to my husband how he does that?”

Randall Cobb came to Philadelphia 10 days before Christmas 1975. He showed up one night at Frazier’s gym carrying everything he owned in a sack, and asked for manager Joe Gramby. He’d gotten off the plane from Texas with $22. The cab ride from the airport had left him with six.

At the time, Gramby had been in boxing about 150 years and Randall was the greenest fighter over 11 he’d ever seen. He couldn’t’ box, he’d never seen snow and he had the flu when he walked into the gym. It is still widely accepted in Philadelphia boxing circles that Texas is part of the world where they don’t develop immunity to disease. Gramby got on the phone to El Paso to ask his partner in the deal exactly what it was that just walked in the door.

The partner was a man named Mel Rabin. Rabin had made some money in the collection agency business in Philadelphia, he’d made some money in Mexican-made imitation Navajo rugs and lost some in Cuban tomatoes. And then he came up with the idea for the fan-clapper, a machine to replace applause. “You shake it, it makes a clappin’ noise, one hand. Open it up, it’s a fan for hot days. It was perfect….”

The fan-clapper was still in development when Rabin looked at the newspaper one day and saw a story about a 21-year-old full-contact karate fighter who had just knocked out his sixth-straight opponent.

Rabin got on the phone and eventually found himself talking to a wrestling promoter, Paul Clinite. They made a deal. A boxer who had never boxed, a wrestling promoter, a Philadelphia manager and the man who invented the fan-clapper. Randall came north and signed a 10-year contract.

“The understanding was that all I had to do was learn to fight, that Rabin would take care of the financial end of it,” Randall said. “It sounded better than shoveling cement with Mexicans, which is what I’d been doing, that or breaking somebody’s kneecaps for $75 a fight. But it’s not like I didn’t have other opportunities. Or ambition. I’d stand out there in the sun and daydream about driving a truck that delivered potato chips.”

Gramby put Randall up in a room at the downtown YMCA, an unhappy place crawling with men who wish they were lady dance instructors. In the morning he ran and in the afternoon he took a bus into the heart of North Philadelphia to get his nose broken at Frazier’s gym. One morning he slipped on some ice, ran into a light pole and broke it himself. And for a while that’s all there was. He was cold, he was beat up, he hated to run. He was learning everything about being a fighter except how to fight.

The money didn’t happen. Rabin says now that he never promised Randall a cent. A minute later he says he spent $55,000 making him a contender. Randall got a job cleaning bathrooms at night, then he got a job watching the door at a center city bar. He moved out of the YMCA.

In the fall, somebody at the gym noticed he couldn’t breathe, so they took him down to the University of Pennsylvania Hospital and had what was left of the cartilage taken out of his nose. It would be almost four years before he would have any money to pay for the operation.

In December 1976, Randall hitch-hiked back to Abilene for Christmas. He’d been promised $500 to get home, and when he saw that promise was as empty as the others, he almost quit. “They called me from Philadelphia and said to come back, that it was all a mistake and they were sorry and they’d be nice. They said they’d even get me some fights. I said, ‘Well, if you’ll be nice….’”

He came back and began knocking people out. He was crazy in the ring, wild and strong and unpredictable, but he could hit and you couldn’t hurt him with a baseball bat.

In his fifth fight he knocked out a San Diego heavyweight, David Wynne.

Randall says the fight against Wynne was a setup. “Rabin told me he’d had the same number of fights I’d had, that he was about at the same place. Afterwards I heard he’d told Gramby that I needed to be taught a lesson. Wynne was a lot more experienced, and he was killing people.”

Rabin denies he tried to set his fighter up, but acknowledges the problem. “I remember him always tellin’ me, ‘Just don’t give me orders.’ He never wanted nobody to tell him what to do.”

Randall ran his record to 7-0, all knockouts.

The relationship with Rabin deteriorated. Rabin’s position was that he had a 10-year contract, and Randall belonged to him and Joe Gramby.

Randall’s position was that he didn’t belong to anybody. He explained it to his lawyer, Jim Greenlee. “A contract ain’t nothin’ but a piece of paper you can tear up or eat. I don’t let people tell me what to do, and I’m sure not going to let a piece of paper tell me what to do.”

Greenlee understood. He had worked his way through college sewing up bodies at a morgue to become one of the highest-priced, most respected lawyers in the city.

Greenlee said, “Yeah, I figured he was probably crazy—I mean, here’s a kid with no fights telling me he’s going to be the heavyweight champion of the world within a year—but he’s such a likeable kid. I thought, ‘Well, if he wants to try that, he ought to be able to try it.’ I realize now that every lawyer needs one.”

Which is how Randall Cobb, who until last spring had never made more than $2,000 a fight, came to have the best legal counsel money could buy, without charge. And which is how, finally, the 10-year contract with Rabin and Gramby was declared illegal—you can’t sign a fighter for that long in Pennsylvania without permission from the state athletic commission. It was not, however, the only contract Randall had signed.

“The thing about Randall,” Greenlee said, “is he’s lovable but he’s not the kind of guy you can tell, ‘do this, do that.’ You sort of suggest things. Right now we’re working on not signing contracts…. God knows what kind of paper is floating around out there with his name on it.”

The night Randall beat Shavers, Greenlee and a couple of Randall’s friends were sitting around a hotel bar, figuring the damages. It had been a brutal, sobering fight, the kind you come away from with a headache. Somebody said he’d heard Randall had hurt his right hand.

Greenlee smiled. “Really?” he said. “The one he writes with?”

Mel Rabin snaps his fingers for the waiter and points to a $24 bottle of Italian wine sitting on the table. “Pour us some of that slop,” he says. Enough slop has already been poured so Rabin doesn’t care what his lawyer advised him, he’s going to tell it all.

Rabin traces his career through Cuba and Philly and Florida and Texas, through Randall’s first seven fights. “At that time I’d decided to sell him. I had a guy who wanted five more knockouts and he’d give us a million dollars. Five stiffs and we sell him for a million. I call Cobb up to tell him—he wants out as bad as I do—and suddenly nobody knows where he is. Not Gramby, not his friends, nobody. Then I find out he’s in Florida makin’ a movie. By the time he gets back the deal is dead. Me with two heart attacks….”

The movie was The Champ. One day the casting people had come through the gym looking for somebody to play Roland Bowers, who kills Jon Voight. They saw Randall and stopped looking. They paid him $10,000—10 times as much as he’d made in most fights—and put him up in a house in Coconut Grove.

Voight returned a call in 20 minutes. “I’ll do anything I can for Randy,” he said. “It’s interesting he wants to be a fighter—if he wanted to be an actor instead, he could be.”

Rabin calls the waiter to pour more wine. “I found this kid when he wasn’t shit,” he says, getting loud. “I did everything for him, and he’s screwed me….” The appeals judge has just tossed out the contract, a ruling that apparently has jeopardized a deal Rabin had made with a Philadelphia car dealer to sell his part of Randall’s contract for close to $250,000.

“I gave up my health for Cobb,” he says. “After all these years, my wife says it’s either him or her. I gave up my rug business, my TV GUIDE cover business, I gave up everything.” He is red in the face now, coming up out of his chair.

“I gave up my fan-clapper for that bum.”

PHILADELPHIA, 1980

It’s one o’clock in the afternoon at Frazier’s gym, in the shadows of the train tracks in North Philadelphia. There are half a dozen kids working in front of mirrors, skipping ropes. Everywhere you look are pictures of the first fight with Ali, the one Frazier won.

The old champion stands near one of the heavy bags with a kid who is short for his age, a little fat, shoulders clear to his elbows. Frazier at 15.

Frazier points to his face. The kid throws a tentative jab there. Frazier walks through it and taps the kid in the ribs with an open left hand. He taps the kid again and again. Frazier is talking. The kid begins to flinch.

Randall watches from a dressing table. “I hate it when Joe shows me something,” he says. “It always hurts. He can’t help it, it’s like askin’ him to weigh 90 pounds….”
George Benton is taping Randall’s hands. Benton is the trainer, an enormously talented middleweight who never won the title, who in a 21-year career got hit with fewer right hands than Randall ran into during the fifth round against Shavers.

“I seen this program last night,” Benton is saying. “There’s this lion, big mother standin’ under a tree, and then the snake drops on him off a branch and ties him all up. The lion starts strugglin’, this way and that way—just like you with Shavers, Tex. Pushin’, wrestlin’….” Benton fights the snake a while, then looks back over his shoulder to bite its head off. He stops.

“He can’t get at him, even when he goes in the water he can’t get this nigger off his back. And the lion is gettin’ worn out and turnin’ blue, and then finally he goes like this….”

Benton goes quiet, gathering himself, then shakes everything at once. “That’s how he got him off,” he says. “He quit tirin’ hisself out strugglin’, just saved it up and hit him. And the lion, after he got him off, he went on his business and he didn’t mess around under no trees no more.”

Randall looks at Benton. “That’s the end? The lion doesn’t mess around under trees? Nobody dies?”

“That’s it.”

“C’mon, Georgie. Marlin Perkins doesn’t even stand up at the end and say, ‘In the animal kingdom, lions protect themselves and their families by not messin’ around under trees, but for the kind of protection we need, go talk to Mutual of Omaha.’” Benton shrugs.

Randall says, “I like stories where something dies.”

That morning Randall had finally gotten a tape of the Shavers fight. He’d gone to a store that sold Betamaxes to watch it.

The fight had ended in the eighth round on a technical knockout, Randall’s 16th knockout in 17 fights, and for most of that time he and Shavers had stood in the middle of the ring beating on each other, both of them dead tired. Randall had taken the fight on 18 days’ notice, and it showed.

“One day Georgie called me up and said we had a fight for $75,000,” he said. Until then the best Randall had done was $2,000. “I said, ‘Who do we have to fight, God?’”

For as long as Randall had been boxing, Earnie Shavers had been the hardest hitter in the world. “The thing about being a fighter,” Randall said, “you lie to yourself.

You don’t say, ‘He’s bigger than me and meaner than me and uglier than me, and his breath’s worse and he’s gonna beat my head off.’ You say, ‘Screw it, I can rumble with anybody.’ You got to say, ‘Prove it, kill me.’ You need a little of that to get in the ring in the first place.

“Leon [Spinks] is like that, and Vito Antuofermo. Vito, in fact, is every reason I’m afraid to go into New York. Leon, you got to love him. A purist. He’s a perfect ‘screw-you’ fighter who never got the hang of civilization. The one-way streets, the dope, partying all night, fighting his ass off the next day. He did that before he was champion and after he got the title he never joined up with the Fellowship of Christian Athletes. Leon Spinks never let success change him a bit.”

Randall put the Shavers fight in the Betamax. The fighters come to the center of the ring for instructions. “Right here,” he said, “I was thinkin’, ‘The worst he can do is kill me. He can’t eat my body…. I don’t think he eats bodies.’”

Randall watched himself have two good rounds. His mouth comes open in the third and Shavers begins to hit him. He hits Shavers back. They do that for five more rounds, nobody getting out of the way. Faces swell. They fall into each other, again and again, exhausted, beat up.

The fight is being taped for television, and Ken Norton is one of the color men. He is saying Cobb is slow.

The salesman came by in the sixth round to ask how Randall liked the set. Randall pointed to himself in the ring. “I’m not sure. It looks like distortion there in that boy’s face.”

In the eighth the referee stops it. Shavers, bent and covering and done, is hit 20 or 30 times on the back of the head with right hands. The damage, though, comes mostly from the left. Short uppercuts and jabs.

The referee steps in. Randall follows Shavers back to his corner. “Here I’m thanking him for giving me the opportunity to fight him,” he said.

He starts back to his side of the ring, changes his mind and goes back to hug Shavers. “Here I’m askin’ him to please never give me an opportunity like that again.”

At the gym, Benton finishes lacing Randall’s gloves and pinching his face into head gear, and is talking to him again about economy of movement, about snakes and lions and living right. It is the genius of Benson that it all makes sense.

Randall nods at the right times, tells Benton that he played the tape of the Shavers fight that morning. “I can see your concern, George,” he says.

It is nine days until the fight with Norton. Randall begins his work with three rounds against a big French-Canadian kid who speaks almost no English. Frazier sends the kid into the ring saying, “Remember, he killed your mother.”

He says that as much to Randall as to the Canadian, but it doesn’t make any difference. Randall slides, moves, works on form. He throws light jabs at the kid’s body, lighter ones to his head. He stops once to show him not to look away when he throws a jab. Frazier shakes his head and says, “When you two gettin’ married?”

There are people who think Randall hurts himself by not throwing harder punches in the gym, who think that you fight the way you train. Every now and then he’ll drop somebody accidentally, but that’s what it is—an accident.

“I won’t hurt somebody in the gym,” he says. “I remember what it’s like having somebody kick your ass every time you make a mistake, then having them kick your ass when you do it right.

“I’m not interested in being the baddest ass in Joe Frazier’s gym, I want to be the baddest ass in the world.”

Randall finishes three rounds with the Canadian, does two more with a quick middleweight, then four with Jimmy Young. In the third round Young—who can still play the game—slides inside and hits Randall with an uppercut. It isn’t a big punch, and it doesn’t land flush, but it’s the kind of thing that can cut you. He makes the move again and Benton tells him to stop. “Don’t throw those uppercuts, Jimmy,” he says, “we goin’ to Texas tomorrow.”

Randall says, “Screw it, George. Throw them, Jimmy.”

Benton says, “Don’t throw no more uppercuts, Jimmy.”

Young stops fighting. Randall is suddenly mad. “Goddammit, throw some uppercuts,” he says. “Let’s see what happens.”

There is a look on his face now that you wouldn’t want to see if you were Jimmy Young, but in the five seconds before they start again he cools off. It isn’t Young he’s mad at. It isn’t even Benton, who he knows is right.

He says that later, in the car on the way home. “Georgie was right. What pissed me off was I felt like he was keeping me from learning. The way the Lord set things up, your life is learning, and there’s a lesson you learn or you can’t go any farther. The Lord says, ‘Son, you got to keep runnin’ into that wall until you get this shit tight.’”

Randall Cobb, dead center, will not be protected.

SAN ANTONIO, 1980

It turns out Randall’s mother cheats at cards. It is two days after the fight with Norton, and she and Priscilla Lowe are teaching Arthur Bourgeau and me to play cribbage. We are trying to teach them to drink, but it is beginning to look like they already know how.

Priscilla lives with Randall, Arthur owns a bookstore and spars with him, and cribbage is a game that depends on putting cards together to count 15. Like a 10 and a five. Or, if it’s Norma counting, a nine and a four, or a nine and a seven, or a seven and a four. “Fifteen-two, fifteen-four, fifteen-six, fifteen-eight and a double run makes 16,” she says. “A real barn burner.” She writes down the score while Randall leans over and glances at her cards.

“Norma,” he says, “you can’t do that.”

She gives him a deep, thoughtful look. “Son,” she says, “what’s done is done.”

They are sitting in a suite at the Holiday Inn, and there are half empty bottle of all kinds of liquor stuck to the dressers and tables, left over from the party. The fact that there is liquor left—or maybe that there is a suite left—speaks to the split decision, which went to Norton. At least 50 of Randall’s friends from his karate days had come for the fight, from all over the Southwest. There is a popular conception of masters of the martial arts which has them sitting cross-legged in corners, arranging space and time until somebody big beats on them with a hammer, and then they get up and kill him.

In Texas, they don’t do a lot of waiting. The friends have mostly checked out now, though, and tomorrow the rest leave. Randall and Priscilla are going to Hawaii for a week, then back to the house they rent just outside Philadelphia.

The place has a porch and a lawn and a boxer puppy. “The house gives Priscilla a sense of security,” he said. “That’s how women are. But there ain’t no security, not in this world….”

Willard Cobb died in 1961 of cancer, leaving Norma with four sons, Glynn, Dan, Randall and Mardy, which worked out to a trip to the emergency room about every 45 minutes. Randall was six at the time, the third oldest.

Some of the things that does to you—losing your father when you’re a kid—it does then. Some of it you find out later. You get protective, for instance.

And some of it you don’t really know about until you have a kid of your own. That part is still out there in front of Randall. One night, maybe driving through Iowa with her asleep against your arm, a set of car lights makes ghosts of you both and you’re face to face with how helpless you are.

Norma moved the family from Bridge City, Texas, to Abilene. She took two jobs. “Randall was the most vulnerable,” she said. “He was like his daddy that way. Sensitive and introverted. For a long time after he died, Randall wouldn’t go near his daddy’s chair. He was always good at art, then all he’d draw was gravestones. He’d see the other boys his age and ask how come God didn’t take their daddies too. I always told him God chose us because we could handle it.

“Sometimes he’d be out playing ball with the other youngsters in the neighborhood and he’d just stop. When that happened, I put down whatever I was doing and went out and took his place. I made him stand on the porch and watch. It wasn’t easy, but there were things he had to be shown….”

He came to San Antonio in the best shape he’d been in for a fight. Besides his running and the daily workouts at Frazier’s gym, he was sparring three mornings a week with Bourgeau. There was karate twice a week and most nights he played basketball. Three times a week he went to Temple University and trained on its weight machines.

“Not only that,” he said. “Every day I have to practice my menacing, snarling and how to stare. It’s something you absolutely got to practice. And tell people how bad you are all the time. Next time you hear somebody getting a million dollars for a fight, try to remember what goes into it.”

The day before he left for the fight, Randall lifted for 28 straight minutes before he had muscle failure.

And he came into the fight confident and building a case against Norton. Before the weigh-in: “You know what he said? On television? He said I was slow.”

And when the promoters came to Randall two days before the fight to tell him Norton wanted a bigger ring and a change in officials, Randall agreed. Without talking to Gramby or Benton or Greenlee or anybody else.

“What I said was, ‘You tell Norton he can bring his brother and his mother and a cousin and let them judge it, and it ain’t going to make no difference because I’m going to put him dead flat on his ass in the third round anyway.’” Looking back on it, Randall shrugs. “He did and I didn’t. There’s probably a lesson in there someplace.”

The fight was another train wreck. Twice early on Norton seemed ready to go, and in the ninth round he was close to out on his feet. But he stayed there, braver and better than he’d been since he fought Larry Holmes, and won the 10th going away. And if you didn’t like the decision—and a lot of people didn’t—the fight was close enough and good enough so you couldn’t really complain.

After the fight Randall sat behind a table in the dressing room, holding an ice pack against his eye, keeping the other eye on his friends, talking to reporters. Some of the friends were crying.

A reporter asked Cobb if Norton had confused him, doubling up on the hook after the jab. Randall looked at him. “Some nights,” he answered, “you go out with a pocketful of money, all dressed up in your best clothes, and you can’t pay a seven-dollar whore a hundred dollars to dance with you.”

While Randall talked, George Benton slipped out of the room to go congratulate Norton. “Tex come a long ways,” he said on the way over. “People forget, he still doesn’t have any experience, he’s still findin’ out how to fight. But he’s got that jaw, like Ali’s. He’s got the heart of a champion. He’s smart and he learns fast. There’s nothin’ to keep Tex from goin’ all the way, and the only way he ain’t goin’ to make money now is if they stop printin’ it.”

It was a better fight than the one against Shavers, but Randall took almost as many punches, and the shots you take accumulate. Over the years, just like over the course of a fight.

Benton went into the dressing room. Norton, holding an ice pack to his eye, was talking about Randall to half a dozen reporters. “Don’t mix Cobb up with Scott LeDoux,” he said. “He hits like a mule…. I knew I wasn’t going to knock him out. I was there in Detroit for his fight with Shavers.”

Benton and Norton talked for a couple of minutes. Benton came out smiling. “I told him Tex was going to make a lot of money before this was all over,” he said. “He told me, ‘Not off my ass, he isn’t. He isn’t makin’ another nickel off me.’”

Norma has another barn burner. She squints at a line of cigarette smoke, making 15 three or four times from eights and face cards, then marks another 16 points on the scorepad.

Randall reaches over and hugs her neck. “I wish you’d quit smokin’,” he says, “take up dope or somethin’.” He kisses her nose, then coughs from deep in his chest. There is an infection there that started right after the fight. It sounds like it hurts him when he breathes.

Norma watches him until the coughing passes, then she shuffles the cards. Suddenly, you are thinking of the night in El Paso when Randall took two minutes to stop Chebo Hernandez, and Norma made Glynn—the oldest brother—go into Chebo’s dressing room and tell him Randall was sorry.

You think of her bringing the four of them up—once she actually had to take Dan to the hospital with a homemade arrow in his eyeball—putting down the cooking after work to play baseball when Randall quit. You don’t have to sit up nights wondering where Randall gets his sand.

And the night of the fight against Norton, she sat at ringside, holding a four-year-old granddaughter in her lap, and watched the punches come home, almost without flinching. Afterward what she said was, “I thought both boys did real well.”

And the punches come home and add up, and there’s such a long way still to go.

“By the time you get here,” Randall says, “you’ve already been hurt as bad as you can be hurt. There’s no new kind of pain, there’s nothin’ that you don’t already know about. It loses its meaning, and all that’s left is you’re uncomfortable.” He thinks for a minute. “The only way you can hurt me is to hurt somebody I love. You know what I mean?”

Randall looks across the table now and cups Norma’s chin. His fingers stuff and slow, the left eye and cheek swollen and dark, and there is the feeling his body hasn’t started to heal yet—that it’s still waiting to see if it gets hit again.

His nose touches his mother’s and flattens. He smiles at her with one side of his face.

I know what he means.

This story is reprinted with permission from the author. 

(Special thanks to Dina Colarossi for transcribing this piece for Bronx Banter.)

For more on Dexter and Cobb, check out this interview from Vice Magazine.

George Kimball, far right, with Mike Tyson and Marvin Hagler, mid-'80s

By John Schulian

George Kimball was blessed with the kind of voluble charm you find in an Irish bar, and, brother, let me tell you he’d been in a few. No amount of drink, however, could rein in his galloping intelligence. It was as pure a part of him as his love of the language and good company, and when he spoke, I did what I’ve always done best in the presence of gold-star raconteurs: I listened. Even when we were on the radio hustling our book of great boxing writing, I did little more than provide grace notes. At least that’s the way it worked in the beginning. And then George’s voice began to turn into a sandpapery whisper. It was the chemo, extracting its price for helping to keep him alive.

Now I was the talker, just me by myself, trying to score points with the strangers on the air at the other end of the line. Again and again, I gravitated to the idea that there is something noble about prizefighters in their willingness to accept the fact that every time they set foot in the ring, they may be carried out on their shield. But it was always George I thought of, the truest nobleman of my lifetime.

The cancer doctors gave him six months to live six years ago, and it was as if he said, with characteristic Anglo-Saxon aplomb, “Fuck you, I’m too busy to die.” He went on to write books, essays, poetry, songs, and even a play. He edited books, too, and worked on a documentary. Somehow he also found time to get out to the theater and concerts and dinners. When we were collaborating long-distance – George in New York, me in L.A. – he surprised me more than once with the news that he had just landed in France or Ireland. He wasn’t simply collecting stickers for his suitcase, either. He was savoring the world that was slipping away from him and looking up writers he had always wanted to meet, like J.P. Donleavy and Bill Barich. And he made a point of staying in touch with them, for once he wrapped his arms around someone, he never let go.

It will be that way even now that he has breathed his last, too soon, at 67. Those of us who knew him–probably even those who have only heard about him–will keep the Kimball legend alive with stories about his wild times and all the nights he dropped his glass eye in a drink someone asked him to keep an eye on. There was a look that George used to get when he was on the loose back then, a look that is probably best understood when I tell you I first saw it in the Lion’s Head as he was trying to set a friend’s sport coat on fire. His friend was wearing it.

I went a long time without seeing George, and when we reconnected, he had changed without sacrificing either his relentless view of the world or his ability to laugh at the hash that mankind has made of things. He was like the record producer in Jennifer Egan’s sublime novel “A Visit from the Goon Squad,” who tells a bewildered young man how he survived the self-destructiveness of the rock and roll business: “You grew up, Alex, just like the rest of us.” So it was that George put booze and drugs behind him and let his work take center stage. His unfiltered Lucky Strikes were the only remnant of his old life. “What are they going to do,” he said, “give me cancer?”

The transformation remained a mystery to me until Bill Nack, as treasured a friend as he is a writer, sent word a few years ago that George had esophageal cancer. I wrote George a note of support and got in return the most startling letter I expect I ever will from a sick man. There were no euphemisms, just pure, raw, unadorned honesty. George was going toe-to-toe with death, and he knew that death would win, but he was damned if he wasn’t going to take the fight the full 12 rounds. Never if my life have I seen a greater example of a fighter’s heart, and that includes Ali and Frazier.

George was fighting for the money he would leave his wife and children, and for a body of work that said he counted for something in the world of sportswriting. He wrote incisively, relentlessly, memorably, and he threw himself into the editing of our Library of America anthology, “At the Fights: American Writers on Boxing,” with the same fervor. Here was a book that would give him the spotlight he yearned for. On that March day in 2010 when the bosses at LoA told us it had passed muster, George was so happy it didn’t matter that he was too sick to swallow his soup. He was a champion.

He wasn’t finished, though. Space limitations–yes, even a 517-page book has them–had confined us to non-fiction, so he tracked down a small press and Lou DiBella, a boxing promoter with a literary bent. Voila! “The Fighter Still Remains: A Celebration of Boxing in Poetry and Song Lyrics from Ali to Zevon” was born.

And still George wasn’t done. We had an abundance of fiction we hadn’t been able to squeeze into “At the Fights,” either, unforgettable work by Hemingway, Nelson Algren and Leonard Gardner, to name but a few, and George wasn’t about to let them lie fallow. Back to work we went, each of us digging up new entries along the way, George zeroing in on Walter Mosley, me on Harry Crews. We didn’t have a publisher, of course, not even a nibble, but we had a title, “Sweet Scientists: A Treasury of American Boxing Fiction,” and that was enough to sustain us for the time being.

I mailed everything I found to George, who promised that he would overcome his Oscar Madison tendencies and send me the manuscript in good shape. I shouldn’t have doubted him, but I did. I read the e-mail he sent to the woman who watches over his web site, the one in which he gave specific instructions about what to do after he was gone, and I knew the final grains of sand were going through the hour glass. But on Wednesday, shortly before noon, Federal Express delivered a box to my door, and inside was the manuscript George had promised, looking neat, even pristine. A few hours later, on the other side of the country, he was dead.

[Editor's Note: George is remembered by his friends Charlie Pierce and Michael Gee. Here is a lovely piece by Glenn Stout.]

One of the great sports-related records ever made:

George Kimball

Also reviewed in the Times yesterday was “At the Fights: American Writers on Boxing.” I’ve been touting the book all spring. It was edited by two veteran writers I’m fortunate to call friends: George Kimball and John Schulian. I was thrilled that it received nothing short of a rave from Gordon Marino:

More than any other sport, even baseball or golf, boxing calls forth the muse in writers. It’s no surprise. Where there is risk there is drama, and boxers put more at risk than other athletes. In a single evening, they roll the dice with their health, marketability and sense of identity. When you have a bad night in the ring, you can’t make it up in a double header on Sunday, or on another football field in a week’s time. And after the very last bell, there is seldom a diploma to fall back on, and there sure won’t be any pension checks coming in the mail.

It’s a very hard game — maybe even crazy — but as the affection-filled writers who have attached themselves to these warriors know, the masters of the ring possess a unique nobility. That nobility is perfectly framed in this remarkable volume from the Library of America. The essays here capture every angle of this world, both solemn and comic.

…I would bemoan only one omission, namely, the wise, lustrous pages of F. X. Toole’s introduction to his short-story collection, “Rope Burns.” Though “At the Fights” weighs in at 500-plus pages, it doesn’t contain a single flabby contribution. Over and over again, writers and readers have sought to get behind the eyes of a fighter, to fathom the fighter’s heart. This is as close as you can get without catching a hook to the head.

It’s my favorite book that’s come out this year. Perfect for Father’s Day or any other day you want to be graced by a collection of great writing.

[Cartoon by George Price]

Here is a compelling essay Pete Hamill wrote in 1996 for Esquire–“Blood on Their Hands: The Corrupt and Brutal World of Professional Boxing”:

On the night of the Tyson-Bruno fight, I went to a place called the Official All Star Cafe in Times Square. There was a huge private party to honor the twentieth anniversary of the first Rocky movie, and crowds packed the sidewalks for a glimpse of Sylvester Stallone and the celebrities he might draw. One of those celebrities was Muhammad Ali.

Ali was already there when I arrived, dressed in a dark-red long-sleeved shirt, seated at a table with his wife and young son. To his right was a movie-size screen on which the preliminary fights were being broadcast from the MGM Grand in Las Vegas. The room was crowded with citizens of the fight racket: Riddick Bowe and Lennox Lewis, Ray Leonard and Willie Pep, managers and promoters, wives and girlfriends. Everybody tried to avoid looking at Muhammad Ali.

His head was bowed and he was trying to eat. But his right hand was shaking so hard that he could not get the piece of chicken to move two inches to his mouth. His wife, Lonnie, put her hand over his to quell the shaking and gently guided the chicken to its destination. Ali chewed diligently but did not raise his head.

Across the evening, people came over to the table to lean down and speak to the ruined fifty-four-year-old man. Sometimes he smiled. Sometimes he whispered a reply. Sometimes he rose to pose for pictures. But then he would be back in the chair, the once lithe and powerful body sagging, the eyes wide and wary, a plastic strew clenched in his mouth, all of him shaking with the Parkinson’s disease, with the damage caused by the fierce trade he once honored.

The disease, caused in Ali’s case by repeated blows to the head, is insidious, degenerative, humiliating, a thief of will and memory. I know: My mother, who was hit in the head by a mugger in 1979, is now eighty-five and trapped in its silent prison. I’ve fed her, as Lonnie feeds Ali.

Only when the fight started and Mike Tyson came down the aisle in Las Vegas did Ali’s eyes focus intensely. We’ll never know what now moves through his mind. But he had made that same walk so many times, with entire arenas and stadiums roaring the chant Ah-lee, Ah-lee, Ah-lee, Ah-lee…. When young, he had been among great throngs where half the audience hated him, and had stayed long enough to convert them all. For Ah-lee, Ah-lee wasn’t about celebrity or even success; it was about excellence and heart. And it was about personal defiance: of odds, of skeptics, of racists, of the American government, and of pain. Along the way, Ali became myth; most myths, alas, are also tragedies.

Big sports Saturday. The Kentucky Derby is in a few hours. If you’ve never read Hunter Thompson’s “The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved,” here’s your chance.

Later tonight, Manny Pacquiao fights “Sugar” Shane Mosley, though Gary Andrew Poole wonders when Pacman will fight the Right American (aka Floyd Mayweather, Jr.).

For you hoop heads, the Celtics look to avoid going down 3-0 like the Lakers. Good news for them is that they are at home. I figure they’ll win tonight but don’t think they can stop the Heat in the series.

On the baseball diamond, Andre Ethier looks to tie a Dodger team record by extending his hitting streak to 31 out at Citifield. And down in Texas the Yanks would love to see Bartolo Colon to keep things rolling. Bunch o runs wouldn’t hoit, now would it boys?

Get the clicker ready, good people, grab some eats, and settle in for a night of high fat bastardness.

[Photo Credit: Christian Science Monitor]

Last night, Jon DeRosa and I went to a book party at the New York Athletic Club for “At the Fights.” It was well attended–contributors like Robert Lipsyte, Thomas Hauser, Larry Merchant and Gay Talese were there. Joe Flaherty’s wife showed up, and so did W.C. Heinz’s daughter. Art Donovan, the football legend whose old man was a great boxing ref, was there too. George Kimball and John Schulian, pictured above, gave lovely speeches.

George talked about the relationship between boxing and writing, about how they are both difficult, solitary experiences. He said, ”Writing is hard but editing this book was a complete pleasure.” Sure, the editors had to make agonizing choices–some fine stories like Jack Murphy’s “The Mongoose,” Frank Deford’s “The Boxer and the Blonde,” and J.R. Moehringer’s “Resurrecting the Champ,” didn’t make the final cut–but still, selecting from a wealth of fantastic writing must easier than writing itself.

If you care about good writing, doesn’t matter if you are a boxing fan or not, this is a book to have.