The Road to Philly

By John Schulian 

I know how I ended up in Philadelphia: I drove.

What I don’t know is why I ended up in Philadelphia.

The Daily News, home of one of the truly great sports sections of the last half of the Twentieth Century, already had three stellar columnists, Ray Didinger, Stan Hochman, and Mark Whicker. Bill Conlin was covering baseball with idiosyncratic fervor, conducting a running feud with the Phillies, delivering history lessons in his game stories, and flirting with scatology every chance he got. Long before I hit town, he set the standard for blue wordplay by quoting Dusty Baker, who had dropped a fly ball, as saying, “I had the motor faker right in my glove.” The quote only lasted one edition, but Conlin was the one guy in all of sportswriting capable of getting away with even that much.

None of the other beat writers came close to him in terms of sheer outrageousness, but each was an intrepid digger: Phil Jasner on the 76ers, Jay Greenberg on the Flyers, Paul Domowitch and the young Rich Hoffman (not long out of Penn) on pro football, Elmer Smith on boxing, and the inimitable Dick (Hoops) Weiss on college basketball. These guys were passionate about what they did. And smart. And aggressive. And competitive. I realize that the Boston Globe was regarded as the gold standard for sports sections back then-–and I know what a joy it was for me to read the Globe–but I still think the Daily News gave it a run for its money.

The Daily News certainly didn’t need me to do that. Even with a hole in its lineup after Tom Cushman, who was so solid on boxing, college sports, and track and field, left for San Diego, the paper still had all the talent–and all the egos–it needed. The Daily News hired me anyway.

No matter how good a sports columnist I was, I was hardly a marketable commodity after my inelegant departure from the Sun-Times. It was pretty much what I expected. There are more than a few newspaper editors who love to have a reason to think they have the upper hand on the talent. In my case, they could go tsk-tsk and say I was a troublemaker or that I was out of control. On the other hand, there was the reaction my blow-up got from Pete Dexter, who was a city columnist at the Philadelphia Daily News and whom I had yet to meet. Pete told our mutual friend Rob Fleder, a world-class magazine editor, “I don’t know Schulian and I don’t know exactly what happened, but I know he was right.” Which, of course, earned Pete a place in my personal hall of fame.

But guys like Pete don’t run newspapers. Guys unlike him do. And the hell of it was, I couldn’t argue with them, even though I’d been provoked and maybe set up. I was wrung out. Getting fired and divorced in a four-month span was all I could handle. I didn’t write a word for the first two months after I left the Sun-Times. I just rode my bike and ate pizza and watched the Cubs on TV. As if to spite me, they almost had a great season, but their muscle memory finally kicked in and they fell apart in the playoffs.

I didn’t put words on paper again until Eliot Kaplan, GQ’s managing editor, called because Vic Ziegel, may he rest in peace, told him I was massively available. Eliot was looking for someone to profile Mike Royko and I convinced him that I was his man. In the course of conversation, Eliot told me he’d read me when he was a kid. It wasn’t exactly what I was hoping to hear, but the truth was, he really was a kid. He couldn’t have been more than 26 or 27 when he became Art Cooper’s right-hand man at GQ. As for Royko, he couldn’t have been a more cooperative subject, right down to musing forlornly about the death of his first wife and dancing with the woman who would become his second wife on the sidewalk outside the Billy Goat Tavern.

Just like that, I was a made man at GQ, which was becoming a home for first-rate writing and reportage instead of pretty boys in clothes guaranteed to get their asses kicked. I wrote for the magazine whenever I could for the next 20 years, until Art got forced out. He died not long afterward, while having lunch at the Four Seasons. The man had style.

Looking back, I wonder if I should have lobbied for a three-story deal with GQ that would have allowed me to stay in Chicago. John Walsh, when he was running Inside Sports, told me he thought I was a natural magazine writer, and he may have been right. Magazine work certainly was a better fit for the way I approached writing than a four-times-a-week column was. The column chewed me up, and yet, when the Daily News called, I threw myself back in the meat grinder. It was partly because I was afraid let go of the identity a column gave me and partly because I was infatuated with the history of the sports section that Larry Merchant had built for glory 20 years earlier.

I saw myself joining a parade in which George Kiseda, Sandy Grady, and Jack McKinney had marched. Merchant had made them the Daily News’ pioneers in trenchant reporting, salty prose, and raucous laughter. Stan Hochman, who was there at the beginning with them, once told me about the old warehouse the paper had called home when it was known as the “Dirty News” for its emphasis on crime and cheesecake. The building wasn’t air conditioned, and one sweltering summer day, with huge floor fans shoving hot air around the newsroom, some genius got it in his head to open the windows. The fans proceeded to blow every piece of paper that wasn’t weighted down out the windows and to hell and gone.

I should have been smart enough to realize there was no recapturing those days or the spirit that infused the Merchant era. Instead, I acted according to Faulkner’s theory that the past is never really past. Faulkner didn’t play in Philly, though, and soon enough I was a man out of time, out of place.

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

There used to be a spot in the Times Square subway station where dance crews used to set up and perform for the tourists.  It’s right as you get off the Shuttle train to Grand Central.  Now, an electronics store is there instead, but they still draw a crowd because a famous fight is always playing on the flat screen TV in their display window.  The first couple of times I noticed a crowd huddled around, the Ali-Forman fight* was playing. 

Nothing brings men together like a fight.

Last weekend, I saw them playing the great Hagler-Hearns bout.  One guy watching served as the commentator.

I remember seeing the fight when I was a kid, and being electrified by the fury of violence.  Here it is, brief, savage, and bloody:

Round One:

Round Two:

Round Three:

And dig this:  John Schulian’s terrific column on the fight for the Philly Daily News:

The Proud Warrior

April 16, 1985

By John Schulian

Blood cascaded down Marvelous Marvin Hagler’s nose, leaving a stripe thick enough to divide a highway. And yet the sight and feel of the relentless crimson ooze moved Hagler in a way that bore no relation to anything modern, automated or federally funded. Suddenly he was jerked out of 1985 and back into a time when warriors wore loincloths instead of boxing trunks and did their hunting without benefit of 8-ounce gloves. He was a primitive and that splash down the middle of his face wasn’t blood. It was war paint.

The more it flowed, the more savage Hagler became. And the more savage he became, the more you wondered if this hellish explosion hadn’t been building inside him for all of his 30 years. Or is he really 32, the way Thomas Hearns kept insisting? For all Hearns knew, Hagler might have been born 2,000 years ago if the violence that poured out of him last night was any measure. And there was no time for Hearns to renew the debate now.

He was trapped inside the third-round nightmare that would end his dream of becoming the world’s middleweight champion. The roar of the crowd that had moved him to try slugging it out with Hagler had turned into an ugly, unbearable hum in his ears, and every time he tried to take a step to safety, Hagler was there punching—punching, punching, punching until the spidery challenger must have thought he was trapped in a thunderstorm of leather.

This wasn’t the way Hagler was supposed to fight. Hagler was supposed to be cautious in the early rounds, jabbing, moving in and out, a conservative who would make Ronald Reagan look like a socialist by comparison. That was why the champion had looked so bad in groping to a decision over Roberto Duran 18 months ago. That was why Hearns’s stock had skyrocketed when he caught Duran on the rebound and splattered that vicious little wharf rat across the canvas like a bad painting. But it counted for nothing now as Hagler turned the gaudy outdoor ring behind Caesars Palace into the kind of hellhole the beautiful people aren’t supposed to know about.

As Bo Derek, Joan Rivers and a lot of TV stars who don’t deserve to have their names in print gaped and gawked, the champion woke up memories of dingy arenas where the air is solid cigar smoke, human flesh is the only thing anybody has to sell, and the showers never work. It can be a miserable business, this fight racket, and maybe Hearns forgot that with the kind of money he and Hagler were making. The price tags on this one said $5.6 million for the champion and $5.4 million for the challenger, and you can get your head turned around by a payday like that. You can think you are better than you really are. You can think your seat doesn’t sink. And if you do, your thoughts aren’t worth a penny.

“Tommy is very cocky,” said Hagler, who knows that fortunes don’t come cheaply, “and I had something for him.”

Make that some things.

The first of them was a leaping right hand that sent Hearns reeling across the ring. Then there was another right that sailed over gloves that were barely at half-mast and rattled the challenger’s brain inside his head. Hagler punctuated the barrage with a left hand that missed—what an irony for a great southpaw puncher—and then he went back to his right for the last time. And Hearns was done.

He lay on the canvas with nothing moving but his heaving chest as referee Richard Steele slowly toiled his destiny over him. At nine he was up, but it didn’t matter. “His eyes were glazed and his legs were wobbly,” Steele said. There was no point in pushing the issue beyond 2:01 of the third round. Thomas Hearns was finished and Marvelous Marvin Hagler was still the champion.

“Yeah, I’m still the champion,” he said, “but I had to fight like a challenger.”

And he was magnificent.

And so was Hearns—for a while. Maybe he was just setting himself up for what matchmaker Teddy Brenner called “a tomahawk followed by an ax.” Maybe he was just giving Sugar Ray Leonard, the only other man ever to beat him, an opening to belittle him for “thinking he could knock everybody out.” But the first round that he and Hagler wove last night was a tapestry of violence—beautiful, beguiling, violence.

They went for each other’s throats, and they refused to back up. If Hagler was rattling Hearns’s ribs, Hearns was hammering Hagler’s head. If Hearns was making Hagler taste blood, Hagler was filling Hearns’s mouth with a fist. Back and forth they went, never pausing for a breath, never looking for a break. It wasn’t just Pryor and Arguello. It wasn’t just Ali and Frazier. It wasn’t just Robinson and LaMotta. It was all of them rolled into one.

And just as he had said he would, the 5-9 ½ Hagler turned into a giant. He was giving away four years in age, 3 ½ inches in height and 3 ½ inches in reach, and none of it mattered. He got cut on the forehead in the first—“A butt,” grumbled one of his trainers, Pat Petronelli—and that didn’t matter, either. He was getting bigger and bigger, and as the round thundered to an end, he whacked Hearns with a left that drove him into a neutral corner and widened his eyes with surprise and maybe even unwanted knowledge. Now the challenger knew who the boss was.

“Marvin took away Tommy’s right hand, that was the key, “Petronelli said. “He ran right through that right hand, and when he knew he could do that, he knew he could do anything. He took away Tommy’s legs and he took away Tommy’s heart.”

The only thing that could have stopped Hagler was his own blood. It poured from that gash in his forehead, and there was more to come when Hearns opened the scar tissue under Hagler’s right eye. The ring physician studied the damage between the first and the second, and the referee followed suit at the start of the third, but Marvelous Marvin Hagler—the single-minded destroyer who had WAR written across the baseball cap he wore throughout training—never paused in his attack. “I was afraid they might stop the fight,” he said, “but you know, when I see blood, I turn into a bull.”

So Hagler raged and Hearns fell in the round he had predicted for the victory that eluded him. The challenger wound up helpless in the referee’s arms and the champion moved within three of Carlos Monzon’s record of 14 successful title defenses. And that was at it should have been. “I hope Tommy will say I’m the better man now,” Hagler said. Whether the loser did or didn’t hardly mattered, though. The rest of the world knew the truth—the world that Hagler rules as the kind of the middleweights.

Never mind that this was the 65th fight of his career. He had never been royalty before. But when he walked into his post-fight press conference, he was embraced by the new major-domo at Caesars Palace. And everything around him seemed musical, even the sound of promoter Bob Arum introducing the sagging Hearns while he, Marvelous Marvin Hagler, donned his championship finery in the sanctuary of his dressing room. Hagler was moving at his own pace now, deciding when he would step back outside into the loving glow of the television lights, enjoying it all so much that he scarcely noticed the stretcher he passed on his way out the door and into the glorious night. No stretchers for him. Only a chariot would do.

*