The Killings of Stanley Ketchel (12 page)

In the dressing room forty-five minutes later Ketchel’s disfigured eyes were concealed behind dark glasses, but the raw distended cheeks and gross purple lips and lumpy swollen ears were in full evidence to the assembled reporters. When one of them asked about Papke’s “sneak punch” at the start of the fight, he said he wouldn’t call it that. “I should’ve been ready.” His nose so clotted with blood his voice seemed to come from a well.

Did he want another go at the Thunderbolt? Of course he did. Sooner the better. Joe O’Connor would be in contact with Tom Jones, Papke’s manager, every day from now until the rematch was a deal.

“He needed twelve rounds to finish a blind man,” Ketchel said, his voice so low the reporters at the back of the pack had to ask those in front what he’d said.

Papke of course crowed. He told the reporters he’d always known he was the better man and he guessed everybody else now knew it, too. He bristled at the mention of a sneak punch. “There
wasn’t nothing sneak about it. If that bohunk’s saying so, he’s a damn crybaby. When the bell rings, the fight’s on and you better guard your ass. You seen how he did last time when I went to shake his hand. Ain’t my fault he wasn’t set. Wouldn’ta mattered if he was. He was lucky in the first fight and I proved it.”

Would he give Ketchel a rematch? Before Papke could answer, Tom Jones said sure they would, but Ketchel would have to wait his turn, just like he made Billy wait after the first fight. “I told Hugo Kelly we’d give him first crack after Billy won the title.”

But shortly thereafter the deal to fight Kelly foundered, and Papke agreed to a third match with Ketchel, on Thanksgiving Day in Colma.

“Y
OU’LL KILL THE
kraut next time,” his brother, John, told him in a letter. “They’ll need a mop and pail to collect him for the morgue.”

His mother expressed equal certainty, albeit in less graphic terms, that he would regain the championship. She did not tell him she prayed daily that he would give up boxing and take up a less anguishing trade. Nor that, although John had hidden from her all photographs of this fight, she sensed he had been badly hurt, sensed it as a mother can, and had cried for him in the privacy of her bedroom.

The crux of her letter was to inform him that she and Rudy had decided they preferred a quiet civil ceremony rather than a church wedding with friends and family in attendance, and so had eloped. They had been married four days at the time she wrote the letter. She hoped he would not be cross with her for not telling him until after the fact, but neither had they told anyone else. John and Rebeka had been vexed when they found out, but had since forgiven
her and joined in her happiness. She wanted him to know, too, that she had asked to retain the Ketchel name and Rudy had no objections. They planned to buy a house in Grand Rapids. John and his family would remain on the farm. She enclosed a small photograph of herself and Barzoomian on their wedding day, and one of Julie Bug playing with a handsome gray kitten she had named Stanley in honor of her uncle.

Ketchel wired his best wishes.

And prepared for Papke.

T
HE ELEVEN WEEKS
and three days between their second fight and their third was the longest wait of his life. He did not leave the camp property during those three months. His cuts and bruises healed with their usual uncanny quickness, and he trained like a Spartan every day except Sunday, when the Goat limited him to calisthenics and shadowboxing. After supper he would play a few hands of nickel-ante poker with his crew and read the newspapers before going to bed at eight o’clock sharp. He read of Henry Ford’s new motorcar called the Model T and its ingenious assembly-line method of production, read of Orville Wright’s airplane accident in Virginia that injured Wright and killed his passenger, the first recorded air crash fatality. He read about William Howard Taft’s election over William Jennings Bryan to become the twenty-seventh president of the United States and was sorry his revered Teddy had chosen not to run. He was astounded to learn that Taft weighed over three hundred pounds, and thought it funny when he heard somebody call him the Great White Whale of the White House.

He was at his roadwork before sunrise. After breakfast he made a rattling blur of the light bag for thirty minutes, then beat the
heavy bag for an hour. He threw boulders. He climbed trees. He napped in the afternoons with a brine-soaked towel on his face to toughen the skin, and, because Pete the Goat said John L. himself had done it to harden his knuckles, with his hands hanging down either side of the narrow cot into buckets of horse piss. “Just don’t get them mixed up,” he told Pete.

During those long eleven weeks he did not permit himself even a glass of beer, a single puff of a cigar. He shuttered his mind against so much as a passing fancy about women. In the last two weeks before the bout, he berated his sparring partners for not applying pressure on him, then flattened them when they did, sometimes knocking them out despite the oversized training gloves he wore. Neither O’Connor nor the Goat made an effort to restrain him. He was honing a fine fury and they would do nothing to distract him from it. Onlookers were in awe of his single-mindedness.

When a reporter told him of the devastation Ketchel was wreaking on sparring partners, Billy Papke sneered. “Christ, anybody can kayo the guy he spars with. He’s just putting on a cheap show for you guys.”

T
HEY FOUGHT FOR
the third time in less than six months on a cool and bright Thanksgiving Day. Papke was the bookies’ pick at four to five, but Colma was Ketchel’s home ground and he stood in heavy favor with the crowd. Ketchel in his customary black trunks posed for the prefight pictures in his usual stance, bent slightly forward with his left arm extended and his right hand drawn back and ready. Papke wore a white jock and faced Ketchel with his fists up, his aspect bordering on smirk. A towering flagpole loomed over the ring and a California bear flag fluttered overhead. Referee Jack Welch, Sunny Jim Coffroth’s top referee, then
gave them the usual instructions. They ignored his direction to shake hands before going to their corners for the opening gong.

The first round was so fierce it brought the spectators to their feet and not a man of them sat down again till the clang of the bell. Papke fought gallantly and well, but Ketchel was a fiend unchained. He floored Papke near the end of the first and for an instant looked as if he would spit at him. He knocked him down again in the third, and again in the fifth. By the ninth round the Ketchel crowd was howling like a massive wolf pack at the smell of blood. In a clinch near the end of the tenth, Ketchel told Papke the next round would be it. Papke told him to eat shit. Ketchel broke the clinch and clubbed him with a left that spun him halfway around and into the ropes just as the gong sounded. In the eleventh a Ketchel uppercut found Papke’s chin, and dropped him onto his bare bottom. Papke was up at eight but stumbling like a rummy, the crowd roaring with a sense that the end was near. Ketchel whaled at his ribs with lefts and rights to bring his hands down, then hooked him to the jaw and sent him sprawling with his feet slinging high. The tumult was deafening. Referee Welch’s right arm rose and fell as he shouted a count that could barely be heard by the ringsiders. Papke started to rise, fell over, made it to all fours at the count of six. To one knee at seven. He later insisted that he misheard Welch’s count. He told the reporters he was waiting for “nine” before he got up, but he never heard Welch say it. He heard “Eight!” and then “Ten!” and it was over. The news guys nodded sympathetically as they made their notes. And among themselves agreed that even if Papke had beaten that count he wouldn’t have beaten the next one. It had been Ketchel’s fight from start to finish.

Ketchel told the reporters he believed Papke’s story about the
count. “It’s hard to hear real good with all those birdies singing in your head.”

Papke wanted another match, of course. But after having defeated him so decisively, Ketchel felt no need for a fourth fight any time soon. As the first champion ever to lose the title and win it back, he was now the best known middleweight of all time, and he had large ambitions. More than seven months would pass before his final meeting with the Thunderbolt.

N
EW YORK WAS
the place for them now, he told O’Connor.

“Maybe the place for you,” O’Connor said, “and you can have it. I was in New York once for four days and it felt like goddamn forty.”

Ketchel called him a rube and said he shouldn’t think so small. New York was where the big money was. New York was where he could really make a name for himself.

O’Connor said that Ketchel had already made a name for himself and it often enough appeared in the papers all over the country, which last he’d heard included New York. And the last time he’d looked, a dollar in California was the same size as a dollar in New York.

Maybe so, Ketchel said, but there were a lot more dollars to be had in New York and a lot more things to spend them on.

Round and round they went. After a couple of weeks, what began as a difference of opinion had grown into an argument. He decided to go see his family for Christmas and visit with them for a time, and he told O’Connor to think things over while he was away.

O’Connor said there was nothing to think over. “You do what you want, kid, but I ain’t going to New York and that’s final.”

As Pete the Goat drove him to the depot in the Locomobile, Ketchel told him he should think things over too.

“I ain’t got to think nothing over, either,” the Goat said. “I like New York. I’m with you.”

“You been to New York?”

“More than once.”

“I didn’t know that.”

“There’s lots you don’t know,” the Goat said. “Tell me, where am I from?”

Ketchel stared at him.

“I ever been married? I been to war? I ever done time?”

Ketchel shrugged. Then said: “You were a bareknuckler, I know that. A good one, too, so they say.”

“Yeah, kid. So they say.”

H
is mother’s new home was large and bright and comfortably furnished. Draped across the parlor wall was a white banner with red letters proclaiming
WELCOME HOME, CHAMP
!

He had never seen his mother so happy. When he hugged Barzoomian in greeting and said, “Good to see you, too, Dad,” the man blushed through his smile.

On Christmas Eve the whole family, including John and Rebeka and Julie Bug, attended a dinner party at the home of Rollin P. Dickerson, whom Barzoomian described as a man of various and highly successful enterprises. His house was at Pine Lake, a few miles north of Grand Rapids. He had bought the place the year before and furnished it through Barzoomian. Mr. Dickerson was also an avid sportsman and very eager to meet the middleweight champion.

Barzoomian drove them there in his spanking new Model T touring car. They drove across the river and followed the Belmont road to Dickerson’s estate, passing through a wide front gate onto a property dense with pines and bare maples. A wind-rippled lake, dark green and cold-looking, was visible through the trees. The lane ended at a circular drive in front of a long, two-story house of red brick and black ironwork. John gave a low whistle and said, “Posh.”

Ketchel thought it was a beautiful place.

He was surprised when his mother rather than Barzoomian made the introductions. It turned out that Dickerson, whom she called Pete, had been raised in Grand Rapids and they had known each other since they were children. He was a short, portly man of around forty, with recessed thinning hair and the look of a former athlete gone to fat. His stickpin and ring were fitted with small diamonds. He told Ketchel he’d been following his career with interest and had been to two of his fights, the one with Thomas under the lights and in a rainstorm in San Francisco, where he happened to be visiting on business, “the only fight I ever been to where there was a chance of drowning,” and the one with Papke in Milwaukee. He said Ketchel was the greatest fighter he’d ever seen and would no doubt be champion for a long time. “You’ve made your mother awfully proud,” he said.

He ushered Ketchel about the room and introduced him to the other guests. The men all expressed admiration and some tried to convey their own manliness through the force of their handshake. One fellow put so much into it Ketchel felt obliged to respond in kind, and the man’s face twitched and paled before Ketchel unhanded him.

The women all greeted him warmly, and some let their hand linger in his.

Everyone addressed Dickerson as “Colonel,” and Ketchel asked him if he had been in the army.

“Only for as long as it took to settle the Spaniards’ hash,” Dickerson said. He’d shipped to Cuba with the Rough Riders. “Teddy was the colonel, I was a lowly private. But when I got back home my pals took to calling me colonel as a joke and the damn thing simply stuck.”

As an avid admirer of Theodore Roosevelt, Ketchel was impressed. “You kill any Spaniards?”

“I did. Three, to be exact.”

“With a rifle?”

“Trusty .30–40 Krag, a real humdinger. Show it to you after supper.”

“The army let you keep it?”

“I wouldn’t exactly say
let
me, but…I have my methods.”

After dinner the colonel conducted him to the den for a private brandy and cigar. The superb cigars were regularly shipped from a master roller in Tampa, where Dickerson had first savored them while training for Cuba. There were various rifles on wall mounts and the colonel took down the Krag-Jörgensen and handed it to Ketchel so he could work its action and dry-fire it.

“A well-made firearm’s a work of art,” the colonel said. “Back home, I’ve got a hundred guns, pistols and long arms both, all kinds. Muzzleloaders, cap-and-balls, the latest Winchester. Got a Mauser machine pistol, by damn.”

“Back home?” Ketchel said.

The Pine Lake house was actually a vacation place, the colonel told him. His real home was in a region of Missouri called the Ozarks, where he had lived now for more than twenty years. He had a house in Springfield, where his timber business was head
quartered and where he owned a mortgage bank and a jewelry store, but his main residence was on a ranch of more than eight hundred acres some forty miles from town. Just for fun he raised corn and a little wheat, and there were several tenant houses on the property for the farmers who worked his fields. He said Ketchel must come and visit him there sometime. Ketchel said it would be his pleasure.

Dickerson was curious to know how much he liked living in California. Ketchel said he liked it fine, but what he’d really like was to have a home not far from his mother.

“Would you be content with a house like this one?” Dickerson asked.

Ketchel said such a place would be perfect. Did the colonel know of one like it for sale?

“No need of one like it,” Dickerson said, “you can buy this one.” He said he had recently decided to sell the place and would gladly let Ketchel have it for less than its market value.

Ketchel thought he was joking, but Dickerson assured him he was not. He had grown up in this region and had always loved the proximity of the forest and Lake Michigan, and for many years now he had been making one or two annual trips back here to hunt and fish. He had a cabin up in the woods and kept a boat stored in a lakeside yard in Grand Haven. During these visits he always spent a few days in town, as well, hobnobbing with old chums. After all those years of staying in Grand Rapids hotels he’d finally bought this house. But even though he’d made use of the place twice in the past year, he had decided such brief visits did not warrant the year-round expense, and he had anyway come to realize he actually preferred putting up in hotels whenever he went to town.

“The place is yours if you want it, Mr. Ketchel. We can get the deedwork started tomorrow.”

“Call me Steve,” Ketchel said.

Two days later the house was his, and Dickerson was now the guest in it. The colonel observed that the property’s only lack for Ketchel was a training facility. The following week there came a delivery of two wagonloads of boxing apparatus and equipment, including a regulation ring, together with a hired crew to set it up in the rear of the house.

Ketchel was flabbergasted by the gift. Dickerson said it was his pleasure to be of some small assistance to such a great world champion.

He trained in his backyard camp every day, damn the mild hangover he might be carrying from a late night with the colonel. He did roadwork in the morning before the sun came up, his breath billowing on the damply cold air. Then did calisthenics and worked with the heavy and the light bags. One afternoon he deigned to spar with several thrilled members of the Michigan State University boxing team who had stopped by to pay their respects. Despite his best effort to pull his punches, he hit some of them harder than he meant to and made them see stars. No matter. A bruised eye from the fist of Stanley Ketchel was to them a black-and-blue badge of honor.

T
HEN CAME THE
report from Australia of Tommy Burns’s humiliating loss of the world heavyweight championship to Jack Johnson, the first Negro to win the title.

The news made the colonel both angry and forlorn. “A nigger champ! Jesus! Who’da believed things could come to such a pretty pass?”

The vast majority of America shared his sentiment. Jim Jeffries was being implored from all sides to put on the gloves again and cool the Texas coon.

Ketchel’s main reaction to the news was to rue his missed chance to take the title from Burns, whom he knew he could have beaten handily. Unlike Burns, Johnson was a genuine heavyweight. But although they called him the Galveston Giant he wasn’t as big as Jeffries.

“Tell you one thing,” he said to the colonel. “It wouldn’ta taken
me
fourteen rounds to put Burns away. Hell, the boogie didn’t even knock him out.”

I
N THE FIRST
days of the new year they went to Dickerson’s hunting cabin on Big Blue Lake in the Manistee Forest and each bagged a buck, the colonel’s an eight-point, Ketchel’s a ten. Dickerson sent the heads to be mounted by a Grand Rapids taxidermist and both would go on the wall over Ketchel’s fireplace.

The colonel gave him two of his rifles as gifts, a .44–40 Winchester that had once belonged to an army cavalry scout who reputedly killed a score of Apaches with it, and a.22 Remington bolt-action with a shoulder sling. The colonel called the .22 “ideal for popping varmints.” Ketchel showed him his frontier Colt and demonstrated his proficiency with it by shooting the head off a squirrel at a range of about twenty feet.

Some days after that, they drove to Grand Haven in Dickerson’s motorcar and then went fishing in his boat. They buffered themselves against the freezing lake wind with mufflers and fur caps and parkas, plus a couple of bottles of rye. They returned to the docks in the redness of late afternoon, half frozen but happily crocked, with more than a dozen muskies and pike.

When the colonel asked about his plans, Ketchel said he wanted to have some fights in the East because of the better publicity, but it meant he would have to cut ties with Joe O’Connor. Dickerson
said he was pals with a few fight managers who would be overjoyed to handle the middleweight champ. The cleverest of them was probably Willus Britt, whose main fighter was his own brother, Jimmy, who just a few years earlier had been lightweight champ for a while. Willus was a Californian, and most of his brother’s fights had taken place on the West Coast, but he was also familiar with New York and its sporting crowd and he had been wanting to set up a camp in New York for some time. In fact, Dickerson said, the Britt brothers were in New York at that moment, preparing to go to England for a match.

“Suppose I wire Willus in the morning and see if he’s interested in handling the one and only Michigan Assassin?”

Ketchel said that would be just fine. Then added: “Tell me something. Is there anything you can’t take care of?”

The colonel laughed and said he was sure there was, he just hadn’t run into it yet.

The following day, after trading several telegrams with Willus Britt in New York, they had things all worked out and closed the deal on the telephone. Britt said Ketchel was doing the smart thing, coming to him, that they would do well together. He was eager to get acquainted but was about to leave for London, where his brother Jimmy would be fighting. He would return to New York in the first week of March. He gave the name of a hotel where they should meet and promised he would have a big-name match set up for him by then. “See you in New York, champ,” he said, and rang off.

“The man works fast,” Ketchel said.

The colonel said that was a fact. “They call him Whirlwind Willie.”

Ketchel then sent a wire to Pete the Goat:
SELL CAR PACK MY
STUFF STOP BE NYC 3 MARCH
B
ARTHOLDI HOTEL 23 AND BROADWAY STOP STEVE.

Then dispatched one to Joe O’Connor:
OFF TO NYC NEW MANAGER STOP GOOD LUCK STOP SK
.

O’Connor wired back:
NO SURPRISE
.

I
N
J
ANUARY HE
agreed to a three-round exhibition match in the Grand Rapids armory for the benefit of his hometown fans and simply to stay sharp. “You rest, you rust,” Pete the Goat always said.

His opponent was an itinerant boxer named Tony Caponi, who happened to be in town. The first time he heard the name, Ketchel said, “Tony Caponi? Sounds like some kinda wop candy.”

For most of the exhibition, and by agreement between themselves, they made it look good by popping jabs into each other’s shielding gloves and throwing smacking hooks into each other’s arms that sounded harder than they actually were. But with less than twenty seconds to go in the bout, Caponi suddenly sprang at Ketchel and landed a stunning cross to the jaw, igniting a blast of cheers at this best punch of the match. Caponi’s smile made clear the punch had been no accident, and Ketchel was outraged at his violation of their deal. His retaliatory effort to knock out Caponi had everyone on his feet and yowling for the final fifteen seconds. Caponi reeled under the assault, wincing at body blows and head-bobbling hooks, and was barely saved by the bell. The armory rang with ovation.

The announcer thanked both boxers for an exciting match and said he was sure everyone agreed it was a draw. Ketchel forced a smile. Caponi had recovered sufficiently to grin through bloated lips and shake his fists over his head as though he’d won a title fight.

Over drinks with Dickerson that night, Ketchel made light of the whole thing, but the colonel said he shouldn’t shrug it off, that it should be a lesson never to underestimate an opponent, even when the contest is of little import and we know the other fellow’s our inferior. That we should be at our wariest against our inferiors.

“More than once I’ve seen the better fellow get the worst of it for not taking the proper caution against somebody he didn’t think was worth it,” the colonel said. “The minute he turned his back, the other one got him from behind with a bottle or stuck him in the short ribs with a knife. You were a saloon bouncer, you know what I’m talking about. It happens that way if a man isn’t careful. I know you know it already, Stevie, but the trick is not to forget it for even a minute.”

A
T THE END
of February he said goodbye to his family and Dickerson drove him to the depot to catch the morning run to Chicago, where he would change trains for New York. Barzoomian’s nephew, Aram, who worked for him at the furniture store and had been living in the apartment upstairs, had agreed to live in the rear quarters of Ketchel’s house and take care of the place in his absence.

The colonel carried his bags into the coach. They shook hands and each made a clumsy move to hug the other and they bumped heads and laughed, then embraced warmly and patted each other on the back.

“If you need anything,” the colonel said. He gestured ambiguously. “You know…”