The Killings of Stanley Ketchel (13 page)

Ketchel nodded and patted his shoulder. The colonel got off the coach and they waved at each other through the window. The conductor took up the stepstool and hollered “Boooarrrd!” and the
train hissed and steamed and jerked forward with a shuddering clash and began to chug away.

“Remember what I said!” the colonel called after him. “Whatever you need, son!”

Ketchel shook a fist in the window and nodded.

D
ICKERSON’S ADDRESS OF
Ketchel as “son” derived from a paternal regard that went beyond the figurative. Ketchel himself had reached that realization during their hunting trip. They were in the lake cabin, sitting in ladderback chairs close to the coal oil stove, drinking whiskey from tin cups, and Dickerson was telling a joke about a whore with a wooden leg. Ketchel was sniggering at the joke’s setup when the word
father
suddenly sounded in his mind.

He told himself it was only a stupid, drunken notion. And then knew, simply
knew,
it was true. The colonel was his daddy. He was no less stunned by the insight than by his failure to have arrived at it earlier.

Dickerson saw the expression on Ketchel’s face and knew the cat was out of the bag. He let the joke fall away and said, “What’s on your mind, son?”

They talked for the rest of the night, though it was of course incumbent upon the colonel to do most of the talking. He told Ketchel everything. Told of his earliest memories of skinny Julia Oblinski and of the beauty she turned into at fourteen. Told with a careful delicacy of their meetings in the barn. Told with no small degree of heat of the fight with Kaicel on the last night he saw her for twenty-two years. He had already told him of the move to Missouri at age seventeen and his success as a young entrepreneur staked by his father, proving himself Captain Jerry’s equal at making money with every venture he put a hand to.

He’d never married. However foolish it might sound, he said, it wasn’t till he’d known dozens of women that he came to understand how much he loved Julia Oblinski. As so often happens, it was an understanding come to roost too late. Through a hired investigator he learned she’d married Kaicel and borne him children. He couldn’t help but believe she’d made the best of a bad bargain and what was done was done.

Yet he never stopped thinking of her. She especially came to mind whenever he paid a visit to his boyhood country to hunt and fish and spend a few days at a poker table with old friends. Each time he came to Grand Rapids he thought of looking her up, seeing how she was. But to do so, he felt, would be folly. She was married and a mother. To intrude on her life would have served only to complicate matters, perhaps open old wounds. He could not even ask his friends about her, as none of them had known of their involvement, and he would not risk staining her reputation even at this late date through a misplaced confidence in a poker pal.

And then a little over a year ago he was visiting Grand Rapids and playing cards with some cronies when the subject turned to boxing and somebody told him if he’d been in town a month earlier he could’ve met Stanley Ketchel, who’d been there visiting his mother. By way of an interview in a local newspaper, the people of Grand Rapids learned that Ketchel had been born among them, that his real name was Kaicel, that his mother lived on a little dairy outside of town. He was the greatest excitement to hit town since the Great John L. staged his last fight there more than three years earlier, and a number of the locals immediately claimed, some even truthfully, that they remembered him as a boy. Some of them, including two of Dickerson’s friends, had gone out to his mother’s farm to introduce themselves and shake his hand and say how
proud he’d made them. He was a polite kid, the colonel’s pals said, and awful damn handsome for a boxer with a slug-it-out reputation.

“Everybody was saying how wonderful it was you’re from Grand Rapids and how proud you’d make the town if you got to be champ,” Dickerson said. “But the minute I heard you were Julia’s first kid, something started eating at me. After the game broke up I went back to the hotel, but I couldn’t get to sleep. I told myself there was no reason to be thinking what I was thinking and to quit being a fool, but by morning it was all I had on my mind.”

Ketchel was absorbed by the tale. The colonel paused to light a cigar and peered at him over the flame as if trying to gauge his reaction. “Then what?” Ketchel said.

“I went to the Grand Rapids public records office and looked up your birth date,” the colonel said.

And found it was eight months after Julia’s marriage and almost exactly nine months after the last time he had seen her. Dickerson thought and thought about it on the trip back to Missouri, then went to the Springfield library with the only photograph he had of himself and dug through issues of various sporting papers and found a clear, close-up photo of Ketchel’s face. It was taken just prior to the second fight with Joe Thomas, not quite a month after his twenty-second birthday. Next to it the colonel placed his own picture, taken when he was thirty-five years old. He studied them for some time, looking from one to the other, but could reach no conclusion. When he’d owned a full head of hair the resemblance might have been easier to judge. Was there a true similarity in the shape of the mouth, in the set of the eyes? He couldn’t tell.

The following month he went to San Francisco to attend Ketchel’s third fight with Thomas. He bought a ringside seat near
Ketchel’s corner and had a pretty good gander at him when he arrived at the ring. The rain was already falling and the electric lighting was poor, but in his close view of Stanley Ketchel’s face he saw nothing to refute outright the possibility that they were of the same blood.

Finally, there had been nothing for it but to go to Julia Oblinski Kaicel. He motored out to the farm on a frozen Saturday morning. It happened that John and his family had gone to the city for the day and she was alone at the house. She did not recognize him when she came to the door, only squinted curiously and said, “Yes?”

He removed his hat. “Hello, Julia.”

They stood at the open door and stared at each other. He felt an enveloping rush of warm air from the house. She was now thirty-eight years old and appeared to him even lovelier than she had at fifteen. “I wish only to know the truth,” he said to her.

She said, “Please, come in.”

They sat in the kitchen and had a long conversation punctuated but once by a mutually surprising moment of shared tears that ended in shared laughter. He confessed his realization of love for her and that it had come too late. She in turn confided that for the first few years after he’d gone, she had sometimes imagined his return and what might happen if he somehow came to know the truth about Stanislaus. Those reveries had slowly waned, and then many years ago ceased altogether. And Kaicel had vanished. And she met Rudy Barzoomian, who had since asked her to marry him and she had said yes. She said she loved Rudy, and Dickerson saw the truth of it in her eyes.

“That’s how it goes, son,” Dickerson told Ketchel. “I love your mother dearly and I’m truly glad she’s happy. My hard luck it’s with somebody else. I had it coming.”

With regard to Stanislaus, he and Julia decided that they would not volunteer to him the truth of his paternity, but neither would they withhold it if he should ever ask. If the opportunity should ever come for father and son to meet, they would let the thing go as it would. That was the real reason Dickerson decided to buy a home in Michigan. To be ready for the opportunity.

“That’s about it,” the colonel said. He told Ketchel he was not a devout man but had prayed they would be friends. “I can’t tell you how happy I am, son. It just kills me that we’ve come to know each other and get on like we do. I hope nothing I’ve said changes that.”

“Hell, Colonel, I’ve never had a better friend.”

They both brushed at their eyes and went red in the face. “Christ almighty,” the colonel said, “between me and you and your mother we make a pretty bunch of crybabies, now don’t we?”

They were of course bound to keep the matter a secret. “It would do injury to your mother’s reputation, son,” the colonel said. “It’s not fair that it would, but it’s how it is, it’s how people are.”

As for Barzoomian, Julia had admitted to Dickerson that she had not yet confessed the truth about Stanislaus to him. She did not want to marry him with a lie of omission on her conscience, but she had been afraid to tell him. She could not say how he would respond.

Dickerson assured her that whether she told Barzoomian or did not, he respected the bravery required of her to make the decision, and she could count on his own abiding allegiance to whatever choice she made.

She told Barzoomian. Told him that very night. The man had sat and listened attentively, and when she concluded by saying in
all sincerity that she would not blame him in the slightest if he should choose to withdraw his proposal, Rudy Barzoomian, that good man, took her in his arms and said, “Julia Ketchel, I do not withdraw,” and initiated the deepest kiss they had yet shared.

Thus did they come to an accord, Dickerson and Julia and Barzoomian. Ketchel’s reaction to the whole business was also amply clear. For most of the trip to New York, he stared out the coach window at the passing world and could not stop smiling.

H
e arrived in Manhattan on an early morning and checked into the Bartholdi Hotel, where Pete the Goat had already been for two days. Willus Britt showed up later that afternoon. A natty little slick-talker given to bowler hats, French cuffs, and red ties, Britt was overjoyed to be managing Ketchel. During supper at a chop house next door to the hotel, he told Ketchel and the Goat that in the morning they would all be moving to a training camp just north of the Manhattan limits, a quiet, nicely wooded training place near Woodlawn Inn. As he’d promised, he had already arranged for Ketchel’s first match in New York, a big-money nontitle bout in only three weeks at the old horse market arena on East Twenty-fourth Street.

“Three weeks ain’t long to get in top shape for a big-time fight, kid,” Britt said.

“Who is it?” Ketchel said.

“Philadelphia Jack O’Brien.”

They all grinned.

“Damn well done,” the Goat told Britt. “Philly Jack’s as big-time as they come.”

“Yeah he is,” Britt said. “But remember, New York doesn’t allow decisions. You knock him out or it’s officially no contest.”

“Got it,” Ketchel said.

I
T WAS HARD TO
believe a spot so near to the teeming commotion of Manhattan could be so tranquil, greenly wooded, sparsely neighbored.

“Quiet as a graveyard,” the Goat said, making the obvious joke, since the camp property was bordered by the Woodlawn Cemetery.

Every day at dawn Ketchel and Jimmy Britt did their roadwork along the dusty lane flanking the graveyard and traded greetings with curious gawkers on passing wagons. When they got back to camp they chased chickens inside a large wire pen for an hour, feeling like fools despite the Goat’s insistence that the exercise sharpened their quickness and agility. In the afternoons they punched the bags and sparred a few rounds against each other. Jimmy Britt, a lightweight with a reputation for quickness of hand, was astonished at Ketchel’s superior punching speed.

When he wasn’t engaged with his training regimen, Ketchel was in Britt’s tow in the city. The first order of business had been at a clothing store specializing in Western wear. Under Britt’s guidance Ketchel acquired a variety of outfits befitting a Man of the West as perceived by Willus Britt, the model of Stanley Ketchel he would present to the Eastern press. They went to a photography studio where Ketchel first posed in his boxing trunks
and gloves, striking various classic stances, and then according to Britt’s instructions changed into an ensemble of cowboy boots and jeans, a logger’s jacket of checkered flannel, a denim work shirt open at the throat, a bandanna knotted around his neck, a miner’s cap on his head.

He beheld himself in the mirror. “Sweet Jesus, I look like some jackleg who don’t know whether to chop a tree, shovel shit, or kick a cow. Nobody I ever knew wore a getup like this. Not a miner, not a cowboy, nobody.”

“And not ten people in New York know that besides you,” Britt said. “Leave the packaging to me, kid. I know what sells.”

He posed Ketchel before a plain pale backdrop, hands behind him, the cap set far enough back on his head to avoid shadow on his handsome face, angled slightly toward the sidelight as toward a radiant future.

During the next two weeks they made the rounds, paying visits to every big-name sportswriter in New York as well as many of the lesser lights of the local sporting world. Ketchel comported himself well in the interviews, smoothly delivering pat responses learned from constant rehearsal with Britt. Britt passed out photos by the handfuls, photos of Ketchel the Boxer, Ketchel the Westerner. His name began appearing in the New York papers, in Boston, in Philly, almost always accompanied by his picture. By the time of Stanley Ketchel’s fight with Philadelphia Jack O’Brien, every boxing fan in the East could have recognized him a block away and could have told you his life’s story, told you how he’d lost his father to smallpox at age thirteen and been forced by his family’s poverty to ride the rails in search of work so he could send money home to his mother and little brothers and sisters, how he’d been unjustly jailed for vagrancy at fifteen and spent six
months on a work farm staffed with cruel guards and to this day was still shy about exposing his bare bottom even in a boxing dressing room because of the whip scars it bore, how he’d gone to work in the Montana mines at sixteen and in the same year became a smalltown hero by saving a little girl from a burning house, how he’d escaped from the mines by dint of his fists and the job they got him as a dance hall bouncer protecting the girls from drunken brutes, how in that same year he’d entered the ring for the first time and found his true calling.

He strode the sidewalks in a euphoric awe of towering, pounding, fast-moving, big-voiced New York City. He’d never seen so many gorgeous girls, so many embodiments of the Gibson Girl. Some of them returned his smile in passing and some ignored it, some frowned in affront and some blushed fetchingly and some seemed to dare him to do more than smile, and those were the ones who made his breath go deepest. Girls winked from doorways to dance clubs that he knew were more than places to dance. He suggested to Britt they go into one and relax with a dance or two, wet their whistles while they were at it.

“Wet your wick, you mean,” Britt said. “Listen, kid, I know lots better places than these dives, but I don’t want you to even dream of booze or babydolls till we’ve done our business with Philly Jack.”

P
HILADELPHIA
J
ACK
O’B
RIEN
was so well known at this time that he figured in a standard vaudeville skit wherein one fellow attempted to physically intimidate another by turning to his own pal and saying, “Tell this mug what I did to Philadelphia Jack O’Brien.” The pal would say, “Tell him what you did to
Philadelphia Jack O’Brien?”
The first guy would say, “Yeah, tell him what I did to Philadelphia Jack O’Brien.” And then
lean closer to his buddy and add in a stage whisper: “Just
don’t
tell him what Philadelphia Jack O’Brien did to
me.”
Rim shot, chortles.

A droll fight journalist of a later day would call O’Brien the
Arbiter Elegantiarum Philadelphiae.
He was a superb defensive boxer, awesomely fast of foot and hand, with the reflexes of a fly. He would entertain saloon crowds by standing with both feet on a handkerchief and his hands in his pockets and betting one hundred dollars that, without stepping off the hankie, he couldn’t be hit in the face by any man in the house who wanted to try for ten seconds. There were many takers, none ever successful, and O’Brien always spent his winnings on drinks for the house. A natural middleweight, in 1905 he won the championship of the newly established light heavyweight division, but the weight class was not popular and he never had occasion to defend the title.

At the time of his first fight with Stanley Ketchel he was thirty-one years old and had won ninety-six fights and lost only five. As evidence of his hardiness it is worth noting that on five different occasions he fought two matches in a single day. And once, feeling especially energetic, he fought and outscored a different opponent in each round of a six-round bout.

Philly Jack was even more of a rarity in that he was given to elevated diction and, outside the ring, the manners of a gentleman. He exercised both qualities at the weigh-in, offering Ketchel his hand and saying, “I’m honored to make your acquaintance, sir. Considering your admirable record and the reported intensity of so many of your engagements, you present a remarkably unblemished countenance, I must say.”

Ketchel said, “Yeah, well…thanks, I must say.”

Jack laughed along with everyone else and said, “I’m very much anticipating our competition. I’m certain it will be highly spirited.”

“You betcha,” Ketchel said.

T
HE FIGHT WAS
set for ten rounds and they both scaled 160 even. The majority of the hacks covering the bout thought O’Brien would outbox Ketchel, but few believed he had the power to knock him out. Ketchel, on the other hand, had a dynamite punch but no one thought it likely to connect with Philly Jack’s jaw. The betting favored the fight lasting the full ten rounds and perforce being ruled no contest.

O’Brien’s longtime popularity in the East had most of the crowd pulling for him, including most of the reporters. He won the first eight rounds on almost every scorecard, and some of the hacks had already written their leads giving him the newspaper decision. Through most of those eight rounds, he’d retreated from Ketchel in a circling glide, warding with an expert jab, intermittently scoring with sharp, flashy punches to the head that each time roused roars from his partisans. Though Ketchel’s jab was working well, too, O’Brien nimbly dodged his strongest head punches, and so he belabored O’Brien’s midsection, making him wince at least once every round. To judge by appearances at the end of the eighth, Ketchel was the worse for wear, both brows cut and swollen, cheeks welted and nose bleeding, while O’Brien showed only a bloated upper lip and a small cut under an eye. In truth, O’Brien’s ribs were in anguish from Ketchel’s pummeling, and the inside of his mouth felt to his tongue like it had been razored. For the past two rounds he had been swallowing blood. Even O’Brien’s cornermen were unaware of the severity of the mouth cuts until late in the ninth when Ketchel landed a hook to the stomach that blew out a
spray of blood together with O’Brien’s mouthpiece. O’Brien clinched and held on till the end of the round. His alarmed cornermen told him to keep his distance from Ketchel for the last three minutes of the match, and try O’Brien did, valiantly staving off Ketchel with the jab and even scoring sporadically as he retreated, but now every punch he threw was a torment to his ribs. Ketchel bulled after him, loosing wild flurries short of the mark, unable to breach the defending jabs. But as the last seconds of the round were ticking away, O’Brien’s agonized jab faltered, and Ketchel swooped in and struck him ferocious hooks to heart and chin and O’Brien crashed to the canvas in front of his own corner as if he’d been dropped from the rafters. He lay unmoving with his head in the resin box. The arena resounded like a madhouse in flames as the ref started counting. He arrived at “Five!” before the gong began clanging like a fire alarm and saved Philly Jack from a knockout.

The fight was ruled no contest.

W
HEN HE CAME
out of the shower, a wire had arrived from the colonel. Dickerson had his own telegraph line at the Springfield office and had received round-by-round reports as the fight progressed. His message read:
NO CONTEST MY ASS STOP KAYO IN MY BOOK STOP CONGRATS CHAMP STOP RPD.

Not until the following day, when several reporters showed up to ask his opinion of the newspaper verdicts, did Ketchel learn that a number of the hacks had given the decision to Philadelphia Jack on the basis of his having won the most rounds.

“Jesus Christ!” said Willus Britt, and went into a blue fit of profanity.

The Goat just shrugged. “Newspaper verdicts don’t count for nothing.”

Ketchel, too, made light of it. “Listen, fellas, just be sure and remind everybody that O’Brien ended up flat on his back in dreamland.”

The reporters laughed and made their notes and went away. But in truth Ketchel was nettled, and the more he thought about it the angrier he became.

“What kind of stupid bastards could give a verdict to a guy who’s out cold at the end of the fight?”

“Newspaper stupid bastards,” the Goat said. “Hell, Stevie, forget about it. Their opinions don’t matter none.”

But Ketchel would not be placated, and he soon worked himself into a state. By God, he’d settle this once and for all. He wanted another fight with O’Brien.

Britt was all for it and said he would see about setting it up.

T
HE FOLLOWING DAY
he went to a high-class haberdashery. The manager was alarmed at the sight of him coming through the door and about to telephone for the police before learning from his chief salesman that the man with the freshly bruised face was none other than the world middleweight boxing champion. When he departed, Ketchel was wearing a custom-tailored suit of superior weave, impervious to Britt’s argument that he should maintain his Man of the West public image rather than turning into Dapper Dan the Broadway Man. He had ordered three more suits to be delivered to the Hotel Bartholdi.

He plunged into New York’s pleasures, Britt having told the truth about knowing where some of the finest recreations could be had. They patronized exclusive sporting houses staffed with stunning girls, and Ketchel enjoyed a different one every night, sometimes two in one night, sometimes two at the same time. They went
to fancy nightclubs where he wowed onlookers with his dance floor acrobatics and drew cheers when he danced with two partners at once as he’d taught himself to do with the Arapaho Sisters.

At a club one night, someone who’d heard he was a good singer passed the word to the bandleader, who requested that Ketchel come up to the bandstand and honor them with a song. And he did, belting out a rendition of “Hello, My Baby” that had the patrons bouncing in their seats and nodding at each other, and they rewarded him with prolonged applause.

When he returned to the table they were sharing with five drunkenly happy girls, Britt said, “Christ, kid, you ain’t just a boxing champ, you’re a goddamn
star.
”

One of the girls said, “Willie, mind your language! Ladies present!”

Britt regarded her with bleary half-closed eyes. Then looked at the other girls. Then looked around behind him. He raised the tablecloth and peered under the table. Then looked at Ketchel and shrugged.

And they all burst out laughing, pounding the table, stamping the floor, heads back and teeth bared, laughing till their bellies cramped.

A
ROUND THIS TIME
he met a hatcheck girl named Jewel. He told her she had a lovely name and started to introduce himself but she said she knew who he was. “The minute you walked in here, everybody was saying your name and that you’re some kind of boxing champion.”