The Killings of Stanley Ketchel (15 page)

A
FEW DAYS
after the news went out that Ketchel had signed to fight Papke, O’Brien’s manager, Butch Pollack, sent a wire offering Ketchel a rematch on three conditions. The fight had to be in June, in Philly, and for only six rounds. That was the deal. Nonnegotiable. Take it or leave it. Britt and Ketchel had one day to give him an answer or the offer would be withdrawn.

“Those clever bastards figure you won’t fight O’Brien just a few weeks before having to take on Papke,” Britt said. “And if you don’t, O’Brien’s off the hook for a rematch. He can say he made you an offer and you said no and as far as he’s concerned that’s that.”

“But in case you say okay,” the Goat said, “he wants a short fight. He knows you can wear him down in ten rounds, but figures he can keep away from you for six.”

“Goddamnit, who they think they are, telling
us
take it or leave it,” Britt said. “To hell with them!
You’re
the champ. You don’t have a thing to prove against a washed-up—”

“Tell them we’ll take it,” Ketchel said.

A
t the weigh-in, O’Brien was his usual silver-tongued self. “Well, my good fellow, we meet again. I’ve no doubt this engagement will prove as lively as our previous one, but I assure you I have no intention of getting resin in my hair this time.”

The reporters smiled and jotted their notes.

“Good to see you, too, Philly,” Ketchel said.

In the first minute of the fight, Philly Jack understood he was being bested at his own quick-footed game by this younger man with the harder punch. Ketchel had learned the trick of cutting off the ring and blocking O’Brien’s escape moves, each time jolting him with lefts and rights to the head, with stinging hooks to the ribs. At the end of the first round, Philly Jack’s face was a mess. Goodly sums had been wagered that he would still be on his feet
after a mere six rounds, but when he went down for the third time in round two, it was apparent to every witness that an early end was at hand. Ten seconds into the third round Ketchel floored him with a right lead to the head, then stood looming as the ref counted and Jack struggled to his feet. The moment O’Brien came upright, Ketchel hooked him with a combination to the belly and jaw, and he crumpled again. Barely conscious and functioning instinctively, O’Brien tried mightily to rise as Ketchel stood by, set to hit him. Sensing an imminent killing if Philly Jack should make it up, referee Jack McGuigan stopped counting and waved an end to the fight, ruling it a knockout. Nobody protested the uncommon action. Every man present had seen Ketchel poised over the struggling O’Brien like a slaughterhouse worker with a ready hammer.

Meeting with reporters after he was showered and dressed, Ketchel was asked if he thought Philly Jack was still as smart a fighter as he used to be.

“Oh sure,” Ketchel said. “Philly’s a real smart fighter. He was thinking all time. And all the time he was thinking I was socking the shit out of him.”

The hacks laughed and wrote it down, though of course “shit” would yield to such printable euphemisms as “dickens” or “heck” or “tar.” It was such a swell quote that in years to come it would be attributed to at least a dozen other boxers.

If the referee had let Philly Jack continue, another reporter inquired, would Ketchel have eased up his attack so as not to cripple O’Brien, or maybe even worse?

“Oh you bet,” Ketchel said. “I would’ve given Jack every chance in the world to recover so that maybe he could get in a lucky punch and knock my teeth out or break my nose, maybe knock me down
and keep doing it till my brains oozed out my ears. Oh sure, you bet I would’ve taken it easier.”

There were a few uncertain titters and crooked smiles, but the only one to laugh out loud was Pete the Goat.

L
ESS THAN FOUR
weeks later, on the fifth of July, he fought Papke under a blistering sun in Coffroth’s arena. They did not speak a word to each other at the weigh-in, but reporters on hand remarked that their glares spoke volumes.

“Theirs is no mere pugilistic rivalry,” wrote one, “but a blood feud rooted in an abiding mutual hatred.”

It was a fight with none of the finesse Ketchel displayed so capably against O’Brien. Referee Billy Roche would himself assert that he had never seen two men in the ring with such evident desire to kill each other. More than one reporter described the match as a dogfight. For more than an hour, for twenty rounds and from bell to bell, the fighters punched without pause. There were moments when they seemed on the verge of tearing into each other with their teeth. There were no knockdowns, though at one point a Ketchel roundhouse wobbled Papke’s knees and only the Thunderbolt’s desperate clutch of the ropes kept him from hitting the canvas. The final round the most brutal of the bout, both men streaked with blood and swapping punches as vehemently over the span of the last three minutes as they had in the opening round. And as in their first fight, they did not let up even at the repeated clanging of the bell and again had to be separated by their seconds, who again very nearly became embrawled.

Referee Roche declared the bout for Ketchel and none of the hacks at ringside took exception in their reports.

Papke of course believed he’d been wronged, that at the very
least the match should have been judged a draw. One more fight, he told anyone who would listen, one more fight with Ketchel was all he asked.

He would not get it.

K
ETCHEL AND
B
RITT
and the Goat celebrated his win over Papke deep into the night in a trio of adjoining suites in a deluxe San Francisco hotel. In their company were four young and lovely and lively girls leased for the evening from a Nob Hill madam of Britt’s acquaintance. The two girls tending to Ketchel were solicitous of his cuts and bruises and kissed them tenderly, cooed over him like sweetly salacious nurses, marveled at his show of lusty energy just hours after having fought a vicious twenty rounds.

The first editions to carry reports of the fight were strewn throughout the parlor, as were bottles of champagne, whiskey, beer. The girls had snipped out newspaper photos of the fight and Ketchel had autographed them, writing on half of them, “To Cynthia, the only true love of my life,” and on the other half, “To Annabelle, the only other true love of my life.”

When Cynthia presented one to him that showed Papke landing a jab on his cheek, he said, “Not this one,” balled it up and lobbed it through the window. The girls intended to frame the clippings and put them on their walls in the Nob Hill house.

Sometime after midnight, he left the girls dozing in the big bed and went into Britt’s suite and found him reclining with a girl named Francie in a steaming bathtub foaming with bubbles and laced with scented oils. Britt was puffing a cigar and sipping a flute of champagne, his derby slanted over one eye.

“Hiya, champ. Like the man said, this is the life.”

“Listen, Willie, I been thinking.”

“Hell you have. I know what you been doing.”

“There ain’t a middleweight left to fight.”

Britt sat up, sensing what Ketchel had in mind. The Francie girl made a low whine of protest at being discomfited and then re-accommodated herself to him. “I guess not, kid. You beat them all. Hell, you beat the light-heavy champ.”

“Yeah, I did. And I think—”

“
I
know what you’re thinking, Stevie!” the Goat called from the adjoining suite.

Ketchel looked toward the door. “Oh yeah?”

“Nosebone time!”

Britt arched his brow at Ketchel. Ketchel grinned. Britt laughed. “I gotta admit, kid, I’ve been doing some thinking along that line myself. I just didn’t have the balls to be the one to bring it up.”

The Francie girl snickered without opening her eyes and murmured, “You got plenty enough, baby, and you bring it up just fine.” She did something with her hand under the bubbles and Britt winced and slapped at her arm. “Hey, tootsie! Careful with the jewels.”

“Think the dinge’ll go for it?” Ketchel said.

“Hell yes, he’ll go for it. He’s dying for a big-money match, and you’re the biggest draw in the country. Know what else I think? I think you can take him. Hell, kid, I
know
you can take him.”

Pete the Goat came in with a lanky and very naked brunette riding him piggyback. “I know that too,” he said.

“Oh Jesus, I just got a great idea,” Britt said.

“Hear them wheels grinding, champ?” the Goat said, and winked at Ketchel.

“If we play this right,” Britt said, “if we by God play this right…we can make a real killing.”

He told them what he had in mind. The Goat said it sounded good to him.

“Yeah,” Ketchel said, “fine.”

“Well all right,” Britt said. “I’ll track the boogie down and then see about—”

“Do it,” Ketchel said.

A
ND SO.
A few weeks after his fourth fight with Papke, Ketchel and Britt met in a San Francisco hilltop restaurant with Jack Johnson and his manager George Little and a shameless Australian redhead named Sheila. They sat at a secluded table next to a window overlooking a blue fog rolling in from the bay. Willus Britt laid it out plain and simple, and they came to an accord. They would sham a draw and clean up with side bets. And then have a rematch and make a real killing on the gate. They’d need a goddamn freight train to haul away the dough….

I
N THE THREE
and a half years since Kate Morgan’s death, he’d not had his old dream of James Jeffries. But for six months now he’d been having one almost exactly like it. It differed in only two details. In this one he was again in a fight that went on and on for two days and the faces of the ringsiders kept changing, but now he was always fighting Jack Johnson. And unlike the Jeffries dream, from which he always came awake just before landing a roundhouse to Big Jim’s jaw, he didn’t wake from this one until the punch struck. Struck and felt…
perfect
…and Johnson fell.

He always woke from this dream in transcendent elation. If I could do that, he would think, if I could do
that
…

Just land that
one big punch
…

Well. He would simply and irrefutably be the best.

The best as best could get.

The heavyweight boxing champion of the world.

That’s who he would be.

Him.

O
ctober 16, 1909. The James W. Coffroth Arena, Colma, California.

The day is dazzling blue under a warm autumn sun. The outdoor arena is packed to capacity with ten thousand paid spectators, more than two thousand others turned away, the ring a small tan island in a sea of white skimmers.

The announcer is the venerable Billy Jordan, his walrus moustache thick and white. Colossal cheering greets his introduction of Stanley Ketchel, the “Michigan Assassin,” middleweight champion of the world, who enters the ring at 170 pounds and with a record of forty-nine wins, three losses, four draws. He spins in his corner, his robe swirling, raises his fists over his head in recognition of the ovation, bounces on his toes, rolls his head on his neck.

When Jordan directs the spectators’ attention to the opposite corner of the ring, the boos rumble like thunder. Jack Johnson, the “Galveston Giant” and heavyweight champ, weighs 209 pounds. Winner of fifty-eight bouts, loser of six, fighter of twelve draws. His head smooth as a burnished cannonball. His gold teeth bared at the squall of insults and catcalls. He shakes his hands together over his head in mock thespian fashion as though acknowledging applause, and grins at the louder heckling.

The boxers shed their robes to their seconds. Both are splendid specimens of leanly sculpted muscle and both appreciably free of obvious scars, a striking detail in light of the many fights each has had at this point in his career, and especially remarkable in Ketchel, given the carnage of so many of his previous contests. His trunks are black, Johnson’s butternut, with his usual red-and-white-striped bandanna tied to a belt loop at his hip.

Now that they are in the ring, the difference in their size is profoundly apparent, and makes clear why the Negro is the bookies’ heavy favorite. For many bettors it is a day of keen dilemma: should they hope to win their bet at the cost of a continuing Negro champion, or hope to rejoice at the boogie’s defeat and to hell with the loss of their wager?

The fighters position themselves for pictures. Johnson jokes with the photographers, says every side is his best side, “Even this one here,” turning his back to them and wagging his buttocks, cackling at his own highjinks. Amid the chattering of shutters and clattering of photo plates, he faces Ketchel with fists upraised and smiling broadly. Ketchel poses in his customary semi-crouch, sideways to Johnson and holding his left arm outstretched toward him, his entire body seeming as cocked and ready as his right fist. Also on hand to record the fight is a motion picture crew.

Now everyone departs the ring but for the principals and the referee, the esteemed Jack Welch, hatless and portly, in shirtsleeves and tie and buttoned vest. He delivers the standard warnings and instructions and then directs them to shake hands and come out fighting at the bell. The fighters tap gloves and Johnson says, “Showtime, Mr. Stanley.”

“Okay, Stevie,” Britt tells him back in the corner, “it’s a nice twenty-round workout for you boys, that’s all. Just make it look good.”

Ketchel nods, his eyes on Johnson in the opposite corner.

The gong sounds.

The crowd roars as the fighters come together in the middle of the ring and Johnson opens his mouth to make a jibe and Ketchel tries to knock out those gold teeth with the first punch of the fight.

B
ECAUSE THE DAY
will not dawn on which Jack Johnson does not expect a double cross from one direction or another, Ketchel’s breach of their agreement does not take him entirely by surprise, though he does not expect it in the opening seconds. For all his feline quickness in turning his chin from the blow, it catches him hard on the neck and wobbles him rearward to a detonation of cheers as Ketchel rushes after him, hammering with lefts and rights. Johnson retreats from the assault, warding it with his arms. Over in his corner George Little says, “What the
fuck!
”

Willus Britt and Pete the Goat are agape.

But in his haste to press the advantage, Ketchel is punching too wildly, and Johnson, with his back against the ropes, counters with three snapping jabs to forehead and mouth and nose that stop him short, and a right cross to the cheek that jolts him into a greater caution.

They circle each other, sidling and feinting, Ketchel feeling the blood running hot from his nose, dripping off his chin. Johnson smiles and says, “Any way you wants it, little man, okay by me.”

Ketchel bores in with fists churning but Johnson defends artfully and scores with another combination to the head, driving him back.

“What the
hell’re
they doing?” Britt says. “This ain’t the deal.” George Little glares at him from across the ring, and Britt turns his palms up and shrugs.

The crowd’s bellow is unremitting. Near the end of the round Ketchel lands two hard hooks to Johnson’s ribs and one to the head, and Johnson grabs him in a clinch, grins over Ketchel’s shoulder and rolls his widened eyes, infuriating the crowd all the more with such shucking. They look like man and boy in intimate embrace. But even as Johnson clutches him so close that he cannot punch at his head, Ketchel beats at his backribs and kidneys and feels him flinching. Just as the round ends, Johnson pushes him away like some peskiness, and the arena resonates with a massive jeering. Johnson waves a fist above his head.

While the Goat swabs Ketchel with a sponge and puts a stop to the nosebleed, Britt says, “Tell me,
please
tell me I’m watching the greatest acting job in the world.”

“I’m gonna take him, Willie.” Ketchel’s voice nasal with blood, eyes afire with exhilaration.

Britt rubs his face like a man not fully awake. “Christ, kid, it’s supposed to—”

“I’m gonna take him!” Ketchel says.

“Yeah!
” the Goat says, and proffers the water bag. Ketchel takes a swig, swishes it, spits it in a bucket.

Across the ring, the veins are standing on George Little’s fore
head as he bends to Johnson’s ear and addresses him in a great agitation about that no-good lowdown double-crosser and the money they’re all going to lose for betting on the draw. “I want you to knock that shithead into next week! You got me, Jack?”

“I hear you, man,” Johnson says, his smiling gaze fixed on Ketchel across the ring.

In the early going of the next round, Johnson effectively defends against most of Ketchel’s punches and consistently scores with the jab. At one point he places the palm of his glove against Ketchel’s forehead and laughs as he momentarily holds him at bay in the mocking manner of a large boy staving off a smaller one in a schoolyard scrape. The crowd showers insults on Johnson. A ringsider cries out for him to stop acting like a gorilla and fight like a man.

“Listen at them, Mr. Stanley,” Johnson says, smacking him with a jab. “Listen at how they
loves
to hate me.”

He stabs Ketchel with another jab and asks when he intends to start fighting. He says he’s been in cakewalks rougher than this match. Ketchel rushes in with another flurry but Johnson covers up well and lashes back with a hook to the heart that drives Ketchel back.

They sidle around each other, swapping jabs, Ketchel looking for an opening, cursing himself for his unruly style, telling himself to quit the wild stuff and fight smart,
smart,
goddamnit.

Johnson raps him with a jab and a glancing right and asks what he thinks of the Australian redhead Miss Sheila. “I recollects the way you admired her carnalicious charms.”

His japery makes him incautious. Ketchel snakes a cross over Johnson’s next jab and rocks him on his heels to an outburst of cheers and then swarms into him with a barrage of punches from
every point of the compass, manically seeking his chin, his jaw. The spectators are in mad shriek as Johnson backpedals, shielding with arms and gloves, then sidesteps along the ropes to keep Ketchel moving laterally and unable to punch with full force. Then Ketchel misses with a pair of wild swings, and a Johnson uppercut snaps his head back and the ring tilts under him and he goes down.

The crowd’s moan is titanic.

He rolls up onto an elbow, hears referee Welch’s cry of “Twoooo!” through the storm of pleading for him to get up, get up. He sees Johnson as a dark blur leaning on the ropes. Britt and the Goat and every man facing him from ringside can see the lack of focus in his eyes.

But at five he is on one knee. Welch counts six. Arrives at seven. At eight Ketchel heaves to his feet and lurches away from Johnson as the crowd howls in jubilation and Johnson bounds after him, backs him into the ropes, hooks him in the ribs, the head, and then Ketchel has him in a clinch and holds on till the bell.

Johnson pats him on the head, and Ketchel swats the hand away.

As Ketchel settles on his stool, Britt bawls, “You took his best shot!” His elation is hardly greater than his astonishment. He has resigned himself to the loss of their wagers. The only concern now is to win the fight. “The dinge ain’t got half the punch they say. You can take him, kid, you can. I always said you could take him.”

The crowd is strident with thrilled witness of Ketchel’s survival of the knockdown, with daring speculations of yet greater possibilities.

Through the third and fourth rounds, Ketchel keeps at a distance from Johnson, stays on the move, circling to the left, sidling
to the right, only intermittently engaging in quick toe-to-toe exchanges and each time getting the worst of it. In the fifth, his frustration erupts and he rams a shoulder into Johnson’s chest as though trying to break open a door and staggers him into the ropes. Johnson charges back and bowls him off his feet with the sheer mass of his forty-pound advantage and then almost steps on Ketchel’s head as he stumbles past him. A reporter notes that it is like a horseman trampling a man underfoot.

Through the sixth and the seventh, the eighth and the ninth, Johnson’s longer reach gives him the better of almost every exchange. A grudging consensus has awarded every round to the heavyweight champ.

Ketchel’s left cheek now a wedge of blue plum, one ear a wet beet, an eyebrow cut and swollen. The Goat swabs blood from his nose and says, “He’s gone scared, Stevie. He knows he can’t take you. Now kick the coon’s ass!”

“What you think I been trying to do, Goat, borrow money from him?”

In Johnson’s corner the seconds work intently at watering and sponging him, tending to a small cut over one eye.

“Goddamnit, I’ve had enough of you playing with that runt,” George Little says. “Quit fucking around and finish him!”

Johnson gives him a look. “
Fucking around?
”

In the early part of the tenth Johnson presses the attack, walloping Ketchel with body punches before Ketchel counters with a ferocious flurry that has the crowd in a wild squall as he drives Johnson into retreat. Ketchel works him into a corner, beats at his belly, his ribs, his chest. Johnson curses and clinches. Then hefts Ketchel off the canvas and heaves him like a medicine ball. Ketchel lights in a tumble and hustles up in a fury. The crowd yowling, ob
jecting of fouls and dirty nigger bastards. Referee Welch warns Johnson against any such further maneuver. Johnson shows his gold teeth and says, “My sincerefulest apologies, Mr. Jack.”

Welch gestures for them to resume fighting and Ketchel bulls into Johnson with his head down and butts him under the eye. Johnson grabs him in a clinch and Ketchel punches him low. Johnson curses and locks an arm around his neck and grinds the laces of his other glove into his eye cut. Nearly choking, Ketchel clubs at Johnson’s kidney with the heel of his fist. Welch shrilling rebukes. Johnson clouts at Ketchel’s battered ear with an elbow. Welch shakes a finger in Johnson’s face and as Johnson cuts his eyes at the ref Ketchel hits him with a hook that sprays the sweat off his head. Johnson curses and clinches and they grapple against the ropes, butting, elbowing, oblivious to Welch’s commands to break until he bravely wedges between them.

The gong declares a minute’s truce.

Ketchel is panting hard when he arrives at his stool. The Goat examines the eye cuts and pronounces them insignificant. So too the cheek welt.

“Keep it up, kid, keep it up,” Britt says. “You’re whipping him, I swear to God, you’re whipping his black ass!”

Ketchel knows better. But he also believes with all his heart and soul that if he can land just
one big punch
he can bring the big bastard down.

In the opposite corner Johnson’s seconds minister to the swelling raised under his eye by the head butt as George Little continues to reprove him. “The little bohunk’s making you look bad, goddamnit! Don’t let him do you like this!”

“I ain’t
letting
him do a damn thing,” Johnson says.

In the eleventh, Ketchel lands his best punch of the fight thus
far, an overhand right that rocks Johnson and raises a thunderous outcry, but even in the instant of landing it Ketchel knows it is not the Big One, it’s a little too high on the jaw. Johnson leans backward as he retreats, keeping his jaw out of range, taking punches on the shoulders and arms, fending with his gloves. The crowd baying like a massive wolf pack smelling blood on the air. But again Ketchel’s bombardment lacks accuracy and Johnson counters with a straight right that flashes a light in Ketchel’s head and almost unhinges his knees and he grabs Johnson in a clinch.

So ends the eleventh.

“Christ sake, Jack,” George Little says, “how much longer this gonna go on?”

Johnson works his sore jaw. “I’ve give him some shots, man. He ain’t hardly human.” He means the remark as a joke but it does not carry that way to George Little or even entirely so to his own ears.

“He’s a goddamn feist dog don’t know who he’s snapping at, is what he is,” George Little says. “And you, goddamnit, are
Jack Johnson
. You’re the heavyweight champion of the
world.
Enough’s enough. Yank the leash on the son of a bitch. Bust him.”

The gong sounds.

Johnson keeps his chin down and hands high to defend his aching jaw, and Ketchel hooks him to the body repeatedly, trying to bring down his guard, expose the chin, make an opening for the One Big Punch.