By W.C. Heinz
From What a Time It Was
2001

We were sitting in the living room of a hotel suite in Chicago, and it was about nine o’clock at night. Rocky Graziano was sitting in an easy chair, with his legs over one of the arms. He had on slacks and a T-shirt, and he was sucking on a dry pipe and trying to spit small, almost-dry spit into a wastebasket over by the near wall. There were a couple of sparring partners on the sofa, and Whitey Bimstein and Irving Cohen were sitting with a card table between them and Irving was counting through a batch of tickets. There was a small radio on the windowsill and the Cubs’ game was on. The only noise in the room was the noise of the announcer. I was watching the Rock. I was watching him sit there, sucking on the pipe and spitting and then staring straight ahead, and I had it all figured out for myself.

This is a guy, I was thinking to myself, who is not listening to a ball game. This is a guy who is twenty-five hours away, a guy in a ring fighting Tony Zale for the middleweight title for the second time and remembering the first time in Yankee Stadium when he had Zale down and beaten and Zale came out the next round, his legs wobbling, and pumped that right hand into the body so it brought this guy’s right knee up and then followed it with the hook to the chin that knocked this guy out.

“It’s a single over short going into left center field,” the announcer said, his voice rising. “The runners on third and second will score, and here they come…”

“You see?” the Rock said suddenly, swinging his feet around onto the floor and taking the pipe out of his mouth and pointing it at us. “If they make that double play they get out of the inning and no runs score. You see?”

I am thinking of this now because on February 20 the Rock is going back into that same ring in Chicago, this time against Sugar Ray Robinson for that same middleweight title. This is just a guy out for the big paynight now, but when he had it he was the most exciting fighter of our time. Now they say this is where he gets off and that this will probably be the last magazine piece anybody will write about him for a long time.

“All right,” Whitey said after a while. “You better get up to bed now, Rock. It’s time you were in.”

He got up from the chair and he stretched and he started out the door. Whitey motioned over his shoulder with his head and I followed them out.

We went down the hall and took the stairway up to the next floor. It was a two-room suite with three cots in one room for the sparring partners and two beds in the other room, one for Whitey and the other for the Rock.

“You better try those trunks on,” Whitey said.

The Rock got undressed. He had been training for months and he was in great shape, and he tried on the two pairs of trunks, black with the red stripes, squatting down and standing up.

“The first ones are too tight,” he said. “These are best.”

He got, naked, into one of the beds then and he pulled the covers up. He put two pillows under his head, so he was half sitting up, and Whitey walked into the other room.

“So, I’ll go now, Rock,” I said.

“Okay,” he said.

“You have to lick this guy, Rock,” I said suddenly, bending over the bed.

“If you ever had to win a fight, you have to win this one.”

He knew what I meant. In New York they had revoked his license for failing to report the offer of a bribe he had never accepted for a fight that had never been fought. There were those of us who had gone day after day to the hearings, who had been able to see through this to the politics behind it, and we had been appalled that such a thing could happen in this country.

“I despise them for what they did to you,” I said, “and you hate them, and there’s only one way you can get even. If you lose tomorrow night, you’re done, not only in New York but everywhere. You have to win, Rock.”

“I know,” he said.

“You have to stick it,” I said. “You have to win the title, because when you win the title it’s yours and they can’t take it away from you outside the ring. You win it and they need it and they’ll come crawling back, begging you on their hands and knees.”

“I know,” he said, lying there in the bed and looking right at me. “If I have to, I’ll die in there, tryin’.”

We shook hands and he snapped off the light over the bed and I left. I felt bad for having made a speech like that, because they make few better guys than Tony Zale and they make them no tougher inside the ropes, and where do you get off telling another guy he has to take those Sunday shots in the belly and on the chin while you sit at ringside feeling a lot but taking nothing and just looking up?

It was 120 degrees at ringside inside the Chicago Stadium that July night. They drew $422,918 for a new indoor record and had them hanging from the rafters. Suddenly the hot, wet, sweat-smelling air was still and the organ started “East Side, West Side” and a roar went up in the back and down the aisle came the Rock. He had the white satin robe with the green trim over his shoulders and Whitey and Irving and Frank Percoco were behind him. The noise was all over the place now and Whitey was rubbing his back under the white robe as they came and then, two steps from the stairs, he broke from Whitey and took the three stairs in one step and vaulted through the ropes, throwing his arms so the robe slid off.

“Yes,” I said to myself, “he’ll stick it all right.”

He stuck it, and there were times when it looked like he’d have to die doing it. Over his right eye the brow swelled and came down and shut the eye, and when Zale cut the left eye the blood flowed into it so he was stumbling around blind or seeing only through a red haze. Zale pitched all his big stuff at him and he took it all. There were times in the third round when I said to myself that if this were just a fight, and not bigger than a fight, he would go down. I said to myself that he couldn’t win it but at least he showed them he had guts. Then a funny thing happened.

Between the fourth and fifth rounds, Frank Percoco took the hard edge of a quarter and, pressing with it between his fingers, broke the skin of the swelling over the right eye. When the blood came out the swelling came down enough for the lid to pull up, and the Rock could see. For two bits they won the middleweight title and made maybe $250,000 and it was the beginning of all that would follow.

He had Zale helpless on the ropes now in the sixth round. Zale, collapsing, had his back to him and, in that frenzy that made him what only he and Dempsey were, the Rock climbed all over him, hitting him wherever he could find a place to hit him. Then the referee stopped it. And now he was standing in the shower stall, the right eye shut again, a clip holding the other cut closed, only a fireman in uniform with us, standing guard.

“Well,” I said to him, “the world is a big place, and how does it feel to be the middleweight champion of it?”

“I don’t know,” he said, hurt and leaning back and resting one arm on the shower handles, trying to think and to talk. “I don’t know. I mean… I mean as a kid I… I mean I was no good… I mean nobody ever… You know what I mean?”

He was standing, naked and cut and swollen, in this basement and holding his hands out to us. It was quiet but for the drip of the shut-off shower.

“I know what you mean, Rocky,” the fireman said, out of nowhere. “You’re giving a talk on democracy.”

“I mean I never…” The Rock said, and then he turned to the fireman and he said, “You’re a good guy. You’re all right. You know what I mean?”

They came through the door then, a half-dozen newspapermen from the mob in the dressing room. They got him in a corner, all of them with their pencils and paper out.

“But how did you feel in there?” one of them shouted at him.

“I wanted to kill him,” he said. “I got nothing against him. He’s a nice guy. I like him, but I wanted to kill him.”

That is the kind of a fighter he was, a special kind. I remember the night he fought Marty Servo in the Garden. Marty had just knocked out Red Cochrane for the welterweight title, and now Graziano had him against the ropes, holding Marty’s head up with his open left glove, clubbing him with his right. He’d have killed Marty if he had a knife in there that night, and he would have been guilty of only one thing. He would have been guilty of giving himself over completely to that which they send two men out to do when they face each other in a ring.

Don’t you know, too, that the Rock liked Marty and Marty liked the Rock? Marty was never a fighter again after that beating. He had to give up his welterweight title without ever defending it, and by that beating he lost the money he had counted on to give him security the rest of his life. I remember a night a couple of years later. The Rock was walking ahead of us and we were going out to eat.

“Where are we going?” I said.

“We’re going to that place where Marty Servo tends bar,” Irving Cohen said. “Rocky likes him and he always tries to bring business into the place.”

We went into the place and Marty, in a white jacket, was standing behind the bar, leaning against the rack that holds the glasses in front of the mirror. When he saw us his face brightened and he leaned over the bar and shook hands. When he shook hands with the Rock, he smiled and faked as if to hook with his left. The Rock, leaning over the bar, stuck his left under Marty’s chin as he had that night and faked to throw the right, and then the two of them dropped their hands and laughed.

“I’ll be glad when that Graziano stops fighting,” a guy said once in Stillman’s. “It’s gettin’ so you can’t even move in here.”

When the Rock trained, they would stand packed, all the way back to the wall. They would be packed on the stairs and they would be packed in the balcony, too. In his dressing room, there was always a mob. There was one little guy there named Barney who always wore a dirty cap and who played the harmonica. He didn’t play it by blowing on it with his mouth. He played it by blowing on it through his nostrils.

“Ain’t he a good musician?” the Rock would say, sitting back in his robe and listening. “Did you ever see anybody do that before? I’d like to get this poor guy a job.”

The guy would smile and then he’d play some more. He had three numbers. He’d play “Beer Barrel Polka,” “The Darktown Strutters’ Ball,” and “Bugle Call Rag.” All the time he was playing “Bugle Call Rag,” blowing on the harmonica through his nostrils, he’d salute with his left hand.

“Ain’t that great?” the Rock would say, and he would mean it. “Why can’t I get this guy a job?”

The guy was satisfied. The Rock staked him. He staked a lot of them. One day I saw him give a guy the shirt he was wearing. The Christmas of the first year he made any money he bought a second-hand 1940 Cadillac and filled it with $1,500 worth of toys. He drove it down to his old neighborhood on the East Side and unloaded the toys on the kids and another $1,500 on their parents. He never mentioned it. It came out because a trainer from the gym who lives in the neighborhood saw it.

“Look, Rocky,” Irving Cohen said to him. “It’s nice to do things like that, but you haven’t got that kind of money and you’ve got to save money. You won’t be fighting forever.”

“Sure, Irving,” the Rock said, “but those are poor people. They’re good people. They never done no wrong. They never hurt nobody. They just never got a break.”

One day in Stillman’s, the Rock walked up to Irving. He asked him for a touch.

“I’ve got fifty bucks,” Irving said.

“Give it to me,” the Rock said, “and hustle up another fifty for me.” Irving circulated and borrowed fifty and gave that to the Rock. The Rock walked away and Irving, who is a little, round guy, sidled after him.

As you come into Stillman’s there are rows of chairs facing the ring. In one of the chairs there was a former fighter sitting. This one is still a young man, but he is blind. The Rock sat down next to him and talked with him for a while. Irving sidled up behind them, and then the Rock leaned over and slipped the rolled-up bills into the lapel pocket of the fighter’s jacket.

“There’s something in your pocket,” he said, and he got up.

It is a shame we lied to a guy like this when we told him that, if he won the title that night in Chicago, he would be all right because they could never take it away from him outside the ring. We didn’t tell it as a lie. It just came out a lie. It came out a lie because when he won the title he became big in people’s minds. He was a name, and now they got it out of Washington that he had gone AWOL in the Army, had put in seven months in Leavenworth, and had a dishonorable discharge. They wanted to bar him from the ring.

I remember the night after he ran out on a fight in California. His disappearance made headlines, and finally he walked through the door into a suite at the Capitol-Hotel across Eighth Avenue from the Garden. He had on a beautiful camel’s hair polo coat, but there was the growth of several days’ beard on his face, and under the coat he wore an old woolen shirt and dirty slacks and there were heavy running shoes on his feet.

“I’m with my friends,” he said, and he held his hands out.

They were New York sportswriters called there on the promise that he would show up. Only some of them were his friends, but they all stood up when he came in and when he said that you could hear every breath.

“It’s like I got a scar on my face,” he said, staring through them and bringing his right hand up slowly to his right cheek. “Why don’t they leave alone or put me in jail?”

Of course, they took his title away outside the ring. They let him defend it against Zale in Newark on June 10, 1948, and they paid him for it, but he was no fighter then. The things they had done to him had taken out of him that which had made him the fighter he had been. He walked toward Zale as he was to walk toward those others in that hotel room another time, and Zale measured him and for two rounds gave him a terrible beating and in the third round knocked him out.

It is an odd thing, but once Rocky Graziano would have fought Ray Robinson for the fun of it. That would be four or five years ago, and he made Irving Cohen’s life miserable with it.

“Get me Robinson, will you, Irving?” he would say, over and over again. “Believe me, Irving, I’ll knock him out.”

“Sure, Rocky,” Irving would say. “Sure you will. But wait.”

There were just those two things, you see, that the Rock had that made him what he was. He could take your head off your shoulders with that right-hand punch, and he fought with that animal fury that is the pure, primitive expression of the essence of combat.

He has not put those two things together in a ring since the night he won the title from Zale in Chicago and they pulled the Army on him. There is no evidence that they are any longer a part of him, and if that is so then this is the end of the road, the last big paynight, the final chapter of a memorable book—and I can’t find the one big sentence with which to end it.

Against Ray Robinson, in the third round that night in he, still put enough of that fury into one right-hand punch to drop Robinson. Then Robinson got up and, with that barrage that was typical of him, knocked him out.

Now the fighter and his wife live in a high-rise apartment in what is known as New York’s fashionable Upper East Side, three miles north of where he was born and grew up. He is sixty-one years old, and they are grandparents.

“I just made The Big One,” he told me fifteen years ago.

“The Big One?” I said. “What’s that?”

“A million bucks.”

“You’re worth a million?” I said.

“Yeah,” he said. “My accountant just told me. How about that?”

It started with his ring earnings, and it came from his autobiography, Somebody Up There Likes Me, from the movie they made from it, from his television and personal appearances, and from radio and television commercials. He visits schools and talks on juvenile delinquency, and when he told me that he had lectured at Fordham University I asked him what he had said.

“I spoke to all the kids who were graduatin’,” he said, “and a lot of elderly people, like professors and priests.”

“But what did you tell them?” I said.

“You know what it is,” he said. “I start out, whether I’m talkin’ about criminology or juvenile delinquency, and I say, ‘You know, I’m so glad my father took the boat, because this is the best country in the world, and if there was another country like this one, I’d be jealous.’ ”

[This article originally appeared in Sport magazine, circa 1952.]

So Long, Rock