Blessed be the Lord, my rock, who teaches my hands to battle and my fingers to fight.
—Psalm 144
Phone call comes in: Lemme speak
with Kelly. Which Kelly do youse want,
the Jewish Kelly or the Italian Kelly?
Then the Italians take Jewish names
from Joe Nisivoccia to Joey Ross,
Al Pescatore to Al Diamond.
Sometimes you want to be Jewish,
sometimes you don’t. In America
you can have it both ways.
There’s talk about boxers having “killer instinct.”
I never had it as a kid, even in street fights,
and I don’t have it now. Don’t get me wrong,
there’s plenty of hate under the surface,
and promoters exploit it, like the 1929 bout
“Battle of the Hebe and the Wop.”
Us pros used to work out at Grupp’s on 116th.
The owner had a drinking problem and he
blamed us Jews for WWI. I got fed up,
so I led the exodus to Stillman’s.
My mother? Are you kidding me? She looks at my
black eye and weeps, so I take out the $20 I earned
in the ring, hand it over to my father — my father,
a tailor who works all week to earn 20 bucks —
and he says: All right, Benny, keep on fighting.
For $20 it’s worth getting a black eye.
Make like you’re a dervish,
duck-feint-dance, your hand
a jack hammer jab with the left
and keep jabbing jab-jab-jab
and when he takes his eye off that jab
smack him with a right cross
then jab again, a left to the body
then deliver that right upper cut.
It’s more than us boxers, it’s an
industry with trainers, corner men,
equipment manufacturers,
managers, gym owners.
Lou Stillman sits on his perch
above the ring, packs a snub-nosed .38
in a shoulder holster, runs the joint
like a dictator and gets away with it.
Everyone takes his abuse, and I mean everyone:
Broadway performers, gangsters looking to fix
a fight, racketeers like Dutch Schultz, Legs Diamond,
Owney Madden, enemies under a flag of truce
sitting ringside with the Park Avenue hoi-poloi.
Stillman’s! Grime with the sanctity of a shrine.
Windows kept closed and never washed.
Floor one gigantic spittoon. Gene Tunney
won’t train here, says it’s “unsanitary.” Hah!
Rocky Graziano spent a few days at an outdoor
training camp in the mountains, and when he
comes back to Stillman’s he tells us:
That fresh air would poison a guy!
Note: Benny Leonard (1896-1947: born Leiner) was a world lightweight champion.
Judith Rosenberg’s poems have been published in Atlanta Review, The MacGuffin, and Two Hawks Quarterly, among other places. Retired from teaching English at Hunter College in New York, she divides her time between Brookline and Brewster.
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