Brick City Grudge Match is a tough-sounding, gritty title for a boxing book, especially when the subtitle is Tony Zale and Rocky Graziano Battle in Newark, 1948.
A great title, sure, but it’s more of a publisher’s book-selling concoction than the down-and-dirty truth. I was inducted into the army in Newark, New Jersey, but reading lawyer Rod Honecker’s book, was the first time I ever heard the “Brick City” moniker, which refers to the seemingly endless public housing projects that were built in Newark after the third and final Zale-Graziano war. So, historically, Newark wasn’t Brick City when the legendary rubber match for the middleweight title took place. No big deal, though.
A bigger deal is the “grudge match” angle. Honecker himself contradicts the title: “Although the Newark fight would be billed as an epic grudge match, the truth was the two men liked and respected each other.” Indeed, the two fighters are shown, all smiles and chuckles, signing the contract on the back of Toots Shor himself at his famous Manhattan restaurant. Also, not a mention is made of a grudge fight in the many quotations Honecker uses from the news reports of the lead-up to the battle.
The weigh-in, too, was a calm affair for the two professionals, unlike the phony punk-ass bravado and antics that infect so many of today’s weigh-ins, likely started by Muhammad Ali and his crazed behavior at the weigh-in for the first Liston fight.
Overall, though, Brick City Grudge Match is a masterful and thorough consideration of a single legendary prizefight. There are some small slip-ups, granted: the mobster who ran Philadelphia boxing at that time was “Blinky” Palermo, not “Palmiero,” although Honecker gets it right later in the book. Also, it is Max Baer, not “Max Bear,” and Felix Bocchiccio, listed as Jersey Joe Walcott’s “promoter” was another mob guy under the control of the former Murder Inc. hitter, Frankie Carbo, the notorious “Mr. Gray,” who ran most of boxing then. Curiously, Bocchiccio’s name is not found in the index, and, more curiously in the chapter notes, Chapter 10 is entirely missing.
Honecker has two purposes in this book: chronicling the fight itself, and examining the city of Newark’s last grasp at redemption with this much-heralded fight before sliding into the long-term despair of political corruption, mob control, deindustrialization, and racial disparity.
Both Zale and Graziano arrived at this legendary moment in boxing after treading dismal and torturous paths to the prizefight ring that would finally elevate them to legends of the game. Zale, “The Man of Steel,” emerged from the mills of Gary, Indiana to bulldog his way to the middleweight title on the strength of a murderous punch and an indomitable fighting spirit. Graziano, a wild child in his New York youth, went from reform school to pulling serious time in the city’s notorious Tombs and Riker’s Island jails, as well as Fort Leavenworth in Kansas, these three institutions constituting a veritable Ivy League of cruel and unusual punishment. His stay in Leavenworth was accompanied by a dishonorable discharge from the army.
Newark, for its part, was at its peak population of 450,000 in 1948, but the conditions of coming urban blight had long been in evidence. Corruption was a New Jersey political mainstay and Newark was at the head of this inelegant class. The mob, in the person of gentleman gangster Abner “Longie” Zwillman, tainted most aspects of the city’s life. With the end of World War II, many of the industries that had thrived in Newark moved south to a friendlier, union-free climate. The city was not yet on the ropes, but a sporting spectacle of this proportion was seen as a potential savior from its evident and precarious slide into ignominy.
Why Newark for a fight of this truly universal magnitude, comparable to the second Louis-Schmeling encounter in the 1930s and the third Ali-Frazier war in 1975? Boxing and baseball shared the American sporting stage in 1948; it was indeed the Golden Age of Boxing. Then why Ruppert Stadium in Newark when this showdown could fill Yankee Stadium in the Bronx, site of Zale’s sixth-round kayo victory in the first match, many times over? Why bush league Newark instead of that gleaming Big Apple across the river?
The answer is disarmingly simple: Rocky Graziano. “The Rock” had failed to promptly reveal a bribe attempt to throw a fight and the New York State Boxing Commission indefinitely revoked his boxing license. “Rocky thought the whole thing was bullshit,” Honecker comments, his diction sliding into the vernacular.
Chicago evidently didn’t agree with Rocky’s opinion. While Rocky won the title back at Soldier Field in the Windy City on July 16, 1947, with a brutal, bloody sixth-round knockout of Zale, the city of broad shoulders upheld the New York revocation and denied the champ a venue there for the heralded rubber match.
In stepped a newly-formed promoter christened Tournament of Champions, Inc. (TOC), quietly backed by Lawrence Lowman of CBS and Charles Miller of the Music Corporation of America, “who sought to exploit boxing’s potential on television,” according to Honecker, although the fight wasn’t televised despite persistent reports it would be. TOC won the day, and the countdown until June 9, 1948 began.
The logistics included traffic controls around the ballpark, strict parking rules, directional signs on the Pulaski Skyway, bus pickups at the Port Authority in New York, 200 patrolmen assigned to keep order, 40 detectives to circulate against pickpockets, and 50 firefighters on call in case the maze of electric wires caught fire. Sixteen thousand chairs were set up on the field to more than double the 14,000 capacity. New York Yankee radio announcers Mel Allen and Russ Hodges would call the fight to 450 stations around the country. Western Union had ringside operators sending dispatches to newspapers worldwide. Four hundred press passes had been issued to reporters from every state plus Hawaii, Canada, England, France, and Australia. The world waited.
While waiting, the public was able to read columns by both fighters during fight week in the Newark Star Ledger. This gambit, long since abandoned, was an occasional promotion for the really, really big fights of those times. Honecker neglects to mention whether the articles were ghosted or really penned by the pugilists, noting that Graziano used his first byline to thank New Jersey for “his early ring education” in the Garden State where he was undefeated in eight bouts. Zale’s initial column addressed his age – he was actually 35, though he claimed to be 34 – promising, “If they think I am too old, they will be surprised.”
Honecker labors in Brick City Grudge Match (McFarland, 203 pages, $29.95) to situate this singular event in the times in which it took place, literally listing big news like the Berlin Airlift and Harry Truman’s presidential campaign kickoff in Zale’s Gary, Indiana, hometown, along with more local news like the barring of a high school majorette in the Woodbridge, N.J. Memorial Day parade for wearing shorts.
It rained on June 9th, and the fight was moved back a day. Among the “boxing royalty” at ringside then were Jack Dempsey and Gene Tunney, Ray Robinson and Barney Ross, as well as department store magnate Bernard Gimbel and New York Mayor Bill O’Dwyer. Joe DiMaggio’s entrance saw him besieged by autograph hounds. According to Richard Ben Cramer’s classic biography, the Yankee Clipper spent many nights in Newark and had more than a passing acquaintance with Longie Zwillman. Even Marilyn Monroe occasionally graced Newark’s high life, long before she ever met Joltin’ Joe.
By today’s standards, the fighter’s entrance ringwear was weird: Graziano wore a green sweater over a white robe, and Zale had a pair of trousers under his white robe. The fight itself was short and brutal. Zale had worked on a left hook in training to go with his feared right hand, and it was a hook that put Graziano down for a count of “two or three” in the first round. In the ensuing bedlam, the sound of the bell was lost and the round went on for about eight seconds, during which Zale landed a crushing right hand to Graziano’s heart. The Rock’s seconds jumped into the ring to put an end to the round.
Graziano gave a better account of himself in round two, but was bedeviled by two more left hooks in the third round. He beat the count, wobbly-legged and staggering, for the first knockdown, but a right to the body followed by a fully leveraged hook left him supine, out cold on his back, arms outstretched in a canvas crucifixion. He was so thoroughly knocked out that rumors had the Rock dead, albeit in reality he was “severely concussed.”
So ended the actual fight, but Brick City Grudge Match goes on to recount the principals’ careers and lives after the battle. The last chapter is called “Requiem for a Middleweight” and recounts Zale’s efforts to find a place in the world outside boxing; at one point he was nearly homeless, before becoming a mentor to underprivileged kids.
Parenthetically, the book’s first chapter is called “The Precinct Captain and the Redhead,” detailing the killing of a high-ranking, low-living married Newark cop by his current flame in the very station house he commanded. A chapter after the fight is called “Trial of the Redhead” and ends up with the woman changing her plea to guilty. The only connection this sensation had to Zale Graziano, as Honecker calls the fight sans the hyphen, was competing for headline space.
It is no easy task to write an entire book about a single prizefight, and Honecker has accomplished that in great measure, even if he looked to some help to fill his pages from a cop and a redhead.
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Originally published in Ringside Seat.