A Website of the Radical Imagination
Bob Ingram Let it be known that W.C. “Bill” Heinz’s “The Professional” is the best boxing novel ever written. He was the Balzac of boxing, a master of unadorned prose.
Let it also be known that Lucia Rijker, “The Dutch Destroyer,” was the best female boxer I ever saw, a stone cold Buddhist killer. I saw her once on the street in New York and she was a beautiful dark angel.[1]
And let is also be known, finally, that Rita Bullwinkel is a young writer and I am an old reviewer.
Before there was an airport in Philadelphia, planes used to land in Central Airport across the Delaware River in Camden, New Jersey. Weber’s Hof Brau restaurant was at the airport. They had outdoor fights there, too.
My father loved to tell about how he was at the fights at the airport one night and every time this one dude got hit with a good shot, his cup would fly out and the ref would call a halt while his corner men retrieved the reluctant cup and gathered around their warrior to reinstall it.
My one experience as a ring announcer took place at outdoor fights, too, and there was an “incident,” shall we say, at that show, too.
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.
Don’t be put off by the opening of this post on a book about a bad man. The story on offer here isn’t pretty or uplifting but reviewer Bob Ingram has written a truth-attack that stands as its own justification…
Willie Pep got locked up a lot, mostly for gambling in the streets and driving too fast, which did nothing to dim the luster of his legendary boxing career. He was the people’s champ, and the people, too, gambled and went over the speed limit and got locked up.
On November 17, 2001, WBC world junior welterweight champion Christy Martin outboxed Lisa Holewyne over ten rounds at Mandalay Bay casino in Las Vegas, which was unusual because Martin was a self-admitted slugger, not a boxer. At the weigh-in, when Holewyne had wished her good luck, Martin answered, “Good luck getting knocked the fuck out.”
On November 25, 2017, the two women were married by a justice of the peace in Austin, Texas, where they currently live.
The marriage is one of the happier events chronicled in Fighting for Survival, by Christy Martin and Ron Borges. The book is subtitled “My journey through boxing fame, abuse, murder, and resurrection.”
Think of Pablo Picasso. Think of Miles Davis. Think of Sugar Ray Robinson.
All three were artists in their chosen realms, who expanded those realms into previously unknown dimensions. All three were difficult and ambiguous and contradictory. All three answered only to themselves in the mysterious ways of genius. Tough nuts to crack.
Herb Boyd, with Ray Robinson II, has a go at cracking the diamond of a nut that is Sugar Ray Robinson in Pound For Pound, a Biography of Sugar Ray Robinson.
Long ago and far away in San Francisco, that lovely city by the bay, I maneuvered myself into the food concession at the Keystone Korner, a jazz club in North Beach. It was 1975, and I had many strange and wondrous adventures there.
In Lollipop, Bob Levin has written a totally honest “memoir” of his year as a VISTA lawyer in Chicago from September in 1967 to September in 1968.
It is totally honest because, as he says in his introduction, “I have made up up (almost) all names of individuals and organizations. I have manufactured dialogue. I have composited some characters and omitted significant others. I have altered time sequences and appropriated events which occurred to others as my own. Some of what I believed happened did not. Some of what I thought I’d made up, I learned from my journal, occurred.”
This is all in legitimate service to telling a story that needs to be told of one young lawyer’s experiences in sixties’ Chicago, that city of Sandburg’s broad shoulders and the Daley administration’s narrow and dangerous mind.
Lollipop might seem a flippant title for a book that at its core is a serious consideration of mid-twentieth America in all its shabby glory. It comes from the following statement by the Black civil rights leader and scholar Roger Wilkins: “What we are talking about is changing the way people live. Everything else is band-aids and lollipops.”
In his book Boxing Babylon, Nigel Collins used a quote of mine from a magazine story I wrote on the late Philadelphia boxer, Tyrone Everett, who was shot to death by his girlfriend when she found him in bed with a transvestite.
Maybe the game you play first is the one that memory coats with the richest patina.
For me it is baseball…
That craggy-faced master of the art, Thomas Phillip “Tip” O’Neill Jr., famously pointed out that all politics are local.
I’m here to tell you about that.
It began for me in mid-summer this year when I was taking my usual morning walk on the Boardwalk in Wildwood, NJ, and a bunch of young teenage punks on bikes came busting by, and the nearest one yelled at me, “Hey, buddy — vote for Trump!”
They tore down the Fox Theatre on Market Street in Philadelphia in 1980.
The horror in the Orlando night club brought to mind when I was 11 years old in the leafy Camden suburb of Collingswood, New Jersey. It was September 6, 1949, and in the Cramer Hill section of Camden a World War Two vet, Howard Unruh, 28, left his house at 9:20 in the morning for what became known as “The Walk of Death,” a stroll of 12 minutes during which he killed 13 people – three of them children – with a souvenir Luger.
I used to drink at Dale’s Bar on Broadway in Camden.
Modern professional athletes are entirely beholden to their corporate masters. Fuck up the brand, and you’re gone. Pete Rose, Lance Armstrong, Tiger Woods, Ray Rice, Adrian Peterson. On and on.
