January 2, 1958
NYPD patrolman Stanley Moodrow sat before a full length mirror in the boys’ locker room of Robert Lehman High School and watched while his trainer, Sergeant Allen Epstein, wrapped his huge hands with a narrow strip of white gauze.
“Tighter, Sarge,” he hissed. “A little tighter.”
“You sure?” Epstein answered, dropping the gauze bandage to reach for a roll of white surgical tape.
“I gotta go six tonight. I don’t wanna hurt my hands in the first round.”
“You can’t hurt your hands punching air, Stanley. This guy’s fast.”
Moodrow tried to frown, but found himself grinning instead. Punching air? The phrase summed up his whole career. “Punching air” and “too damned big.” It was funny, in a way. The last fight of a boxer’s career wasn’t supposed to be held in a Brooklyn high school. And it wasn’t supposed to be the most important fight of that career. The last fight was supposed to come after a career filled with main events in Madison Square Garden, with championship belts held aloft, with popping flashbulbs and crowds of reporters.
Moodrow turned away from Epstein and curled his hands into fists. Satisfied, he studied himself in the mirror. Or, at least, he studied that portion of himself visible in the narrow glass. If he wanted to see the whole of his six foot six, 245-pound frame, he’d have to stand on the other side of the locker room. But he didn’t want to see his chest or his shoulders. Stanley Moodrow was looking into his own eyes, looking for any sign of indecision.
“Too damned big,” he thought. That’s what his first serious trainer, Sammy Turro, had told him. “You’re too damned big, Stanley. Ya stay in the fight game, ya gonna get your ass kicked.”
Moodrow had begun his fighting career in 1948, when he was fifteen years old. Most kids take up boxing because they’re afraid, but not Stanley Moodrow. He was always the biggest kid in his class, always a head taller than the tallest student. Maybe that was why, despite his good grades, he was cast as a dummy, a dope. The other kids made fun of him and he reacted, as kids will, by beating the crap out of them. That ended the teasing, but it hadn’t made him popular.
No, the end result of his schoolyard victories was that the losers, the hoods and the dummies, came to admire him, while the rest of the school left him entirely alone. Stanley Moodrow knew all about losers-growing up on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, there was no way to avoid them-and he wanted no part of their lives. Lost in arrogance, they hung out on every street corner, sucking on bottles of beer, dreaming of easy scores and easier sex. Right up until the day a judge sent them up the river.
“These are bums, Stanley,” his father, Max, had explained again and again. “All of them. They don’t want to work, so they take what they need from the people. Better to be a dog than a bum. God willing, I’ll live long enough to spit on their graves.”
God, apparently,
But that didn’t end the lectures. Moodrow’s Uncle Pavlov took up the theme before his brother was in his grave. “I hear you’re fightin’ in school, Stanley,” he counseled. “It’s okay to be tough. Ya gotta be tough to survive down here. But don’t be stupid, all right? Don’t be a bum. Ya wanna fight, go in the ring where it’ll do ya some good.”
Uncle Pavlov, a ten-year veteran of the NYPD, just happened to be in charge of the P.A.L.’s Lower East Side boxing program. He also just happened to be smart enough to act surprised when his brother’s kid turned up a month later.
“Hey, Stanley, fancy meetin’ you here.”
“I thought I’d give it a shot, Uncle Pavlov. I mean boxing. I wanna try it out.”
Try it out? The truth was that fifteen-year-old Stanley Moodrow wanted to be a champion. Like every other kid who put on the gloves. And his first twenty fights did nothing to discourage him. It wasn’t just the power in his right hand. Stanley Moodrow, like all good fighters in the early stages of a career, simply refused to lose. He found a way to win, even when overmatched, to eat the pain and keep on coming. If his fists weren’t good enough, he beat his opponent into submission with the sheer force of his will. The pain-and there was
“Ya mind’s not where it belongs, Stanley.”
“Huh?” Moodrow turned to his trainer. “What’d you say, Sarge?”
“The fight,
Moodrow stood up and kicked the stool away. He set himself in front of the mirror and began to shadowbox with his reflection. Fights, he knew, don’t begin with the opening bell. They begin the day the match is made and progress through a number of stages. Training, first, then a layoff two days before the bout, then the weigh-in, the taping of the hands, the ritual of working up a sweat, the long walk to the ring, the introductions. You could lose your edge anywhere along the way. The will to win could be sucked out of you like a malted through a straw.
“I’m gonna take this guy tonight,” he said without stopping. “It’s six rounds, not three. I’m gonna catch him and take him out.”
The thing about it was that you could control a lot of things in your life, but you couldn’t control everything. You couldn’t control the fact that you were seventeen years old and six foot five inches tall and maybe you’d kicked the hell out of YMCA competition, but now you were in the Golden Gloves and your opponents were faster and more experienced. Very few kids are full-blown heavyweights at the tender age of seventeen.
Moodrow made it to the semi-finals, despite the fact that his opponents were all in their twenties, but that was the end of it. Bobby Brown was a three-time Golden Gloves national champion. Four inches shorter and thirty pounds lighter than Moodrow, he used his speed to every advantage, darting in to throw four-punch combinations, then moving back and away before Moodrow could respond. The blood began to flow halfway through the second round and the referee stopped it fifteen seconds into the third. Moodrow, back in the dressing room, tried to make an excuse.
“It was a butt,” he told the doctor sewing his eyelid back together. “A butt,” he insisted to his trainer.
Sammy Turro was kind enough to wait until the doctor finished, until there were no witnesses, before he enlightened his fighter.
“Ya too big, Stanley. Too fuckin’ big. There ain’t no champions big as you. And don’t give me Jack Johnson, neither. Guys today are scientific. They know how to stay away. You get in against one of the good ones? Eddie Machen? Zora Folley? Cleveland Williams? I don’t care how hard ya work, they’re gonna use ya for a punching bag. Lotta guys big as you, guys with your heart, they go into boxing anyway. Fifteen years later they’re sparrin’ partners for two bucks a round. They hear bells whenever they close their eyes.”
“Sammy,” Moodrow insisted, “he
“Yeah, well I didn’t see no butt, Stanley. But if he
Moodrow, eyes riveted to his reflection in the mirror, stopped throwing punches and assumed a defensive posture, fists alongside the jaw, elbows tight against the ribs. It was the “peek-a-boo” defense used by the current champion, Floyd Patterson, who should have been quick enough to do without it. For Moodrow, on the other hand, it amounted to an acceptance of punishment. He wasn’t fast enough to slip punches, to move out of harm’s way. He was going to have to take one to give one. Or take two. Or three. Or four.
“All right, Stanley, don’t overdo it. You’re supposed to warm up, not leave your fight in the dressing room.”
Moodrow ignored him. Allen Epstein didn’t know squat about the fine art of bringing a fighter to his peak on the night of a big bout. Epstein was in it for the same reason as Moodrow, though he wasn’t dumb enough actually to be the one in the ring.
Moodrow had never seen his desire to be a world champion as simple ambition until his third week at the Police Academy. He’d looked at the freshly scrubbed faces of the other recruits, then raised a finger to the still-pink scar on his brow. He knew things they didn’t know, things you learn by going into the ring and winning your first twenty fights. He knew, for instance, that he could have turned pro and worked himself into contention for a championship. Maybe he would never
