Review of Jeremy Schaap's book on Braddock from the Miami Herald: Thanks, Allison: Posted on Thu, May. 05, 2005 IN MY OPINION Riveting book traces boxer's stunning upset by EDWIN POPE Every
day he wore out more of the bits and pieces that were left of his
shoe soles. Hoofing Jersey's streets to the ferry in Hoboken. Riding
across to Manhattan with nothing but hunger in his gut. Then pounding
city cement for 10 or 12 miles, looking for a decent fight or a decent
job. And all with only the merest shot at even being able to grab
maybe half a grubby sandwich in a grubby gymnasium. Worn out. Tapped out. Just not burned out. That's why they called Braddock ''Cinderella Man,'' as in Jeremy Schaap's remarkable, just-released book of that name, and an identically titled movie coming out in a month or so. Book and movie were independently created, but if the movie is half what Schaap's book is, Russell Crowe can grab his Oscar in advance. Hey, if Cinderella had hung in there the way Braddock did, they would have named her after him. Braddock fought Baer on June 13, 1935, as an underdog at odds ranging so high, from 6-1 to 10-1, most bookmakers wouldn't even look a bettor's way. Muhammad Ali would do the same thing three decades later against Sonny Liston. Big difference. The world knew Ali, or, back then, Cassius Clay, had a future. All Braddock had was a past. The toughest kind. HARD TIMES In five years leading into his title match, Braddock had lost more fights than he had won. He was busted everywhere but in his heart. That's how it was in the Depression, the dirty dozen years from '29 to '41 when only the luckiest Americans could put three squares a day on the family table. Braddock wasn't even close to lucky. He was just another plug-along fighter when nobody could afford the price of admission to a fight. Half a year before he fought Baer, he was rated no better than No. 20 among all heavyweights. A big payday for James J. Braddock was $250, and he had to split that -- and what sandwiches they could rustle up in Stillman's Gym -- with his manager, Joe Gould. 'NORMAL' WORK When he could find ''normal'' work, it paid $4 a day, handling baling hooks on Jersey piers. Often he spent all day tramping Jersey and Manhattan searching, like hundreds of thousands of others, for jobs that weren't there. Braddock could fight. When his hands weren't busted. In his own way, which is to say dead broke, he was to the boxing of his era what Emmitt Smith would be to football of the 1990s. Slipping, ducking, countering fast, he almost never got hit big. He didn't get any big paydays, either. At least till Baer. Baer came across as the polar opposite of Braddock, one of the heaviest punchers ever, a swaggerer, an irrepressible seeker of women. He considered Braddock dirt. Baer put that opinion in play, literally, by engaging in what fight men consider unthinkable the day of a fight, let alone within a couple of hours. Sex. Baer turned his dressing room into a tryst while Braddock was taking the traditional nap across the way in the old Madison Square Garden Bowl in Queens. Why should Baer worry? He punched so hard he had killed one opponent. Meanwhile, Braddock wasn't even listed among Ring Magazine's top 19 heavyweights at the beginning of '35. It wasn't that Braddock was unnoticed. He was noticed for the one thing he didn't want to be. Shortly before he and Baer met, a story broke that he had gone on relief. He had had to move his family to a basement apartment because they couldn't afford the upstairs rent in their dingy dwelling house in North Bergen, N.J. Plenty of others did the same thing, millions of them. But it never got mentioned that Braddock tried to repay the county with a $300 advance on his title fight take, which was all of $30,000. That's a riot by today's standards, right? His payment was refused, with thanks. Altogether, it was anything but a great emotional atmosphere for a hard-luck guy to take on one of the hardest bangers in boxing history. It was booked for 15 rounds. Braddock crowded and pounded Baer from the first. The wonder was that Baer could even fight back so long. By the end of the 15th, no one had to wait for the decision. No TV told of it. Radio and newspaper extras from coast to coast spread the news. Talk about bulletins. And now, the book. Most sports volumes are barely literate efforts rushed to the presses after momentarily significant events. They are as irritatingly short on candor, except in the unique case of, say, Jose Canseco's scattershot volley, as baseball and football players are in public. That's one of the redeeming virtues of a sport, boxing, that is too short of virtues overall. Boxers say what they think, not what their agents program them to say. That's the Braddock who emerges from Cinderella Man. So just how relevant is Braddock's story? WHEN BOXING WAS BIG Well, only three sports really counted in the mid-'30s. They were boxing, baseball and college football, and boxing had one champion in every division instead of the alphabet soup drowning us today, when we notice at all. Can you name today's champ? Can you name even two of the top five? Braddock was not only king of heavies, he might have been the most popular man in America when he beat Baer. Author Schaap is a demon of a reporter for ESPN in his own right, as well as the son of the late, great Dick Schaap. But even Jeremy needed divine help in trying to bring events of 70 years before to close-up life. Somehow his research turned up a treasure in an original book on Braddock written by Lud Shabazian, Braddock's ''hometown reporter'' from The Hudson Dispatch in North Union, N.J. That book was discovered in, of all places, the papers of Fiorello La Guardia, New York's old mayor. It gave Schaap details otherwise buried with just about everyone involved. RICH IN DETAILS Schaap kept digging and digging on his own, far, far past that single work, for the touches that won't let you stop reading Cinderella Man. Small sample: In the ninth round, Baer hit Braddock low. The blow probably was intentional. Baer was boxing's poster boy for wasted talent, but he wasn't a dirty fighter. That didn't stop Joe Gould, Braddock's manager at ringside, from screaming, ``Fight clean, you animal!'' Picture Baer's reaction and treasure it. Trying to squeeze words through his bloody mouthpiece in front of 30,000 crazed customers, Baer turned to Gould and said, ``I am fighting clean.'' But he was fighting Cinderella Man, in perhaps sports' most raucous upset until the U.S. Olympic hockey team beat the Soviet Union in Lake Placid, N.Y., in '80. That's Schaap's story, and it's prime. |
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