Login to your Account

Do not have an account yet? Create one

I lost my password. Please email it to me

Looking for something specific?

Type the athlete, team, or year you are looking for...

Blog

The Improbable Graziano – Rocky Graziano

graciano1 water1 The Improbable Graziano   Rocky GrazianoJanuary 1956
The Improbable Graziano
By: Rex Lardner

JOE LOUIS, the fightingest heavyweight champion, hated only two fighters Jersey Joe Walcott and Max Schmeling. Jim Corbett, the conqueror of John L. Sullivan, had cool disdain for anyone presumptuous enough to step into a ring or onto a barge with him. Rocky Marciano shows a kind of impersonal detachment toward the opponents he assaults, pursues and buffets; he is a good natured, if altogether destructive, robot.

On the other hand, Rocky Graziano, the actor, author, comedian, exmiddleweight champion, night club singer, television panelist and man about town, hated every opponent he ever fought. Just before the fight and during the fight, he hated them with an all consuming, fiery hatred. Chewing his nails, throwing quick, practice rights, and reading comics didn’t take the edge off his anger. Essentially, when untroubled, a generous and gentle, if profane, young man, Rocky admits he didn’t care how he won, so long as he won. He rabbit punched, he hit out of clinches, he hit fighters on the way down and as they tried to get to their feet, he clambered over the referee to get at groggy opponents and he hit after the bell. In all his years of boxing he stuck to a single pattern; he charged across the ring, threw his arm back, lunged forward and swung. Unless he was paralyzed by a body blow, like those delivered by Tony Zale and, surprisingly, Chuck Davey, he never paused and he never moved back. He was constitutionally unable to block punches, just as he was unable to learn to jab or feint or throw. a short punch. His trainers found that instructing him in technique was the most dangerous thing they could do.
Fists, it had been impressed upon him from the age of about five, were for punching.
It was as though his hair trigger temper and sustained rages were beneficial instincts for survival. It was as though they were things he felt he owed his fans. Certainly the fans appreciated Rocky’s efforts to please; he was one of the biggest middleweight attractions the world has ever seen and, for at least two years of his career, he made more money than any other man in the ring. And even today, when the Rock is introduced from a ring, his ovation is three times as hearty as that accorded Jack Dempsey. He is the people’s choice. Boxing fans, it has been demonstrated, take a primitive slugger to their hearts more than they do someone who dazzles his opponent with footwork and after Rocky’s knockout of the fast, hard punching Billy Arnold, Damon Runyon called him the new Stanley Ketchel, Ketchel being, of course, the very symbol of a vicious, destructive puncher. Hearing about it, Rocky said, “Ketchel? Get me that salami. I’ll knock the bum out.”
Stocky, confident, heavy muscled, with powerful legs and lungs, a powerful back and tough hands, Rocky had, on his best nights, the ability to concentrate utterly on cutting his opponent down, a concentration shaped by his blind, animal fury. The salami in the other corner was venturing to challenge Rocky’s superiority in Rocky’s chosen field. (If he wasn’t a fighter, what was he?) Fighters are prideful specialists and it is probable no one was more prideful, when he was active, than Rocky. Fighters walk in a bouyant, rolling way, gracefully acknowledge the familiarities of strangers, cheerfully submit to the cajolery of bums and modestly tolerate the flattery of hanger on. With them, pride is a devouring thing that spurs ambition and allows them to go along on the assumption that the head is not a housing for the brain and a few useful sense organs, but a target; that the scraping off of scar tissue around the eye is not a painful process; that hands are best used as rapiers and clubs; that blows on the throat do not affect the voice, that blows to the body do not affect the kidneys, and that blows to the head do not affect the reflexes. Graziano’s pride, it turned out, took as many blows as his chin. At various times in his career he was called yellow, crooked, and a doublecrosser. For some reason, no person in public life is as much exposed to violent public reactions as a prizefighter. Cries of “What’s with the bribe, Rocky?” and “How come you run out on Apostoli, Rocky?” pursued him during the bad days wherever he went. They stung deep. Rocky was proud of his craftsmanship. It brought him money and the noisy accolades of his friends and it seemed to remove him, little by little, from a bitter and unpleasant past. The more opponents he defeated, the further away his beginnings seemed. That was the way he wanted it. He spent, after all, six of his first 20 years in reform schools, was deaf for two years as a result of an ‘automobile accident, had an embarrassing relationship with the U. S. Army and never got beyond the fifth grade in grammar school. He once said, “When I got out of the Army, it was either fight or steal so I turned into a fighter.”
Rocky wasn’t kidding about that stealing bit. From clipping nickels and dimes out of the milk money box on the teacher’s desk in school and prying pennies out of the chewing .gum machines in the subway, Rocky, when he was a tough kid running with the East Side gangs, progressed to heisting more important loot such as bicycles, cameras, watches and expensive toys. In his remarkable book, Somebody Up There Likes Me, which he wrote with Rowland Barber last year and has since sold to the movies, he looked back on those days with a candor that was downright hairraising. “At Christmastime,” he said, “with so much merchandise laying loose all over the place, a guy lost money going to school. There wasn’t even time for the usual _ thingssneaking into movies, shooting pool, shooting craps, playing poker, rolling drunks in the subway, stealing trucks for rides, things like that.” Naturally, this kind of boyish fun was frowned upon by the authorities. Rocky was always in trouble. He can still remember the words of the detective who turned him over to his grandmother after an allnight session on the hard wooden benches of Children’s Court: “Well, there goes another little guinea on his way. Good looking kid. But I can tell his kind. Look in his eyes, you see the devil himself. Ten years from now, the Death House at Sing Sing.”
The cop was wrong, but not far wrong. That was the path Rocky was walking on, all right in fact, he wasn’t walking on it, he was running along it as hard as he could run. He became an expert on reform schools and he knew what the inside of the Tombs looked like, too. (Later on, after his trouble with the Army, he became acquainted with Leavenworth.) When he was only 16, he and one of his pals spent a terrible night in the station house refusing to confess a series of robberies even though a couple of cops beat them methodically and mercilessly with lengths of rubber hose and baseball bats. Rocky can be bitterly funny about it now. “Suddenly they stopped the workout,” he said. “It was time for the shift to change, and the cops wanted to wash our blood off them before they went home to dinner.”
Some of the budding young hoodlum’s adventures were less gory and more honestly funny. Like the time a bunch from “the clique” borrowed some shovels and made a midnight attempt to dig up the body of Peter Stuyvesant because they had heard he had been buried with a silver peg leg, a gold watch and a diamond ring. But there was nothing funny about being in jail, Rocky discovered not even when your cellmates include such distinguished felons as Jimmy Dines, the famous politician; Robert Irwin, the sculptor who murdered the beautiful model, Veronica Gedeon; and Dixie Davis, the notorious gangster mouthpiece. But it took Rocky a long time to, as he puts it, wise up. If he hadn’t got into the Metropolitan AAU Boxing Championships and won the New York City welterweight title (he sold the gold medal for “a lousy six dollars”), and thus began the slow switch from stealing to fighting, Rocky surely would have spent most of his life behind bars and it probably would have been a short life. But he did, finally, see the light. Not so much, at first, that he was eager to stay on the straight and narrow. It was just that he caught on that there was more money, and easier money, to be made fighting than trying to buck the law. Later on, as he began to be exposed to what he calls “legitimate” people, he realized how crazy he’had been. He understood, finally, that when your deliberately do something wrong, you’ve got to pay for it. If not oneway, then another.

“When I say the law don’t punish you,” he has said, “that’s what I mean. You got to punish yourself. That’s the only way you’ll ever go right and make it stick. Until it comes to you, like it come to me one day, that the law ain’t your enemy, but you yourself are your enemy, until then you’re nothing but a cheap, no good bum.”

That’s a man talking, a man who has been here and has been there and has found out a few things about himself as well as about the rest of the world. Rocky wasn’t very old in years when he started boxing professionally under Irving Cohen’s management while he was more or less in the army, but he was old in experience. And nothing that had happened to him had been able to stamp out the drive, the blind fury, the pure and simple guts of the man. He was never a rookie fighter. Awkward, yes, clumsy and wild. But as soon as the bell rang, he was ready to fight. That was something that had been born in him. He understood that he was in there to beat the other guy, and he wasn’t particular about how he did it.
Rocky’s most effective maneuver as a civilian fighter one he was not taught by his trainer, Whitey Bimstein was holding his opponent’s throat with his extended left hand used for leverage on the opponent’s windpipe. Despite his superb reflexes, he was crude; it helped his marksmanship when his opponent’s head was anchored. So Rocky anchored it the best way he knew how. Rocky had to take four or five punches to land one, and was glad to do it. He had enough confidence in his own punch to consider it a bargain. His pride insisted that he gamble, taking a hard shot in order to pinpoint an opening for his heavy right hand. He was fortunate in that it was just as heavy, when he trained hard, in the late rounds as it was in the early ones. Few ring records are as studded with late round KO’s as Rocky’s.
Until he forsook boxing for television Rocky was a dependable protagonist in the sport’s most popular type of drama the old faithful wherein the slugger is’outpointed, stung, eluded, hit off balance, tricked, pecked at, chopped up and frustrated by the clever boxer until such a time as he can catch up with his will o’ the wisp enemy and land solidly. In 84 fights, some of which were against opponents several pounds lighter than he was (proper casting called for it), Rocky managed to catch up most of the time and land the equalizer. He lost only ten fights. Once he landed the right hard and solid, his opponent was shaken to his heels and his senses were dulled. Rocky was generally as effective a finisher as Dempsey. He would press in, his head forward, raining roundhouse rights to the jaw, to the jaw, to the jaw, and an occasional left hook to the head or body, lunging, stalking, firing punches without let up. Finally his opponent would cave in. It is said that Graziano caused more fighters to retire from their profession than any other fighter before or since. , Marty Servo, the former welterweight champion, became a barkeeper after his bout with, Graziano. After the first Zale fight, which Zale won by a knockout in six rounds, it was Zale who went to the hospital. It was Zale and his manager who vetoed a fourth fight with Graziano even though Zale had won the third more easily than he had the first. Graziano, who, it developed, had no memory of fighting the second and third rounds of the fight and had a concussion as a result of Zale’s punches, wanted Zale again. Zale refused. No more than onethird the fighter he had been, he soon lost the title to Marcel Cerdan.

“When the Rock hits them,” his placid, blue eyed, white haired manager, Irving Cohen, used to say, “it stays with them. He’s liable to hit you on the arm and break it. He throws rocks, that boy.”

RockysBoys1 The Improbable Graziano   Rocky GrazianoRocky’s single minded approach to his work was such that Cohen had to pay his sparring partners higher wages’ because Rocky was constitutionally unable to take it easy with them during training. He had a compulsion to belt them out. It was such that when he was knocked out by Ray Robinson, considered to be the greatest fighter of his generation, he told Cohen gloomily, “Let’s wrap it up. If I can’t beat Robinson, I better quit.” It was such that, under suspension for not reporting a bribe offer in New York, he refused to let his seconds stop the second fight with Zale, who was tearing his face to ribbons during the first five rounds of their title bout in Chicago. In that one, Rocky came back to his corner virtually in tears from frustration. He couldn’t hit Zale because he couldn’t see him. His left eye had an inch long gash under it which Bimstein had covered with carpenter’s wax a substance so dangerous to the eyes if it gets in them that it is used only in championship bouts. The wax had coagulated with the blood and, while Zale couldn’t open the cut any deeper, the eye was useless to Rocky. The right eye, from repeated Zale jabs, was swollen to the point where Rocky could hardly see through it, either. Bimstein and Frank Percoco worked desperately over him between rounds. Percoco applied primitive surgery. He pressed a quarter against the swollen part of the eye and broke open the wound, allowing the blood to spurt out. He patched it up before the buzzer sounded and Rocky lurched forward to battle again. By turning his head to the left and peering out of the corner of his right eye, Rocky could see a lithe, dancing Zale within range of his lunges. Rocky took a dozen punches to the cheek, the body and the eyes, and scored a few of his own. Some of them landed sharply. Zale, affected by the heat, arm weary from the effort of throwing hundreds of punches at Rocky’s exposed head, and slowed down by Rocky’s roundhouse rights, grew steadily less elusive. The temperature was 113 degrees at ringside. Zale had his championship to buoy him up; Rocky was in disgrace in New York, anyway and for him the only way out, no matter what it cost, was to knock out Zale. Zale, several years older than Rocky, felt the heat more. He found himself pinned against the ropes, unable to punch his way out or to escape to either side. Nearly blind, Rocky swung and swung. He hit Zale a hundred times and Zale would not go down. Rocky was a great finisher of hurt fighters, but Zale would not be finished. Rocky threw two right hands under Zale’s heart probably the hardest two punches he ever threw. Zale would not go down. Then Rocky was being pushed away by the sweating referee. A white blur was between him and his victim. The fight was over. Rocky couldn’t see well and his mind was cloudy. Why had the referee stopped it? Because he had kept hitting Zale while Zale was on the ropes? Then the light dawned. It was a technical knockout. He had won. It was vindication. The referee had Saved Zale from further punishment. Rocky was champion.
A horde of people crowded into the ring, a robe was flung over him, photographers’ bulbs exploded. Rocky’s hand was raised, he was kissed by people he didn’t recognize, he was dragged from corner to corner and allowed to make the conventional inquiry about the defeated fighter’s health. His, victory was affirmed by the ring announcer and a microphone was shoved in front of his face. Above the tumult, above the happy cries of the bettors who had taken the short end, an exultant Rocky shouted to the world, “Hello, Ma! The bad boy done it!”
In the steamy dressing room, pushing through the crowd, a reporter shoved his head down next to Rocky’s and asked, “How does it feel to be the middleweight champion of the world?”
Rocky had a bewildered look about him. He was happy, but you could see he hadn’t grasped the immensity of it. He hadn’t begun to fully savor what this victory meant to him, a fighter who was suspended in his homy state for failing to report a bribe offer he had refused for a fight that never came off. But he was thinking about it. “I don’t know,” he said haltingly. “I mean . . . I mean as a kid I . . . I mean I was no good …. I mean nobody ever thought . . . I mean . . . You know what I mean?”
There were others yelling at him, trying to get stories for their papers. There was one answer they got out of him that summed up Rocky’s whole creed as a fighter.
“How did you feel in there when you had him in the corner?” one writer called out to him.
Rocky turned to face his questioner. “I wanted to kill him,” he said, and he was very serious. “I got nothing against him, he’s a nice guy. But I wanted to kill him.”
Rocky received a hero’s welcome in New York. Cops on motorcycles and the Mayor’s personal representative escorted him to his apartment on Second Avenue. He had made $70,000 for a night’s work, the general feeling around town was that the New York commission officials were willing to concede they had been too harsh in suspending him, and everyone agreed that the beating Zale had given him in their first fight was canceled out. Through a gantlet of congratulations, Rocky beat his way into his home. His daughter Audrey, then four, was in the living room. She didn’t recognize her father. His ear was swollen and bandaged, there was a huge, red lump on his forehead, one eye was swollen and the other was lined with stitches. It hurt Rocky to talk, to walk and even to eat. Audrey asked her father what had happened to him. She knew only vaguely, if at all, that Rocky was a fighter, and he and her mother had kept her from looking at his fights on television. “I fell down in the gutter, honey,” he told her.
He spent the night soaking in a warm bath full of Epsom Salts. He was the middleweight champion of the world and he had the scars to prove it.
Rocky Graziano, the 33 year old television performer and comic personality, has no visible scars. One presumes that the mental ones he developed as an ex Dead End kid, an ex convict and an ex street fighter are now submerged in his spectacular success. A surgeon removed the hardened tissue from over his eyes, and the wounds of his face and body, even after later beatings by Zale, Robinson and Davey, have healed. He is a regular on the Martha Raye show. He is the highest paid panelist on a summertime charades program. He appears as a guest on shows like Name That Tune, Down You Go, Who Said That? and What’s My Line? He sings, he says, like Jimmy Durante, and he stops night club audiences cold with “If I Knew You Were Coming, I’d've Baked a Cake.” He poses in boxing trunks with the presidents of television networks and in ballet tights with, ballerinas for publicity purposes. He is toying with the idea of starring in his own television show and his aforementioned autobiography, Somebody Up There Likes Me, is a gold mine. Rocky now smokes an occasional pipe, gets a haircut more often than he needs it, shaves daily, helps his daughters (the younger, Roxie, is now seven) with their homework, drives a ’54 Cadillac which does not have his name emblazoned on the sides, and goes over his television scripts with his wife, Norma, in their apartment in Long Beach, Long Island.
“What I love best today,” Rocky says, “is just walking down the streets of New York. I can walk down Broadway or First Avenue.or even Fifth Avenue, and this is my town. My name is Rocky Graziano, I had it changed legally from Rocco Barbella, which it was when I was in the can and in the Army, and what’s yours? I got a right to ask anybody that, even a cop. Who’s a cop to me but some poor guy trying to make a living in a uniform. I’m legitimate, and I’m doing all right, and it’s a free country and I’m glad I’m living in it.”
I paid a visit to the ballroom of the Henry Hudson Hotel in midtown New York one afternoon recently, to see Rocky at a rehearsal for the Martha Raye show. The Henry Hudson, where the New York Giants and visiting French military bandsmen put up, was thick with theatrical atmosphere. Men in tweed coats, cotton polo shirts and scarves, wearing caps and dark glasses, hurried about, showing scripts to one another. A man in a white suit talked over the lessons to be learned from reading Proust with a lady in tight bicycle pants. Men and women with bulky scripts under their arms or brief cases in their hands strolled about the lobby with a purposeful air. The atmosphere was full of Broadway Hollywood talk: “Be my guest.” “When does the integrated commercial go on?” “The typical is prototypical.” “I have news for you.” The ballroom, a few yards away, was brightly lit, had a long conference table in the center with a pitcher of water and some glasses on it, a prop coat rack nearby, two prop beds at each end, a line of chairs in one corner, and a couple of pianos near the beds. Another lady in bicycle pants was reading from a script and practicing exaggerated facial expressions. A foreign looking man in a white waiter’s jacket moved across the floor. An exceptionally large lady in a large black skirt and a white blouse poured herself a glass of water. A man in a checkered coat examined the strips of tape that formed right angles andacute angles on the floor, apparently as directional aids for the actors. Martha Raye, dressed in dungarees and a camel’s hair overcoat, came in, followed by a half dozen distinguished looking men. Then Rocky Graziano, dressed in a dark blue lumber jacket, neatly pressed gray slacks, a checked shirt, black shoes and gray socks, walked in. He was followed by a group of large men casually attired. “Hey, cousin!” the largest of the group called. Rocky turned and smiled in a preoccupied way. A man near Martha Raye, who could cackle like a parrot, cackled like a parrot. Rocky waved a hand at the group. “We just come down to see how you was doing, Rocky,” the large man said. “Nice to see you,” Rocky said. “We thought we would drop by to see how it was going with you,” the largest man said. “Yeah, how’s things, Rocky?” somebody behind him asked. “Pretty good,” Rocky said.
Guys from the old neighborhood, the old gang, from the fight mob, or even guys from what Rocky would describe uninhibitedly as “one of the cans I was in,” stop by fairly often just to see how things are going with him. It’s interesting, and revealing, to see that to all these faces out of the past, Rocky the television star is the same old Rocky. They may kid him a little, goodnaturedly, about making love to Martha Raye “What’s Norma gonna say when you get home?” they’ll want to know but their kidding is strictly friendly, between friends. His old pals don’t resent Rocky’s success, his famous “legitimate” friends, his handsome clothes, his bank account, his improved speech, his confidence as he walks among the great. They know how he got there, and they know he never sold out a living soul in order to get there. Which is more than can be said for a lot of the “legitimate” guys.
A dark haired man in his shirtsleeves called to Rocky that he wanted him to do the picture frame bit. Rocky waved his hand in a friendly way to his visitors and said, “I’ll see you later, huh?” Then he walked over toward Martha Raye, kissed her on the cheek, and sauntered, rolling his shoulders, in the direction of one of the beds. He seemed suddenly expansive, as though he had emerged from an alien element into one he was familiar with. He retended to throw a left hook at 1he man in shirtsleeves, who playfully dodged it. “Okay,” the man said. “Everybody quiet!”
Rocky shouted in great good humor, “I’m emotin’!” His face took on a world weary look, and with presence and gestures, he said, “O, wouldst that it couldst have been thee instead of me!” He looked as though he were going to cry. When the scene was over, a lady in a red skirt, holding a script in one hand and a stopwatch in the other, asked him to do it over again for timing. Rocky obliged, looking just as world weary as before. Then he lit a cigarette and sat down with a newspaper. The man in the white shirt asked him to say; “I love her better than life itself,” a couple of times, which he did without a trace of self consciousness. The man in the shirt appeared pleased. Rocky stuck the lighted cigarette behind his ear and popped a piece of chewing gum in his mouth. The man in shirtsleeves moved off to talk to Miss Raye and I walked over to Rocky. Nat Hiken, who used to direct the Martha Raye show and who was the discoverer of Rocky as an acting talent, had told me that Rocky was a thorough study, if not a quick one, that he used to look at his feet when he delivered his lines, aid that, like most non pros, he. didn’t talk loudly enough until constant urging trained him to do what the professionals call “project.” Graziano, who thought “free expression” was being allowed #o use dirty words and that Stanislavsky was a Russian wrestler, had apparently come a long way. He had made a most difficult jump from the world of toughs, hoods, spinachand lambchops and violence to the world of makeup (for men yet!), theatrical artistry, milking an audience, and memorizing lines; from a world where almost any demonstration of feeling except wrath and cynicism is frowned on to one in which he must play on his emotions like a musician on his instrument. Hiken thought Rocky was a successful actor because, as a boxer, he had learned how to move and because, no matter what he was called to do, the unmistakable Graziano personality showed through.
I asked Rocky if he felt nervous before a show.
“Nervous?” he said. “Never. I’m playing Rocky. I’m doing what comes natural. Before the show, the actors come up to me and fake punches and tell me, `Don’t be nervous, Rocky.’ It ain’t like you was going out against Zale hooking you to the body. But if somebody had told me eight years ago I was going to make a living acting, I would have said `You must be crazy.’ It was the least thing from my mind. After Robinson stopped me, I thought I was through fighting. But Irving said, `Well, let’s take one more money shot and wrap it up.’ So he signed me with Davey and I figured, this guy is a little small welterweight and I’ll wrap him up. I wasn’t too ambitious for the fight, except for the money, and I couldn’t hit him good he was left handed so I lost the decision. Then I was ready to quit, although it hurt me. It was my trade, you know what I mean? So then Hiken saw me on the Nick Kenny Show and says he’ll give me $1,500 to appear on the Martha Raye show. I figured I’d just be taking a bow, which I done,plenty, and for $1,500 that’s a pleasure. So I see him in his office and he tells me I’m to say lines, not take a bow. I told him I don’t know how to say lines, I hardly know how to read and write. But he has me say, `I think I’m gonna go out and eat,’ the natural way I say it and he says that’s great. He says Cagney and Edward G. Robinson ‘ and all them guys aren’t actors, they just talk the way they talk in real life and they’re a big hit. He tried 20 actors for this part, he says, and I’m the only one who done it correct. So I went on the show with Cesar Romero and Martha Raye and Rise Stevens, and it worked out all right. For this, NBC gives me a two year contract. If I blew a line on the show I would kill myself, and the actors know it.

“I tell you one thing. If I’m ever killed by punches, it’ll be by an actor. I was never hit so much in the ring as I am by these actors. They rupture my back with knocks. Even the girl actors. I guess they think it makes me feel at home. It was the least thing in my mind, being an actor, but I done better at it than I done at anything. I like it.”

Rocky took his cigarette down from behind his ear and puffed on it. I asked him what he did for exercise these days. “I don’t do nothing but play a little golf and run up and down the stairs at NBC,” he said. “I used to see these guys play golf when I was doing roadwork out of town on a golf course. I used to say to myself, `this must be some game if these guys get up at six in the morning and play golf.’ So I didn’t have no lessons or anything, but I took it up with some friends and I got so I could shoot 85. At NBC I run up and down the stairs, visiting all the different big shots. They ask me in their offices and I tell them stories about the fight game, how Joe Jacobs, Schmeling’s manager, used to go around with BB shot in his mouth and peck anybody’s head he got the chance at in Stillman’s Gym. They didn’t know if they were being stung by hornets or what. Or how we .used to get a guy’s name and announce he was wanted in the phone booth, so when he was in there we would bar it shut from the outside. Nobody is on the phone, of course, and when he tries to get out, he sees he can’t. So he’s inside there, hollering and yelling and pounding like a crazy man, and nobody pays him any attention. Finally one guy goes over and listens to him, real polite he’s shouting and making motions with his hands and then the guy makes out he can’t understand him and goes away. I never clipped off a guy’s necktie with scissors or give out laxatives or _ anything like that, like some fighters do, but I played some jokes. I know Frank Sinatra pretty good, and one time a kid I know who didn’t know whether he should be a boxer or a singer asked me how Sinatra got his voice. So I told him Sinatra goes to a hotel room and takes off his tie and opens a bureau drawer and sings with his head inside it for all he’s got. Then he opens up the window and sings out of it as loud as he can. Then he sticks his head inside the drawer again and sings. So the kid goes and does this, with me and a friend looking on, and the manager comes up and throws us all out of thehotel. The kid finally became pretty fair boxer.
“I used to be a real wild kid,” Rocky went on, squinting a little, “but I got over it. I wouldn’t listen to nobody. I wouldn’t manage a fighter because if any fighter done to me what I done to my managers, it would drive me crazy. The only thing that didn’t change about niesince I got to be an actor is where I get my clothes. I got 20 suits, all mohair, like the rabbis wear, and I get them from Newman Brothers, on the East Side, only now they’re tailor made. Bright, with slash pockets. When I go in there, a bunch of guys come out with tape measures ”
“Hey, goombar!” Martha Raye yelled at him in .tones that echoed and re echoed throughout the ballroom. Rocky mashed out his cigarette. “Excuse me,” he said. “I got to go rehearse.”
On those rare occasions when Rocky had money, he used to buy long wearing suits, with vertical pockets, from the Newman Brothers at five dollars down and five a week. In those days he and his two brothers and two sisters (five out of the ten children were all of the family that survived) used to eat doughnuts for breakfast in their tenement kitchen and Rocky was called “Muscles.” Rocky was hardy, or he wouldn’t have reached adolescence. He was run over by automobiles four times, he fell down arr elevator shaft, and once, when he was being chased by two cops for turning on a hydrant, he ran spang through a plate glass window in a Chinese laundry shop. Instead of taking him to jail, the police took him to the hospital, where he was. __ sewed up with 56 stitches.
Rocky wasn’t the smartest kid in his gang, but, despite these inconveniences, he was the toughest, and when affairs of honor had to be settled man to man, it was Rocky who was singled out as the gang’s representative. He generally won his fights by knockouts even against ex professional or active professional fighters. A good many members of his gang later became prizefighters; a couple were sent to the electric chair. He was Thomas Rocco Barbella then, and he showed early that he had a devastating sock and that he wouldn’t step backward or quit. It was part of the street code just as it was part of the code, later, to keep quiet about a mysterious bribe offer even though his silence cost him his New York State boxer’s license for some 26 months.
Rocky at six was recognized officially as the toughest six year old in the park district, at ten he picked Tony Canzoneri for his special idol, at 15 (having run away from a halfdozen schools) he was beating up the other boys in his yard in reform school, and at 18 he won the Metropolitan A.A.U. welterweight championship. Despite the fame and money that professional fighting seemed to offer, Rocky didn’t especially want to become a serious prize fighter. He didn’t like the discipline of training any more than he liked the discipline of school or, later, the Army. He didn’t want his face messed up, either. His father had been a boxer known as “Fighting Joe Bob” and hadn’t been famous or rich. His uncle enjoyed the same situation. Rocky has memories of them and their friends sitting around the gloomy tenement, swapping boisterous stories about the boxing business over buckets of beer. His father, who got occasional work as a longshoreman, kept boxing gloves around the house and encouraged Rocky and his brothers to fight one another something they didn’t see much profit in, since they felt most of their energies ought to be devoted to bringing in money or raiding pushcarts for groceries.
As he grew older, Rocky forsook the street games of ring o levio and stickball for gang fights in parks. He spent more time on street corners and less time in school. He felt his poverty more. Since it was more profitable to fight for gold watches than for free in an alley, he joined clubs and won watches, which he sold at the going rate. He was scouted, naturally enough, by sharpeyed managers, and finally, getting sick of the diet of doughnuts and seeing no other way to raise his standard of living, he listened to the blandishments of some of them and signed a few contracts. But the rigmarole of training disgusted him and he and his early managers went their separate ways, the latter hoping he would get stiffened when he stepped into the ring with a competent fighter. Rocky finally wound up with Irving Cohen, who had the sense to give him a long leash. Cohen changed Rocky’s name from Barbells to Graziano (his grandfather’s name) and lined up a fight. Refusing to train much, Graziano nevertheless showed a gang war, killer instinct and won by a knockout. Other fights were lined up with Cohen trying, in his subtle way, to overmatch Rocky, get him defeated, and thereby show Rocky the value of getting into condition. It was impossible to overmatch him. Rocky kept knocking them over. He even demanded a fight with Sugar Ray Robinson which, fortunately, he didn’t get for a good many years.
He had money in his pockets and he set them up for his friends their number was growing by the hundreds in every bar on the East Side. He wallowed in noisy celebrity. He was moving up in the world, at least in the only world he had ever known.
But a fighter’s mouthpiece takes funny bounces. The outside world, which he knew practically nothing about, moved in on Rocky. The Germans marched into Poland and the Japanese finally got around to attacking Pearl Harbor. Like many of his contemporaries, Rocky was drafted to push them back. He was ~sent to Fort Dix, where he was told to pick up cigarette butts. Rocky didn’t take to it. A boxer spits when he wants to spit, his friends constantly tell him how he can beat up people, and he sometimes attracts as many customers as the Yankees and the Dodgers draw for a World Series game. It was beneath his dignity. He was sent to see the cap tain. The captain called him a wise guy from New York. Yardbird Barbells, after the fashion of his youth and environment, invited him to step outside. The captain made a move, and Rocky, not knowing the captain’s plan was to call the M.P.s, slammed a right hand to his jaw and knocked him out. For once, the old standby was the wrong solution to the problem. You are not supposed to hit your commanding officer in the jaw. If it had been known that Barbells had fought as a pro (professional boxers’ fists are considered by law to be deadly weapons), Rocky might still be serving time in Leavenworth. Somehow he escaped a general court martial and was put back at picking up cigarette butts. He went AWOL. Returning to New York,,he managed to persuade Cohen that he had been given his discharge, and for four months he won fights as Rocky Graziano. Then the M.P.s dropped by and he was shipped to Fort Jay, tried, and sent to Leavenworth.
“I felt lower and lousier every mile the train went west,” Rocky says in his book: “I was leaving the world. I would never see the East Side again. I might as well be dead. Creep town after creep town we went through. They got miles of these here woods and fields between all the creep towns, like it was the reform school farm stretched out for a thousand miles, which God forbid should ever happen. I knew there must have been some place between New Jersey and Kansas, where my grandfather once worked. But if you had told me there was so much of it and it took three days to get across it, I would have called you a liar . . . I sat hour after hour with my face stuck to the window. I looked out, yet I didn’t look out. I seen so much of this sad, lonely country I don’t want to see no more. I didn’t want to believe that people really lived in such a place, this place with no end to it, and with no river, no movies or pool rooms or caddy stores or hock shops or pushcarts.”
Rocky spent ten months in Leavenworth, and, for a jail, it wasn’t so bad. He became the star of the prison boxing team and a pet of the colonel who commanded the post. He also had time to think, and what he was thinking was that he didn’t have a hell of a lot to be proud of. Sure, they treated him like a big shot around the prison, but what kind of a big deal is that, being a big shot in the can? Rocky felt even worse when his mother wrote him that his kid brother, Lennie, had been drafted and was overseas with the 69th Infantry Division. Not Lennie, Rocky thought. He’s a nice, polite kid. He might get hurt. They ought to send me over to take his place. He even tried to get them to, but they wouldn’t. They wanted him where he was, in the can. It made him think some more. It made him realize there was another way to live and maybe he ought to try it.
After ten months, they let him out and gave him a dishonorable discharge. Back in New York, he
avoided people except for a pretty young brunette, Norma Unger, whom he married. They set up housekeeping with Rocky’s mother. Rocky just hung around. ,
One of Rocky’s routines when he is a guest member of a television panel goes like this:
M.C.: Tell me, Rocky, what was your toughest fight?
Rocky: Getting my mother out of the house.
But life is different from television scripts. It was Rocky’s mother who felt that Rocky should get out of the house or contribute some rent money. So he looked up Cohen. He submitted to the drudgery of training after Harold Green twice demonstrated that his wild swings could be avoided and he demanded that Cohen line him up a match with the flashy Billy Arnold. Full of misgivings, Cohen did. After taking a terrible beating in the second round, Graziano knocked Arnold out in the third. Afterward, as was often the case with Rocky’s foes, Arnold was not much good. “From a four hundred dollar fighter,” Graziano says of the Arnold fight, “I became a fifty thousand dollar fighter. I could buy some, new sweaters, a convertible and some suits with color to them. I done it with my fists.” He also bought a house for his own growing family. It wasn’t anything fancy, but it was a nice, solid, two family brick place. on Ocean Parkway in Brooklyn, with a hedge out front and a garden in the back. It was a big day for Rocky when he walked in with Norma and stood there while the moving men carried in their furniture and their other possessions. “It was my own house,” Rocky says. “If I wanted, I could lock the door and tell the whole rest of the world to beat it. If I wanted, I could have a ball every single night and take my shirt off and start a crap game and nobody could stop me. Most important, this place belonged to Mr. Graziano, and you better call him Sir on account of he’s a husband and a father and it ain’t every jerk who can own a house in Brooklyn.”
Few people in public life have had so many damaging blows thrown at their solar plexus when they are riding high or have been given so many whiffs of restoring oxygen when they are hanging on the ropes as Rocky has. After working his way up to champion, he was sent into a tailspin when somebody in Washington made news of his Army troubles. Already barred in New York because of the “bribe” scandal, he was now barred in most NBA states and when, his head full of melancholy thoughts, he skipped out on a fight with Fred Apostoli in California, he was barred in most of the rest, as well as in all the foreign countries where a boxer could make a real buck. The sportswriters protested that it was unfair to hold his past against him, but he was out in the cold until Commissioner Eddie Eagan, acceding to the demands of loyal Graziano fans, and a sizable segment of the press, restored his license to fight in New York. He knocked out Charlie Fusari in ten rounds. He went to the sticks and piled up a list of unimpressive kayos, including one that was remarkable in that it was a blow to the forearm rather than to the jaw that won it for a badly outpointed Rocky. When he returned, Cohen got him a fight with Sugar Ray Robinson in Chicago. The super patriots had finally taken the heat off him everywhere. “I thought he would be over the hill,” Rocky says of Robinson. But it was Rocky who .vas over the hill.
Rocky was down again and then suddenly he was up. His face, which had been mirroring his emotions for the past 30 years, was in demand on television screens all over the country. People liked to see a tough talking, square jawed ex fighter playing the part of a tough talking, square jawed exfighter.
Rocky, having finished rehearsing a bit of comic business with Martha Raye, bounced back, tearing open a stick of gum and offering it around. He was friendly with everybody, dodging and throwing playful punches, as much at home as if he were in Stillman’s Gym. Charles Laughton in a T shirt. Why not? John L. Sullivan used to chop wood onstage; Canzoneri and Rosenbloom and the Baer brothers made the jump successfully. So instead of hitting them with your right, you hit them with your personality. Obviously, Rocky has taken it in stride.
“What was your toughest fight?” I asked him when he had a minute.
“Getting my mother out of the house,” he said. You could see how naturally the lines came to him.
“This acting racket,” he said, “I’m nuts about it. The good food washing around in my belly. The actors calling me Mr. Graziano. I’m a member of a team – you know what I mean? I’m doing something” he made some abrupt gestures with his hand-“creative.”

That’s how far Rocky Graziano has come.

No Comments yet

Be the first to write a comment

Leave a Comment

You must be logged in to post a comment.

Share this Post with a Friend

Stay Informed