By Thomas Hauser
SIXTEEN years in the past, an Iowa lawyer named Adam Pollack based Win By KO Publications. Pollack has labored as a coach, referee, and ring choose. But his biggest contribution to boxing lies in a sequence of biographies he has written about boxing’s early gloved heavyweight champions.
“Publishers wanted to edit my books down and wouldn’t use the photos I wanted to use,” Pollack remembers. “I wanted total control over my books and how what I wrote was published, so I decided to do it myself. Then other writers started coming to me, asking if I’d publish their books.”
Win by KO has revealed 25 books up to now; 11 by Pollack and 14 by different authors. All however one (a novel by VADA president Margaret Goodman) are non-fiction. Homicide Hank:The Life of Boxing Legend Henry Armstrong by Kenneth Bridgham is its newest providing. Armstrong is credited with a 1956 autobiography titled Gloves, Glory, and God. Other than that, Homicide Hank is the primary book-length work written a few man who’s universally acclaimed as one of the best fighters who ever lived.
Armstrong was one of 13 youngsters born right into a sharecropping household in rural Mississippi someday between 1909 and 1912. Named Henry Jackson Jnr at delivery, he later took the final identify of his coach and pal, Harry Armstrong.
Fighting professionally from 1931 by 1945, Armstrong amassed a hoop file of 147 wins, 21 losses, and 11 attracts with 98 knockouts and a pair of KOs by. At his peak, he held world championships concurrently in three weight courses at a time when boxing had eight weight divisions and just one champion in every division. His accomplishments have been virtually past comprehension. He was “pound-for-pound” earlier than the phrase was invented for Sugar Ray Robinson.
Armstrong fought 27 fights in 1937 and gained all of them, 26 by knockout. He captured the featherweight crown that yr by knocking out Petey Sarron. Then, over the subsequent 9 months, he added the welterweight championship with a lopsided resolution over Barney Ross and annexed the light-weight title with a victory over Lew Ambers. For good measure, he fought 12 title fights in 1939 and gained 11 of them. He went in robust many times and was near unbeatable in his prime.
He additionally grew to become a cautionary story. Most of the cash Armstrong earned that he didn’t spend on playing, automobiles, nightclubs, girls, consuming, and costly garments was stolen by folks he trusted. Even Joe Louis (a infamous spender) cautioned Henry, “Slow down. Nobody’s money goes as far as you stretch it.”
“He ought to be in some less wearing trade by now,” David Lardner wrote of Armstrong in 1944. ” But when he’s within the ring, he makes good cash. And when he’s anyplace else, he loses it.”
“I fought hard and I lived just as hard,” Armstrong later acknowledged. “I drank like a demon and I gambled. If I didn’t chase women, it’s because I didn’t have to. They chased me.”
Late in life, Armstrong discovered God and have become a preacher. Then dementia and different demons that too usually torment fighters set in. He died in 1988.
Bridgham offers a pleasant framework for Armstrong’s story. “One of the challenges of writing about a professional boxer from the 1930s and 1940s,” he notes, “is conveying the sport’s importance in American culture. Children in the 1930s could have told you the reigning heavyweight champion’s name before they could identify the president of the United States.”
Drawing a distinction between boxing and baseball (America’s different nationwide sport in that period), he writes, “For all its popularity, baseball was not integrated. It offered no example of Black men succeeding against white opposition.”
Other sociological insights relating to race are additionally on level.
“Jim Crow,” Bridgham states, “was more than just legal statutes and signs on water fountains reading ‘whites’ and ‘coloreds.’ It was more than just segregation of neighborhoods and schools. For the people who lived it, it was a code of daily behavior meant to reinforce Black people’s subjugation as second-class citizens in perpetuity . . . As far as the public was concerned, Henry Armstrong was a quiet smiling well-behaved Negro who could fight like hell, and they wanted nothing more from him.”
“Being a black celebrity during the Great Depression,” Bridgham continues, “was a tightrope walk. One had to be non-threatening, non-political, and reinforce white peoples’ beliefs about their own superiority, especially if one wanted to cross over to the more lucrative white audience. Black celebrities who crossed over to white approval and made good money were figures like Bojangles, Ethel Waters, Louis Armstrong, and Hattie McDaniel. All were talented individuals but their popularity largely rested on their willingness always to appear as though their only purpose for living was to entertain and that they never resented anything about their status as second-class citizens.”
Bridgham additionally attracts a pleasant distinction between Joe Louis’s two fights towards Max Schmeling.
Regarding Louis-Schmeling I (when the “invincible” Brown Bomber was knocked out within the twelfth spherical), he writes, “The immediacy and far-reaching signal of radio had made Louis a new kind of Black hero. And his defeat brought an equally new kind of widespread sorrow. Lena Horne, who had broken down and wept along with the rest of her band during the fight, put it more simply. To her and her people, Joe was now ‘just another Negro getting beaten by a white man.’”
Bridgham then strikes to Louis-Schmeling II (when Louis destroyed Schmeling in a single spherical) and recounts, “Black people already regarded Louis as the living refutation of the hatred spewed forth daily over radios, in newspapers, in movies, and in books about their lives. With this new victory, Louis had sent this refutation worldwide. An estimated five hundred thousand people erupted in Harlem’s streets in ecstacy and many stayed there till sunrise. New York’s police chief told his men to back off, saying, ‘This is their night. Let them be happy.’ It was, reported Porter Roberts in the Pittsburgh Courier, ‘the greatest show of Negro unity America has ever seen.’”
And there are attention-grabbing nuggets of data interspersed all through the e-book. For instance, in 1964, Barney Ross appeared at trial as a personality witness for Jacob Rubenstein (higher referred to as Jack Ruby), an previous pal who’d been charged with the homicide of Lee Harvey Oswald (John F. Kennedy’s murderer).
But Homicide Hank isn’t with out flaws. Bridgham writes that, early in his profession, Cassius Clay was managed and skilled by Archie Moore. No! Moore briefly skilled Clay however by no means managed him. Boxing historian Peter Heller is inadvertently referred to at one level as “Joseph Heller.” And writing of the Great Depression, Bridgham states, “On October 29 [1929], Americans opened their newspapers to find headlines declaring the most significant stock market crash in the history of Wall Street, a staggering fall of fifteen thousand points.”
That fifteen-thousand quantity is troubling. The Nineteen Twenties inventory market peaked at $381.17 on September 3, 1929. On October 28, 1929, it dropped 12.82% ($38.33) to shut at $260.64. The following day, it dropped one other 11.73% ($30.57) to shut at $260.64.
Errors like these can undermine confidence within the general accuracy of a manuscript. And there are locations the place Homicide Hank blurs the traces between truth and fiction.
The particulars of Armstrong’s youth are shrouded in uncertainty. Bridgham writes evocatively of Armstrong’s childhood. But as I learn, I had the nagging feeling that some of what I used to be studying was apocryphal fairly than correct.
Armstrong was a teller of tales. He gave totally different variations of occasions to totally different folks. Bridgham relied closely on the fighter’s autobiography. But as Adam Pollack mentioned not too long ago of fighter autobiographies, “For the fighters’ own personal feelings and certain insights into how they thought about things, those books are okay. But if you’re looking for accuracy, forget it. Most of the old autobiographies are self-serving and wildly inaccurate. And most of the time, these guys were talking years later off the top of their head. And they were hit in the head a lot.”
Further up to now; Bridgham writes that Armstrong would ceaselessly bear in mind his grandmother’s tales of life in slavery and of “once seeing the Great Emancipator, Abraham Lincoln, with her own eyes as an enslaved girl in Alabama.”
However, Lincoln was by no means in Alabama. Yes, Armstrong’s autobiography recounted his grandmother telling him that story. But shouldn’t Bridgham inform readers that it wasn’t true?
That mentioned; Homicide Hank provides readers take a look at a person who, in Bridgham’s phrases, “punched as though he were trying to rip open the air.” Grantland Rice likened Armstrong’s combating model to “wildcats using machine guns as well as claws.” And Damon Runyon wrote, “A man would have to have an axe in there with Henry to make it even up. And he would have to be an expert with it.”
Thomas Hauser’s electronic mail tackle is thomashauserwriter@gmail.com. His most up-to-date e-book – The Universal Sport: Two Years Inside Boxing – was revealed by the University of Arkansas Press. In 2004, the Boxing Writers Association of America honored Hauser with the Nat Fleischer Award for profession excellence in boxing journalism. In 2019, Hauser was chosen for boxing’s highest honor – induction into the International Boxing Hall of Fame.
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