Bonecrusher--Why Is He Called That?

There was a cartoon in an old issue of The New Yorker that showed a group of pugilistic types sitting around a table at a title fight, and one of the managers was leaning toward the promoter and saying: “My boy says he don’t sign till he finds out precisely why they call him the Bushwick Assassin.”

If I were Iron Mike Tyson today, that vagrant thought might just cross my mind, too. The old hustler’s advice: “Never play cards with a guy named Slick, never eat at a place called Mom’s and never fight a guy named Rocky,” should apply equally to fighting a guy named Bonecrusher.

You hear that name and you conjure up an image of a shaven-headed monster who spends his off-hours biting the heads off live chickens or stomping canaries, the kind of guy who would be the lookout for the gang hideout, a sadist whose vocabulary consisted of grunts and growls and, “You want I should pinch his head off now, Boss?”

You picture this brutish guy who would shake your hand and the next sound you hear would be like twigs snapping, a guy who could open beer cans at a twist or hold people by their legs out of hotel windows.

And then you meet James Odell Smith and you think there’s been a terrible mistake. Either that, or they call this man Bonecrusher for the same reasons they call a bald man Curly or an old grouch Smiley or a thief Honest John.

First of all, he smiles a lot. Guys nicknamed Bonecrusher should go through life at a scowl. They should have the outlook of a guy in charge of a chain gang.

Then, James Odell has a sense of humor. He likes to tell people he comes from a town so small that the ZIP code is a fraction and so far off the beaten track that the area code is unlisted.

He’s so erudite, you’re surprised he doesn’t wear glasses. A lorgnette, even. He has a twinkle in his eye. He carries a briefcase, for crying out loud. You figure he’s either going to sell you a bottle of snake oil or a lame horse. He talks in complete sentences.

They used to call people like this in the fight game Perfessor, or Deacon, maybe Doc. Bonecrusher is a name for a nose guard on the Raiders, a character in a James Bond movie, not this egghead. Bonecrushers don’t graduate from college. This one did. Bonecrushers spend four years at college without ever seeing anything but the inside of a locker room.

Boxing is also this kind of a sport: Some years ago, another cartoon appeared in The New Yorker showing a frightened-out-of-his-wits pug looking across the ring at something that appeared to be a cross between a Neanderthal man and an orangutan, and the manager is saying, “My boy says he don’t fight till he hears it talk.”

Odell Smith can talk. He might not sound like the second act of “King Lear,” but there are verbs in all the sentences, the meaning is clear. Ronald Colman couldn’t get his point across any clearer.

Smith can also punch. The nickname wasn’t pinned on him by the overheated imagination of a fight game publicist. This Bonecrusher’s nickname came courtesy of the U.S. Army. When he was in Germany with the Third Division a decade ago, he used to box in the camp shows and when he landed his right hands there was the sound of a guy chopping wood. “The Germans called me Bonecrusher,” he explains.

A guy named Bonecrusher should revel in the reputation. James doesn’t, particularly. He sees himself more in a board room than a ring. Prizefighting was almost an afterthought to him.

The name doesn’t embarrass him, though. It’s just show biz, he shrugs. “It’s my name in the ring. It sells tickets. It’s worth something. My friends call me Crusher sometimes, or just James.”

Prizefighters often seem to come up through prison nowadays and Bonecrusher was no exception. Except that he was a guard in one, not an inmate. He also taught math and civics there when he was not locking cells.

Gene Tunney was almost the last heavyweight champion with intellectual pretensions. Tunney always loftily reminded his hearers that he read Shakespeare for recreation and that he was a close friend of George Bernard Shaw, who didn’t have many.

Although Tunney never went to college, he ended up as chairman of the board or member of the board of some of America’s most distinguished companies.

Tunney was also smart enough to stay down when he saw that Dempsey wasn’t going to the furthest neutral corner.

A lot of people think Bonecrusher may need all his intellectual pursuits on Saturday night. He may even need a long count. His erudition may not help him. You can’t learn to fight Mike Tyson out of a book. No number of academic degrees can compensate for a left hook to the head. Is a ferocious pseudonym enough to hold off an Iron Mike? Is it a case of sticks and stones break bones but nicknames never hurt you? Does Mike Tyson even have bones in the ordinary sense? Is J.O. Smith the kind of gladiator who would be better off with the nickname Bubbles, or just plain Smitty? Does having a good head for figures help if someone is teeing off on it with left hooks?

Or will it be Tyson the referee is picking up from the canvas Saturday night and will he be saying as they lead him to his corner, “I shouldn’t have fought him till I found out precisely why they called him Bonecrusher.”?