Former Prizefighter Gives Heroes a Fighting Chance

Every year about this time, on his birthday, I have lunch with Jimmy McLarnin, the old prizefight champion.

The years have been kind to Jimmy. He’s 82, but he hears no bells ringing, sees no flocks going overhead, doesn’t spar with telephone poles. He still has the same disingenuous unmarked face with the wide stare that led the sporting press to label him “Baby Face” all those years ago. He’s probably within 10 pounds of his fighting weight. He didn’t have a whole bunch of chorus girl marriages. He was married to the same lovely woman for 50 years until her recent death.

You look at Jimmy and you see an old pug although the only thing that gives him away are the permanently broken knuckles that make his fists look like pieces of dough.

But, I look at Jimmy and suddenly I’m 50 years younger. I’m a kid again and it’s the 1930s and I’m glued to the old Atwater Kent radio with the red loudspeaker and I’m listening to great events--like the McLarnin-Al Singer fight, McLarnin and Sid Terris, McLarnin and Young Jack Thompson. The glory years. I don’t see the aging old man with the broken knuckles, I see the swift, trim young Irishman with the devastating right hand under the hot lights of the Garden ring and it’s 1935 or ’36. A better time.

You see, McLarnin was my favorite fighter when I was a kid growing up. When he won, I won. When he lost, I lost. I was inconsolable.

It was important in our old neighborhood to have a favorite fighter. It was important to have a favorite anything, cowboy star (Ken Maynard), movie star (Cagney, naturally), ballplayer (Jimmie Foxx).

It was a part of growing up. It is really a feeling that belongs to youth alone. I was the welterweight champion of the world for a few heady years. Barney Ross finally took it away from me but it took three fights. Me and Jimmy were tough. He and I fought through some tough times. Billy Petroile beat us once but he could never do it again in two more tries. Louis (Kid) Kaplan was our toughest fight. We managed to knock him out in the eighth round but we hit the floor, too, and we fought on instinct for seven of those eight rounds. Kaplan was tough. So were we.

I look at Jimmy and I wonder why it is that the heroes of our youth remain forever mythic in our hearts while the heroes of our middle-age are discarded at will?

You know, I am positive if Babe Ruth were to come back to life, I would freeze at the controls of my computer keyboard. I am sure I would call him “Mr. Ruth.” I would never be able to ask him the penetrating questions sometimes demanded of today’s seeker of truth and knowledge. I would be awed by the man.

I’m not awed by Mickey Mantle. I’m not awed by Henry Aaron and he hit more home runs than Ruth.

I can manage to keep my voice from squeaking when I talk to Carl Yastrzemski. I can have lunch with Willie Mays without choking on the salad.

I got to know Jack Dempsey, thanks to the author Gene Fowler (he was my favorite author, by the way). I called him “Jack” but it kind of stuck in my throat. I never had that trouble with Ali. Or Rocky Marciano, or either of the Sugar Rays.

It was funny, I remember I interviewed Jess Willard, an embittered broken-down old champ and I was totally uncomfortable even as he spelled out the details of how he felt he had been traduced in the Dempsey fight in 1919. It’s probably because it happened before I was born and therefore somehow unreal. I felt somewhat like an historian working on the Revolutionary War when suddenly George Washington walks in.

Do you get the feeling politicians were in some way--oh, bigger men in the old days? It seems to me Senator Borah was a larger than life. We don’t have senators, governors like that any more. I mean, Alan Cranston isn’t exactly Hiram Johnson, now, is he?

Presidents were as remote as Martians. You didn’t see them on television every night of the year. If they came to your city, it was to pass by in a motorcade and you stood in a parade route 10 deep just to catch a glimpse of them as they went by. You never thought of them as mortal. Franklin Roosevelt belonged with Lincoln and Washington--hell, with King Arthur. If someone told us he was crippled we would have knocked him down.

I suppose, as you confront your own mortality, it’s only natural to confront a “hero’s.” A pity. It’s hard to have heroes when you have jobs, mortgages, debts, family, health to worry about. You can’t put heroes in there. It’s too crowded.

But I can look at Jimmy McLarnin and bring back a time and a place when it was possible to have heroes. And, even if it’s just for a lunch, I’m back at that place again. And it feels good.

You know something? Jimmy McLarnin is still my favorite fighter.

Just for the record: In a recent column when I alluded to Nuremberg as an example of a place where people were oppressed and abused, I didn’t--God forbid!--mean the defendants there. I was referring to the Nuremberg that was the cradle of Nazism, the site of the obscene Nuremberg laws and the place for Hitler’s horror rallies and the place where his terrorist Brownshirts first practiced the art of kicking, killing and torturing their fellow human beings, so infamous it’s the reason the war crime trials were put there in the first place. Nuremberg was a symbol for terror long before it became a symbol for retribution.