A Room Full of Champions

Sometimes they’re too loud because they can’t hear well, and sometimes their stories are too long because they’re locked in the past, but those who meet and dine at Cauliflower Alley are good and gentle people.

Time was when they could punch their opponents silly with stiletto jabs and doomsday uppercuts that came from the bowels of the Earth itself. Today, they cuddle grandchildren with hugs as soft as clouds.

All are ex-boxers whose histories go back half a century. Some, like Clarence Henry and Joey Barnum, were contenders; others, like Cannonball Jimmy Green, were steady, workaday fighters who made their living in a world of spit and blood because that’s what they did best.

That is not to say they were bums. They fought champions like Joe Louis and Jack Dempsey, and put the fear of God into guys like Rocky Marciano.

Now they’re members of a group called the Golden State Boxing Assn., but everyone knows their gathering place as Cauliflower Alley, named after what too many punches to the head can do to a man’s ears.

They’ve been meeting for lunch once a week since 1969, these days at the Spaghetti Factory in Hollywood, like old soldiers from a distant war who are keeping a tradition of combat alive.

Seamon Glass, who knew a lot of them, told me about the Alley and said I ought to go there, because this is a part of L.A. no one knows about and something ought to be said to honor a lot of sweet, old champions.

I couldn’t imagine how a guy who had spent his life pounding an opponent into hash could be sweet, but I’m in the business of learning, so I went.

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I was a boxing fan myself once and used to sit ringside in Richmond to watch a lot of semipros hammer each other into oblivion as the crowd roared its wild approval. Afterward, if they were violent enough, we threw coins into the ring, like citizens of ancient Rome celebrating savagery.

Then one night one of the boxers was flattened about two feet in front of me and had to be carried out on a stretcher. I had his blood all over the front of my shirt. His skin was a gray color. Death is gray.

The guy didn’t die, but I heard he’d become a mental cripple from brain damage and spent his days walking around town slurring and drooling like a baby. Some reward for a few lousy coins.

I swore off boxing after that and still can’t watch it without remembering the comatose fighter who lay on his back staring at the gray in his head.

Many of those who gather at Cauliflower Alley are African Americans, and talk about times when white boxers refused to fight them. They had to come in the back door of the arenas even when they were contenders.

Clarence Henry, who is 68 and limps slightly from the effects of a stroke, was twice supposed to fight for the heavyweight title, but both times was denied the opportunity.

He shrugs and says it was just the breaks, but you get the feeling color had a lot to do with it. Henry is black and, after the long reign of Joe Louis, boxing was looking for a Great White Hope. It still is.

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They had a good time at Cauliflower Alley. Dave Maier at 87 was the oldest one there, but he’s still got a grip like a wood clamp and a stomach as flat and hard as milled lumber.

He was a Golden Gloves champ in 1928 and showered me with clippings of the days they packed the auditoriums of New York and Chicago to see him fight. Boxing reporters said he had dynamite in his gloves and hooted Jack Dempsey for refusing to meet him in the ring.

Easily the flashiest in the Alley was Joey Barnum, now a bail bondsman, who glowed like neon in a watermelon-pink blazer. He wore dark glasses, a shirt opened to his belly button and a tiny, solid-gold boxing glove on a chain around his neck with a diamond in the middle.

Barnum isn’t happy with boxing these days and talks sadly about Jimmy Garcia, the fighter killed in the ring two months ago.

“In the old days,” he says, “friends would call and ask me to get them a seat at the fights. Now I tell them they can have mine.”

The years have been good to most of the 15 or so who gathered at Cauliflower Alley. There were gray heads and paunchy stomachs among them, but no buffoons or droolers who couldn’t tie their own shoes.

Rather, they were courtly, graceful gentlemen, the combative edge polished by time to a patina of serenity. They’ve come to the age when they realize the auditorium is dark and it’s time to live in a mellowed house.

We could learn from these old champions on Cauliflower Alley.