Speed Kings (21 page)

Eddie was utterly out of his element at Yale. His gauche, garrulous manner was at odds with the “stiffness and restraint” of his fellow students. He couldn't afford a suit and spent the first semester of his freshman year wearing his old army uniform. People assumed he wanted to show off the badge on his shoulder, but he was just too proud to admit how poor he was. He took a job as a physical instructor at the local YMCA, where he lived in a skinny little room. Struggling to adjust, Eddie got on with what he knew how to do—studying and boxing.

In April 1919 he decided to compete at the National Amateur Championship. He was too self-effacing to say he was representing Yale, so he entered himself as a member of the Denver Athletic Club. He scraped together his rail fare and traveled alone, without seconds or support, to Boston. Eddie had put himself in for two categories, light heavyweight and heavyweight. That meant he had seven four-round fights in the space of two days. He had grown into quite a fighter now, with a style all his own. He was clever and cunning, using his quick feet to maneuver around the ring. He loved to attack, and was always pressing forward. He looked to fight inside the reach of his opponents, who were invariably bigger than he was. And when he was on the back foot, though he would never admit it, he knew a few dirty tricks that he had picked up back when he was roughhousing around Colorado. There were at least a couple of occasions when, in a clinch, he wrestled his opponent out of the ring. He did that in his light heavyweight semifinal, against a man named Al Roche, and the crowd booed him because of it. “No more of that rough stuff,” the referee warned him, “or I'll disqualify you.” He didn't need to do that: Eddie lost the fight, on points. Even the
Denver Post
said that he was “decisively beaten,” though Eddie, bullishly confident in his own abilities, said he knew in his heart that he had won.

Eddie needed to tell himself that, whether it was true or not, because the heavyweight final was scheduled to take place that same night. Only a few hours later he was back in the ring, squaring up against Jim Tully, a policeman from
New York who knew a couple of tricks of his own. Tully's seconds had tried to bring the final forward so that Eddie wouldn't have any time to recover from his first fight. He saw through that. Then at the start of the fight Tully told the referee, “If you see I'm killing him, stop it, I don't want to hurt the lad.” Eddie didn't fret. He could smell whiskey on Tully's breath, taken for Dutch courage. He knew then that he had the measure of the man. He stepped in close, inside the range of Tully's long arms, and pummeled his stomach. In the clinch, Eddie whispered, “I must win, I must win, you hear, you big Harp? I will win.” And he did, on points. When Eddie returned to Yale, his eyes were swollen almost shut, both his brow and lips were cut, and his nose was broken. But he had a gold medal in his pocket. He was the amateur champion of the United States. Word soon spread. Eddie, still a freshman, became a hero around the campus.

The victory won Eddie an invitation to try out for the US team at the 1919 Inter-Allied Games in Paris. He traveled to Europe that spring, after taking a temporary job in the sports and recreation department of the American Expeditionary Force. His first fight came as a surprise. He was attending a Franco-American boxing night at the Palais de Glace and had only just finished his meal—he'd had a bellyful of sole, shrimp, and oysters—when he was asked if he would step in to an empty slot on the card and fight a French middleweight. He won, just, but decided that he'd best start taking his training a little more seriously. After that he spent most of his time running the roads in the Latin Quarter, where “every window framed a girl's head.” They would call out to him as he passed: “
Chéri! Où allez-vous? Restez ici
.”

“A sock on the nose or soft caresses?” Eddie wrote. “It was, at times, hard to elect the socks.”

One of his teammates was a sly “will-o'-the-wisp” named Gene Tunney, who would go on to make his name by defeating Jack Dempsey to become the champion of the world in 1926. Tunney was certain to be picked to represent the United States in the heavyweight division, which left Eddie competing with Al Norton for a slot in the next category down, the light heavyweights. Norton was a pro. He had fought Dempsey three times himself, and he'd had little more luck at it than Eddie in his exhibition. US coach Spike Webb arranged for the two of them to face off for the spot.

Norton got the edge over Eddie right from the get-go. Eddie, amateur that he was, began the fight by stretching out his arm so the two men could touch gloves. Which they did, briefly, before Norton, the gnarled old pro, clobbered him with a left hook that knocked him down for a seven count. The blow had
caught Eddie unawares and left him so concussed that he suffered from amnesia for three days after the fight. When he fully came to, he was told that he had fought on, furiously, for ten rounds, and that the fight had been called a draw. But seeing as Eddie finished it unable to remember his own name, let alone what day of the week it was, the team had entered Norton for the Games. Eddie was offered the middleweight slot instead, as long as he could sweat off nine pounds. He did it, just. He had more of a struggle making the weight than he did winning his first fight, against an Italian named Negri: it took Eddie thirty-two seconds to knock him out. The Belgian Eddie fought in the second round fared only a little better. The two knockouts made such an impression that Eddie's two remaining opponents withdrew, “cowed into submission,” as the
New York Times
put it, “merely by his demonstration in the preliminary bouts.” Eddie became the Inter-Allied champion by a walkover.

Sweet as the win was, Eddie was even more pleased with two other rewards that came his way. The King of Montenegro, Nicholas I, was so taken with Eddie's pugilistic prowess that he gave him a medal and made him a member of the Order of Prince Danilo I. “The Montenegro coach says that you fellows that got medals are Counts of Montenegro,” Spike Webb told Eddie afterward. “See to it that you ain't ever Count Ten.” Better yet, Eddie managed to wangle a press ticket to see the signing of the Treaty of Versailles. He took his place at the back of the Hall of Mirrors, but got so fed up with looking over the backs of so many heads that he pushed his way toward the front. He watched history unfold from thirty feet away. Not that he was all that impressed with what he saw. He expected the great statesmen David Lloyd George, Woodrow Wilson, and Georges Clemenceau to seem “splendid and godlike” and was disappointed to find them, as he wrote later, “acting like a lot of Oxford boys at a coming of age party,” each seeking the autograph of the other.

Eddie wasn't long back at Yale. He lost his national title in the spring of 1920, beaten on points by a heavyweight named Karl Wicks. There was a similar result in the light heavyweight final, when he took on Jack Burke. The
New York Times
reckoned that Eddie fought “with the bulldog spirit for which Yale is noted,” that he had “backed his man into all four corners of the ring” and had Burke “virtually defeated” when he was caught by a lucky punch. He weathered out what was left of the fight, but lost on points. Burke, Eddie said, had a right uppercut that hit like “a rock catapulted up from the floor.” He once used it to knock down Jack Dempsey in a sparring session. He lost in the final of the heavyweight category, too, on points again.

Eddie had changed in the space of the past twelve months. This time around he was a proud Yalie. He'd traveled to the tournament with his fast friend Sam Pryor, a wealthy young man who would go on to become the vice president of Pan Am. They spent the morning before the Burke fight studying John Singer Sargent's murals at the Boston Public Library. Eddie actually thought the defeats did him good: “They brought me back to my main purpose at Yale.” He knuckled down and passed his Easter exams with honors. The only fighting he did was during Yale's mock political convention ahead of the 1920 election, when he was chosen to serve as the sergeant at arms. “He is expected,” the
Times
reported, “to insure peace and quiet.” That, Eddie gleefully recounted, is exactly what he did. The convention was crashed by a group of socialist delegates calling for “free love, free beer, and no work,” and Eddie, together with the varsity football team, enjoyed a “good rough-house.” By the time it was over, “the intruders were repressed and order was restored.” He did such a good job that he was hired to serve in a similar role at the real Republican convention in Chicago that May.

By July 1920 Eddie was back in the ring. He traveled down to New York to take part in the qualifying bouts for the 1920 Olympics, to be held in Antwerp, Belgium, that August. He hoped to avenge the two defeats he had suffered in Boston, but Burke had since turned pro, which meant he wasn't eligible for Olympic competition. Eddie remained resolutely amateur, though there were plenty of times when he was tempted. He was offered a guarantee of $1,500 to fight Mike O'Dowd for the middleweight championship of the world, a “sum that loomed as large as the Allied Indemnity bill.” But accepting it would have compromised his education and committed him to a career as a prizefighter. He turned it down, mindful of what both Tobin and Dempsey had told him in the past, but he spent the rest of his life wondering whether it had been the right thing to do. If Eddie couldn't fight for money, he would fight for glory. And the most prestigious prize available to him was the Olympic title, so that was what he set his heart on. He won all four of his qualifying fights and took his place on the US team in the light heavyweight category.

The team traveled out on the
Princess Matoika
, a rusty old tub that had served as a troop carrier. The trip was a farce, and the ship became infamous when a group of athletes mutinied in protest at the poor conditions on board. The men were packed into the sweltering hold, where plenty were struck down with seasickness. As for training, the runners had to practice on a sixty-yard-long cork track on deck, the javelin throwers were forced to tether their spears
to the side of the ship and toss them out into the sea, and the swimmers made do with a leaky canvas tank full of saltwater. Eddie didn't much mind. As a boxer, all he needed was a little patch of deck to exercise on and a space to spar in. Besides, he had endured worse in his time. “Star athletes can put prima donnas to shame when it comes to demonstrating displeasure.”

To win the Olympic title, Eddie needed to beat three men. The first of them was a South African, Tom Holdstock. The fight was nip-and-tuck until the last round, when Eddie knocked Holdstock down with a left hook. Next came an Englishman, Harry Franks. He was clever and quick, but, as Eddie's coach Spike Webb put it, “he couldn't punch his way through a spider's web.” Eddie had planned to rush him, but found himself like a bull charging at a matador's red rag. Every time he closed in, Franks would sidestep and shoot out his jab. At the end of the first round, Eddie was well behind on points.

“Show him you can dance the tango too,” Webb told him.

And Eddie did. He switched his stance, putting his right foot and fist out in front instead of his left. It was a neat trick, and it foxed Franks. While he was blinking in confusion, Eddie caught him with an uppercut. By the third and final round, Eddie had the Englishman's measure. He won on points. “If you'd only made up your mind which way you were going to stand,” Franks told him after the fight was over, “I'd have done much better.”

They say there is a difference between a brawler and a boxer. One relies on aggression and instinct, the other on art and technique. Eddie was both. His childhood in Colorado had left him with rough edges, but he had learned his craft. He had beaten Holdstock with brute force, and then he had outwitted Franks.

Eddie spent the day before the final in the Royal Museum of Fine Arts, looking at the paintings by Rubens. That night he slept in a feather bed for the first time, in a room he had rented so he could be away from the noise and bustle of the team camp. His opponent was a Norwegian, Sverre Sørsdal, a giant redhead, “tireless and game,” with a body that looked like it had been cut from marble. Eddie was cagey. He held himself back in the first two rounds, standing off and allowing Sørsdal to come at him. Each time Sørsdal closed in, Eddie would block and parry the blows he delivered and then pick him off. In the third, Eddie switched up a gear. “I cut loose with every remaining ounce of energy in my body. I tore into him.” If Sørsdal was still landing blows, Eddie couldn't feel them. When the bell sounded, the two men embraced each other. It had been a great fight. And Eddie had won it. He was the Olympic champion.

Modern Olympians often talk of the slump they experience after the Games are over. They expend so much time, energy, and effort in the four years running up to that one event that afterward they are left feeling spent, wondering what to do next. Eddie's life was too full, too rich, for him to waste time worrying about that, but he did decide to step away from the ring for a while and see what else life had to offer during his senior year at Yale. He decided to try out for the varsity football team and played a few games as a tight end. He won good reviews, too, from both his teammates, who reckoned him one of the “most popular members of the squad,” and the
New York Times
, which reported that he “played a wonderful game” against a scrub team and that “with the rapid strides he is making, in another season he should be a star.” That didn't happen. Frank Merriwell may have been able to excel at everything he turned his hand to, but Eddie found football a stretch. He did, however, win a coveted “Y,” as captain of the boxing team, and he was elected class secretary and class orator. He had come a long way in the three years since he'd arrived in New Haven, penniless, intimidated, and unsure of whether he was worthy of a place there.