Speed Kings (23 page)

In Australia, on the other hand, a suitable opponent was waiting in Sydney. News had made its way from England about Eddie's deeds against Jack Dempsey. The story had grown in the telling, and by the time he arrived, he was
known as the man who had knocked Dempsey down “15 times in the first two rounds” during their fight in Brighton. Eddie, it has to be said, didn't do anything to disabuse anyone of the idea that he had battered the greatest boxer in the world. His opponent was J. D. Brancourt, who had won the amateur heavyweight championship of Australia in both 1922 and 1923. Brancourt was six foot eleven and weighed 250 pounds, which made him a foot taller and seventy pounds heavier than Eddie, who prepared for the fight by nailing a padded board to the wall of his gym seven feet off the floor. He threw “two or three hundred” left hooks at it each day, until he had a “little knot of muscle in the back of [his] left shoulder blade as hard as steel.”

In the ring, wrote the correspondent of the
Sydney Sporting Sun
, “it looked like an encounter between an alarm clock and the Post Office tower.” An attendant had to come out with a stepladder and tie up the strings hanging from the overhead clock because they were brushing against Brancourt's head. Brancourt stood, almost immobile, in the center of the ring. Eddie threw a feint with his left, and suckered Brancourt into slipping out a straight left of his own. That was as much of an opening as Eddie needed. He slipped in and socked him on the jaw with that hook of his. Brancourt collapsed to the canvas. He got back to his feet, utterly stunned, and Eddie sold him the same trick all over again.
Thump
. “Mr. Brancourt,” as the
Sun
put it, “reclined gently on one ear with a look of ineffable peace.” They had to shove him out for the second round. One more blow, and he was done, “down to sleep with an air of determination.” Jack Munro, the man who had organized the fight, later remembered, “They say in boxing that a good big man will always beat a good little man, but boxing axioms are very like the rules of grammar—there are always exceptions.” Brancourt's father collared Eddie after the fight and told him that he felt the victory was “unfair.” No one had ever had the temerity to hit his boy in the face before. Eddie reckoned the big lump had been entirely overawed by the stories he had heard about all those knockdowns Eddie had scored against Jack Dempsey.

His next stop was Saigon, then Hong Kong. Eddie beat the local champions he fought in both cities. He took particular satisfaction from the win in Saigon, since his opponent was Amadou Diop, a gangster who had been extorting protection money from the local shopkeepers. And as Eddie said, “If a good fight also presented the prospects of teaching a bully a lesson, that was an added incentive.” He beat Diop so badly that he announced his retirement from boxing in the next day's papers.

From there it was on to Manila, Shanghai, Peking, and Tokyo, then across
the ocean to Buenos Aires and up through South and Central America. By the time Eddie and the boys docked in Los Angeles in the summer of 1927, they had been traveling for nearly two years. “I had done what most young men would like to do—explored the world, sailed the seas, and had adventures in all lands.”

Eddie's mother didn't care about any of that. She hadn't seen him in five years, and she was just happy to see him back safe and sound, even if his cheeks were puffier, his ears thicker, his nose a little more bulbous and broken in the middle. He had changed, and so had the world he came back to. Denver itself seemed to him so small now. The boys he had once taught on the west side were now all working the railroads, like their fathers before them. His Yale classmates had started their careers. And his friend Gene Tunney was the heavyweight champion of the world, having taken the title from Dempsey. Eddie found that especially hard to swallow. He still thought of Tunney as the little kid he had known back in 1919. Now he was readying himself to defend his title in a fight that would earn him a million dollars.

The money was too much. Eddie found himself wrestling with that old dilemma again, wondering whether he should become a professional boxer. This time it was Tunney who talked him out of it. “It's not worth it, Eddie,” he said. He told him how long and hard the road to the top would be. “If you were broke with no other talent I'd not only advise you to turn pro, I'd help you get matches. But you're ready to tackle law.” Instead, Tunney made him an offer: he asked him to be his sparring partner for the upcoming fight and suggested that when it was all over, the two of them should take another trip around the world together.

The pair headed up to New York together, but Tunney found that he had no privacy there, no rest. So they moved again, up to the small town of Speculator, across the Adirondacks from Lake Placid. There the two of them settled into a routine. They would run in the morning, eight to ten miles, and spar in the afternoons. At lunch and after supper, Eddie would study his law books and revise for his bar exams. At least that's what Eddie says he was doing.

On September 22, Eddie had a ringside seat at Tunney's victory in the rematch with Dempsey, one of the most hyped fights in history. Behind him at Chicago's Soldier Field stretched row after row of spectators, 145,000 in all, so many, said Hearst papers journalist Westbrook Pegler, “that you couldn't see them on the last rows, you could only sense that they were there from the combers of sound that came booming down the slope of the stadium out of the darkness.” The
New York Times
reported that the city's bookmakers had taken three
million in bets. The wise ones had backed Tunney, who won it on points. But the fight was remembered for the long count he was given in the seventh, after Dempsey had knocked him down. The referee, Dave Barry, didn't start the count to ten until Dempsey had retreated to a neutral corner, as was specified in the rules of the fight. The referee's count was on eight when Tunney got to his feet, but he had been down for fourteen seconds in all. By standing over Tunney as he lay on the canvas, Dempsey had allowed his opponent a few extra seconds to recover. Eddie felt Jack had penalized himself. He swore that he saw Tunney smile to himself as he lay on the floor. Asked to split his two pals afterward, Eddie diplomatically suggested, “Jack is the greatest fighter and Gene the greatest boxer in ring history.”

If Eddie stayed out of the ensuing controversy, it was because he had other things on his mind. On his way back from Chicago, he called in at Cleveland, where he met up with Peggy Colgate, whom he had been courting that summer. The two of them drove up to the Adirondacks together and were married in Saranac Lake on October 1. Peggy's family had a house there, Camp Beachwood. Her brothers Gilbert and Robert had been on the Yale boxing team with Eddie, and her father, Sydney, was the grandson of Samuel Colgate. He and his brothers still ran the family cosmetics company. The papers said that the couple had eloped, but that wasn't quite right. They had simply kept it quiet. News only broke a fortnight later, when they were holed up in a Fifth Avenue apartment in New York.

After that, life did begin to settle down. Eddie and Gene never did take that world tour they had planned. Instead, Eddie passed the bar exams and began his career as a lawyer. He still did a little sparring, when work allowed. His first daughter, Caroline, was born in March 1931. By then, Eddie was beginning to feel a little like he was gathering cobwebs. At the age of thirty-three he was starting to itch for another adventure and was considering the idea of making a return to the ring to try to win another title in the following summer's Olympics when the phone rang.

Eddie told Peggy he would be out for dinner that night, catching up with an old friend from around and about, Jay O'Brien.

“That night,” Peggy remembered, “Eddie came rushing home and said, ‘Guess what? I'm on the US bobsled team!' I thought that was pretty strange, because he had never been on a bobsled before.”

Hank Homburger and his Red Devils, Lake Placid, 1931.

THE NEW US TEAM

T
he snows came late to Lake Placid that winter. There was a single heavy fall at the beginning of the season, which was reckoned by many to be a good omen. It wasn't. November turned to December, Christmas and the New Year came and went, and all the while the few citizens of the small town grew ever more anxious. The land was colored in bleached-out browns and greens—wet mud, dank grass, and bony trees, their brittle branches shorn of leaves. Above, blue skies and bright sun. The few clouds that did come carried rain. No one could remember a winter quite like it. The New York State weather bureau said that it was the warmest they'd recorded in the 147 years they had been taking measurements.

The athletes began to arrive. They traveled from New York by train up the Hudson Valley. The river was open water all the way up to Albany. The Norwegian team was the first to get to Lake Placid, followed closely by the Japanese. The locals were happy to see them. The Depression had grown so severe that a lot of countries had been having second thoughts about coming. Great Britain was sending only four athletes, all figure skaters; Argentina wasn't sending anyone at all. Godfrey Dewey had dispatched a special envoy from his organizing committee on a six-month tour of Europe to whip up enthusiasm overseas. Even so, some of the national Olympic committees had even suggested postponing the Olympics until the economy had begun to recover. In the autumn of 1931, using the contacts he'd made through the club, Dewey persuaded the North Atlantic
Steamship Line to grant a 20 percent reduction on round-trip tickets and the New York Central Railroad to cut the cost of a return trip from Manhattan to Lake Placid to fifteen dollars. Even Congress got involved: a resolution was passed exempting foreign athletes and officials from the usual visa requirements, waiving an eight-dollar tax, and granting free entry to baggage and equipment. They were extraordinary measures. But then, there was an extraordinary amount at stake. The townspeople were in for around $1.5 million, all told. “The tiny village has gambled in an effort to establish itself as the winter sports capital of America,” wrote Edward J. Neil of the Associated Press. “Every merchant, every citizen, has in one way or another contributed to the total.”

That January of 1932, the town itself was ready. The streets, Dewey wrote, “were a riot of color,” decorated with flags, colored lights, and sprigs of evergreen. “It was in gala attire. The flags of nations flew everywhere. Great hotels and clubs, cottages and private homes, and business hotels were brave with bunting. There was a tenseness in the air as of something impending.” The one thing they didn't have was cold weather. The organizing committee actually started to bring in wagonloads of snow from across the Adirondacks so they could spread it around the ski trails.

Billy Fiske arrived in New York on January 6. He paid for his own ticket across from England on the SS
Europa
. For Dewey and the residents of Lake Placid, so busy getting ready, the four years since St. Moritz had flown by. But that's a long time in the life of a young man. Billy had been a boy when he won the gold in St. Moritz. He was only twenty now, but he had changed. He had graduated from Cambridge University the previous summer, with a degree in history and economics from Trinity College. And he was full of himself, thought he knew best, as only a young man can. His time abroad had given him a different perspective on America. He admired the “bulldog” spirit of the British, and thought the French were “children” because “when they get on top they like to gloat over it.” It was, Billy had decided, “part of their character, just as self-sufficiency is part of an English character.” He hated New York, thought it was “without doubt the most expensive place in the world” and “full of the damnedest snobs, not for anything but money . . . the sort of people one ought to see I can't stand.” The curious thing is that everyone who knew Billy, however slightly, agreed that he “never had a bad word to say about anybody.” It's a phrase that occurs over and again in descriptions of him. And it's wrong. He had plenty of bad words for plenty of people—he was just too polite to share them. He confined his thoughts to his diary. He was, in some ways, a diffident man.
“Bashfulness,” he wrote, “gives rise to self-sufficiency in an intelligent person and boredom in a stupid one.”

When it came to politics, Billy was convinced that America needed to have more influence in Europe, and that Europeans “treated her like a weak child with lots of toys to be taken away from her.” He had a peculiar notion that the United States should “develop Spain as a buffer state in Europe,” something he felt “could be done in 12 years or so by clever capitalisation.” He would often talk stocks and shares with his father, who hoped that his son would come to work with him at Dillon, Read & Co. But Billy had other ideas. Three years of study left him hungry for adventure.

Not that it had all been early mornings, exams, and lectures. He'd spent a lot of time whizzing about the country lanes in that Bentley of his. Students were meant to be in bed by midnight. Anyone out later than that, as Billy often was, had to sneak around the college constables, the “bulldogs,” as the students still call them. The trouble was, one luxury that Billy's Bentley didn't exactly allow him was inconspicuousness. There was one bulldog in particular who used to wait in the little village of Melbourn, at a tiny bottleneck on the road to London, to ambush anyone returning to the city after hours. And he knew there was only one man in town driving a supercharged Bentley. After he had been caught once too often, Billy hatched a plan. He popped along to the pub, where, he had been told, the bulldog could usually be found on his free afternoons. He bought him a couple of “dog's noses”—a cocktail of gin and beer so potent it made Billy's nose wrinkle—and after some polite small talk mentioned, in passing, the subject both men knew to be the only one that had prompted this casual meeting in the bar. They soon came to a happy arrangement. Whenever Billy was out late in his car from then on, the next day he would stop by that same bar for a round of “dog's noses,” bringing with him a couple of gramophone records as a gift for his new friend. After that, he wasn't busted again.

Allowed to come and go as he pleased, Billy spent what free days he had at Royal Worlington golf course in Mildenhall. He was a good golfer, with a handicap down around four, but golfing didn't come as naturally to him as racing did. The tempo was wrong. The thing with Billy, his friend Henry Longhurst reckoned, was that “having driven us there in his monster at an average speed of something like 65 mph for 20 minutes, he could never understand why he found it so difficult to hole out from five feet.” He had too much adrenaline in his veins. He toyed with the idea of entering the British Amateur Championship but never felt his game was quite good enough. At other times, he was out on the horse-
racing circuit. He loved to gamble and reckoned himself “an excellent judge of horse rump.” In the evenings, as often as not, he was in London. “Bill was a superb dancer,” said his sister, Peggy. During his holidays he would travel over to France to stay with his family, and the two siblings “would spend hours whirling around the dance floors of Paris nightclubs, doing the Charleston and all the other dances to the sounds of big bands and small combos.”

Peggy was now married, to Jennison Heaton, but Billy was still single. And while he still didn't much care for drink or tobacco—“everything in moderation,” Billy wrote in his diary; “balance is the essence of good living”—he was, as his friend Harry Hays Morgan put it, “quite the ladies' man.” Which was, in itself, quite the understatement. The only rule he had was that he didn't care to date anyone who was too much taller than him. He became an expert, he said, “at measuring a girl's height before asking her to dance.”

By the time Billy got to New York, his two old friends Jay and Clifford were already up in Lake Placid, along with their new recruit, Eddie Eagan. When it came to people, Billy was a great believer in gut feelings. “I find one's first opinions of a person based entirely on appearances are usually correct,” he wrote, “and a clever person should have the vision to keep these in mind and not let them be warped by a stronger relationship.” He took to Eddie from the first moment they met. The two of them couldn't have had more different childhoods, but there was a keen kinship between them—both were educated in England, both were Olympic champions.

Eddie was a bull of a man, as brave as any. He had fought Jack Dempsey and stalked big game. But that first run down Mount Van Hoevenberg with Billy scared him more than anything he had ever known. “That run,” Eddie said later, “will always be vivid in my memory. It took only about two minutes to make, but to me it seemed like an eon. I remember the snow-covered ground flashing by like a motion-picture out of focus, speeding a few inches away while I hung on to the straps without any sense of security. My hands seemed to be slipping. But still I clung. We hit a turn. My head snapped first to the right, then to the left. FINALLY we neared the bottom.”

He had so much nervous energy in him that he couldn't stand still after the run was over. He and the other three were supposed to sit in the sled while it was tied to the back of a tractor and hauled up the mountain to the start of the run. The driver was a local farmer by the name of B. J. Cook. “I was pulling back their sled to the starting line,” Cook remembered, “and I noticed one of their fellows standing up in the sled, shadow-boxing. I stopped the tractor, went back,
and told him to sit down. He said he wasn't going to. So I told him a second time, and I said I was going to knock him down if I had to. A little smile came over his face, and he sat down. The rest of the fellows on the sled looked pretty amused.” A little later, Cook learned he'd just threatened a former Olympic boxing champion. He was pretty embarrassed about it, so he made a point of apologizing. Eddie just smiled and called him “one tough little hombre.” It cracked Billy up. He didn't quit kidding Eddie about it for a fortnight.

Godfrey Dewey, on the other hand, was a man Billy never warmed to. He had met him before, of course, back in St. Moritz, though their paths had barely crossed because they kept very different hours. But in 1932 Billy and the other bobbers were staying at the Lake Placid Club, Godfrey's fiefdom. And while they were there, they had to abide by his rules: no drinking, smoking, or gambling, and no noise after 10:30 p.m. That was a rough-enough start. Things got worse when Billy quickly picked Dewey as “a snob.” Plus—a silly thing, this: Dewey had a strange high-pitched laugh that set Billy on edge. And besides, more than any of that, something in his gut told him that Godfrey Dewey couldn't be trusted. And he was right. The truth was, Dewey didn't want Billy Fiske at his Olympics, and he didn't want Jay O'Brien or Clifford Gray there either. In his mind, Jay, Billy, and the others were arrogant out-of-towners who had come to steal the locals' glory. For the past two years, he had been plotting how to stop them.

—

I
t had all started back in 1930, when he first fell out with Jay O'Brien.

Dewey had staked so much on the Mount Van Hoevenberg bob run because he wanted to “establish a broad base of support” for the sport. He wanted the run to become the central attraction of the Lake Placid tourism business. He had fought Roosevelt to secure the money for it, the environmental lobby for the right to build it, and the Jewish lobby for the right to run it. It had cost, in the end, more than four times the amount he had quoted to the community, making it the single greatest expense of the Games—and all that, every single dollar spent, was on his head. He had poured still more resources into publicizing the run. He'd hired a firm for the purpose and given them a budget of fifty thousand dollars. They sent fifteen hundred posters, two hundred thousand booklets, and a quarter of a million stamps out around Europe, all of them advertising the new bob run. They gave out ninety thousand stickers to passengers on the New York Central Railroad. They sent salesmen out to department stores in New York, Cleveland, Boston, Philadelphia, and Montreal to install themed window
displays. And around the Adirondacks they put up blue-and-white billboards reading, “This way for the thrills of a lifetime!” Even after all that, Dewey had one more ace up his sleeve. He had it planned that a local team was going to win the four-man bobsledding contest, the blue riband event of the Olympics. He wanted four hometown heroes, as payback for the community's investment and a promotional tool for his new winter sports resort.

The problem was, of course, that in the late 1920s there wasn't anyone in Lake Placid who had any real experience as a bobsledder. A few men had taken runs over the slopes in open fields, in the old American style. But no one, apart from Dewey himself, had ever ridden anything like the track at St. Moritz. Dewey had a solution. In 1929, when the architect Stanislaus Zentzytzki was over making his first survey of the land around Lake Placid, Dewey had him draw up designs for a simple, half-mile-long bobsled run at a site called Intervales, just outside the town.

Intervales was little more than a practice track, with seven curves built from sand and wood, but Dewey christened it the “first bobsled run in America.” It served three purposes. The first was to whip up a little publicity and enthusiasm for the new sport—and right from the time the first sled set off down it, crowds came out to watch and ride. Second, it enabled Dewey to test-drive the new sleds he was designing. The third and most important purpose was that it would be the training ground for the local teams who wanted to compete in 1932.

Dewey soon found a few likely contenders. There were the Stevens brothers, all four of them, Paul, Hubert, Raymond, and Curtis. They were from an old Lake Placid family: their grandparents had been among the very first settlers in the town, back in the 1850s. They lived in their family's hotel, on a hill up on the other side of Mirror Lake from the club. They were all sportsmen, a little wild for Dewey's taste; and their mother was so scared about the risks they were taking in the sleds that she refused to let them all ride in the same one, just in case she lost all four in a single crash. So they couldn't make up a team together. Dewey had higher hopes for Henry “Hank” Homburger, from the neighboring town of Saranac Lake. He and Dewey were good friends. Dewey had even pulled a few strings on Hank's behalf to help secure an academic scholarship for a young friend of the Homburger family. Hank wasn't exactly blue-collar, but he was closer to it than any of the other bobsledders on the circuit. He had been practicing with a couple of other locals, Percy Bryant and Ed Horton, the town florist. They often took the eldest Stevens brother, Paul, along with them to make up a foursome. They called themselves the “Saranac Lake Red Devils.”