I met James J. Braddock when he came to our house prior to an appearance at the local Eagles club where my dad, Art Ehrmann, was a poohbah?
Fifty-three years ago on this date in boxing history, Emile Griffith defeated Jose Stable in a welterweight championship fight, Jose Torres won the light heavyweight title from Willie Pastrano, and the Wisconsin Correspondent for The Ring magazine almost killed someone with his bare fists.
The first two events occurred at Madison Square Garden, the other on the playground of Holy Cross School in Milwaukee, where my victim and I were in the 8th grade. I?d chosen him based on his popularity, volubility and swaggering cocksureness, in all of which I was strikingly deficient.
I had just started sending ?The Bible of Boxing? local news about the sport about which I was wholly ignorant until the day, two years earlier, when I met James J. Braddock. He came to our house prior to an appearance at the local Eagles club where my dad, Art Ehrmann, was a poohbah.
?He looks more like a former heavyweight champion of the world than anyone else you ever saw,? wrote W.C. Heinz of Jim Braddock. That fact made such an impression on me upon meeting him that I went directly to the Compton?s Encyclopedia in our bookshelf, took out the ?B? volume and devoured every word therein about the sport that produced such men as ?The Cinderella Man.? It became my consuming interest.
I had what an older brother called ?brute bigness,? but it was offset by such a severe case of what Dr. Rocky Balboa correctly diagnosed in his first movie as ?the disease of shyness? that I couldn?t look anyone in the eye.
I signed up for boxing lessons at the Eagles Club. Juste Fontaine, a 1940s lightweight contender, tried to teach me to bounce on my toes and flick out left jabs, for which I was not suited by build and lack of coordination. Worse, he called me ?Pork Chop? in front of the other larval pugilists.
My athletic haplessness extended across the board. In team sports I warmed the bench, and when put in basketball games in junk time was as apt to throw the ball at our opponents? basket as our own. My burgeoning teenage ego needed a boost in the worst way, which is exactly how I went about providing it.
He said he didn?t want to fight, but a punch in the stomach and a slap in the face changed his mind. When he slapped me back, my brain, such as it was, traveled from my head into my right fist, which proceeded to pound him, King Levinsky style, until he?d had enough. It was the post-lunch recess, and I spent the balance of it showing off my boxing stance to an audience of schoolmates too cowed by what they?d just witnessed to show their revulsion.
By the time school got out for the day I shared it, and not just because my right hand was swelling up painfully. My total engrossment with boxing notwithstanding, I was appalled and scared by spontaneous, unprovoked violence, and decided that as soon as I got home I?d tell my mother what had happened.
But when I entered the house there sat my older brother, his right hand in a plaster cast. During his lunch hour at high school he broke his thumb punching a kid in the jaw, breaking it too and getting himself expelled. I decided to keep my mouth zipped, and did so until Sr. Margaret Therese, principal of Holy Cross School, phoned at dinner time to peremptorily summon me and my parents to the convent.
The kid I?d beat up, she told us, had required emergency room treatment for injuries that included a badly contused ear. I had committed assault and battery, she said, possibly attempted murder, and then celebrated it with disgusting posing. Today I?d likely be arrested, but I wasn?t even suspended from school.
After a deserved hour-long verbal drubbing by the heavyweight champion of the School Sisters of Notre Dame, I braced myself on the drive home for whatever Dad would dish out. It turned out to be the worst possible thing, a mere 10 words that shook me more than a punch on the button:
?This has been a great day for the Ehrmann family.?
Up to now Dad had tolerated my obsession with boxing and sometimes used it to inveigle me to tackle chores around the house, as when he once remarked after a blizzard that Big Jim Jeffries had attained his impressive physique by shoveling snow. Now I figured there?d be no more of that, that writing for and even reading The Ring were out, that I was grounded for life and could forget about attending that night?s closed-circuit TV broadcast of the Griffith-Stable/Pastrano-Torres championship double-header at Madison Square Garden. It was at the Warner Theater in downtown Milwaukee, and I?d carried around my precious $4 ticket for weeks.
None of those things happened, and on what had to be one of his worst days as a parent my dad drove me to the Warner Theater. When the fights were over I called him and he picked me up and took me home. At their glorious best, Griffith, Torres and The Cinderella Man himself paled next to the man whose seven kids (??the seven reasons we?re broke and nuts, too,? Dad wrote on one of our annual family photo Christmas cards) called him with affection and awe ?BA? (?Big Art?). He was the best man I?ve ever known.
After graduating from Holy Cross that June I enrolled at a high school where nobody knew me. In all the years since I have not thrown another punch at anyone except in the ring, from which I retired with a lifetime record of 0-1.
