Whitechapel Whirlwind

John Harding

Description

Jack Kid Berg dominated boxing in the early 1930s like no other British-born boxer before or since. Born of immigrant Russian-Jewish parents, he grew up in the East End of London, gaining a fearsome reputation for scrapping in the streets of Whitechapel. Berg's American battles with Tony Canzoneri and Kid Chocolate gained him worldwide fame. His 1930 victory over Mushy Callahan made him world junior welterweight champion, and he won the British lightweight title at his first attempt in 1934. Old-timers recalled, 'When you think Berg is going to slow down, he goes faster. He punched so fast he demoralised opponents rather than demolished them. No boxer was bolder and gamer.' The Whitechapel Whirlwind features exclusive interviews with Berg in the years before his death in 1991, and makes deft use of eyewitness accounts, newspaper cartoons, statistics and photos of Jack's 200-plus fights. Never a man to display false modesty, Berg is brutally frank about his wins, his losses, even his love life.

Sujets

• Boxing
• Xian de Boxing

Informations

• Publié par: Pitch Publishing Ltd
• Date de parution: 08 octobre 2018
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781785314773
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 2 Mo

Extrait

First published by Pitch Publishing, 2018
Pitch Publishing A2 Yeoman Gate Yeoman Way Durrington BN13 3QZ
www.pitchpublishing.co.uk
John Harding, 2018
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the Publisher.
A CIP catalogue record is available for this book from the British Library
Print ISBN 978-1-78531-443-8 eBook ISBN 978-1-78531-477-3
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Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction
1 How it all began
2 The fledgling fighter
3 Prize fight debut (1923)
4 Kid Berg at 14 (1923/24)
5 Pride and pet of Premierland (1925)
6 Harry Corbett: a tough option (1926)
7 Putting on the style (1927)
8 Chicago debut (1928)
9 New York sensation (1929)
10 Champion of the world? (1930)
11 The roughest of the rough (1930)
12 A meeting with Kid Chocolate (1930)
13 The private life of a gladiator (1930)
14 Canzoneri s revenge (1931)
15 The iron man melts (1931)
16 The film star weds (1932-33)
17 British lightweight champion (1934)
18 Second stardom (1934-36)
19 Battling in Brooklyn (1938-39)
20 The Peter Pan of boxing (1939-45)
Epilogue
The Last Word
Appendix 1
Appendix 2
Cartoonists who drew Jack Berg
Jack Kid Berg s fight record
Bibliography
Index
England s Human Buzzsaw. USA cartoon c1930
Acknowledgements
T HE author s acknowledgements are due to Louis Behr, Max Solomons, Harry, Judah and Moe Mizler, Morya Berg and Becky Cohen, Nat Fishman and Roy Segal; to Benny Caplan, Pat Butler, George Odwell and Johnny Cuthbert; to Gilbert Odd, Ralph Finn, Alby Day, Jack and Mary Powell; to Harry Mullan and Caroline Blackadder, Lew Pinkus, Jack Corner, Alex Steene and Rinze van der Meer; to David Carden, Steve Pyke and Chummy Gaventa and, above all, to Ray Arcel; not to mention the many credited and uncredited boxing correspondents of the twenties, thirties and forties in both Britain and the United States.
Thank you to Stephenie and Tony Bergman and Alex Daley for help with illustrations dealing with Jack s social life. A special thank you must go to Martin Sax for the use of his rare action and training pictures featuring Jack. The photograph of Jack with Tommy Farr in the plate section is by courtesy of the Sunday Times (Chris Smith). Acknowledgement is also due to the many illustrators and photographers whom the author and publisher have been unable to trace.
Introduction
Kid Berg, a Londoner, who carried on the Jimmy Wilde tradition of clean boxing and extraordinary courage, was one of the few little men whose name made news.
(Robert Graves and Alan Hodges, The Long Weekend )
J ACK scours a battered, dog-eared Ring Record Book (circa 1956). He jabs his fist at it indignantly. KO by him? Never! The referee stopped the fight! He stopped it! The guy didn t knock me out. Where s the pen? He reaches out for a tiny betting shop biro and alters the record. His finger travels on down the list of his fights, his lips moving soundlessly as he repeats the names like a litany. He stops again, jabs again. That was an exhibition! Exasperated, he pushes the book away like he was shoving off a tired sparring partner. I used to know the editor very well. Nat Fleischer. He was a good friend of mine. He wrote an article about me, about the Canzoneri fight, called it something like, The Greatest Fight I ve Seen , something like that. Now one thing you ve got to get clear when you write my story is that when I fought Canzoneri for the world s title, the second fight, somebody - I m not accusing anybody by name - but somebody doped my water! I never swallow water between rounds, you see, only gargle, take a quick swig and spit, but this time, I don t know why.
I first met Jack Kid Berg in 1986 when he was a 77-year-old spruce, a voluble force of nature. I was researching a book on the Arsenal player Alex James. James being a regular frequenter of West End nightclubs during the 1930s, I wanted to find someone who might have known him during that time. An old footballer mentioned a club in Leicester Square run by a boxer called Jack Bloomfield. Bloomfield had long since passed away, but a regular patron would have been Jack Berg. I have to confess that I had never heard of Berg.
I was told I could meet him at one of his regular haunts, the London Ex-Boxers Association meetings then held monthly at the Sobell Centre in Islington. I went along. It was an amiably chaotic occasion where the once-great and not-so-great members of the boxing fraternity gathered and chatted and swapped stories.
I was introduced to Berg who, when he heard I was writing a book, immediately said that he had a book, his own story, and that all he needed was a publisher. This turned out to be somewhat short of the truth, but I said I would look at the manuscript and see what my publisher thought. Alex James was mentioned briefly but Jack was adamant - his story would top any footballer s tale.
My publisher at the time, Jeremy Robson, was a boxing enthusiast and was keen on Jack s story. Thus began a year-long saga during which I was given a crash-course in boxing history in general and Jack Kid Berg s considerable part in it in particular.
His manuscript turned out to be a dog-eared collection of notes of little use. We would have to sit down (a very difficult exercise for Jack) and talk his story through, get it down on tape, and see if I could shape it into an autobiography. It was rapidly apparent that much more was needed by way of background and so a hybrid developed. I would write the narrative history and background and Jack would supply a running (very often literally running) commentary.
Unlike many ageing sports stars, Jack s memory was remarkable. It seemed at times as though events of 30, 40 years before had only just occurred. Indeed, as others have pointed out, Jack Berg seemed at times to be simultaneously in two places at once - then and now. A newspaper report on a fight from 1930 would elicit small details that most other participants would have long since forgotten. A fight decision would be instantly challenged, a sportswriter cursed and rejected, an old girlfriend recalled in fond detail. At times, one half expected him to pick up the telephone and give her a call.
This was not the wandering mind of someone who had taken too much punishment to the cranium. It was a sharp, insistent sense of the immediate. It was also exhausting. Jack was never still. His great trainer and friend Ray Arcel once described him, as Always moving, getting ready to go, to run.
He was certainly always on the way to somewhere, and once there, immediately on the way back. I used to wonder at times if his impatience with the fleeting moment was a source of unhappiness to him, that he needed to keep the momentum going, break up the continuity, in order that the mundanities of everyday life didn t weigh him down too heavily. But the sense of his own worth, of his unique place in sporting history, never let him down.
Back then, in the late 1980s, a great deal of the boxing world that he was familiar with still existed. Hurrying in and out of gymnasiums and promoters offices, picking up and spreading gossip, telling the latest Harry Levene joke, pulling the old tricks that never failed (the vigorous handshake that relieved you of your wrist watch, which he would politely return to you amid cackles of laughter), the casting of a caustic eye over boxers going through the never-ending process of losing weight, pounding muscles, sweating, skipping, sparring - this was his routine during the months we worked together.
We sat one afternoon in the St Thomas A Becket gym on the Old Kent Road. It was crowded, the atmosphere close, no windows open and the sun streaming in on boxers, trainers and onlookers alike, all sweating hard. We were watching Dennis Andries preparing for a subsequently successful world title fight. The three-minute bell rang with deafening regularity like a burglar alarm on the blink. Jack pushed his trilby on to the back of his head and wiped his brow. A skipping rope whirred, snapping at the floor, whacketywhacketywhack, while Andries feet pounded, patacakepata-cakepat
I loved to skip, Jack said. My favourite exercise. I liked to move about, move around, didn t stop in one place. I used to do a lot of movement. Andries seemed to fly, seemed suspended inside the strange illusion of a circle created by the whirring rope and Jack was impressed.
He works well, that s the main thing. You ve gotta keep it up, that technique. It s American, that s where he learned it. English fighters don t do that, although Harry Mason could keep that up for ten minutes at a stretch and that s hard. But Andries looks good. Let s hope he can box as good as he skips.
The three-minute bell clanged once again; the crowd moved across the big room to the training ring as Andries stepped up to spar, yet another contender for yet another title, an endless process.
Jack waved me over; he had no need to watch. Take a look at him, he said. See what you think. He drops his right arm low, too low. He ll get caught one of these days.
As Andries sparred, drawing applause from the onlookers, Jack Berg remained alone in the sunshine, seated on the bench surrounded by mirrors, indifferent to us all. Yet his presence somehow bestowed upon Andries, a tough but at that time unregarded son of a West Indian immigrant, the blessing of boxing s past greats, linking him with the men in the faded photogra