was to make you independent of him. But he never knew when to cut the cord and let someone go out and make his own mistakes,” Fariello said.
D’Amato eventually found the battle he had been preparing for since childhood.
At the outset of 1949, Joe Louis, the heavyweight champion for twelve years, decided to retire. Harry Mendel, a leading press agent in boxing, hatched an idea for an elimination tournament among the top contenders to determine the new champion. The idea, though, needed financial backing and a promoter. Mike Jacobs, who had promoted Louis for the past twelve years, also wanted to retire. Mendel pitched his idea to a Chicago business man named James D. Norris, the son of a wealthy Midwest commodities merchant known as the “Grain King.” Norris had used his share of the family fortune to buy several major baseball stadiums, indoor arenas, and the Detroit Red Wings hockey team. He accepted the invitation into boxing.
Norris and his partner, Arthur M. Wirtz, created the International Boxing Club. For $100,000 it bought Jacobs’s lease and promotional rights to stage fights at the mecca of boxing, New York’s Madison Square Garden. The I.B.C. also cornered boxing rights at the outdoor Polo Grounds, Yankee Stadium, and a few smaller arenas. Joe Louis secured the signatures of the four top contenders for the tournament and sold the contracts to the I.B.C. for $150,000 and a $15,000-per-year salary as vice president. Just to keep a lock on the Garden, Norris and Wirtz bought thirty-nine percent of its public stock.
Every fighter who entered the tournament, including the eventual winner, signed multifight contracts binding them to the I.B.C. Norris used the same tactics in all the major weight classes. Soon, no contender could hope for a shot at any title without also signing up. The I.B.C. dictated purse amounts, rematch terms, the date of the title shot, and in some cases the outcome of the fight. Some managers had to relinquish control of their fighters entirely. The I.B.C. loaned money out to fighters and managers as a means of obligating them in future deals.
Between June 1949 and May 1953, the I.B.C. and its affiliates around the country promoted thirty-six of the forty-four championship bouts that took place in the United States. Champions Ezzard Charles (who won the tournament), Jersey Joe Walcott, Rocky Marciano, Jake LaMotta, Sugar Ray Robinson, and Joey Maxim all did their deals with the devil, as it were, for the money and the fame.
The I.B.C. took on the imprimatur of a big business, but its ethics arose from the underworld. Though raised to be a blueblood, Norris indulged in a prurient taste for the unsavory. As a Chicago college student in the 1920s he befriended Sammy Hunt, one of Al Capone’s bodyguards. They remained close up through to the 1940s, when Hunt introduced Norris to a New Yorker named John Paul Carbo, alias “The Uncle,” “The Southern Gentleman,” “Jerry the Wop,” or just plain “Frankie.” The moniker “Mr. Gray” stuck because of his understated style of dressing.
Carbo, mild-mannered, polite, soft-spoken, had a long history of murder charges. He once served twenty months for manslaughter. Notoriety came in 1939 when he was indicted and tried for killing Harry (“Big Greenie”) Greenberg under contract to the Jewish mob organization, “Murder Inc.” The chief witness against Carbo mysteriously fell to his death from a Coney Island hotel. Two of the twelve jurors refused to believe the remaining evidence. A hung jury set Carbo free. Norris relied on Carbo for inspiration, ideas and enforcement. Carbo was always seen sitting just a few feet away from Norris in his office. Several Carbo associates became promoters and managers in I.B.C. fights.
In the 1976 “Brujo” interview, D’Amato said that as soon as the I.B.C. was formed he became passionately determined to break its monopoly, on the grounds of principle. However, he needed the means to achieve that end. “I knew that when I made my move, I had to do it with a certain kind of fighter,” D’Amato said. “So I was waiting for the right type of guy, that had the right type of character and personality and loyalty to make a champion. I hadda have a guy who would listen, because the things I’d hafta do would require the complete cooperation of the person I was managing. Patterson was the first guy to have the qualities I’m speaking of.”
Floyd Patterson, like Fariello, was a lost boy. D’Amato met Patterson in 1949 when Floyd was only fourteen and going to a “600 School” in New York, a new type of classroom for inner-city children considered emotionally disturbed. Patterson was deeply withdrawn, sensitive, highly impressionable, a scrawny 147 pounds, and, most important for D’Amato, full of fear. D’Amato helped train him for the 1952 Olympics. Patterson won the middleweight gold medal. D’Amato told the boxing press that he would make Patterson the future heavyweight champion.
For the next four years, Patterson won a series of middleweight fights with non-I.B.C. opponents in small arenas in New York and around the country. On January 4, 1956, Patterson’s twenty-first birthday, D’Amato published an open letter challenging all top heavyweights, including undefeated champion Rocky Marciano.
The boxing community did not take the challenge seriously. Marciano had forty-one knockouts to his credit; Patterson had yet to fight beyond eight rounds. At 182 pounds he was similar in weight to Marciano but was not known to have as powerful a punch. Most of all, Patterson’s boxing style was odd.
American boxing style had its roots in early-eighteenth-century England. Traditional style, stripped down, put the left foot forward and the left hand out. The left hand jabbed into the opponent’s face. It also set up the right, which remained cocked back. Various other types of punches were added onto that basic form: left and right hooks that arched out and then into the side of the head or body, crosses, and uppercuts.
The fundamental problem for all boxers who used that form, no matter what punch they threw, was exposure. Throwing a punch, almost by definition, left one open to a counterpunch. Defenses were concocted—stopping the punch with an open glove, crossing the arms in front of the face, and of course moving back or away—but they didn’t help much. In order to inflict pain, a boxer had to take it.
D’Amato didn’t accept that premise. He devised a style for Patterson that limited risk yet at the same time delivered maximum punishment. D’Amato called it his “system,” and it was described in detail by A. J. Liebling, who wrote on boxing, among other subjects, for the New Yorker from 1935 until his death in 1963. In the system, both hands were up around either side of the head, the elbows tucked against the body. That created, in Liebling’s words, a defensive “shell.” D’Amato then put Patterson in a crouch, with the feet along a horizontal line. Movement looked awkward, off-balance, like “a man going forward carrying a tray of dishes,” Liebling observed.
Fariello disputed D’Amato’s claim to sole authorship of the “system.” D’Amato had taught him to box in the traditional style. Then, as Fariello became a trainer in the late 1950s, one of his fighters, Georgie Colon, said he felt more comfortable putting both hands up around the head. “D’Amato got pissed off with me about using that style,” Fariello said. “But it caught on with the other fighters. Even Torres used it.” Charlie Goldman, who trained heavyweight champion Rocky Marciano, ridiculed it as the “peek-a-boo” style. When Life magazine did a feature on D’Amato and his stable of fighters, and the distinctive peek-a-boo, D’Amato claimed authorship. “It got so much publicity he had to endorse it. That’s when Cus started teaching the peek-a-boo to Patterson.”
Whatever the origins of the hand placement, D’Amato took the basic idea and made a variety of tactical and strategic additions. He realized that the stance, though awkward, was potent. It baffled opponents. Patterson didn’t telegraph his punches. He could shoot out just as easily with a left or a right. Still, there were risks. Patterson found it awkward to move backward in his shell. He had to go forward, and he had to get close enough to deliver.
D’Amato didn’t want Patterson to get hit doing either. He drilled Patterson on how, while keeping his hands up around the head, to move the whole upper body from side to side as he went forward to elude the jabs—in other words, to “slip” (the sideways motion) and “weave” (the duck-and-move-forward motion). Once that series of elusive movements brought him in close enough, Patterson attacked. D’Amato taught him to exploit the moment by throwing a combination of two or more punches.
The system had drawbacks. It was a highly mechanical, robotlike