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An ESPN anchor and national correspondent, Jeremy Schaap is a host of ESPN's Outside the Lines as well as its acclaimed SportsCentury series. An Emmy Award®-winning reporter, he has been published in Sports Illustrated, ESPN The Magazine, Time, Parade, and the New York Times. Schaap is a native of New York City and the son of award-winning journalist Dick Schaap.


From the Compact Disc edition.

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Cinderella Man

James J. Braddock, Max Baer and the Greatest Upset in Boxing HistoryBy Jeremy Schaap

Random House Large Print Publishing

Copyright © 2005 Jeremy Schaap
All right reserved.
ISBN: 9780375435430
1 CORN AND HASH

Queens, New York: June 14, 1934

On the night of June 14, 1934, James J. Braddock walked into the Madison
Square Garden Bowl, an enormous outdoor arena in Queens, New York. His
pockets were empty. A week earlier he had turned twenty-nine. He was a
father of three, a washed-up fighter, and a part-time longshoreman. As feared
as his right hand had once been — he was among the most powerful
punchers in the light heavyweight division in the late 1920s — he was equally
adept at taking a punch. In eighty pro fights, only one opponent had ever
knocked him out, and that was a technical knockout. He had never been
counted out. Beyond the ring, his toughest opponent had clearly been the
Depression — which nearly knocked him out. But here he was, getting back
into the fight game after nine months of inactivity.
By 1934, Braddock had outgrown the light heavyweight division"s
175-pound weight limit and was fighting as a heavyweight, at about 180
pounds. He was six feet, two inches tall, with a head of thick, curly black
hair. Ruggedly handsome, he looked every bit as Irish as his name, and he
wore a shamrock on his trunks and was sometimes known as Irish Jim
Braddock. He didn"t talk much, but when he did the words were delivered
from the side of his mouth in a thick, blue-collar Jersey accent. His smile
was always described as crooked. His parents, Joseph and Elizabeth
O"Toole Braddock, had been born in England and immigrated to the United
States in 1889, but they were both much more Irish than English or
American, though there is no evidence that either ever set foot on Irish soil.
They were raised in impoverished Irish enclaves in and around Manchester,
where the Braddocks and the O"Tooles clung to their Irishness — mostly
because the English never let them forget where they came from.
Forty-five years after Joseph Braddock escaped from the poverty
and prejudices of northern England and made his way to America, his son
James was struggling to clothe and feed his burgeoning family. He owed
money to his landlord, the milkman, the gas and electric company, and his
manager, to name just a few of his creditors. In the bitter winter of 1933–
1934, he had trudged through the streets of North Bergen, New Jersey, in
shoes that were falling apart. Most of the time he was hungry.
Braddock"s decline as a boxer exactly paralleled the nation"s
descent into the Depression. After fighting for the light heavyweight
championship in the summer of 1929, Braddock met defeat after defeat, first
in big arenas, at the hands of top competitors, and then, gradually, at the
hands of boxers only a couple of notches above club fighters — tomato cans
and ham "n" eggers, the dregs of the heavyweight division. He had lost
sixteen out of twenty-six fights since the day the market crashed in 1929.
Finally, on September 25, 1933, he broke his right hand, his only real
weapon, on the jaw of a twenty-year-old heavyweight named Abe Feldman.
The hand had been broken twice before, and Braddock thought it was
unlikely that it would ever heal properly. If he somehow managed to scrape
up enough cash to find a doctor who knew how to set the fracture, it would
still take months to mend. By that time, he knew, he would be older and even
slower than he already was, which was quite slow. Braddock announced his
retirement — but virtually no one noticed.
Braddock was often called plodding. "Slow of foot" doesn"t begin
to describe the inadequacy of his speed and footwork. He could punch, he
could take a punch, he could even box a little, but James J. Braddock
couldn"t move. Nor could he inflict much damage with his left hand.
Incapable of fighting, he sought work on the docks of Hoboken
and Weehawken. The man who just five years earlier had come within one
punch of winning the world light heavyweight championship was reduced to
hauling railroad ties off ships coming from the south and loading them onto
flatbed railroad cars. Initially he wasn"t very good at it — not with a lame right
hand. But Braddock was strong, and physical labor was something he never
shied from. Not when he was training for a fight, and not when he was earning
four dollars a day operating a baling hook.
Like tens of millions of Americans who had thrived in the 1920s,
Braddock was wiped out by the economic collapse. Much of the money he
had earned fighting at famous arenas like Boyle"s Thirty Acres and Madison
Square Garden disappeared when the Bank of the United States, in which he
had deposited thousands of dollars, failed. He was far from alone. The men
standing beside him on the docks in the shapeups, hoping to get picked by
the hiring foremen for work, were lawyers and bankers and stockbrokers as
well as laborers. The Depression took nearly everyone down a few pegs — or
more. Unlike everyone else on the docks, however, Braddock was
unknowingly building the strength he would need to get himself back in the
ring.
Still, the work was irregular. There were days when he would walk
the three miles from his apartment in Woodcliff down to the waterfront in
Hoboken in vain. He would then turn north and walk another couple of miles
to West New York, or farther, to Edgewater. Sometimes there would be work
on the docks. Sometimes he would just turn around and head back home. It
wasn"t uncommon for him to walk ten or twelve miles in a single day. When
there was work to be had, he would keep working until the job was finished.
A double shift meant double pay. Fatigue was for sissies.
People who knew Braddock well thought that the nickname that
best described him was Plain Jim, coined by John Kieran of the New York
Times. Unlike John L. Sullivan and Jack Dempsey, the most popular
heavyweight champions of the early days of gloved boxing, Braddock was as
far as it was possible to be from a showman. He liked to go to pubs and have
a few beers with the friends he had made growing up in West New York. But
it concerned him not at all whether his dinner companions found him
amusing. Or whether the sportswriters enjoyed his quips. Or whether the fans
got a glimpse of his personality. On those rare occasions when he did speak,
his words made an impact.
Braddock was teetering on the verge of anonymity as winter
turned into spring in 1934. The talents he had displayed in the late 1920s
were fading rapidly from the collective memory of the boxing community.
When aficionados discussed the men who might challenge Primo Carnera for
the heavyweight championship, the name Jim Braddock never entered the
conversation. But Braddock remembered. So did his manager, Joe Gould.
Perhaps a few of the men he had punished with his big right hand did too.
Everyone else, though, thought of James J. Braddock — when they thought
of him at all — as a brokendown, washed-up, one-time contender who just
didn"t quite have enough talent or power.
Even so, Gould continued to sell Braddock as a worthy opponent
long after most promoters had...