In between starting another book which has not yet been selected or even purchased, I reached for a collection of sport essays by Gay Talese, a writer who at a sartorially bespoke 88, is still with us. Whether Mr. Talese and Roger Angell, at 100, meet at P.J. Clarke's and reminiscence about the early days of the 20th century, I don't know. They certainly could.
I remember Mr. Talese's byline a bit when I was reading the NYT as a kid in the back of the flower shop in the '60s. A friend's mother gave me 'The Kingdom and the Power' as a Christmas present, knowing I was soaking up newspapers. How I didn't come to work for one is one of my favorite stories.
The high school guidance counselor I saw after dropping out of my second college enrollment sent me to United Medical Service for a job interview. UMS was the corporate name for Blue Shield, then a small company detached from Blue Cross at 2 Park Avenue. There I started at I think $90 a week, and remained for 36 years, until I left for another company. My progression through that employment and all the iterations the company took financed my life.
If Mrs. Bittkower had sent me to the NYT I might have been one of those stories about someone who started as a copy boy. My guess is that I wouldn't have been fired for drinking from there, once all I ever read was that was what newsmen did: drink. I would have been right at home.
Anyway, I love linkages, handshakes if you will, of people who knew other people who go so far back in time that before you know it, you're reading about someone who knew of someone, say Lincoln.
It's like the time I met a fellow at Belmont in the '70s who saw Man of War run, the legendary thoroughbred who lost only one race out of 21 starts, to a horse named Upset at Saratoga in 1919 in the Sanford Stakes (still being run) when Man o' War was 55¢ to the dollar and Upset was 100-1, during what were the "hand book" days off oddsmaking prior to parimutel betting.
If I attain another near decade of life I can be the fellow at Belmont who has no none to tell other then the people who accompanied me to the races about the legendary Dr. Fager who won the 1968 Vosburgh Handicap at Aqueduct carrying 139 pounds while setting a 7 furlong track record that stood for decades in 1:201/5. No horse carries 139 pounds these days. And almost no one runs that fast. Dr. Fager was Babe Ruth.
The 1968 Vosburgh has already drifted so far back in the rear view mirror that when they ran this year's race the broadcasters recounted memorable ones that included Forego in the early '70s. Fager wasn't mentioned. His performance is outside their collective memories, or their pre-broadcast summary sheets.
But getting back to Mr. Tales, anyone can read something from someone's writing of 1958, but what makes it special is that Mr. Tales is still with us, and I'm sure would remember his story on Billy Ray, 93, the last of the bare-knuckle fighters.
The November 23rd essay is no obituary, but a short piece written upon interviewing Mr.. Ray for what I'll guess was a NYT story. Mr. Ray and Mr. Tales do not remember the same presidents, in as much as Mr. Ray was born in 1865 and fought when Benjamin Harrison was president.
Thus, in 2020, the man who wrote in 1958 about someone fighting in 1889 is still with us. A man who was born when Andrew Johnson was president, and the assassination of Lincoln was still fresh news. That is some link back to the past.
Aside from finding the NYT piece Mr. Talese wrote about Billy Ray, complete with four small photos as if taken from a photo booth of what he looked like in 1958, the was a Google link to a piece Clarence George wrote on March 17, 2015 for 'Boxing.com' that reprises Billy's career with many references to Mr. Talese's 1958 piece and a few to A.J. Liebling who wrote of meeting Mr. Ray in 1955 and described him as:
"the shortly-to-be nonagenarian wore no glasses. his hands were shapley, his forearms hard, and every hair looked as if, in the old water-front phrase, it had been drove in with a nail."
Mr. George opens his piece about how he's lead to read about Billy Ray. Like me he's searching for something to read and picks up A.J. Liebling's "Sweet Science' and comes across the story of Billy Ray. This leads Mr. George to Gay Talese. It's never too late to read good writing.
Through one of my favorite Errol Flynn movies, 'Gentleman Jim' you get the story of James J. Corbett fighting John L. Lewis, the famous heavyweight bare knuckle champion, under the Marquess of Queensberry rules, using boxing gloves. End of an era. Spoiler alert: Corbett wins.
In Bayside Queens there is a plaque commemorating Corbett, who retired to a section of Queens near the waterfront where many actors lived, Corbett loving to be associated with them. The Queen Anne style home is still there, and the street is named Corbett Road. In the early '60s my friend and used to go through that area and I seem to remember a status of Corbett being on Corbett Road. Perhaps it was removed. The plaque dates from 1971.
Billy Ray attributed his longevity to street fighting and women. Not many people would give credit to the company of women that he loved so much he was apparently married seven times. That's affection.
I always knew about the bare knuckle era, but didn't know it extended all the way down to Mr. Ray's weight class of 122 pounds. Rounds in that style of fighting were not measured in three minute intervals, but rather whatever went on in between fighting and getting knocked down. The round ended when someone hit the deck and was not counted out. Tired fighter would purposely fling themselves to the canvas in order to end a round. That's why you had fights that went way up into the upper double digits.
Billy Ray apparently owned as many as 15 bars, mostly in Brooklyn, and held court in all of them with this ring stories.
Mr. Talese's piece is not very long. At the end we learn that in his 9th decade Billy is living with his sister and her husband at 130 Ashford Street in Brooklyn.
Google Earth shows a row of homes at that address that could easily have been there in the 1950s. This is the Cypress Hills section of Brooklyn, hard by the Jamica El and the Queens border, near Cypress Hills cemetery and Brownsville, where Mike Tyson came from.
I doubt there is a plaque there for Billy, but there probably should be.
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