Cinderella Man Read Free Page B

constant fistfights. His chief nemesis had been a kid with the same name. Jim and Jimmy had tangled more than thirty times, with Braddock’s best friend, Marty McGann, holding his coat and keeping score. Sometimes Jim won, sometimes he lost, but always the fight was interesting.
    It was another friend, Elmer, who’d been Braddock’s first KO. Some argument over marbles had led to Elmer’s going at it with Jim, the kids in the schoolyard running over to look on, eyes wide. Suddenly, Jim landed a terrific right on his pal’s chin. The kid went down like he’d been hit by an axe, then his head hit the sidewalk and he lost consciousness.
    â€œElmer is dead!” some kid yelled and Jim had frozen in terror.
    A doctor came and Elmer woke again, but in the time it took, Jim had gone through a sickening scare. He’d never felt he was cut out for school—books, math, history, none of it connected. So a few months after Elmer dropped, Braddock dropped out for good.
    At fourteen, he started working a series of unskilled jobs. Along the way, his older brother Joe had started to box and made it all the way from an amateur welterweight championship to a professional rating. One day, he and Jimmy got into a brotherly argument. The fists started flying, and to everyone’s astonishment, including Jim himself, the skinny younger brother held his own against the older, more experienced fists. It was the first time Jim thought maybe he could be a winner in the ring.
    Finally, on the night of November 27, 1923, at the age of seventeen, he’d climbed through the ropes in Grantwood, New Jersey, using the alias Jimmy Ryan. The alias was necessary for two reasons. His brother Joe had already put a Braddock on the card that night, and Jimmy had been paid to enter the bout—a grand total of three dollars. Jim Braddock wanted the chance to prove himself, but he knew a professional match on his record would derail his ability to fight as an amateur. Thus, to prevent the New Jersey state amateur boxing authorities from finding out, he’d used the “Ryan” moniker.
    Jim’s opponent that night was Tommy Hummell, a member of the Fort Lee police department. During the bout, both boxers went down more than once, but they came back every round. Newspapers wrote about it, calling it the best fight they’d seen that night, which was as good as the church blessing to a young boxer who’d just fought the first professional match of his life.
    These days, Braddock lived in Newark, New Jersey, the state’s largest city, with a thriving business district, green parks, and neighborhoods that had buildings from the time of the Revolutionary War still standing. To the west, the gently sloping woods of the Watchung Mountains overlooked a city center of skyscrapers, built up among the remnants of an old seaport town. To the east, the city faced the gaunt flatlands of the Hackensack tidal river, with Jersey City and New York visible from taller buildings. The industrial area was also to the east, where freight lines ran from Port Newark’s docks past large factories, electric plants, great garbage dumps, and Newark’s poorest residential districts.
    Braddock and his family lived far from those bleakindustrial areas. His recently purchased home sat in a sedate, old suburb north of the city center, where Victorian and colonials occupied large, well-tended yards. As Frank, the limo driver, turned down Braddock’s wide, tree-lined street, Gould dipped into his pocket and pulled out a thick wad of green.
    â€œWe’ve got eight hundred eighty-six for Jeannette,” he said counting out bills for Joe Jeannette, the veteran heavyweight who’d opened a gym on Summit Avenue in Union City, the place where Braddock trained and he and Joe Gould had first met. “Two hundred sixty-four each for the two bucket kids; three hundred for the ring fees; my two thousand, six hundred fifty-eight;