Buzz-Saw Belter

Chapter One Mayhem Maestro

I’ve told this story to a lot of people without telling them who the lead character is. Some of them think the story is about Stone Gowal. He has a part in it. A lot of prominent people have come off the hot, littered pavements of the East Side. A lot of little kids who are now sleeping out on the fire escapes to get out of the heat will be making headlines when they grow up.

Stone Gowal grew up on those streets. Seeing him from a distance he looks like any other hard boy. Short neck, big shoulders, heavy face bones. A lot of pounding has thickened his brows and his lips and widened his nose. Close up he’s something else. Close up his skin has a hard, grayish look, and under the shelves of his brows his eyes are a pale watery gray. Killer gray.

By tradition, outside the ring, he should be a big, happy, gentle animal. But all he has is the animal aspect. He is vain, ruthless, brutal.

Maybe this is rightfully a story about Len Kennedy. A lot of boys have drifted into the boxing game via the college route. Few of them have been any good. None of them have been champions. The writeups have given Len Kennedy some American Indian blood. He looks it. He is what the folks think about when they talk about turning fighting into a clean American sport.

Maybe the story really started ten years ago. Stone Gowal was twenty. That was when “Chalk” Leebna was still accumulating his big stable. Chalk saw Gowal in an amateur semi-final in Jersey City and liked the looks of him. The next day Stone Gowal was a professional and Max Gleason, to whom Chalk was paying a hundred a week, started to teach him how to move around a ring, how to hold his hands. Billy Lee Gleason was a goldenheaded ten, with skinned knees and a collection of movie star cutouts. Len Kennedy was fifteen that year. He was doing well in high school football.

Stone Gowal was a surly kid, unpredictable. During that first week at Dannegan’s Gym, Gowal, fretting under the constant instruction, pasted Max. Max, who ten years ago was forty something, still had enough left to give Gowal a worse beating than he has ever taken since. Max cut him to little bits, but the kid wouldn’t stop trying until both eyes had swelled completely shut.

Max has since told me that during all the years he worked with Gowal, he never once lost the feeling of being a sort of animal trainer. Gowal was like one of those big dangerous cats who, if they feel in the mood, will leap through the flaming hoop.

Chalk Leebna died a year later. He was crossed by a punk who, on another charge, is still doing twenty to life up the river.

Leebna lost a lot of dough and made the mistake of sending the punk over with the payoff. The punk pocketed the payoff and told the syndicate that Leebna had sent him to tell them that they’d better try to collect.

Chalk Leebna died on his hands and knees in an alley. At that point Max had saved some money. When the stable dissolved, Max then bought Stone Gowal.

It was about that time that my name started to appear on the sports page of the paper I’m still with.

I’ll never forget some of those early fights as Max Gleason started to bring Stone Gowal up the ladder. The crowd loved him in the same way they love to go to the midget auto races in hopes of seeing somebody smashed to a pulp.

His style was the same as it is now. But cruder. Stone would come out slow at the bell, his face impassive. He was never a pretty boxer, but he could roll to take the sting out of a punch, and he kept that jaw down so tight behind a humped left shoulder that he was hard to hit.

That left jab of his was like a piston. In the clinch he would appear to paw almost aimlessly at his opponent’s middle. But each lazy pat would boom like a big drum and soon the poor guy in the ring with him would be panting for air.

Max, during those early years, finally convinced Stone to wait until Max gave him the word. Max waited until that jab and the pawing right had taken the edge off the other man. When he finally gave Stone the word it was like unsnapping the leash from the collar of a mad dog.

Max never did manage to get Gowal to defend himself in the payoff round. Very few boys lasted beyond that round. The roar of the crowd always started in that round, building up into a scream as Stone moved in for the kill.

I’ll never forget the way Gowal’s thick lips would lift away from his teeth so that the white rubber guard showed. With his eyes slitted, grunting with each punch, he would work his man onto the ropes and even the slow motion camera couldn’t take the steam out of some of those punches. Imagine an unarmed man in the ring with a savage who carries a rock in each hand. It’ll give you the general idea.

Stone Gowal’s specialty was waiting until his man was headed for the floor and then he’d hook up on him with a blow that would straighten him for the payoff punch.

If Stone Gowal had happened to be under the wing of a syndicate, he would have become champion long before he did. But the fight racket had a million angles. With only one fighter under his wing, Max couldn’t arrange the proper favors, or get the proper booking. And when boys were brought up via the tank route for a shot at the topside, they avoided Gowal on the way up. But on the way down Gowal got to them, doing a much more serious job on them than the champ had done.

Even so, by the fourth year they were getting four-figure purses and Gowal was fighting a lot. You could tell when they started to make money. Stone started wearing neckties because then he could afford the tailored shirts to fit around his bull neck.

Billy Lee was sent away to a decent school. Max wanted to turn her into a lady. That was silly, because there was no time, even in the bubble-gum stage, that Billy Lee wasn’t very much of a sweet little lady.

Maybe in the movies they would have it that Stone Gowal, the refinement of brute fury, had a soft spot in his heart for the kid of the guy who managed him and trained him. But to Stone she was “the brat” until the skinny, little-girl frame began to fill out into the contours of woman and then Stone began to have a wet look around his mouth — but that comes later in the story.

There is an easy way and a hard way to come up in the fight game. The syndicate way is the easy way, because then you have the dough to buy your own publicity, and buy your victories. The other way is the way Max Gleason and Stone Gowal traveled. They got their publicity just by being around, by knocking the ears off everybody who came their way, by making trips through the brush and knocking off the promising beginners before the syndicate could step in and put those promising beginners out of the reach of the Gleason-Gowal combination.

You do that long enough and the sports writers begin to put little digs in the columns, and after a while it snowballs up to the point where the syndicate has to give the unconnected boy a shot at the tame champion.

It takes a long time.

Stone Gowal’s private life gave Max a lot of trouble during that period. When Gowal’s divorce came up, the plaintiff appeared in court with the jaw Gowal had broken the week before. Her teeth were wired together. The alimony kept Stone poor. It was two years before she married, taking away the financial burden.

The college kid Stone slugged in a Birmingham night spot never regained the sight in his right eye. Only the fact that both parties had been proven very drunk kept the settlement as low as it was. Even so, Gowal got a lot of bad publicity.

Stone Gowal carried his belligerence around with him. He strutted when he walked, and the tiniest slur, real or imagined, could tighten those huge fists that looked like paving bricks.

But nothing can contradict a long string of knockouts. Not forever.

Toward the end of the seventh year of Gleason’s handling of Gowal, the syndicate had to throw a bone to the dogs by giving Gowal a shot at the “ranking contender for the heavyweight crown.”

The night before the fight a few sharpies moved in on Gowal at his hotel. That’s a story that didn’t get in the paper. They slugged him, stripped him, moved him out onto the fire escape and doused him with cold water. The temperature was about ten above. At the end of an hour they brought him in and put him to bed and left.

They got what they wanted.

The next night Gowal went into the ring with a temperature of a hundred and two. Max knew he was weak and feverish and he unsnapped the leash in the first round. You may remember reading about that fight. Maybe you even saw it. Barney Jeeno wasn’t too bad a boy. He came out feeling with a cautious left which Stone slammed out of the way to plant a solid right hook under Barney’s heart. Barney’s mouth sagged open and he got on his bicycle.

Stone stalked him like a big cat. He moved Barney into a corner and rolled with the stiff left and right that Barney laid alongside his jaw. Stone looked like a man spitting on his hands before chopping down a tree. His shoulders rolling in heavy rhythm, Stone went to work on Jeeno’s middle. From my ringside seat it sounded like somebody slapping a tile wall with a wet mop.

Finally, when Barney’s arms sagged, when only the force of Stone’s blows were keeping him upright in the corner, Stone moved back a little and shifted to the head. Barney’s mouthpiece flew out in a fine mist of blood and his eyes rolled up so that there were just slits of white visible.

The bell sounded and Stone swaggered away. They dragged Barney to his corner and held him on the stool, slapping his face, dousing him with water, holding the smelling salts to his nose. Barney stirred a little. When the bell sounded, they pushed Barney up and took away the stool. Barney never took a step. He just swayed beyond the balance point and went over on his face. Barney was never able to bring himself to climb into a ring again. Stone Gowal spent the next six days in the hospital fighting pneumonia with the same brute courage that he fought everything else.

It was obvious to all of us that Stone Gowal had earned a shot at the title. But even so they stalled another six months. The angered yells of the sports scribes rose to a shrill scream and died away when the date was set.