Just Watch Mah Smoke: The Secret Journeys of Cocoa Kid

Just Watch Mah Smoke: The Secret Journeys of Cocoa Kid

The following is a series of articles on Cocoa Kid posted at TheSweetScience.com, written by Springs Toledo.

Intro/Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5
Part 6
Part 7
Part 8

Full PDF: http://www.ibroresearch.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/cocoa-kid.pdf

“JUST WATCH MAH SMOKE,”
The Secret Journeys Of Cocoa Kid

INTRODUCTION

Cocoa Kid was only eighteen years old when he signed to meet Connecticut’s Louis Kaplan, a former world featherweight champion with 160 professional fights. Most believed that the teenager was in too deep, too soon. Kaplan was not only a veteran -he was as relentless as nature in a news clip. He’d rush in hurling both fists at an opponent like “breakers against storm swept rocks” until a bloody towel was thrown in from the opposite corner. That’s what happened on the night he took the title and the gym rats believed it was going to happen again. Kaplan, they said, had “too many guns” for this gangly newcomer with premature aspirations.
“Lawd, the way some people talk you’d think I needed sympathy,” Cocoa Kid told reporters, “It’s Kaplan who needs it. He was good once and he still may be good. But ah intend to prove ah’m bettah. Just watch mah smoke.”

Early on the morning of February 21st 1933, headlines in the nom de guerre announced the shocking results of the main event: “Cocoa Kid Gives Louis Kid Kaplan Severe Beating in New Haven Arena Bout.” The future Hall of Famer and 7-5 favorite spent ten rounds on the receiving end of long jabs and right crosses. Whenever he mustered up that old grit to charge in, Cocoa Kid tied him up or “threw his speed in reverse” and then sprang forward with a scorching attack. The referee didn’t give Kaplan one round.

Three days later Kaplan retired. “Nothing can make me change my mind,” he said.

…
Chances are slim that there is anyone left who saw that young fighter’s first taste of glory. Even the site is gone; the New Haven Arena was replaced by the Coliseum in 1972, which was itself demolished in 2007. But for a moment in time, the golden-hued frame of Cocoa Kid stood glistening under the lights, his eyes burning with pride. For a moment in time, the future was his.

Eight decades have come and gone since then, flitting by like signposts along Interstate 95. He’s hard to see in the rearview mirror where the past disappears in the distance.

He was hard to see anyway. He competed in a sport of many shadows where sharkskin suits pulled strings and made damn sure no one talked. Those shadows have lengthened with time.

The case of Cocoa Kid is a cold one. It’s a strange one too, rife as it is with false leads and contradictions. Few sports fans knew his real name even while he was campaigning. He was referred to by his nom de guerre, most often “Cocoa Kid” or “Kid Cocoa” by New England newspapers in the early 1930s, then “Louis ‘Kid’ Cocoa” in the mid 1930s. A proper name began to appear in print as his career progressed, though it seemed to be a fluid concept. “Louis Hardwick,” “Luis Harwick,” and “Luis Aroya” are only a few of the variations. Cocoa Kid himself was behind these variations, prompting some boxing historians to theorize that he was purposefully trying to conceal his identity. It is just as likely that he himself wasn’t exactly sure what his name was. His ethnicity is also uncertain. He was called a Cuban and (more often) a “Porto Rican” at different times during his career. In 1961, a former manager confused things further when he told the Baltimore Sun that he had everyone convinced that Cocoa Kid was “Puerto Rican and couldn’t speak a word of English” though in actuality, he said with a laugh, “he was as much an American Negro as Joe Louis.”

What we know is that he had over 240 professional bouts in a career that spanned the toughest three decades of the modern era. We know that he was ranked in the top ten by The Ring as a lightweight, welterweight, and middleweight for eighty-one months between August 1933 and February 1947 -and yet was never granted a shot at a world title. We know that he was good enough to not only defeat, but downright embarrass a few of the greatest fighters that ever climbed through the ropes.

He was better than we know.

Sixteen years after upsetting Louis “Kid” Kaplan, he was hired as a sparring partner at Sugar Ray Robinson’s training camp in Pompton Lakes, New Jersey. Robinson was at his peak. In the second round of one session, Cocoa Kid landed a short right to the chin and down went the welterweight king. Robinson scrambled to his feet and finished the round but that shot had a message in it, and the message was clear.

“Watch mah smoke,” he told the boxing world a long time ago. The boxing world still strains to see him –still asks a question that has echoed down generations: Who was Cocoa Kid?

http://www.thesweetscience.com/news/articles/12155-just-watch-mah-smoke-the-secret-journeys-of-cocoa-kid

Part 1: Lost at Sea

In 1901, a nine-year-old went missing in Georgia. “Negro Boy Disappeared from His Home on July 28,” ran a headline in the Atlanta Constitution. After eleven days his mother was beside herself and the police were still searching. We know that the boy was eventually found because at seventeen he was living with his parents and driving a truck for his father’s transfer company. His name was Lewis Hardwick. It would not be the last time he went missing.
The sea called to him. Hardwick became a sailor living a life of scenic drudgery. In 1914, he was on liberty in Mayaguez, a western seaport in Puerto Rico where mango trees are everywhere and blacks are the majority. While there, he met a young woman who would become his wife. Her name was Myrtice Arroyo. She gave birth to a son on May 2nd 1914. Not long afterwards, Hardwick brought his new family to Atlanta and eventually moved them into a small house -not much more than a shack, and got a job as a porter on Auburn Avenue. The sea, the irresistible sea, called to him again and he enlisted in the United States Navy. The world was at war when he did.

He worked as a mess attendant in the galley of a ship assigned to the South Atlantic. “Messmen” were almost invariably African American in a still-segregated military. Hardwick probably kept to himself, absorbing and avoiding the scuttlebutt of the white officers he served. He took his own meals standing up. His quarters were dank and cramped and it is not difficult to imagine him there, alone, reaching into his sea bag for a book. Pressed between its pages he would find a small photograph that made his heart ache.

…..

The U.S.S. Cyclops was a 522 foot, 19,000 ton steamship commissioned by the Navy after the United States entered World War I. Captain George W. Worley was a German sympathizer notorious for his cantankerous disposition and the routine abuse of his crew. Bound for Baltimore from Brazil with a cargo of manganese ore, the ship made an unauthorized stop at Barbados on March 5th 1918. Worley issued a request ashore to the U.S. Consul for 600 tons of coal and additional supplies, though the reason why is not clear. The Consul distrusted Worley and his suspicions grew when he found many Germanic names on the ship’s manifest.

The next day a long, low blast of the horn signaled the departure of the Cyclops. It raised anchor, left port, and transmitted a message -“Weather fair. All well.”

After March 6th the ship was never seen or heard from again.

No distress call was communicated. No debris was found. No German ships, submarines, or mines were in the area. Not one of the 306 men on board ever turned up anywhere. The Navy launched an exhaustive search at sea and a decade-long investigation to no avail. The U.S.S. Cyclops disappeared in the heart of what is now known as the Bermuda Triangle.

The government released the names of all crew and passengers to American newspapers a month after the disappearance. Hardwick’s eldest son was three years old when his mother frantically scanned the Atlanta Constitution on the morning of April 15th 1918. There on page three, column three, she read the name “Hardwick, Lewis Herbert” among the lost.

This time, he was never found. He was twenty-six years old.

Myrtice Hardwick died soon after that.

These were the first memories of an orphan named for his father, Herbert Lewis Hardwick… Cocoa Kid.

SWEET AUBURN
Antonia Arroyo was his aunt. According to the 1930 U.S. Census, she was born in Puerto Rico (almost certainly in Mayaguez) before moving to Georgia with her husband, a black American by the name of E.A. Robinson. They raised nephews Lewis and his younger brother Jimmy alongside a half-dozen other children in Brunswick before moving into a modest-sized home on Auburn Avenue. Only a stone’s throw away, Martin Luther King Jr. was born on a winter’s day in 1929.

Auburn Avenue is a one mile thoroughfare where the black community built up businesses, organizations (including the Atlanta chapter of the NAACP), a hotel, churches, entertainment spots like the Paramount, and a heritage that prompted John Wesley Dobbs to call it the “richest Negro street in the world.” During the Roaring Twenties, it was the hub of Black Atlanta, where bootstraps and a can-do attitude lifted many. Sweet Auburn, they called it.

When his nephew was a skin-and-bones adolescent in 1928, Robinson took him to a boxing gym. Lewis, as the boy was called, walked in and was greeted by the stench of sweat, resin, and wet leather. He was probably too self-conscious to wince, too spellbound by a spectacle that was, by the standards of the Deep South, remarkable. No hats were in hand here. Strong black men were conditioning themselves for battle, their arms lashing out at shadows. Fists beat drum rhythms on leather bags and pounded sacks hanging on chains. Skip ropes snapped on the floor and whirled so fast he couldn’t see them.
Ropes. White mobs in Georgia had already lynched well over 400 black men by 1928, and a dangling noose was their symbol of terror. Sometimes they used guns. A Morehouse College student was delivering newspapers around the same time that Lewis first went to the gym. The student did not remove his cap when collecting the monthly bill from a white store owner. The store owner shot him in the back and killed him. The murder was ignored.
Ropes here surrounded a ring, stretching tautly around a square deal and a fair fight. This was a place where violence was re-imagined in the midst of violence, where self-determination was captured in the fists of the oppressed –in the blessed fists. Blacks weren’t allowed to fight whites in the south yet but that didn’t matter. They could pretend.

And they could make money. They could make money and raise the ire of the whites like Jack Johnson did; or they could make money and raise awareness like Tiger Flowers, whose mansion stretched to heaven over on Simpson Road.

Lewis stood wide-eyed and took it all in. He found what he was looking for here among leather and stink. In no time at all, his skinny arms were splitting lips and stretching necks in sparring sessions. His uncle peered through those ropes with his own neck stretched. Managing this kind of natural talent, he must have mused, would sure beat managing a sandwich shop.

Monday night was fight night at Elk’s Rest, “a colored establishment” on Edgewood Avenue. Promoters jockeyed to put on “all-colored” boxing shows and sold tickets at shops lining Auburn Avenue. Ladies were admitted free with a male escort and refunds were typically offered to anyone not completely satisfied with the card. A section was reserved for the white folks who wanted to attend. Battles royal opened the shows. These unseemly relics from the days of slavery saw eight or twelve African-American boys (“darktown huskies” according to one account), no older than Lewis, wildly swinging at each another for coins tossed into the ring. Sometimes they were blindfolded.

Lewis was a fourteen-year-old featherweight when he had his first professional fight. It was scheduled for four rounds and was over in two. In no time at all, he had cut Kid Moon to ribbons, put D.W. Jackson to sleep, and scored another three knockouts in his first seven bouts.

Then the sea beckoned him as it had his father. The athletic commission probably beckoned him first after finding out he was underage. Lewis and his uncle boarded a ship for Puerto Rico in the summer of 1930. He had at least one fight there in Mayaguez -the city where he was born. It wasn’t until late October when he packed his bags and headed back to the port in San Juan. He lied about his birth date to appear eighteen, gave his address as “310½ Auburn Av. Atlanta Ga.,” and took a seat among forty-seven other passengers as the ship departed for the states. There, on board the S.S. Ponce, alongside Fuentes, Garcia, Gonzalez, and Jimenez sat “Hardwick, Herbert L.” like a fly in Spanish soup.

The Fates were winking at him. The Cyclops was in the news again with another theory purporting to explain its disappearance, and the Ponce sailed into the heart of the Bermuda Triangle.

http://www.thesweetscience.com/news/articles/12170-just-watch-mah-smoke-part-i-lost-at-sea

Part 2: My Ship Is Coming In

Harry Durant was an expert angler, a playwright, lawyer, judge, and state legislator in New Haven, Connecticut. He was also a New England snowbird wealthy enough to flee to Florida in wintertime. Snowbirds typically pass their days amid the sun and the green of golf courses. Harry preferred leather and stink.
He would take jaunts to the boxing gyms of West Palm Beach with eyes peeled for talent. One afternoon in 1932 he found it. An underfed teenager was beating the begeezuz out of professionals. It was Lewis Hardwick, trying to make a dollar out of fifty cents. Fifty cents -that’s what sparring partners earned in an afternoon. Durant was impressed enough to take Lewis aside and bend his ear. It wouldn’t take much to persuade him to relocate north to New Haven that spring.

Like Lewis, New Haven had its own connections to the sea. The city was built out from a natural harbor and the young boxer need only walk down to the wharves to gaze at schooners and hear the sound of buoy bells and waves lapping the shore. Most new citizens in the area during this time were, fittingly enough, African-American and Puerto Rican. Lewis probably felt right at home. His new sponsor set him up, became his temporary guardian, and brought in seasoned trainers Charley Brown and Al Blondi to continue his education in the fistic arts. They had him sparring with the best around; including future featherweight champion Petey Sarron.

It was around this time, April 1932, that newspapers began calling him “Cocoa Kid.” Lewis said that he chose the nickname as a tribute to the Cuban “Kid Chocolate” –the Jr. lightweight king then taking the northeast by storm. Durant, who also happened to be a manager of stage stars, was probably behind it.

Back in Atlanta, Lewis fought as if he was in a battle royal. He had a crowd-pleasing style that saw him flailing from all sides to force a knockout. Brown and Blondi calmed him down. They taught him to use his nearly six foot frame to control range behind a jab and set up what was becoming a destructive right cross. His combinations became less about nerves and more about placement. They made his mobility more efficient by adding angles and showing him how to maintain distance between himself and his opponent. His defense was also improved; with two lashing long arms and height enough to look down on just about everyone else in his division, there were plenty of good reasons to deliver punches and not one to accept them.

Lewis was an attentive student –too advanced for Rene Peloquin to make the grade. In the summer of 1932, Peloquin went down five times and ended the fourth round draped over the second rope. Three weeks later “Kid Cocoa” showcased a set of skills that was “a revelation to fans” and a curse on Baby Jack Renault. Renault tried to send over a haymaker for ten rounds, missed, and lost all of them. Cocoa Kid’s Boston debut in July saw jabs and right hands send Pete Herman floundering around the ring like an old salty on a raft.

The new arrival became one of the busier boxers in the racket. Between April and December 1932 he had 17 fights, 21 in 1933, and 24 in 1934.

It was the height of the Depression. Boxers had to accept smaller checks but few talents were standing in bread lines. If attendance levels at events during those years are any indication, America needed her fighters. Martial societies always have. The attraction isn’t mere escapism; at times it’s cathartic and often patriotic. It’s a visual reminder of cultural virility that has persisted on either side of the Roman timeline.

Boxing, like the Roman Empire, like mayhem for that matter, is multi-cultural. After retiring Louis “Kid” Kaplan (a Russian Jew), Cocoa Kid (“that New Haven smoke,” according to the Holyoke Daily Transcript and Telegram) faced Irish-American Frankie Carlton in May 1933. He entered the ring a 7-5 underdog. Once he started throwing away Carlton’s signature left hook like yesterday’s news, it became a brutal clinic. In the second round, Cocoa Kid landed a jab that blinded Carlton for a second. The local newspaper puts us at ringside for what happened next:

“And then, pivoting rapidly and sharply he snapped his right hand out and it crashed Carlton just below the left ear… Carlton’s head jerked back, his mouth fell open and the rubber protector for his teeth flashed out and bounded across the ring… A glaze came over Carlton’s eyes but he shook his head and turned to renew hostilities instinctively… the Kid stepped back and then flashed rapidly in with a left and right to the chin… Carlton shook to his heels, halted in his tracks, then slowly crumbled and spread-eagled the canvas… he lay there while the referee counted and until with the assistance of the Kid… his seconds carried him to his corner, where he flopped about lifelessly as they attempted to seat him in his chair.”

Carlton was out, the report continued, “like many of our bankers.”

Cocoa Kid was on a train to Atlanta the next day to bring Aunt Antonia and his younger brother with him back north. He sought the company of familiar faces like anyone else. He was like anyone else in another way too –he could be thwarted. Harry Emond proved it when he sent him sailing unconscious through the ropes.

Emond, a southpaw out of Taunton, Massachusetts, got lucky. Four sons of Rome didn’t need luck.

Mike Frattini, Luigi Giuseppe d'Ambrosio (that is, Lou Ambers), Battling Battalino, and Saverio Turiello had his number. He fought them a total of seven times and lost six. Before a rematch against Frattini, reporters framed the bout as Cocoa Kid’s attempt to break the “Italian jinx.” When he lost, they said that “this race of boxers” put a hex on him. It was no such thing. These contubernales shared a common complaint –the sidewalk was built too close to their shoulders. They shared a common style too –they were crowding, aggressive men who slipped jabs and attacked sternums and flanks.

Seasoned trainers know that tall fighters should fight tall. They should keep a shorter opponent at the end of a jab, a bit like holding a wolf by the ears. Short fighters might wear lifts outside the ring but inside they want to create the opposite illusion; they want to look smaller. The smart ones will crouch down and shoot inside long arms to leverage shots into protruding ribs. To the short and ferocious, ribs become ringing chimes.

This is precisely what Frattini was –short enough to get under shots and ferocious enough to “set up a steady bombardment” to his body. At the end of the rematch, Cocoa Kid was a bit mangled but on his feet. When Turiello went underneath Cocoa Kid’s lightning left, the Baltimore Sun said he was “practically on the floor” but he “dodged and ducked and fell in close to deliver plenty of body punishment.” The chunky Ambers, an all-time great who would go on to become the lightweight champion of the world, moved ever-forward and hurt the teenager several times. According to the Providence Journal, he met a long jab with short jolting ones. By combining aggression with a versatile attack, Ambers put him down three times in the seventh round. Cocoa Kid’s gallant exertions did not win him the decision. In 1934, Battalino bobbed and weaved around the ring, got close and attacked a weight-drained body. When Cocoa Kid lowered his guard to protect his ribs, Battalino landed four rights to the head and his knees sagged. In the sixth round, a “distressed look” was observed on Cocoa Kid’s face when he was corralled into a corner. After the round he “slumped on his stool” and his chief second signaled the referee to end the fight.

Not all of his losses were so clear. Some had more shadows than a film noir:

When he lost a decision to Frankie Carlton’s brother Harry in 1933, the crowd booed itself hoarse. When Mike Kaplan was awarded a split decision over him in Boston, the Globe reported that the pro-Kaplan crowd was “amazed at the verdict for its favorite.” A decision loss in Stamford, Connecticut to Billy Bridges was roundly booed. The matchmaker took a look at the referee’s card and found that scores for two rounds had been altered in favor of Bridges. He was robbed of a victory in New Orleans when his bout against Harvey Massey was scored a draw. The dismayed announcer looked at the tally several times before reading the decision and when he did, the uproar lasted twenty minutes with fans throwing whatever wasn’t nailed down into the ring. The sports department of the Times-Picayune took a survey and couldn’t find anyone “who didn’t think Cocoa won as far as you can throw a rock.”

Cocoa Kid fought on. His ship was coming in, but there was fog in the harbor and uncharted dangers ahead.

http://www.thesweetscience.com/news/articles/12206-just-watch-mah-smoke-part-2-my-ship-is-coming-in

Part 3: The Great Informer

Jimmy Leto took a decision over Cocoa Kid in 1933. The fight was close. The correspondent for the Hartford Courant saw it even, though his eyebrow was raised before Leto’s hand was.

Here’s why: In the eighth round, Cocoa Kid threw a wide right that landed on Leto’s chin, turning him completely around. Leto stood dazed in the middle of the ring, but “instead of rushing in ‘for the kill,’” the correspondent watched as Cocoa Kid “stood off and sparred around long enough to allow Leto to come out of the fog.”
That “wide right” may have been an accident.

Paul Gallico was a sports writer during this era who retired early due to his disgust with what he uncovered. In Farewell to Sport (1938) he insisted that in eight out of ten professional boxing matches between a black man and a white man, “the dice were loaded.” Black fighters, he said, often agreed beforehand to either lose or “carry” their white opponents. In other words, the black man was “handcuffed.” What’s worse, he claimed that these directives were typically handed down by their own managers. Gallico also said that even without handcuffs on, black fighters could not expect to win close ones. Looking good and winning most of the rounds weren’t enough -they had to dominate in hopes of getting a fair shake.

This looks like undue cynicism. Perhaps it was. A page later, Gallico predicted that because white people grow weary of “seeing a Negro triumph too often,” Joe Louis would not hold the title for long. He held it for almost twelve years.

Then again, perhaps his cynicism was not so far off. Cocoa Kid’s record is a convincing Exhibit A.

It is standard these days for highly skilled fighters to coast through a round or two when fighting an easy mark. Cocoa Kid either didn’t have that option or didn’t believe that he had that option –the number of decisions wins where he won every single round is startling. A “shut-out” served two purposes for a black boxer. First, it made it harder for judges to rob him of a victory. Split decisions and close fights frequently went against him, especially when his opponent was white. This accounts for many of Cocoa Kid’s 56 losses. Robbing an African American of his rightful win had to be done with some caution because even white crowds hoping to see white arms raised by referees did not tolerate fictions. Secondly, a shut-out wasn’t a knockout. By agreeing to allow a white fighter to go the distance, an ambitious black boxer proved cooperative with managers. Cooperative fighters got fights and with a little luck and the right connections, perhaps even a title shot. Handcuffs served as a happy medium -no one took a dive and no one got hurt.

Was Cocoa Kid handcuffed? That first fight with Jimmy Leto suggests that he was. The rematch points toward something worse.

April 26th 1935, New Haven. Over a thousand outraged spectators rose as one in the New Haven Arena when Leto was announced the winner after his rematch against Cocoa Kid. They jeered for three minutes. As Cocoa Kid made his way out of the ring, the sports editor for the Hartford Courant reported that an approving roar followed him to the dressing room.

The next day, Cocoa Kid’s wife went straight to matchmaker Al Caroly’s office and dropped a bombshell. Two nights before the fight, she claimed, Leto’s manager offered her husband a $100 bribe to intentionally lose. Caroly later spoke to Cocoa Kid directly. The fighter confirmed it and later made a signed statement confirming it again.

Twenty-five-year-old Lou Viscusi, called “Big Lou” at the time, was Leto’s manager. He responded to the accusation by stating that he was “misunderstood” and then let fly a number of counter-accusations. He said that Cocoa Kid “pestered him for months” to take over as his manager, and that he begged for a fight against the popular Leto “saying he needed the purse badly.” Cocoa Kid’s manager, Viscusi said, had made a suspicious midnight call offering Leto a larger percentage of the gate than usual.

One of the flailing shots he threw had mustard. He said that Cocoa Kid planned to come in over the contracted weight to gain an advantage, and that the scales were rigged at the New Haven Arena to cover it up. Before the official weigh-in, he said that he brought Leto to a non-affiliated state office, where he weighed just under 140 lbs. At the arena, he weighed under 139 lbs. Viscusi’s suspicions supposedly compelled him to investigate further. He said that he scraped away paint from the drill holes on the weights and extracted lead filling. Viscusi did nothing about it at the time. He claimed that he was too disgusted.

A public hearing was held on May 2nd to investigate the bribery charge leveled against Viscusi. Cocoa Kid’s testimony was considered very credible. He said that Viscusi had pretended to be an auto salesman to gain access into his house and then asked him if he’d like to “make some money.” He replied that he would. Then, the fighter recalled, Viscusi offered him $100 to lose to Leto and said that he could take that money and wager it on Leto on Cocoa Kid’s behalf. Cocoa Kid also said Viscusi tried to sweeten the deal by offering to slide lucrative out-of-state bouts his way in the future.

Cocoa Kid declined. He told Viscusi that “he would enter the ring to give his best.”

Word on the street was that Viscusi feared that “his best” would sideswipe Leto’s chances for a May date with welterweight champion Jimmy McLarnin.

Under questioning, Viscusi admitted that he drove to Cocoa Kid’s house in New Haven two nights before the Leto fight. He said that he did so because he wanted to speak to Cocoa Kid about whether or not he would be able to make the contracted weight. In the car with him were heavyweight boxer Nathan Mann (nee Natale Menchetti) and “another fellow.” Viscusi said that Mann was only there to show him where Cocoa Kid lived, and that they found the house “with the help of a policeman.” Cocoa Kid emerged from the house and got into the car while Mann and the other individual, who evidently just came along for the ride, “went off to get a glass of beer.”

Viscusi testified that Cocoa Kid asked him if he would pocket the $100 forfeit for non-appearance if he couldn’t make weight and the match was called off. “I tried to explain to him,” said Viscusi, “that he would not get the forfeit and also told him that Jimmy [Leto] would beat him badly if he was at weight.”

Let’s examine the undisputed facts: Two days before a boxing match, the manager of one of the boxers gets into a car accompanied by a heavyweight under his control and another unnamed individual. They drive forty miles from Hartford to New Haven to speak to the opponent in the upcoming match. They do this at night. The opponent is black and twenty-years old. His own manager is not present. Two days later, the opponent loses the bout and half the arena erupts in protest of what they see as a terrible decision. The next day, the opponent comes forward with the claim that he was, at the time of the confirmed visit before the fight, offered a bribe.

Viscusi brought what clearly seems to be “muscle” with him on that nighttime ride. Knowing what it looked like under official scrutiny, he included details, but the details only make it appear even more suspicious. “I took Nathan Mann along with me,” he said, “to show me where Cocoa Kid lived.” Just in case that wasn’t enough to take the edge off, he added another detail: a “policeman” showed them where Cocoa Kid lived. The problem here is that the introduction of the policeman into his account disables the stated reason why Mann came along in the first place. Viscusi also felt it necessary to place both of his companions out of the car when Cocoa Kid emerges from the house and gets into the car. He seemed to be straining to minimize what looks like intimidation.

It gets better. Recall Viscusi’s most serious counter-accusation -his insistence to the press that the scale was rigged for the official weigh-in. He changed his tune at the hearing. After the commissioner and deputy commissioner testified that they had personally inspected the weights and found them in working order, Viscusi admitted “that he was satisfied the weights were all right” despite what he said earlier. This does not reflect well on his honesty. None of it does. He had ample motive to deny and distort the truth. Cocoa Kid, by contrast, took a risk by coming forward. He’s lucky he didn’t end up in the Mill River.

The incident affords us a glimpse into the personality of Cocoa Kid. It is clear that he had courage. Senator Harry Durant might have called it ‘a lotta’ -something else. Durant had severed his association with the fighter seven months before this incident, complaining that he got “hard to handle” once the money started rolling in. When Durant left, he took his considerable clout with him and Cocoa Kid was left unprotected. Did the sharks start to circle? There is evidence that he soon moved to Cos Cob, a secluded little harbor village on the southwest corner of Connecticut.

The incident affords us something else as well. We may have uncovered a partial explanation as to why Cocoa Kid never got a world title shot; after all, he did what few fighters of his era would dare to do –he reported a bribe.

Was he lying?

The State Athletic Commissioner of Connecticut didn’t think so. He suspended Viscusi. “There was an unsavory air to the entire episode,” he said, and the conduct of the accused was “reprehensible at least.” Viscusi resigned as Leto’s manager and told the press that he would not dispute the ruling. Twenty-five years later, his name was brought up in the Kefauver Subcommittee Hearings on Antitrust and Monopoly. It was alleged that he was among those boxing promoters and managers who were either “very close to” or “controlled” by gangster Frankie Carbo.

In 2004, Lou Viscusi was enshrined in the International Boxing Hall of Fame.

http://www.thesweetscience.com/news/articles/12253-just-watch-mah-smokeq-part-3-the-great-informer

Part 4: “Knock the Eight Ball Out!”

Just a few weeks after the bribery hearing, Cocoa Kid snatched a pair of New England championship titles from Frankie Britt.
“With marvelous control over a marvelous body,” reported the Boston Globe, Cocoa Kid opened the argument by “planting three sharp lefts to Britt’s probiscus.” Britt got physical and threw the challenger off balance but agility kicked in and the challenger landed damaging punches anyway. And he landed often. Usually hard to hit, Britt “was seeing the world through rose-colored gloves.”
In 1939, Cocoa Kid was nearing his peak and yet lost the rematch to Britt. It took place in Britt’s hometown of Fall River, Massachusetts. Not even the local paper agreed with the decision. Cocoa Kid’s manager was appalled -“I don’t think it’s fair to any fighter to be the victim of such a decision,” he said. They met for the third time six months later and Britt didn’t see round eight.
Andrea Jessurun, a South American Dutchman turned New Yorker, faced Cocoa Kid four times. Jessurun won a decision in a main event that prompted one reporter to assert that Cocoa Kid fought “as if he didn’t care whether or not school kept.” The reporter had heard that Cocoa Kid’s training was delayed because of marital difficulties and there was talk that he may have attempted to postpone the bout. After losing a close one in Holyoke, he knocked the Dutchman out in Baltimore and then took a decision in Washington. The Baltimore bout was a brutal one. Jessurun’s nose and mouth were crimson smears when he came out for the eleventh round. A left hook and right cross crashed on his jaw and when he fell to the canvas he bounced. No count was necessary. As his seconds ran out and carried Jessurun back to his corner, Cocoa Kid walked across the ring grimacing with pain and rubbing his right glove with his left. The force of the knockout blow jammed two small bones in his hand out of joint.
The only time Johnny Lucas beat him was after the referee deducted two points for low blows. In their first bout, Lucas survived the ten rounds (or was allowed to survive the ten rounds), and revealed nothing, said the Holyoke Daily Transcript and Telegram, “save a pair of new shoes with pretty white laces.”
Cocoa Kid’s trainer once said that he fought “to the caliber of his opponent.” In other words, “he looks like a world-beater against top notch foes and like a second-rater when in there against mediocre mittmen.” There could be more to it than that. Hot and cold performances against the same opponent in different fights are curious, particularly if the fighter is a widely-heralded talent and his opponent is white. Britt, Jessurun, and Lucas were white. Temperament may explain the variation, but then, so wouldn’t handcuffs.
Andy Callahan gave us a good snapshot of Cocoa Kid’s capability when sharp and uncuffed. Callahan trained in Boston and sparred with Honey Melody and former world welterweight champion Lou Brouillard. “I never had any trouble fighting tall fellows like Cocoa Kid,” he told reporters in Holyoke, “and after taking the right hand smashes of Brouillard all week, I guess I can stand anything the Cocoa Kid has to offer.” In the second round, chief second Brouillard watched Callahan’s right eye swell up to grapefruit proportions. The man who did it may have recalled hearing the hype that said Callahan had been routinely beating black fighters. Cocoa Kid popped that grapefruit in the tenth round. Callahan was blinded by his own blood and rescued by the referee.
The popular southpaw Jack Portney was defeated in Connecticut, and then pushed for a rematch at home in Baltimore. Both Portney and Cocoa Kid were ranked in the top ten for the November 1936 rematch and the event was portrayed as a true-blue battle between near-equals. Portney, up against a jab “that travels with the speed of light” wisely tried to make a brawl of it. Cocoa Kid obliged him by refusing to concede space and landing more punches overall. Portney’s nose was split and so wasn’t the decision. This time, Cocoa Kid was on the winning end despite his complexion; perhaps the sobering presence of the mayor at ringside was enough to leave this one on the up-and-up.
Cocoa Kid-Jack Portney III was an event that serves as a reminder of why many boxing matches were also profiles in courage. Ollie Stewart of The Afro-American saw the mixed-race event as only a black reporter could. “It’s both amusing and ironic,” he wrote, “Baltimore pays heavily to satisfy a longing to see Cocoa plastered to a fare-thee-well. They let him fight here as a Puerto Rican –but the cash customers call him another name when he’s in the ring. Most of the names are well known fighting words.”
Stewart quoted what they said. With his help, we can move closer to the action. We can move even closer than Stewart, closer than ringside, and experience this event from the vantage point of Cocoa Kid himself.
The official result of the match is ‘Cocoa Kid W TKO12 Jack Portney March 1st 1937.’
Now look again.
You’re a bilingual black man in a desegregated boxing ring of the segregated south. Jim Crow made sure you arrived here in a separate railroad car. Only an hour ago you came in through the back entrance of Carlin’s Arena while Jack Portney came in through the front like a star. You changed your clothes in a separate dressing room and that water fountain you walked by had a sign on it that said “WHITE” -that meant you couldn’t bend down to take a sip. They don’t want you drinking their water. They don’t want you near them. If you fall in battle tonight and get buried here, they’ll stick you in a separate graveyard across the freeway from theirs.
You peer out over the top rope and scan the crowd for a black face. You won’t find any because they’re up on the balcony. The faces in the front rows looking up at you aren’t friendly –they simmer with the hostility and glee of racial supremacy, a supremacy they hope to see proven tonight. You’ve seen those faces before, but never so many. You’re surrounded by a rolling, broiling leviathan that laughs and curses with five thousand faces; that was what the promoter said –five thousand with cash-in-hand, Baltimore’s largest gate in years!
And they’re all here to see you lose.
You stand under the lights feeling uncomfortable in your own skin. Don’t think about it, just limber up and get the juices flowing -that’ll help the shivers.
There’s the bell.
Someone yells “knock the eight ball out!”
Portney charges forward to get inside your long arms. You let him. He punches like a man accustomed to working over heavy bags. You instinctively block most of them, and then come around with hooks to his flanks, though they’re not hard yet. You can’t get much leverage because nerves are messing with your legs. Suddenly, your foot slips and you sit down in the ring with a thump. The crowd screams with delight; some of them are hollering “black person of African descent!” as you get to your feet.
Take a deep breath and tuck your chin in, because here he comes.
He comes in stupid –his right elbow is out like a chicken wing. You see the opening and throw a left hook that bends his ribs. He groans. You feel better.
Settling down now, finding your rhythm, you notice something -Portney is sucking wind already, working too hard, wild. The crowd has gone to his head. He thinks he’s Jim Jeffries battling for the white man’s dignity. Let him, he’s bound to buckle under all that heady nonsense. You fight for yourself.
Round three ends and the crowd is on its feet cheering because your nose is bleeding. Portney is ahead on points and your nose is bleeding.
Someone yells “sissy!” Another one calls you something worse.
Your corner tells you to step back, adjust the range, and let loose that lightning jab. It’s time to dash all that hope and nonsense.
The next four rounds are yours –and you did it with one hand. Portney is no slouch, he takes the eighth. You decide that’s all he’s gonna take and turn up the heat. He’s beginning to wilt. In the tenth round, you steal a look into his eyes and they’re wide. His confidence is peeling away and he’s desperate. Then he looks into yours. A glove whistles around and you don’t see it in time to get under it. Pain shoots through your right eye to the back of your head. The swelling starts and you curse your luck.
Revenge comes midway through the twelfth round. You measure the hometown hero for a straight right and a bolt shoots up your forearm at impact. It splits the thin flesh over his eye and he’s bleeding down face and chest. The crowd turns menacingly quiet as the round ends and the referee bounds over to Portney’s corner to examine the wound. Portney, brave and game, tries to wave him off. The referee calls in the ringside physician who takes one look and stops the fight.
You feel relief first –and it’s a good feeling. The robe your corner man just draped around your shoulders feels like a warm blanket on a cold night. Your chest fills with exhilaration, but you don’t want to celebrate too much in that blood-drenched ring. It’s hard to celebrate alone, and that’s a white man’s blood you spilled.

http://www.thesweetscience.com/news/articles/12280-just-watch-mah-smoke-part-4-knock-the-eight-ball-out-

Part 5: Holman Williams

Cocoa Kid wasn’t the only African American spoiling for a fight during those bleak and desperate years of the 1930s.
When he was a child in Detroit, Holman Williams had aspirations no higher than a rotary lift. He wanted to be a skilled auto mechanic. But he had a problem. Holman, like countless other skinny boys then and now from rough neighborhoods, was a target for bullies. Learning how to protect himself had become a pressing concern. The newly-built Brewster Recreation Center had a boxing gym in the basement and he started heading down there after school. Monthly dues cost a quarter –and those quarters changed everything; he gained self-confidence, blossomed into a different kind of Motor City mechanic, and became a group leader. His problems with bullies vanished.

One autumn day in 1930, a large, quiet boy wearing bumpkin clothes that didn’t fit walked into the Brewster gym. Holman eventually began teaching him the principles of the sweet science. When the boy lost his first amateur bout and wanted to quit the ring for baseball, it was Holman who talked him out of it. The two became friends and competed in the amateur ranks together. Holman won the Detroit Golden Gloves featherweight title and went all the way to the Olympic semi-finals in 1932. The following year five products of the Brewster Gym won the Golden Gloves. One of them was Holman’s friend. His name was Joe Louis.

Louis never forgot him. “Holman Williams encouraged me a lot,” he remembered, “He was a beautiful boxer.”

He was also known to be almost obsessive about the tools of his trade, hand-washing his gym clothes every afternoon following a workout and holding fast to an unwritten rule that his trainers respected. It insisted that no one wrap the hands of Holman Williams except Holman Williams. By 1936, he was in his fourth year as a professional and built a record of 32-1-1 with 18 knockouts. The “Brewster style” got him there, with its emphasis on mobility and educated jabs, right hands, and left hooks. That fussiness about his tools and his technique did wonders on the road and he would display his mastery in five foreign countries and fifteen states before hanging up his gloves.

The first battleground he would conquer was New Orleans. Three stand-out performances at the Coliseum Arena earned him a small army of African American fans down on Rampart Street.

Another road warrior arrived on the scene six months after Holman and Rampart Street started buzzing. This one fought the same opponents and cleared the field “with ridiculous ease.” One of those opponents was Wesley Farrell. Farrell was in the gym training a couple of days before the match trying to ignore the presence of a tall, golden-hued fighter standing nearby:

“Did you see his eye?” Cocoa Kid asked his trainer.
“Yeah,” said the trainer, “it’s got a few cuts around it.”
“–I’ll have it all the way shut inside of three rounds.”

Pete Baird of the Times-Picayune soon proclaimed Cocoa Kid as the “the best negro fighter since Holman Williams and possibly better than even Holman.” With that, a historic feud between two all-time great welterweights began. Nothing like it had been seen since Jack Britton fought Ted “Kid” Lewis twenty times between 1915 and 1921. Nothing like it has been seen again.

Firing commenced on March 13th 1936.

Baird sat awestruck watching the hero of Rampart Street fend off the invader’s attack in the early rounds. Holman, he wrote, “gave one of the best displays of defensive ability I have ever seen.” Taking his time offensively, he used his arms to block shots while keeping a sharp eye on whatever slipped in. He would “shift his head an inch or two and catch the punches on his shoulders or neck, or duck them entirely.”

Holman was relying on a set of natural facts. Men get tired from constant physical exertion and throwing punches is far more exhausting than slipping them. Cocoa Kid, “curly-headed, quick-punching, and fast-stepping” seemed erratic compared to the “sullen, gliding” figure moving into him. He also seemed unnatural. As the rounds wore on Cocoa Kid didn’t wear out, instead, he accelerated down the stretch, jabbing forward and backward, crossing with his right to the head and kidney, and hooking to the ribs.

When the attack showed no signs of slowing, Holman tried to send over a general anesthetic. More often than not Cocoa Kid saw them coming and either stayed in close, clinched, or moved over. At the end, it was Cocoa Kid who got the gumbo.

The context was close and Holman was unconvinced. So weren’t the fans on Rampart Street. They put down enough money to make their man a 9-5 favorite in the April rematch. As hostilities resumed, Holman tried time and again to land his murderous right but Cocoa Kid’s jab kept forcing his gaze to the ceiling and his gloves swiped at air. Holman began crowding the taller man and roughhousing but it didn’t matter, his foe merely stepped back and measured him with straight shots. In the eighth, Holman landed a right followed by a head butt and Cocoa Kid sagged for a moment. Seeing his chance, he came in swinging but Cocoa Kid ducked and moved and pivoted and jabbed to weather the storm.

“You told me to go out and loaf that round,” Cocoa Kid complained during the minute rest. “Yeah,” said the second, “–but I didn’t tell you to get hit on the chin.”

“Holman is a good fighter,” Cocoa Kid conceded after the win, “but tonight he was grandstanding.” To Baird, the victor not only made Holman look “slow and ineffective,” he gave the impression that he could beat him every day of the week and twice on Tuesday.

Things were looking up for Cocoa Kid in the Big Easy. Even celebrities were beginning to notice; the Irish singer Morton Downey was making overtures to buy his contract soon after this performance.

Cocoa Kid publically boasted that no black man had ever defeated him, and Rampart Street got wind of it. They looked to their hero to do something about it, so he did. He fell in with light heavyweight champion John Henry Lewis in Philadelphia and learned new tricks. Then, in March 1937 he faced Cocoa Kid for the third time. This time things were different. Holman, who could switch between several styles on a dime, settled on the right one. To protect against Cocoa Kid’s left hook to the ribs, he fought out of a crouch –rolling, weaving, and slipping underneath long jabs to bang the body. Holman staged an upset after twelve rounds by fighting like those Italians who habitually beat his nemesis for years.

Rampart Street celebrated all night long.

Meanwhile, Cocoa Kid went and made his own adjustments. The fourth match was in June. This one began as a counterpunching contest with Holman the busier until Cocoa Kid took over. As his seconds “whooped it up,” he finished just fast enough on the outside to take a decision everyone agreed was close enough to go either way.

Only the crickets were heard on Rampart Street.

Cocoa Kid was ranked number two in the world by The Ring in January 1940 when he met Holman for the fifth time. From the opposite corner in a Baltimore ring he saw a cryptic emblem stitched on the front of Holman’s white terrycloth robe. When he turned around, Cocoa Kid noticed black letters on the back that read “I WILL.” Did he bring some voodoo up from the bayou? He brought something better than that. Joe Louis, the Heavyweight Champion of the World, worked his corner along with trainer Jack Blackburn. But Cocoa Kid was in high-gear. He was too good. No voodoo, no self-affirmation, not even the presence of a world-beater was enough to deny him. Holman lost a wide unanimous decision.

The next eight fights featured a draw and a decision loss that saw the Baltimore Sun and spectators dedicate a ditty to Cocoa Kid called ‘He Wuz Robbed’, a unanimous decision win that saw Holman outboxed and outpunched for 15 rounds, a six round decision win in a fast fight at Madison Square Garden, another clear victory over twelve, a draw that was popular among the fans, and a slow split decision win. Their last bout was in 1945, two weeks after Cocoa Kid’s thirty-first birthday. Knowing that his ability to keep a sizzling pace was diminished, he came out strong but faded by round five. Holman, who at 167 lbs was nine pounds heavier than his rival, used the same strategy he tried the first time they collided –he waited for Cocoa Kid to run out of gas. Nine years later it worked.

The record shows that Cocoa Kid defeated Holman eight times, lost three, and scored two draws over their thirteen fight series. Boxing historian Harry Otty has included both of them in the dreaded ranks of Murderers’ Row, those great black middleweights first identified by Budd Schulberg who were routinely avoided during the 1940s.

Holman fought seven members of those ranks a total of thirty-six times.

He was mastered by only one.

…..
In 1967, someone set fire to the Club Wonder in Akron, Ohio. A maintenance man sleeping inside woke up to find the place ablaze and tried to escape. He was overcome by smoke and died where he fell. The charred remains of Holman Williams were exhumed from the rubble. He was fifty-two years old.

After years of neglect, his accomplishments were exhumed and he was voted into the International Boxing Hall of Fame in 2008.

http://www.thesweetscience.com/news/articles/12332-qjust-watch-mah-smokeq-part-5-holman-williams

Part 6: Top contender, adrift

On a September day in 1935, Cocoa Kid’s manager sat down and wrote out a check for $2500. He filed it at the New York State Athletic Commission for his fighter to meet world champion Barney Ross. In October he threw up his hands. “We can’t get a title shot at Ross,” he said, “because they duck us, saying the negro won’t draw, is too tall, and other things.” Ross’s manager offered Cocoa Kid a non-title shot in November, which meant that he would have to come in over the 147 pound weight limit so Ross’s welterweight title would not be at stake. Cocoa Kid’s manager was willing: “I told the promoter we would take anything he gave us just to get Ross in the ring with Cocoa.” It didn’t happen.
In early 1937, Cocoa Kid defeated Jack Portney and knocked out Andrea Jessurun. Promoter Lou Fisher offered Ross $3,000 to fight Cocoa Kid in Baltimore but the telegram was never answered.

On June 11th two boxers considered by the New Orleans Times-Picayune to be “the best negro welterweights in years” were prominently mentioned for a St. Louis bout in July with the champion. That night Cocoa Kid whipped Holman Williams for the third time and took a title no one cared about –the so-called colored welterweight championship. He followed it up with two knockouts and a decision win, and July went by without a phone call. In August, Ross outpointed Al Manfredo, a loser in his previous six bouts, and then defeated Ceferino Garcia for the third time in two years.

In May 1938, Ross was blown off his throne by the Category 5 hurricane that was Henry Armstrong. The new world welterweight champion began an impressive reign, but maintained the status quo. Among the sixteen men who got title shots were Ceferino Garcia and Al Manfredo –twice. Cocoa Kid was dutifully avoided.

As Cocoa Kid entered his peak in 1940, efforts were renewed to get the streaking top contender a title shot against Armstrong. New York’s Ringside Weekly joined New England and waved a flag for such a “natural” match-up. “Every fight fan who has seen the Cocoa Kid in action,” it proclaimed, “invariably walks away asking himself this question: ‘Why don’t they match this great fighter with champion Henry Armstrong?’” Meanwhile, promoter Lou Fisher offered $5,000 to Armstrong’s manager for a non-title bout in Baltimore. Armstrong’s manager refused, citing his obligations to the New York State Athletic Commission. In Washington D.C., a promoter offered Armstrong $10,000 in June and a matchmaker offered him $15,000 in July to fight Cocoa Kid, but nothing came of either. The National Boxing Association (NBA) announced its intention that summer to force Armstrong to face the winner of the Cocoa Kid–Phil Furr bout or risk losing his title. Cocoa Kid beat Furr to a pulp, the NBA backed off, and who got the next title shot? Phil Furr.

October came and Armstrong faced third-ranked Fritzie Zivic despite the fact that Cocoa Kid had been ranked number one since April.

The Maryland Boxing Commission was disgusted enough to withdraw recognition of Armstrong as champion. “If Armstrong intends to limit his fights to second and third raters,” the chairman declared, “there is no reason for Maryland to recognize him.” In a gesture that combined goodwill and absurdity, they declared their intention to crown the winner of the upcoming Cocoa Kid–Izzy Jannazzo bout as the “World Welterweight Champion” …of Maryland.

SMOKE AND MIRRORS
He had to sweat off two pounds on the afternoon of the fight but Cocoa Kid walked into the ring a 9-5 favorite over Jannazzo anyway. He was in for a surprise. Jannazzo, either concerned or slighted by the laurels around Cocoa Kid’s famous jab, elected to jab with him. It was a wise move.

The chief priests of pugilism have long since traded in white tunics for moth-eaten sweaters and incense for cheap cigars, but their maxims remain constant. “Never hook with a hooker,” warns a gravelly voice, “–but jab with a jabber.” Like many tactics of the sweet science, such instructions make sense only after explanation. A properly thrown hook is the most physically complicated punch in the boxing textbook. It can also be the most lethal. Its circular trajectory comes in from the periphery, and is therefore harder to see than a straight punch. When it lands, the brain twists on its stem and crashes against the jagged inner part of the human skull. That kind of trauma can kill a man.

The jab is to the hook what a bean shooter is to a military flail, but what it lacks in power it makes up for in utility. In fact, it’s a multi-purpose tool. It allows the boxer to judge distance and set up more powerful blows. It expends the least amount of energy of any punch and buys crucial moments to rest and regroup after a rough exchange. It is positioned closest to the target and can be snapped out quickly to keep opponents at bay, thus forcing the less cerebral to think twice before barreling in.

If you are on the receiving end of a jab now and then, it isn’t so bad. The price is often no more than a sore sniffer and bleary eyes. “Jabbing with a jabber” is a relatively safe option, and there’s a considerable payoff. Boxers, like anyone else, are prone to crystallize habits over time. They may take tea in the afternoon, watch the news at 6, and rely almost exclusively on their jab in sparring. Sometimes they develop a neurotic reliance on it. If their opponent can defuse it by countering it into extinction or by turning the tables and out-jabbing him, a funny thing happens –the boxer often abandons it. Once the boxer is so disabused he will have trouble finding his rhythm and range, and he won’t be able to sneak in those little rests. All of these comforts are snatched away like a pillow from a sibling.

Jannazzo played it cool, reported The Sun, “–coolly and confidently,” as he stabbed Cocoa Kid with his own sword. But Cocoa Kid had answers. He began countering his mirror-image with a “wicked right” that sailed over the top of the incoming jab. In the ninth, Jannazzo landed his own right cross and Cocoa Kid exploded with a combination to the head and body. Both threw caution to the wind and fought on even terms in the last three rounds.

The decision was split. The two judges disagreed on the winner so the deciding vote was cast by the referee –no less an icon than Jack Dempsey himself. Dempsey (who was rebuked by trainer Ray Arcel in 1952 for inexplicably deciding in favor of a good white fighter over a great black fighter) chose the white fighter. The decision was greeted by cheers and boos. The Sun had Cocoa Kid way ahead –seven rounds to four with four even. The Associated Press agreed that Cocoa Kid took seven rounds with Jannazzo taking five and three even. Cocoa Kid’s manager was outraged enough to appeal to the people: “What does a fighter have to do to win?” he squawked, “There is no question that my fighter made all the fight.”

SMOKE ON THE WATER
When the United States entered World War II, four thousand American boxers heard the bugle call. Five world champions were among them and their thrones were kept on ice while they marched. Jack Dempsey, too old to join the Army or Navy, was permitted to join the Coast Guard. Barney Ross asked for combat duty and saw action as a Marine at Guadalcanal. It turned his hair white. Sugar Ray Robinson and Joe Louis enlisted in the Army. After boot camp, Louis defended the heavyweight crown against the hapless Abe Simon in March 1942 and donated his entire purse to the Army Emergency Relief Organization. He boxed over 96 exhibitions for two million troops before he was discharged. The Secretary of War praised him for his patriotism.

None of this escaped Cocoa Kid, who fought on the undercard of Louis-Simon at Madison Square Garden. On October 29th 1943, three weeks after winning every round against Jimmy McDaniels in Hollywood, he voluntarily enlisted into the Naval Reserve and became a patriot. He swore an oath of allegiance to his country and promised to serve honestly and faithfully for two years.

The Navy wasn’t so enthusiastic about having him. Jim Crow wore a pea coat.

This period of American naval history is shameful. For years, the brass strongly resisted expanding the role of black Americans to anything outside of swab work. Under pressure from the White House (itself under pressure from the NAACP), they cited the white man’s rejection of the black man as an equal to justify their resistance. They didn’t see it in terms of fairness or utilization of manpower because of a preoccupation with upholding the black man’s traditional subservient role; anything more, they argued, would “lead to disruptive and undermining conditions.” The Chief of Naval Operations offered to include construction, general labor, and yard craft as possible assignments, but also requested "that men of the colored race, other than those for the messman branch, be not assigned to ships or shore stations."

Despite the efforts of Navy brass, African Americans were finally allowed to enlist for general service in the Navy as well as messmen in 1942. By the end of the war about 123,000 had served overseas, though they continued to be segregated from white crew members and any who achieved the rank of petty officer could only command black subordinates.

Cocoa Kid reported to the Navy Recruiting Station in Los Angeles to begin active duty at 9am on November 5th 1943. His motivation to join this branch of the military may have been sentimental. At the height of World War I, his father’s footsteps led to the sea –the angry sea that swallowed steamships whole and never spat back a scrap of metal or a sailor’s cap. In 1943, messmen were re-designated “steward’s mates” and it was in that capacity that Cocoa Kid would serve his country. He became a steward’s mate –a messman, third class– just like dad.

He received orders to report to the Puget Sound Naval Shipyard in Washington for duty and almost immediately applied for a life insurance policy. He named his wife Maria and infant son Carlos as beneficiaries. At the end of December he was reassigned and sent to the U.S. Naval Station in Astoria, Oregon.

There was something wrong. On January 14th 1944 he was placed aboard a train back to Washington to a naval hospital “for treatment.” He was there for a month and was then sent back to Astoria. Soon he was walking up the plank of the escort carrier U.S.S. Marcus Island, sea bag over a shoulder. The former top contender donned the messman’s bow tie to set tables and serve white officers their meals. It didn’t last. Five days after boarding the ship in Washington, Cocoa Kid was back ashore in a naval hospital in California. He would be hospitalized for the remainder of his term.

Cocoa Kid failed to serve out his two-year commitment as expected. He was given an honorable service lapel button and mustered out on June 12th 1944 –only seven months after enlisting. (Oddly, the length of time between his father’s enlistment and the disappearance of the U.S.S. Cyclops was also seven months.)

He was “not recommended for reenlistment.” What happened? A Board of Medical Survey examined the case and the patient appeared before it in May. They determined that he suffered from a permanent disability “not due to own misconduct” and their recommendation that he be discharged was approved by the Bureau of Medicine and Surgery in Washington D.C. The specifics were never publicized and it is unlikely that Cocoa Kid ever shared what they told him with anyone.

A typed page in his service record reveals his secret. It glares ominously even now: “DIAGNOSIS: DEMENTIA PUGILISTICA.”

http://www.thesweetscience.com/news/articles/12450-just-watch-mah-smoke-part-6-top-contender-adrift

Part 7: Divin with da sharks

An aging Cocoa Kid, more damaged than anyone knew.
On December 9th 1943 the Boxing Writers Association of New York awarded those 4,019 boxers who answered Uncle Sam’s call during World War II the Edward J. Neil Memorial Plaque for outstanding service to the sport. One of those recipients was a thirty-year-old steward’s mate.
The following June, Cocoa Kid was handed his military discharge papers while a patient at a United States Naval Hospital and sent on his way. He filed a claim for disability benefits from the Veterans Administration and boarded a train east to live with his family on West 53rd Street in New York City.

After spending two months in the gym, Cocoa Kid, now a middleweight, stepped through the ropes of a Brooklyn ring. A thousand servicemen watched him knock Billy Campanelli down three times before the fight was stopped. From there he took a train down to New Orleans for a draw with Holman Williams and then went west to Hollywood where Jack Chase was waiting. “Some critics,” opined the Los Angeles Times, “think these two should deal off such a scientific spray that pictures ought to be made to serve as instructions to the younger generation on what the manly art of self-defense is all about.”

Cocoa Kid shocked them all by winning every round. No one filmed it.

Three weeks later, he met the third consecutive member of Murderers’ Row in two months. Aaron “Tiger” Wade nailed him in the first round and he dropped like a cheap suitcase for an eight count. He got up to finish the remaining rounds in a daze and lost the decision. In two weeks he was telling the San Francisco Examiner’s Eddie Muller that he’d be in better shape to fight Oakland Billy Smith. Muller believed him.

The betting odds favored Cocoa Kid over Smith by 2-1, but referee Frankie Brown had an ear on the avenue and he heard that Cocoa Kid was set to take a dive. The rumor was buzzing around the San Francisco Civic Auditorium before the main event. When the odds sank to even money and suddenly sprang up in favor of Smith at fight time, Muller saw the writing on the wall.

So didn’t the referee. He confronted Cocoa Kid in the dressing room. “He promised me then,” said Brown, “that he would do his best, that he was a clean fighter all his life and knew nothing of rumors being circulated that he was to lose.”

Brown watched him closely from the opening bell. He watched him roll with a “light left hook” to the body and go down anyway. Brown didn’t start the count; he told him to get up and warned him that he wouldn’t be paid if he threw the fight. In the second round, Cocoa Kid’s jab hissed out like it was supposed to and he won the round. Then came round three; Smith landed a right of no account to his forehead and he collapsed by the ropes. Brown angrily told him to get up. After he tumbled down again, Brown waved the fight off and declared it a “no-contest.” The crowd gave Brown an ovation, and booed Cocoa Kid out of the auditorium.

After the fiasco, Brown wrote a report where he recommended that Cocoa Kid’s purse be withheld and he be banned from competing in California for the rest of his career. Cocoa Kid feebly claimed that the first punch that knocked him down debilitated him. No one was buying it. At the official hearing on December 6th 1944 the disgraced fighter tried a new claim. He said his poor performance was because of familial concerns, including a sick mother and problems with his now ex-wife Maria, who was suing for custody of his children.

…It had been nearly a decade since Cocoa Kid stood up to a well-connected manager and reported a bribe in Connecticut. He was a fresh-faced newcomer then, bolder perhaps and more naive. We can’t see the personal or professional cost of that decision, but we can guess: It may have forced him to leave town and hide out in a harbor village. It may have seen his name blacklisted by the powers-that-be who decided who got world title shots and who got left out in the cold.

His clock was ticking and he knew it. By the spring of 1941, he had, according to the Washington Post, “lost some of his zip.” If the Navy medical officers were correct in diagnosing him with Dementia Pugilistica, he was losing more than that. By the end of 1942 insiders were calling him “the ancient Keed” and he wasn’t even thirty. By the time he fought Smith, he was thirty and his odometer read 213 fights in a career that began way back in 1928. That’s a lot of wear and tear on a man.

If he wanted a world title shot before his power surges turned to hot flashes and his mind turned to mush, he had to get it soon. He had to do something. So what happened? A manager or a representative of something grimmer may have approached him out of the shadows. “Take a dive,” he’d have heard, “and we’ll take care of you.” There may have been a flip-side –“double-cross us like you did Lou Viscusi back in New Haven and you won’t walk away from it.” What no one counted on was how awful Cocoa Kid would be at falling down. He was worse than Sonny Liston in Lewiston. Sure, he could carry an opponent –he almost certainly carried several white ones over the years, but taking a dive is different. It crosses the line into the kind of corruption you don’t come back from, the kind that causes irreparable harm to a career and reputation. Diving also requires practice and some degree of thespian talent. Cocoa Kid had neither.

What he had was a gun to his head. That would, at least, explain why he fell down after warnings that began in the dressing room and why he continued to fall down even after he was told that he wouldn’t be paid. What –or who– was he afraid of? The chairman of the California State Athletic Commission smelled sharks: “The Cocoa Kid had a high reputation,” he said, “and he is possibly the victim of the intimidation of others.”

If he was, he kept his mouth shut this time around.

The truth is often a liability in red light districts. Sometimes it’s in the trunk of a car stuffed in a sack. Rocky Graziano was as tough a middleweight as there ever was and he was approached to throw a fight on four different occasions. A prosecutor put him under oath and asked him to name names. He refused. Graziano knew the consequences. Cocoa Kid was asked about the rumors of a “gambler’s fix” and replied “I don’t know anything about it.” Then he was asked if he recognized the name of a prominent underworld figure operating in the area. “I’ve heard the name,” he said, “but I’ve never met him.” Cocoa Kid knew the consequences.

In the end, his $600 purse was forfeited and the commission unanimously voted to suspend him from fighting in California for the maximum time allowable.

THE SHIP SAILS
Archie Moore is considered by many to be among the best pound-for-pound fighters who ever lived. He was not only in his prime and ranked second in the light heavyweight division when Baltimore invited Cocoa Kid to face him, he was a debilitating puncher. No fighter in history scored more career knockouts.

Cocoa Kid’s decision to face him was either high-minded or desperate. At first it seemed high-minded. Long arms and legs enabled him to outmaneuver Moore for seven rounds. But Moore caught up with him in the eighth, landed a right hand smash on the tip of his chin, and that was that. Cocoa Kid lay still as death and was counted out. With that, Moore also counted him out of serious contention for all time.

The aging fighter’s journey soon decelerated into something of a farewell tour. He fought in nostalgic venues such as Holyoke and New Orleans, and even travelled to Puerto Rico for two bouts. Less ready but still willing to face top-ranked fighters, he’d crash enemy gyms to watch them train, and lose nearly as much as he won. When Cocoa Kid fought stable mate Bert Lytell for the third time, he couldn’t hold him off anymore. He went six rounds “on courage alone” until chief second Dan Florio refused to let him out of the corner for the seventh. Florio may have saved his life.

Once in a while, Cocoa Kid was still able to conjure up old tricks and surprise everyone. He fought a hungry prospect in Ray Barnes who, at eighteen, happened to be the same age that Cocoa Kid was when he defeated Louis Kaplan all those years ago. Barnes had never been stopped. He brimmed with the confidence of youth –and was knocked cold inside of six rounds. “The odds were 15 to 1 on Barnes,” Cocoa Kid said after the smoke cleared. He said it quietly –perhaps in that slurring whisper so sad and familiar.

It would be his last victory.

A circle was closing. What began with fifty cent sparring sessions in West Palm Beach was ending with sparring sessions in the camps of middleweight champion Tony Zale and Marcel Cerdan. Once again he found himself forced to work for fighters with brighter futures, only now his jets had cooled as much as his bank account.

He told the Chicago Daily Tribune that he “could use a good-sized purse,” and he almost got one.

Sugar Ray Robinson had signed a contract with a promoter in Houston, Texas to face Gene Burton. When Burton’s suspension in another state came to light, the promoter reached an agreement with Robinson to face a rusting Cocoa Kid on April 17th 1949. Robinson, who had complained that both Zale and Cerdan had turned down offers to fight him, never showed up. The Deputy Boxing Commissioner recommended that he face immediate suspension until he fulfilled the contract or reimbursed the promoter. “This runout,” he said, “is certainly no credit to Robinson.” Robinson agreed to reschedule the bout for May 24th; but didn’t show up for that either.

Cocoa Kid, now 35, was robbed of yet another opportunity to prove himself against a world champion. Three months later he was in New Jersey sparring with Robinson for chump change. He knocked him down with a perfectly timed right hand

–and then disappeared.

http://www.thesweetscience.com/news/articles/12472-just-watch-mah-smoke-part-7-divin-with-da-sharks

Part 8: Traveling Light

After Cocoa Kid’s sparring session with Sugar Ray Robinson in the summer of 1949, I lost him. I was groping in the dark for a while, staring down dead ends, wondering where he went and where to go to find him. I thought of those 153 men he jabbed blind before stepping off into the periphery, into the smoke. I knew how they felt.
Chicago seemed a good place to rummage around. Perched as it is on the windy shores of Lake Michigan, Chicago would make sense to him. I knew that he had six fights there when his career winded down, and that the Daily Tribune mentioned him living there after his knockout of Ray Barnes. Then I found a marriage license filed with the Cook County Clerk in 1951. It announced the marriage of Marguerite Winrou to one Louis Herbert Hardwick.

He routinely used his middle name for his first name and seems to have habitually misspelled it. Louis is actually Lewis, and his father’s hand-written signature on a 1917 draft card proves it. His last name varied by one letter. “Hardwick” was the name he gave before boarding the S.S. Ponce in Puerto Rico in 1930. It was the one he gave at the hearing before the Connecticut State Athletic Commission in 1935. He also spelled it Harwick. A New Haven telephone directory from 1933 records a Louis E. Harwick living on Dixwell Avenue with his wife Maria. The Holyoke Daily Transcript and Telegram from the same year has Lewis claiming that he was given the name Elberto Louis Harwick at birth.

It is not unlikely that he was given a Spanish name when he was born in Puerto Rico. His mother may have doubted that the American seaman she met and slept with while he was on liberty in Mayaguez would ever return. When the seaman did return and brought them both to live in Georgia, the infant was renamed ‘Herbert Lewis Hardwick’ for him. But Lewis came to identify more with his Puerto Rican heritage. In the forties, he began referring to himself as Luis. In 1948, he told the Chicago Daily Tribune that he was born Luis Humberto. Indeed, his use of the names “Elberto” and “Humberto” may indicate a desire to spice up an Anglican name –Herbert– that he was probably not fond of. Long after both of his parents were dead, he would include his mother’s maiden name (Arroyo) when asked his name by reporters. According to the late Allen Rosenfeld, the name printed on his boxing license was Louis Hardwick Arroyo.

I believe that all of this reflects an attachment not to his mother but to his aunt.

At the hearing following the Oakland Billy Smith fight, he said that his poor performance was due to his anxiety about his “sick mother.” This could only have been his mother’s sister, Antonia Arroyo. It was Aunt Antonia who raised him and immersed him in her native culture. Her influence on his personality can be imagined.

In his younger days, he was confident and even cocky, but he also exhibited class. He would give credit where credit was due and was not averse to apologizing for knocking down a sparring partner. When an opponent named Wild Bill McDowell disrespected him over the air at a local radio station during a pre-fight interview, Lewis responded gracefully: “When a man is in the ring I give him everything I have,” he said into the microphone, “but outside the ring I treat him like a gentleman.” An article in the Washington Post tells us more. His habits were those of an introvert; he enjoyed listening to his portable radio and reading health magazines when he wasn’t boxing. He was a fitness fanatic long before it was in style and it showed in his build, particularly during his peak.

But peaks don’t last long. Neither do purses. In an era where purses were respectable but nothing close to the loot of later decades, he could have made a decent living if he saved or invested wisely, but he did not. Sometimes the purses he took weren’t even his: The day after a fight in the spring of 1939, New York City police officers fired two shots in the air and arrested Lewis for running off with a woman’s purse. It wasn’t the first time he was arrested and it wouldn’t be the last time he was desperate.

Desperation steadily drips behind the life journey of Cocoa Kid. It began on a sea of mystery when a ship disappeared and in the tears of a mother who learned that her husband was gone with it. It is in an orphan’s decision to become a fighter at fourteen. It is hinted at in references to his troubled marriage and his fear of losing custody of his children. It is there in the silence of opportunities that never came, in his stand against a well-connected manager, and in his dive a decade later. This desperation had tragic consequences as he aged; it put him in the ring against horrific punchers even after the fog of dementia set in.

In 1950 Lewis was retired from the ring and living in a basement room in the Bronx. It was burglarized, and he blamed the superintendents. His military discharge papers were taken along with his social security card. In a hand-written letter to the Navy to secure new papers, he pleaded for advice “as to what steps I should take.” What upset him most was his belief that his family photographs were stolen. Among them, he wrote, were photographs of “my sons whom I have lost.”

By 1955 he was living on 64th Street in Chicago and looking for a job. In an application for a certificate in lieu of lost military papers, he reported that he was held up and his discharge papers were stolen along with his compensation checks. “Please expedite” was typed and underlined on the application. A month later, he hadn’t received a reply and so sent in a second request; only by then he no longer had a home address.

Everything fell apart. "The Cocoa Kid, great welterweight of the 30's and 40's,” claimed the Police Gazette in early 1961, “is a wino derelict along New York's Tenth Avenue." This claim may be corroborated by a set of facts newly uncovered. In 1958, Lewis drifted back to New York City and lost his discharge papers again. On April 17th 1959, he filled out a form at a local Veterans Administration office and recorded his address as “general delivery, c/o Main Post Office 33 + 8th Ave N.Y.C. N.Y.”

–He was homeless.

The handwriting on the form bears the marks of the mentally ill. On every previous military document, his signature read Luis Humberto Harwick. Suddenly, we see him writing his name in a painstaking manner, as if straining to sift through an addled memory. He writes “Heriberto” as his first name, and seems to be moving closer to who he was: Elberto, Humberto, Heriberto… Herbert. He writes “Lewis” as his middle name. Lewis –it is finally spelled as it was intended, as his father’s was. His damaged mind is scrolling backwards into childhood. The last name spells “Harwitz.” He records the wrong date of birth (“Jan. 9, 1916”) and scrawls “Mexico” as his place of birth.

At 44, he was wandering the streets of New York and needed help. Someone came through and lent a hand because he was admitted into Chicago State Hospital soon after filling out that application.

Then known as Dunning Asylum, the gothic buildings of the hospital were antiquated and overcrowded. Many patients, cast off by families who could not cope, lie strapped to their beds or were forced to sleep on mats lining the narrow, windowless hallways. Lewis remained there for an unspecified amount of time, though hospital personnel didn’t know who he was, and neither did he anymore. He was called “Herbert Horowitz.” In an effort to identify him, administrators sent his fingerprints to the Naval Record Management Center in St. Louis –the same office that I contacted to identity him again over fifty years later.

It was the Veterans Administration that took care of him during those years of estrangement and destitution after boxing. There was no one else. Lewis was eventually transferred to the VA Hospital in North Chicago. He died there one winter’s day in 1966.

…
February, 2011. It is an hour’s ride from North Chicago up the coast of Lake Michigan to the gates of Wood National Cemetery. The cemetery is located in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. It opened on the property of the Soldiers Home in 1871 and was originally used to inter the remains of veterans who died at the home, including several Buffalo Soldiers and members of the 54th Colored Regiment of Massachusetts.

Fifty acres of white granite headstones are arrayed in perfect symmetry to commemorate lives less perfect. They stand in reproach of time and its lengthening shadows.

I found him here, at last.

Engraved on one of those headstones is the name “Herbert Lewis Hardwick” of “Georgia.” His grave is buried under a blanket of snow. It marks a journey buried under six decades of history. The snow is thawing.



Tomorrow, Lake Michigan will sparkle in the distance as dawn’s golden hues spill across the eastern sky. A breeze will caress ground no footsteps tread, stirring the early morning mist and sending it waifing

…like smoke.

…..
The opening photograph is from asylumprojects.com. Special thanks to Andrew Jacobs, C.F., Program Support Assistant at Wood National Cemetery for the photograph of the headstone.

The whereabouts of Herbert Lewis Hardwick during the 1950s was revealed through correspondence located in the military service record of Luis Humberto Harwick/Cocoa Kid obtained from the National Personnel Records Center, Military Personnel Records, in St. Louis, MO through the Freedom of Information Act. The description of Dunning Asylum derived from an unpublished article by Richard J. Vachula, 7/11/88.

The origins of Cocoa Kid were determined with the help of the following sources: Atlanta Constitution, “Louis Hardwick is Missing,” 8/9/01; 1900 U.S. Census (Lewis Hardwick of Atlanta, GA); Lewis Hardwick’s draft card dated June 6, 1917; New York Times, “Collier Cyclops Overdue A Month” 4/15/18 and Atlanta Constitution 4/15/18 front page; U.S.S. Cyclops; Officers and Enlisted Men of the United States Navy Who Lost Their Lives during the World War –published by the Government Printing Office; Holyoke Daily Transcript and Telegram 5/23/33 and 5/24/33, 1930 U.S. Census (E.A. Robinson of Atlanta, GA). Also see Chicago Daily Tribune 2/23/48, Hartford Courant 5/3/35. His use of the name “Arroyo” (as “Aroya”) can be seen in the New York Times and the Hartford Courant 8/6/41 and the Chicago Daily Tribune 9/2/41. Arroyo was his mother’s maiden name. Knowing that E.A. (Edward Allen) Robinson was his uncle and his wife’s name was Antonia allowed me to locate the Sanabria-Terreforte family tree. That confirmed that Antonia was born in Mayaguez and her maiden name was Arroyo. This solved the mystery of Cocoa Kid’s use of that name.

Lewis alternated between “Hardwick” and “Harwick.” Why he did is unclear. The official record of interment obtained from the US Department of Veterans Affairs states that “name of deceased” is “Luis Harwick” though the “name of the deceased exactly as it is to appear on headstone or marker” is given as “Herbert Lewis Harwick.” The surname of the next of kin on the document reads “Hardwick.”

The Washington Post reported Lewis’s apology to El Brookman after knocking him down during sparring (7/13/40), his on-air exchange with Wild Bill McDowell (6/18/40), and his introverted habits (6/17/40). Johnny Bos was kind enough to supply the report of Lewis’s arrest (The Chicago Defender 3/25/39).

Boxing historian Alister Scott Ottesen was very helpful in determining The Ring rankings for several fighters discussed in this series. The due diligence of Laura Magere, Communications Specialist for the Freedom of Information Act in Washington D.C. enabled me to exercise my own due diligence. I am grateful to Dan Cuoco, director of the International Boxing Research Organization who remains a prince for the long-forgotten fighters of history. Special thanks to boxing historian Ed Cahill for his willingness to help this stranger on his own secret journey.

I encourage readers to visit the grave of this great and tragic fighter, located in Wisconsin at Wood National Cemetery, section 36a, row 11, site 3.

Cocoa Kid still needs a hand. In October, the voting members of the BWAA should be contacted on his behalf and urged to vote him into the International Boxing Hall of Fame.

http://www.thesweetscience.com/news/articles/12507-just-watch-mah-smoke-part-8-traveling-light-

Incredible stuff, Scott.

I shall enjoy reading all this at some leisure. Thanks very much for sharing.

Very interesting stuff on a boxer that I didnt know a great deal about. The bit on Dempsey certainly raises an eyebrow or two especially given the recent scrutiny he has been under!

Thanks for the links.

Seconded. It's really good of you to take so much trouble. What a fascinating read.

Nice one Scott

Just been told I missed the intro, will add it to part 1.

http://www.thesweetscience.com/news/articles/12155-just-watch-mah-smoke-the-secret-journeys-of-cocoa-kid