[8.7] BARNEY ROSS 81-72(22)-4-3 [Welterweight & Light-Welterweight & Lightweight]: The New York Times - Real Sport online -
Once upon a time, in the not so long ago, boxing was a major sport, a staple of network television, a constant in the sports pages, and its champions were some of the most celebrated figures in the world of sports. But today boxing has been consigned to cable and pay-per-view TV, coverage in the press is hidden somewhere under the shipping news, and its four alphabet-soup heavyweight champions are so well unknown that if they were to appear in a police lineup clad in robes, trunks and gloves, not only would you not know who they were, you might have a hard time figuring out what they did for a living.
But if today's boxing carries about the same amount of interest as municipal bonds, then television documentaries, movies and books have more than made up for its present by recycling its past, offering up the lives of such old-timers as Jack Johnson, James J Braddock, Joe Louis and Max Schmeling to fan the dying embers of boxing’s campfire.
All the above-mentioned, of course, were heavyweight champions, the fighters with whom fans have long identified. Which makes the selection of Barney Ross an unusual subject for a boxing biography. Still, he is an excellent choice. For while some people are ahead of their time, and some after it, Barney Ross was his time – his time being the Great Depression, when fans who could not feed their bellies identified with this ‘little man’ who dealt out large platefuls of hope. This was especially true of his Jewish admirers, for whom Ross served up a healthy portion of ethnic pride. They adopted this warrior who, as Douglas Century writes, ‘embodied the fantasy of Jewish force’ in much the same way fans some 10 years before had adopted Benny Leonard, who, in the words of Budd Schulberg, ‘was doing with his fists what the Adolph Zukors and William Foxes, and soon the L B Mayers and the B P Schulbergs, were doing in their studios and their theaters … fighting the united efforts of the goyim establishment to keep them in their ghettos.’
Leonard had been the first stone to hit the water, creating, in ever-widening circles, wave after wave of fighters from the ghettos. In his wake came Maxie Rosenbloom, Al Singer and Sid Terris from New York; and from Chicago, King Levinsky, Jackie Fields, Charley White (whose talents inspired Ernest Hemingway to say that ‘life is the greatest left-hooker so far, although many say it was Charley White’), etc. etc. the et ceteras going on for about five pages or more. There were so many, in fact, that by 1930 the descendants of the 18th-century champion known as Mendoza the Jew so dominated the sport that the boxing announcer Joe Humphreys said, ‘The United States today is the greatest fistic nation in the world, and a close examination of its 4,000 or more fighters shows that the cream of its talent is Jewish.’
Perhaps the greatest of the 30s crop of Jewish boxers was a fighter out of the Maxwell Street area of Chicago, born Dov-Ber Rasofsky, better known by his nom-de-guerre, Barney Ross. The 19-year-old Rasofsky-Ross won the Chicago and Intercity Golden Gloves championships in 1929 and turned pro that same year, just as the Roaring Twenties came to a screeching halt, soon to be replaced by bread lines and Bonus Army camps. Fighting to exorcise ‘the bitterness and hatred inside me’ that resulted from the murder of his father in a grocery store holdup, Ross embodied the hopes and dreams of his Jewish followers, who were also battling with bitterness against the forces trying to keep them imprisoned in their ghettos.
But if a depression lay on the land, it also lay on boxing. By 1933, not only was the sport depressed, its talent was equally depressing. The heavyweight champion, Primo Carnera, was a joke; six of the eight major weight divisions suffered through periods when their titles were vacant; and Nat Fleischer, the editor of The Ring magazine, moaned: ‘Was there ever a year when so few boys shone in pugilism? I dare venture that 1933 is the worst on record.’
Into this vacuum came three little men who stood taller than their actual heights: Tony Canzoneri, Jimmy McLarnin and Barney Ross. They also stood for something more, ethnic identification: Canzoneri was Italian; McLarnin, Irish; and Ross, Jewish. Together these three would be the tonic the sport needed; as Century makes clear, their ring wars, in effect, were wars for ethnic turf.
In the years before Joe Louis took over as the face of boxing, the three would light up the sport’s bleak skies. Ross and Canzoneri initiated the wars with two fights in 1933, with Ross winning both, and the lightweight and junior-welterweight titles in the bargain. Ross next determined to challenge the welterweight champion, McLarnin, who was known as the Hebrew Scourge and the Jew Beater for taking on, and taking out, the best of the ghetto heroes.
In as thrilling a fight as New York had seen in many a year, Ross threw both caution and punches to the wind. Discarding the efficient, careful style that had served him so well in his previous 57 fights, he matched McLarnin punch for punch. Time and again he got away with it. He also got away with a split decision and the welterweight championship. Twice more these two greats were to battle for the ethnic turf of New York. And when the final tally had been made, it read: two victories for Ross, one for McLarnin and three for boxing.
Ross would go on to fight 18 more times, his final bout coming in 1938 against the perpetual motion machine called Henry Armstrong. For 15 rounds, Ross exhibited an infinite capacity for pain, absorbing everything Armstrong had to offer. He was badly beaten, and as he left the ring the sportswriter Grantland Rice asked, ‘Why didn’t you quit?’ A defiant former titleholder answered, ‘A champ’s got the right to choose the way he goes out.’
Barney Ross would indeed go out as a champion. And those fans who had cheered him at the beginning of his career in faith, and midway through in appreciation, now cheered him in adulation, his name worthy of being stenciled on all the white ribbons adorning Maxwell Street and his feats forever pressed between the pages of boxing’s record book.
However, the book on Ross was hardly closed with the end of his boxing career; it would go on to have more plotlines than a Russian novel. Century, the author of Street Kingdom: Five Years Inside the Franklin Avenue Posse, treats Ross’s boxing afterlife in exacting detail: his winning the Silver Star for having saved two Marine buddies and killing some 20 of the enemy on Guadalcanal, despite suffering serious injuries; his addiction to the morphine administered to him during his convalescence; his slide down the razor blade of life and his subsequent rehabilitation; and his advocacy of a Jewish state.
If there is one fault to be found with Barney Ross (the third book in the Jewish Encounters series), it’s that Century fails to connect the dots between the young Ross and those whose names appeared on the front pages and in the police blotter at the same time. Instead, he cites Ross’s claim that he ran only ‘innocuous errands’ for Al Capone (a statement he made in an FBI interview regarding his childhood friend Jacob Rubenstein, aka Jack Ruby) without carefully examining it. There are many competing versions of the story of the connection between Ross and Capone, depending upon which Chicago graybeard you listen to. One has it that Capone, a benefactor of all things boxing in Chicago in the 20s, actually underwrote Ross’s professional beginnings. Another, that if it wasn’t Capone himself, then it was one of his henchmen who gave Ross his amateur start. Either way, it deserves an explanation. And an explanation for the explanation.
Quibbles aside, this is an excellent story of a man and his times. And proof positive that time does not relinquish its hold over men or monuments. In a sport devoted to fashioning halos for its superstars, Ross wore a special nimbus, and this book properly fits him for that. The sport of boxing could surely use another Barney Ross today. The New York Times article 19 February 2006 Bert Randolph Sugar
Boxing Clever: The Remarkable Life of Barney Ross: Barney Ross (72-4-3) should never have been a prize-fighter. His father wanted him to be a scholar or a Rabbi: a man of peace and wisdom treading in his footsteps. The old man was an advocate of peaceful resistance and didn’t believe in fighting or any forms of violence no matter the level of provocation. He had himself settled in Chicago via anti-Semitic persecution in his native Belarus.
He was the respected neighbourhood rabbi and ran a small greengrocers shop to support his large family. Ross, whose birth name was Dov-Ber Rasofky, could be found there leafing diligently through text books. Instilled with the highest ideals he sought to become a scholar or teacher and had no connection or interest at all in the ring.
However, everything changed when Dov-Ber’s father was killed one day resisting a robbery at his little shop. A moment that recalibrated his 14-year-old son’s life forever as his once stable world was thrown into a state of flux. It was the darkest moment of Ross’s eventful life and proved the catalyst for him seeking out the formerly alien world of boxing.
Out of darkness came light, and it is easy to assume that without this horror, Ross would never have felt the compulsion to lace on gloves. That the future all-time great and three weight world champion would have been perpetually lost to the alternate realm of the ‘road not taken’.
But for all that, Ross lived his life with such a sense of purpose, courage and commitment that he probably would have prospered in whatever sphere he pursued. Instead, conversely, Judaism may have lost ones of its great scholars.
Following the death of his father and the subsequent nervous breakdown of his mother, the Rasofky family was split up and scattered like the wind amongst distant relatives and children’s homes. At 14, Ross, alone, hungry and consumed with rage was left to fend for himself. The cruel fate of his father led him to turn away from religion. Desperate and angry he ran with street gangs robbing and stealing, even at one point finding himself on the pay-roll of the notorious Al Capone.
Among Ross’s crew was another local tough by the name of Jack Ruby. A boy that went on to run night clubs, exist on the edge of probity and play an important supporting role in one of the great seismic events of the 20th century. Ross took to the stand as a character witness for Ruby at his trial for the murder of JFK’s killer Lee Harvey Oswald. Much earlier it was Ruby that first encouraged Ross to take his first tentative steps into a gym. Rather than dreaming of stardom he saw it as a means of making money to purchase a house and achieve his dream of reuniting his family.
Ross, soon found that he had a natural affinity for the sport, and armed with his unwavering sense of purpose, scooped multiple amateur titles. When he turned professional in 1929, he dropped his birth-name out of reverence to his father’s abhorrence of violence, and his desire to not link his family name to it.