A Rough and Tumble Life
Douglas Century reflects on the life of the great Jewish boxer Barney Ross. He grew up in a tough Chicago neighborhood, and lived through his father’s murder and his mother’s nervous breakdown before dabbling in small-scale crime and finally becoming a championship boxer. The new biography Barney Ross is part of the Jewish Encounters series.
In Chicago, a regulation of the Illinois State Athletic Commission makes it obligatory to score prizefights by points, ten to a round. When Lightweight Champion Tony Canzoneri had finished defending his title last week against a sad faced young Hebrew named Barney Ross (Bernard Rossofsky) the referee gave both fighters 50 points. One of the judges gave Ross 52. Canzoneri 48. The other judge gave Ross 53, Canzoneri 47. That made Ross the new champion but the sweltering crowd in the Chicago Stadium, believing that to win a championship a man should do more than fight ten clever defensive rounds without falling down, loudly booed the decision. Said Canzoneri, who had indubitably won the first round, been outboxed in the next two, come on fast till the sixth and then traded punches carelessly till the fight ended: 'The decision was the surprise of my life. . . . Honestly, I thought I was so far ahead that I coasted in the eighth and ninth, did not extend myself in the tenth. . . ." Said Ross: 'I fought just as I planned. I coasted myself in those closing rounds.''
A fighter who had never been heard of four years ago, Bernard Rossofsky was born in Manhattan, reared in Chicago. He made the Chicago Tribune Golden Gloves learn in 1920,. Like many Golden Gloves boxers, he promptly turned professional. Unlike most, he won his fights. Last week's was his 23rd victory in a row. All Hebrew lightweights who know how to execute a simple feint are automatically compared with Benny Leonard. Slick little Ross may turn out to justify the analogy better than his predecessors—Sid Terris, Ruby Goldstein, Al Singer—if, as he promised to do last week, he gives Canzoneri, who had held the title for three years, a return match next autumn. Far more uncertain than the light weight situation is the condition of the heavyweight championship. This week's fight between Jack Sharkey (champion) and Primo Camera is actually no more than an elimination bout to provide a worthy opponent for Max Baer, who beat Schmeling. In Oakland, Calif., newshawks last week unearthed another Baer possibly even more alarming than Max—his brother "Buddy" Baer, 17, 6 ft. 4½ in., 246 lb., who plans to become a professional fisticuffer next autumn.
Since the first fight with Canzoneri, there had been a lot of speculation -- especially from the New York press -- that Canzoneri had been jobbed by a hometown decision. Ross, who never ducked anybody, gave Canzoneri a rematch on Tony's home turf in New York City. The return bout, on September 12th, before more than 40,000 roaring, stomping fans in the Polo Grounds, was a major Big Apple event. The celebrity's in the crowd included members of the Presidential Cabinet, governors, mayors, famous mobsters & movie, radio & recording stars.This time scheduled for 15 rounds, the fight was a brutal, bloody, bout. It wasn't until the last few rounds, when Ross had Canzoneri out on his feet, that Barney was able to develop a clear cut edge. After the fight, Ross indicated that he was glad he had not knocked out the gallant Canzoneri.
Synopsis: Andre De Toth's MONKEY ON MY BACK stars Cameron Mitchell (HOW TO MARRY A MILLIONAIRE) as ex-boxer Barney Ross. Ross returns from military service in Guadalcanal, where he became addicted to morphine after succumbing to malaria. Unable to kick his craving, Ross becomes a fully-fledged heroin addict, much to the dismay of everyone around him. Although the film isn't graphic in its depiction of a fallen man caught up in the throes of a powerful addiction, it was still very much ahead of its time. Otto Preminger's THE MAN WITH THE GOLDEN ARM precedes De Toth's film by two years, and its tale of a poker player trying to give up heroin is the most obvious cinematic predecessor to MONKEY ON MY BACK. But such films were few and far between in the 1950s, making this a brave stab at tackling addiction in a time when drug taking was barely mentioned in the movies. Based on the true story of boxer Barney Ross, Martin Scorsese's docudrama RAGING BULL is another close cinematic bedfellow; if nothing else, De Toth's film certainly keeps some impressive company
Barney Ross and the "tough Jew"
In the mid-1950s, my family lived in an apartment above the Kentucky Club, a nightclub catering to NY Jews who stayed at bungalow colonies and small hotels during the summer. Most of the acts were veterans of the Jewish stage like Molly Picon or Moishe Oysher but the biggest draw was the Jewelbox Revue, a group of men who performed in drag. One day I came home to find one of the performers in our living-room, where my mom was sewing some sequins on his costume as a favor. She nonchalantly introduced this charming Black man as "Miss Peggy", as he preferred to be called.
The Kentucky Club had hired famed ex-boxing champion Barney Ross as a "greeter" one summer, which one I can't exactly remember. But I do have vivid memories of spending time with him on the street corner in the evenings as he took a break from his duties. Resplendent in a tuxedo and puffing on a cigarette beneath a streetlamp, he cut a dashing figure. He was always happy to chat with me, as were many of the people at the Kentucky Club who treated me like their mascot.
Since that time, I have learned few details about Ross's life, other than the obvious fact that he was a Jewish boxer and that he had kicked a morphine addiction developed as a way of suppressing the pain of wounds suffered at Guadalcanal. His struggle was dramatized in the 1957 biopic "Monkey on My Back."
When I learned that a new biography of Ross by Douglas Century had been published, I would have bought it even if it were nothing but a standard sports biography. I was really curious about who Barney Ross was and how he compared to the image of him that lingered with me all these years.
"Barney Ross" is the third volume in a joint project of Schocken and Nextbook publishers called "Jewish Encounters" that seeks to promote Jewish literature, culture, and ideas. Although a biography of Barney Ross might be the last thing to expect in the same series of already released studies of King David and Maimonides (Moses, Spinoza and others to follow), Century does achieve a kind of monumentality. Century connects Ross not only to legendary figures that preceded him, like Daniel Mendoza the British Jew who was the champion of the London Prize Ring in 1792, but to a host of important cultural and political figures such as Saul Bellow, who came out of the same hardscrabble Chicago streets. Additionally, Century draws out all the interesting political and social implications of Barney Ross's amazing tendency to cross paths with controversial Jewish personalities from Irgunist Peter Bergson to Jack Ruby.
Beyond the interest that is sustained in Barney Ross as an individual, Century also addresses a phenomenon that is the subject of two earlier works by other writers, namely the "tough Jew." In considering Barney Ross and the Jewish boxer in general as an example of this phenomenon, Century contributes to a debate on the "Jewish Question" that will remain unresolved until contradictions between Jews and their ostensible antagonists are resolved on a higher level.
Dov Ber Raskofsky, who would assume the name Barney Ross after launching a career as a boxer, was born to Itchik and Sarah Rasofsky on the Lower East Side on December 23, 1909. Although his father had taught Hebrew back in Brest-Litovsk, he made a living as a small grocer. This was a trade he would continue once he arrived in the USA, following his departure in the aftermath of state-sanctioned pogroms in 1903.
Within two years of his birth, Ross and his family would depart for Chicago to take over a grocery store in the Maxwell Street ghetto, also the home of bandleader Benny Goodman, future Supreme Court Justice Arthur Goldberg, actor Paul Muni and William Paley, who would one day run CBS.
Maxwell Street was a poverty-stricken rat's nest that was a breeding ground for pneumonia, TB and diphtheria. It also bred many Jewish criminals, who, like the Jewish boxers of the time, were considered "tough Jews." This included Jacob Guzik, who was Al Capone's financial adviser and Samuel "Nails" Morton, who provided protection to Jewish businessmen against marauding gangs from other ethnic groups. In 1917 Morton was arrested for nearly beating to death several members of a Polish gang.
Barney Ross began running with young Jewish hoodlums at an early age and soon gained a reputation for being an effective street fighter despite his small size--his nickname was "Runt."
In 1923, Itchik Rasofsky was shot and killed by robbers in his store. Shortly afterwards, Barney Ross dropped out of high school and started hustling on the street. His younger two brothers and sister were put into an orphanage. Two years later, at the age of fifteen, he began hanging out at Kid Cross's gym where Jackie Fields (born Jacob Finkelstein) trained. Fields would win the gold medal at the Paris Olympic in 1924 before turning pro. In this period, it is estimated that 30 percent of all professional fighters were Jewish. Despite the deep prejudice against sports in general and especially fighting in the Jewish community, many men became boxers for the same reasons that Irish, Italian and Blacks would: to escape poverty. But other nationalities would not have to overcome the psychological hurdle created by a millennium of Jewish traditions.
When the Japanese, attacked Pearl Harbor, Ross — beyond draft age at 32 — received a waiver to join the Marines. Assigned to serve as a boxing instructor, Ross instead asked for combat duty and was shipped to Guadalcanal, sow* of some of ft bloodiest fighting in the Pacific. On patrol one night Ross and three comrades were attacked by a superior force of Japanese troops. All three of Ross’ comrades were wounded. He gathered them in a shell crater and defended them through the night by firing more than 400 rifle rounds. When he ran out of bullets, Ross threw 22 grenades at enemy machine gun positions. Ross claimed that he said two hours of prayers, "many in Hebrew," hoping to make it through the night. Finally, at dawn, with two of his three comrades dead, wounded in the leg and foot himself and out of ammunition, Ross — who weighed less than 140 pounds — picked up his surviving wounded comrade (who weighed 230 pounds) and carried him to safety. Ross, whose helmet had more than 30 shrapnel dents, was awarded the Silver Star for heroism.
Ross all the morphine he asked for. When he got out of the hospital, Ross toured military plants to raise morale among workers, but couldn’t shake his need for morphine. When his habit began to cost him $500 per week and his wife left him, Ross sought admission to a federal drug treatment facility. While few gave him much chance of breaking the habit, Ross went "cold turkey" and, after much agony from withdrawal, emerged 120 days later having kicked the habit. While he lived in constant pain from his wounds, Ross spent the remainder of his life speaking out against drug abuse. Hollywood later turned Ross’ autobiographical account of his addiction into the movie "Monkey on My Back."
A former Coney Island strongman killed by a minivan at the age of 104 was laid to rest Saturday by friends and family who spared no superlative in describing his life.
"Joe Rollino wasn't just a man, he was an irreplaceable fixture of South Brooklyn for over a century," friend Gino Longo, 42, said at St. Bernadette Church in Dyker Heights, Brooklyn.
"They just don't make men like Joe Rollino anymore. God broke the mold."
Rollino - war veteran, boxer, weightlifter and all-around Brooklyn legend - was crossing Bay Ridge Parkway to buy a newspaper last week when he was struck and killed by a Ford Windstar van.
Joseph J Rollino
Birth Year: 1915
Race: White, citizen (White)
Nativity State or Country: New York
State of Residence: New York
County or City: Kings
Enlistment Date: 9 Apr 1942
Enlistment State: New York
Enlistment City: Fort Jay Governors Island
Branch: Branch Immaterial - Warrant Officers, USA
Branch Code: Branch Immaterial - Warrant Officers, USA
Grade: Private
Grade Code: Private
Term of Enlistment: Enlistment for the duration of the War or other emergency, plus six months, subject to the discretion of the President or otherwise according to law
Component: Selectees (Enlisted Men)
Source: Civil Life
Education: 1 year of high school
Civil Occupation: Athletes, sports instructors, and sports officials
Marital Status: Single, with dependents
Height: 63
Weight: 123
Ron Ross' dazzlingly descriptive biographical novel does a wonderful job in the recreation of the Brooklyn Jewish ghetto of Brownsville during the throes of the Great Depression. Ross exhaustively researched his material to give us a feel for the sights, sounds, smells of the crowded, sometimes squalid tenement that Brownsville was, complete with Yiddish expressions and verbiage common for the time.
Brownsville spawned both Murder Inc., the Jewish Mafia, and Albert Abraham Davidoff, better known as Bummy Davis, a dynamic lightweight boxing contender with a thunderous left hook. Murder Inc. was headed by Louis "Lepke" Buchalter. He used local Jewish thugs such Abe "Kid Twist" Reles, "Pittsburgh Phil" Strauss and "Buggsy" Goldstein to enforce policies
of protection, loan sharking, extortion, prostitution, and bootlegging. They terrorized the community using murder to keep everyone in line.
Davis, whose dad was a local merchant, had an older brother Willie who was a Lepke henchman. Davis who was a loyal, thoughtful, industrious and respectful guy, could never shake a negative image brought about by the exploits of his brother. After working as a fruit peddlar from a pushcart at the tender age of 10, he soon discovered that his fighting skills learned on the streets could be honed into productive boxing skills.
He turned professional at 16 lying about his age and became a money making prize fighter with exceptional skills. He used his money to buy his parents a home and refused to be controlled by the mobsters in cohoots with Murder Inc.
The story goes on to chronicle both the rise anf fall of the Brownsville Jewish mafia. Unfortunately the storied life of Bummy Davis was also abbreviated. At the tender age of 25 having retired from boxing due to the rampant corruption and prejudices that existed and about to begin a new career, he was gunned down in a bar room stick up trying to protect his friends.
Sid Terris, "The Galloping Ghost, "Lightweight Contender
By Evan Lerner
Boxing writers of the era, having rarely seen a fighter faster on his feet or with quicker hand speed, fondly referred to him as "The Dancing Master of the East Side". The Bible of Boxing, Ring Magazine called him, "the speediest fighter of his generation". And when Damon Runyon called Sid Terris, "The Galloping Ghost of the Ghetto", the name stuck.
Sidney Terris was born one of five children of Fred and Gussie Terris on September 27th 1904 on Clinton Street in the Lower East Side of Manhattan. In the 1910Ï€s and 20s the Lower East Side was veritable breeding ground for prizefighters. Hundreds of fighters, some of the best of a generation came from this impoverished neighborhood of Jewish immigrants.
Fred Terris passed away suddenly when Sid was eight years old, leaving Gussie to care for the entire family herself. Encouraged by her to focus on his studies and desperate to help support the struggling family, Sid decided he would grow up to become a lawyer. But he was a natural athlete; fast, agile and rangy and instead of focusing on his studies, everyday after school he and his friends would make their way to one of the local gyms to shoot some hoops.
One afternoon at Rutger's gym, the neighborhood boxing instructor, Dan Caplin noticed thirteen year-old Sid's footwork. Caplin, a bespectacled schoolteacher by trade, signaled over to his brother and fellow trainer, Hymie. Dan and Hymie Caplin were streetwise, low level trainer/managers in the New York City fight game, where if you had a hot prospect, there was profit. Dan was sure he had found unmined gold in young Sid Terris, and Hymie, blond and pink-cheeked took one look at the kid's footwork and agreed. That day Dan Caplin convinced Sid to take boxing lessons at the gym.
Much like his Hebrew Schoolmate, Ruby Goldstein, Sid was an instinctive, scientific boxer and he had an unparalleled speed and agility. He took to the "sweet science" as quickly and easily as his feet moved him around the ring. He was short on punching power, but he moved like Mercury; Hymie Caplin figured his lightning feet would propel him to the lightweight championship if he couldn't get there with his fists alone.
To test train their new protege, the Caplin's began entering Sid in amateur tournaments. He coasted through the ranks winning the Metropolitan, New York State, National, and International amateur titles. The Caplin brothers turned Sid pro in 1922 and by then he had chalked up 50 consecutive amateur wins. After 20 fights in his first year as a pro, Sid lost only twice. The fleet-footed kid, now a handsome, tall 19-year-old, was suddenly a prominent lightweight contender.
1924 was a star-making year. He delivered eighteen straight wins, the most notable in August when he fought Benny Valgar. In his fights around New York City, the Ghetto Ghost was drawing huge crowds.
In October of that year, the bible of boxing, Ring Magazine wrote, "There is no stopping Terris in his quest of the 135-pound laurels. Many are of the opinion that in six or eight more months he will defeat [Benny] Leonard".
That was quite a statement to make. Benny Leonard had been the undefeated lightweight king since 1917. His fists and feet were the picture of speed, but what made him most dangerous was his punch: it was nothing if not persuasive. Leonard with his smooth, slicked back dark hair was fond of declaring that it was a rare event it ever got mussed in a fight. To this day he is considered one of the top five lightweights of all time. For Sid to unseat the man they called The Ghetto Wizard, he would need to out class the master.
Benny Leonard: Ghetto Fabulous Ghetto Wizard
By Pat Putnam
“Benny Leonard moved with the grace of a ballet dancer and wore an air of arrogance that belonged to royalty.” – Dan Parker, NY sportswriter
The kid in the woolen underwear cut off at the knees and the badly scuffed gym shoes thought he looked like a fighter until he saw his opponent, a redheaded Irish fireplug named Joey Fogarty but called Shorty by everyone but his mother, who never called him anything but Joseph, except when she was angry, and then she called him Joseph Francis Xavier. A veteran of bootleg boxing at the Silver Heel Club on the squalid lower East Side of New York City, Fogarty entered the club’s jury-rigged ring wearing Kelly green swimming trunks, the kind that drooped over the knees; a sash made from pink netting from a crate of oranges, wrapped twice around his waist and tied with a huge bow in the back; and a pair of old skating shoes, which, if you did not look too closely, offered the appearance of boxing shoes. Fogarty had surreptitiously lifted the shoes from the cold water flat of the boyfriend of his older sister, Maureen.
“Geez, look at John L. Sullivan hisself,” Rusty Grogan said to little Benjamin Leiner, who was studying his resplendent ring rival with narrowed eyes.
“I know that little rat,” snarled Leiner. “He runs with that Sixth Street Irish gang that used to beat up on me.”
For the opening decade of his life, before his Russian immigrant parents, Jacob and Minnie Leiner, moved the family to Harlem to be nearer Jacob’s tailor shop, Benjamin lived in an Orthodox Jewish neighborhood on Eighth Street, hard by Second Avenue and two long blocks from the home turf of Fogarty and his fellow Hibernian hooligans. A public bathhouse straddled the bottom of the narrow cobblestone street. Years later, Leiner, by then recognized as Benny Leonard, the lightweight champion, said: “We had Italians to the south and Irish to the north and they were always passing through our neighborhood on the way to the baths. You had to stay in the house or you had to fight the Italian and Mick kids as they came through.”
When there was snow on the streets, the ethnic neighborhood gangs battled with snowballs packed tightly around pieces of coal, soaked with water, and frozen until as hard as cannon balls. Other times, they fought with baseball bats and bare fists, with bicycle chains and loaded canes and broken bottles. Leonard said they were the hardest fights of his life, “and many a kid, Jew, Italian and Irish, suffered permanent injury.”
There is as much fable as fact to the biographies of Leonard, but one thing that everyone appears to agree on is that it was the brothers Max and Joe Dornholz, Benny’s uncles on his mother’s side, who found their 11-year-old nephew bruised and bloodied a few moments after another one-sided battle against either the Italians or the Irish, and, after cleaning the little fellow up, hustled him off to a gym, where he received instruction in the proper fashion to bust some poor fellow’s nose.
“Benny,” Max, the largest of the uncles, told the willing youngster, “if you are going to fight, it is best if you learn how to use your fists. There may not always be an iron pipe handy.”
“Right,” said Joe, the oldest Dornholz brother, “but just don’t tell your mother and father that it was our idea.”
Unlike the Jews of New York in the early 1900s crammed, sometimes 15 to a room, into cheerless cold-water tenements on New York’s East Side, the Dornholz brothers found no shame in boxing. “Where is it written that Jews cannot be fighters?” said Max. They were in the minority. Their people were Orthodox; the men bearded and the women, as the Ribalow’s wrote in Jews in American Sport, “properly humble.” Strict Orthodox teachers, most often the local rabbi, educated the children, who honored and obeyed parents as their mothers and fathers had honored and obeyed parents in the old country. Rarely did one of the youngest generation step beyond the pale to become a fighter or, Abraham forbid, an actor or actress, and when that happened, the elders sighed and blamed each fresh moral failure on the new fast life of America that was making life difficult for “the real Jews.”
That not more fled their harsh surroundings for the uncertainties of the ring or stage is a tribute to the immigrant parents that hammered the moral codes of the old countries into their young almost from the first breath. Shortly after 1910, a year before Benny had his first professional fight, a report issued by New York City officials estimated that within the square mile of the lower East Side where the Leiner’s lived there were more than several hundred brothels, as many pool halls, twice that number of bars, and, according to the NYPD, more than 300 gang hangouts. In Patrick Downey’s Gangster City, a history of the New York underworld over the first 35 years of the 20th century, the Lower East Side of Manhattan was labeled the greatest breeding ground for gunmen and gangsters this country has ever seen. The same area that produced the Benny Leonards and Al Jolsons, produced the Buchalters and Anastasias and Releses of Murder Incorporated.
Jack Karney was my friend Richard's father. He wrote several pulp type detective and suspense novels. It was a big deal for me as a kid to go to the Chatham Square Library on East Broadway and see Mr.Karney's book "Cop" right there on the shelves. The dedication of the book was to Richard. I never read "Cop." The only books I was interested in reading were the John Tunis books, "The Kid From Tompkinsville," etc. I'm making up for it now by reading Karney's 1956 "Work of Darkness." It's no "Striver's Row," but it's very good. It takes place on the LES and in the scanned pages that make up this slide showhe mentions other LES movie houses, the Apollo and the Academy.
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