Sweet Thunder by Wil Haygood

Author:Wil Haygood [Haygood, Wil]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-27307-9
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2009-10-14T16:00:00+00:00

Many of the familiar faces—entertainers, bookies, sportsmen, newspapermen—were eagerly looking forward to the fourth matchup. There was a feeling that the bad blood between the two fighters was truly roiling. “They were out to kill each other,” says Arthur Mercante, the onetime Golden Gloves referee. There would be one figure, however, missing from the proceedings, and both Robinson and LaMotta would lament his absence.

No one knew how old Hype Igoe—the longtime boxing writer for the New York Journal-American—really was when he died twelve days before the Robinson-LaMotta match. He had covered Louis-Schmeling, Braddock-Louis, Louis-Baer, and hundreds of other memorable encounters across America and into Puerto Rico. Igoe was one of the first writers to sense nuance and cultural sensibilities in the Robinson-LaMotta pairing, scavenging for new angles as he wrote about each fighter. Over the years there had been more than one “sixty-fifth” birthday party for Hype. His coterie of admirers came anyway, laughing into the wee hours. He was overweight, obviously vain about his age, enjoyed the remoteness of woodsy boxing camps, practiced magic tricks in idle moments, was an admired cartoonist, wore a signature fedora, and could often be found atop a Manhattan barstool. There were plenty of odd and eccentric occurrences in the life of Hype Igoe. He once hitched a ride out to the Indianopolis 500 with the great flying ace Eddie Rickenbacker piloting the plane. A voluble sort, Hype moved easily amongst the Hoosier crowd. In a field, whiling away some time, he began displaying his magic coin tricks, turning nickels into pennies, dimes into quarters. Both children and adults gathered. But there was confusion about the speed at which money was changing hands. Law officers came closer and weren’t amused by the trickery. They quickly suspected Hype of being a con artist from back East and whisked him into custody. Colleagues helped convince authorities Hype meant no harm. He seemed to like everything about the heartbreaking fight game—the way heroes (Joe Louis) could come out of nowhere; the sheer will of the comeback champion (Braddock); the business acumen practiced as if it were all part of a carnival act by so many fight promoters (Mike Jacobs); the falling-apart heroes (Joe Louis again) who he thought had some kind of majesty in their efforts to hang on. He was a sightseeing passenger with a notebook on a vessel that moved between Madison Square Garden, Chicago Stadium, Yankee Stadium, and smaller joints in between. The old newspaperman of indeterminate age had a Runyonesque guys-and-dolls sensibility. (Runyon was at the funeral out on Long Island.) Caswell Adams, writing in the New York Daily Mirror, would refer to Herbert “Hype” Igoe as “a definite legend in the curious business of writing sports.”

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