Unbeaten by Mike Stanton

Author:Mike Stanton
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pan Macmillan UK

10

The Lion and the Lamb

On a cool september night in 1952, a car made its way north on a highway in Connecticut. It was well past midnight, but the police were out, searching for escapees from the women’s prison in Danbury.

A police cruiser pulled the car over. Two female passengers claimed to be the sisters of Rocky Marciano, who had fought for the world heavyweight title in Philadelphia earlier that night.

The policemen, who like most people in America knew about the fight, and perhaps had stolen a few minutes during their shift to follow the updates on the radio, were skeptical. Yeah, yeah, they said, sure you are. The two women insisted. They were headed back to Brockton from Philadelphia, they explained, because they had young children at home. If the police wanted proof, the women said, they had proof in the trunk: We’ve got the glove. Curious now, the troopers watched as they opened the trunk. There was no prison escapee hiding inside—just a boxing glove, sheathed in a plastic garment bag, still bright with blood. The glove that had thrown the punch that delivered the crown to the son of a Brockton shoemaker in a savage fight that would go down as one of the greatest heavyweight championship bouts in history.

Excited, the officers asked the women if they would mind going to the police station with them, so they could show the other officers on the night shift. Rocky’s sisters Alice and Concetta agreed. At the police station, they showed off the glove, which had hairs stuck in the matted blood around the laces. The sisters even signed autographs for the awestruck policemen. Then, cheered by the police, they continued home to a city in celebration of its improbable champion.

* * *

ROCKY MARCIANO WAS the heavyweight champion of the world.

Pacing in his hotel room in Philadelphia after the fight, unable to sleep, he reminisced with Allie Colombo about how, just a few years ago, they had hitched rides to New York on a produce truck, rolling out at dawn looking like a couple of cauliflowers, as Charley Goldman used to say. Rocky marveled at everything that had happened since, “like the best movie I ever saw,” he said later.

He had gotten a taste of what it would be like to be champion a few months before the Walcott fight, when he went to Lawrence, Massachusetts, to speak at a local dinner. Lawrence was an old factory town like Brockton, and Rocky received a hero’s welcome befitting the man viewed as the next champ. When he asked to borrow a razor to freshen up, his hosts instead paraded him through the streets of the city, accompanied by a police escort, to a barbershop. It was Sunday afternoon, but the barber opened and proceeded to lather and shave Rocky while spectators crowded around and more people pressed up against the window outside. Afterward, they took him next door to a local haberdasher, who fitted him with a new suit.

In Philadelphia’s Warwick Hotel, the celebration stretched late into the night.

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