Rocky Graziano by Jeffrey Sussman

Author:Jeffrey Sussman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: undefined
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Published: 2012-03-18T04:00:00+00:00

While setting up Rocky as a man without character, a stooge, and a liar, there were some things that neither the D.A. nor the commissioner of the New York State Athletic Commission understood: The rules of honor on the Lower East Side had not originated in the state capital or with the city council. The rules were not promulgated by legislators wearing high, stiff collars and speaking in sanctimonious and self-righteous effusions. Rocky had imbibed the rules of the street well before he reached puberty. You remained true to your code and conscience, and did not rat on friend or foe. If you had a problem, you or you and your gang dealt with it. You never called in the cops. When sporting men, emissaries of gamblers, approached the Rock to pay him to take a dive, he laughed and showed them the door. If they kept coming around, he told them to pound sand. How could Rocky Graziano, the hero of the Lower East Side, an idol to teenage boys, take a dive and expect his friends and neighbors to remain in his corner? Look what happened when he unexpectedly lost to Tony Zale. People crossed the street to avoid him because they thought he took a dive. Friends from his boyhood wouldn’t talk to him.

Rocky certainly would not take a dive for a pushover like Cowboy Shank, a man Rocky referred to as a bum. It was laughable. It was insulting. It was ridiculous. Sure, the gamblers would clean up if Rocky were to lose such a fight, for the Cowboy was more than a 30-to-1 underdog. Had Rocky taken a dive it would have been headfirst into a pool of incredibility. The laughter, the disappointment, the anger, and the criticism would have buried him in a tank of obloquy and humiliation. Had Rocky taken a dive, it would have been to boxing what the crash and immolation of the Hindenburg was to the rigid airship industry. Why not just take a razor to his wrists and watch the blood of life pour out?

Rocky was neither a rat nor a fool, neither a stooge nor a dummy. He had his eyes set on the prize, and that prize was the championship of the world. The transit of his career had gone from nightmares to dreams of glory. He would rocket into the stratosphere, where only champions dwelled. Below him would be a heap of knocked-out opponents, men like Billy Arnold and Marty Servo, whose boxing careers lay like abandoned car wrecks in Rocky’s rearview mirror. Rocky was going right to the top. He would become the superstar of boxing. The KO king. The man who no one could hold back, not the D.A., not Colonel Eagan, no one. He believed his destiny was to be the middleweight champion of the world.

He was the former Thomas Rocco Barbella, juvenile delinquent, petty criminal, ex-convict, draft dodger, transmuted into Rocky Graziano, the best, most colorful middleweight the world had ever seen.

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