Book Review: Friday's Heroes

Brett Conway/Maxboxing.com

The boxing autobiography almost always fit the same template. And its theme can usually be boiled down to one sentence: “I was once a down and outer; but now I’m an up-and-comer -- look out world!” In “Raging Bull,” Jake La Motta writes of finding himself with nothing, but after a time in a jail cell, he discovers the light in his life. In “By George,” George Foreman writes of hitting bottom in the jungle of Zaire when losing to Muhammad Ali but finding redemption when he regains his heavyweight title from Michael Moorer almost 20 years hence. In “Victory over Myself,” Floyd Patterson writes of being a boy with no courage, no identity. But discovering it when he regains his heavyweight title from Ingemar Johansson.

Every now and then there is a book that breaks the mould. And a book, recently reissued, that does that very thing was written by none other than former featherweight champion Willie Pep. In “Willie Pep Remembers . . . Friday’s Heroes,” originally published in 1974, Pep doesn’t just give us a sob story about how life was unfair to him and how he found a way back to the top through his own grit. This book is about how he always had something to give to other people and how all boxers have something to give to other people. Long before we had Barack Obama chanting “Yes, we can,” Willie Pep was answering, “Yes, I did.”

The narrative of this book is cemented in a road-trip he takes with ex-boxers like Chico Vejar and Joey Archer and others to the Appalachians to help some disabled children on Christmas. He and his companions grab a bunch of presents, dress up in holiday garb -- Santa and elves – and hand out gifts to the children. Along the way, Pep reminisces about the time of his career, an era when young ghetto athletes were getting a touch of the big-time on that new-fangled technology, television. Pep writes of his contemporaries, from his beginnings in the late 1930s to the late 1950s, many of those years he spent as the greatest featherweight in the world, winning his first 73 fights in a row before losing his title to Sandy Saddler.

Pep writes of many of the great and well-known fighters of his era: Ezzard Charles, Jersey Joe Walcott, the Rockys – Graziano and Marciano and Castellani – Jake La Motta, and Carmen Basilio. But for me, the interesting part of this book is when Pep writes of the “Friday’s Heroes,” those fighters that became household names because of the growth of television and boxing on the small screen. Fighters like Kid Gavilan, “Tiger” Jones, and the person Pep refers to as the ultimate television fighter, Chuck Davey, fighters that made a lot of money in their time, some over a million dollars in purses over their careers. And other fighters that got rich (few remained that way) from television but are known to only the hard-core fans, fighters like the above mentioned Vejar, Tony Janiro, and Steve Belloise.

Pep gives a nice primer for his era. He has real insight into the pros and cons of television on boxing. It gave him and the other fighters a chance to make some real cash. But it also emptied out the gyms and the clubs. As Pep asks at one point in the book, why should someone go all the way out to the boxing club when he could just go to the local bar or pop open a six-pack at home? Television made those fighters rich in a time when there would be 200 main events on free television annually. But it also halted the manufacturing of boxers in the true boxing factories: those once open but now closed clubs and gyms. And it also hurt some fighters. As Pep says, “some guys got rushed because of television.” That’s a still timely statement if I ever heard one as are many other of his observations.

This book is not without its flaws, however; there are sometimes strange page breaks, awkward transitions from the main narrative to parenthetical stories and back to the narrative. There are also some repetitions.

But this book is a charming one. It contains dozens of black and white fight photos from his era. Pep talks candidly about boxing, about the type of people who get into it, and about the pitfalls that face a boxer when the chance to make money dries up. He also has a classic line about the aging prize fighter: “when you’re young you fight and, in spots, you try to remember to pace yourself. When you’re old you pace yourself and, in spots, you try to remember to fight.” That lined earned a “LOL” in the margin.

In the end, Pep thinks of boxing and the ring as a place for redemption. It’s a place where lessons of sportsmanship and respect for “the other guy” (Pep’s phrase) in the ring and outside the ring are translated into charitable acts outside the ring, acts that are done to help society.

So Jake La Motta can write of redemption in “Raging Bull” but then give us the real horror of his life in its sequel, “Raging Bull II”; George Foreman can write of discovering the error of his ways in Zaire in “By George” but then continue insisting he was drugged and thus lost to Ali; and Floyd Patterson can say he found confidence all he wants but then pack a disguise in his gym bag to escape the arena in case he loses -- La Motta and Foreman and Patterson can tell us things about themselves through words.

Willie Pep, though, shows himself through actions -- actions spawned from lessons learnt in boxing rings, lessons that bring him and Charley Fusari and Ralph “Tiger” Jones and other “Friday’s Heroes” out of their snug homes just days before Christmas to help children less fortunate.

I recommend “Friday’s Heroes.”