THE WITNESS
deeply anti-Semitic 1920s. In spite of his Ivy League schooling and glittering privilege – or perhaps because of it – Schulberg was increasingly drawn to this blue-collar, immigrant sport. He traveled to the East Coast to cover fights, making his own name as a keen ringside reporter. During the mass poverty of the Great Depression, he knew his father was making $11,000 per week, and it
place in his greatest of films. With On the Waterfront , his work did not end with the screenplay. Knowing Marlon Brando’s character had to have the mannerisms of an ex-fighter, he asked his friend – middleweight rumbler Roger Donoghue – to help train Brando at the famous Stillman’s Gym in New York. (Donoghue, for his part, thought Brando had real potential in the ring.) Schulberg also remained on set for the
interview: Galento’s habit of greeting people with a friendly left hook on set was a memorable one. One day, he accidentally knocked director Elia Kazan to the floor. Kazan was not the only one to take a knock around this time. During the anti-Communist witch hunts in Hollywood, Senator Joseph McCarthy and his House Committee on Un- American Activities threatened the
couldn’t help but impact his politics: He was an avowed leftist. He recognized the fault lines of economic and racial inequality in 20th century America and wrote sharply on the topic where it intersected with boxing. By the late 1940s, Schulberg had served in the Office of Strategic Services (the CIA’s predecessor) during the Second World War and joined a combat documentary unit during the Allied Liberation of Europe. He had also written a successful first novel: a scathing takedown of Hollywood opportunism called What Makes Sammy Run? He had lived enough life to understand that boxing – and art, be it literature or movies – were important safety valves for a violent, chaotic society. He would double down on this wisdom for years to come. In 1972, he would wisely write in
livelihoods of film workers if they did not testify as “friendly witnesses.” Pushed to name colleagues who they knew to be leftists or Communists, some heroically refused to rat. Schulberg, a former Communist Party member, had grown disillusioned with the movement and the horrors of Stalinism. Or at least that’s what he said when he named names. It was a complex and unhappy moment of American political history, where artists were asked to turn on each other to hold onto their jobs – and where the ones who did, like Schulberg, would be remembered as villains by many. It may be the one black mark on an otherwise sparkling career. Fittingly, Schulberg leaned into moral ambiguity when it came to boxing. He was fascinated by the dark underside of the sport he loved – be it fight-fixing,
Schulberg flanked by former champs Rocky Graziano and Jose Torres.
in 2009, aged 95, he had become a giant of the boxing world without ever lacing up a pair of gloves. Adored by fighters and artists alike – from The Great Gatsby author F. Scott Fitzgerald to Muhammad Ali – few lived a life like Schulberg’s. (“To my main man. Thanks for sticking up for me.” went the note from Ali that Schulberg framed on his office wall.) Schulberg’s glories and adventures in boxing over the decades are so many they are hard to summarize. After the success of On the Waterfront , The Harder They Fall – his classic 1947 novel on prizefight corruption – was turned into a 1956 film starring Humphrey Bogart. He became the first boxing editor and a longtime correspondent at Sports Illustrated, where his tenure spanned decades. He wrote on everyone from Rocky Graziano to Ali to Mike Tyson;
Born in 1914 in Los Angeles, Schulberg lacked for nothing in early life. His father, B.P. Schulberg, was one of the original founders of Paramount Studios, and young Budd wandered the Hollywood backlot during a period when you might spot Cary Grant, Mae West or Gary Cooper. But famous athletes and prizefighters were also naturally drawn into the Hollywood scene, and Schulberg soon realized how exciting he found the fighters. (He later wrote that movie stars simply “didn’t get to me as the boxers did.”) His obsession with the sport came young: He was 6 years old when he started attending twice-weekly fights with his father at the Hollywood Legion Stadium. The Jewish Schulbergs were avid fans of lightweight champ Benny Leonard – a fighter who proudly wore a Star of David on his trunks in the
saw the Phantom Punch and the “No Mas” debacle. He even met – and argued with – a belligerent Ernest Hemingway over who had more boxing knowledge. For his money, the best pound-for- pound fighter he had ever seen – and he had seen them all – was Sugar Ray Robinson. “I would pick Ray Robinson over Ali and [Joe] Louis,” he told The Observer in 2002. “Because he could box as well as Ali – he was so fast – and for his weight could punch like Joe Louis. He was the perfect combined boxer-puncher.” Perhaps sportswriter Hugh McIlvanney said it best when describing Schulberg: He was “a living archive of the fight business.”
his book Loser and Still Champion: Muhammad Ali : “Boxing is not the cause but the lightning rod of all the bolts of destruction ripping up the skies of paranoid nations. The business of fist-fighting makes more vivid the clash of positives and negatives besetting the societies that tolerate or encourage it.” Or to put it more simply: Boxing has “always been a magnet for all the flying nails, knives and needles of racial hostility and social tension.” As such, it was only right that Schulberg made sure that boxing had a
film’s production in Hoboken, New Jersey, using his fight connections to populate the gritty milieu. Real longshoremen and former boxers, like former heavyweight contenders Abe Simon and “Two Ton” Tony Galento, both of whom challenged Joe Louis, appear in the film. Galento was a wide- set bruiser best known for a bout in 1939 where he put Louis on the canvas. He was a colorful personality who had battled the likes of Max Baer, if not very good at memorizing his lines as an actor. As Schulberg said in a 2004
racial animus or exploitation. “Old fighters never fade away. They simply die slowly in front of our eyes,” he wrote in his book Ringside: A Treasury of Boxing Reportage . He was talking about the melancholy of seeing great athletes fighting past their prime. On the suspicious 1954 triumph of the mob-owned Johnny Saxton over welterweight champion Kid Gavilan, he wrote: “It might be time to ask again whether boxing is going to be a legitimate sport or a dirty business. To say this is not to attack boxing
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