You know, if you didn’t get your ticket before Friday when I fought, forget about it. They was none left. I had 2,000 ladies came to see me. They’d yell, “Uh-oh, here comes that tiger again.”1
—Beau Jack
1. Gary Smith, “Still Fighting Old Wars Former Lightweight Champ Beau Jack Lives Out His Legend,” Sports Illustrated, February 15, 1988, http://www.si.com/vault/1988/02/15/117125/still-fighting-old-wars-former-lightweight-champ-beau-jack-lives-out-his-legend, accessed December 11, 2017.
Beau Jack was moving up in the boxing ranks and rapidly entering the title hunt. During his first 13 months of professional fighting, he racked up 22 victories, four losses, and two draws. Now an earnest contender to be reckoned with in the lightweight division, it was time for Beau to depart Springfield and Valley Arena and move to the boxing capital of the world, New York City. Beau’s Holyoke days were over. He would only make one return trip to the Valley.
The Syndicate enthusiastically embraced Beau’s rising stock. In an aggressive move to ensure Beau’s success and a shot at the title, they hired famed New York publicity guru Chick Wergeles and well-known trainer Sid Bell. They even acquired a private dressing room for Beau at the legendary Stillman’s Gym, located a couple of blocks from Madison Square Garden.
Charles “Chick” Wergeles (1893–1972), lightheartedly referred to as “Hercules” because of his short height, immigrated to the United States from Russia as a toddler with his mother and siblings in 1894. He grew up in an Irish neighborhood on the lower East Side of New York, the sixth of seven children. “As a Jewish boy in an Irish neighborhood, Chick had to fight his way to fame—and did.”1
Chick was small in stature, standing 5'4" tall, with dark hair and brown eyes, and he almost always wore a smile on his face. He married Charlotte “Nettie” Sigel in 1918 and they parented three boys and three girls. His upscale office at 9 Rockefeller Plaza in Rockefeller Center was located in Midtown Manhattan between 48th and 51st streets and 5th and 6th avenues. Chick, however, was rarely there. He was always on the go. At 48 years of age, Wergeles was not your ordinary publicity man. The little man never slowed down. He trotted rather than walked, and continually promoted his projects. Chick bubbled with gusto for any venture he embraced to ensure its success.
Chick comprehended the challenges of promoting sports. His publicity ventures encompassed football, basketball, auto racing, golf, and boxing. Ironically, his knowledge of sports was rather feeble. Chick seldom knew much about a sport beforehand. It was often said that Wergeles, “has as much knowledge of athletics as a hog does about mathematics.”2 In fact, Chick habitually used ghostwriters. Wergeles explained, “I had to have ghostwriters because I did not know which end of a football you sat on, or ate.”3
National Associated Press Sports Editor Dillon Graham4 said it right when speaking of Chick. “Perhaps the best known purveyor of publicity in New York,” Graham wrote, “he distributes ballyhoo that other fellows write, hopping from one sport to another as the seasons roll around.”5 Like the boxer he was hired to promote, Chick was a man of perpetual motion. He had “more irons in the fire than a village blacksmith.”6 John Kieran, a journalist for the New York Times, depicted Wergeles, the publicity man:
For untold years Mr. Wergeles, happy as a lark, has been trotting in and out of newspaper offices, leaving in his wake vast bundles of publicity for sports events of an amazing variety—boxing, wrestling, football, basketball, golf, skating, or name your poison. He chats cheerfully and fluently and he slaughters the English language with gusto, but his heart is in the right place even if his adjectives are not.7
Cheerfully promoting his sports, Wergeles could also massacre the English language.
Chick’s publicity resume included his role in making professional football successful in New York. In 1925, he muscled his way into the New York Giants of the American Professional Football Association (APFA), the predecessor to the National Football League (NFL), as their publicity man. When Wergeles first started, he was given 5,000 tickets to give away for every home game. It was a struggle promoting professional football. Chick avowed, “We used to have to take a suitcase full of tickets and scatter them around to get people to pro games.”8 Not anymore!
For many years, Chick worked publicity for Edward “Ned” S. Irish. Irish (1905–1982), a former sportswriter and prominent figure in collegiate basketball during the 1930s, was convinced that basketball would flourish at Madison Square Garden. So, in 1934, he began renting out the Garden for the duration of the college basketball season. With Chick’s assistance, Irish’s college basketball program at the Garden averaged an attendance of 18,196 by 1946.
Wergeles also served as the publicity agent for the $100,000 Roosevelt Raceway located in Westbury, Long Island, New York. Built in 1936, the speedway was situated on Roosevelt Field, the same field from which Charles Lindburg (1902–1974) departed on his 1927 historic plane trip across the Atlantic to Paris. In plugging the speedway, Chick worked closely with George Washington Vanderbilt, III, George Preston Marshall, and Eddie Rickenbacker, the raceway’s chief financiers. Featuring four miles of winding, twisting track, the racetrack was surrounded with enormous grandstands for nearly 100,000 spectators. The inaugural race took place on October 12, 1936, in front of roughly 50,000 spectators—the 300-mile George Vanderbilt Cup. Regrettably, the racetrack proved too twisty and curvy for racecars of the day, so it was converted to a half-mile harness track in 1940.
In 1939, Wergeles commenced working with the Goodall Round Robin Golf Tournament. At the time, he didn’t know which end of a golf club to use, but he did so well, the tournament retained his services for the next two years. An unusual event, only fifteen professional golfers received invitations to participate in the Goodall tournament. Held at Fresh Meadows Country Club between 1939–1941, players vied for a $5,000 purse. Sam Snead collected the purse in 1939. Ben Hogan won the tournament in 1940, and Paul Runyan earned the prize money in 1941.
Out of all the sports he publicized, Chick was best known for his connection with boxing. Chick always had an interest in boxing. When he was 16, he already had his own stable of fighters. Subsequently, the New York Morning World hired Wergeles to conduct publicity for its boxing interests “and out of that grew a career.”9 Chick also began to manage fighters and operate a fight club. Later, he would obtain a ten percent interest in Rocky Marciano and serve as his co-manager along with Al Weill.
Through his work, Chick developed a close relationship with the Herald Tribune’s sportswriter, Richards Vidmer, an avid golfer. When Vidmer was in Augusta covering the 1941 Masters Tournament, he recommended Wergeles’ services as a second manager and publicity man for Beau Jack. The Syndicate thoughtfully approved.
Chick initially learned that he was being retained as Beau’s manager by telegraph. For his services, he would receive 25 percent of the net gate for Beau’s fights. Chick immediately began touting his new fighter and “had the big columnists doing pieces about this boy before he even got a prelim bout.”10 The press began buzzing. “Chick is bringing in a new face in Beau Jack, a hard-hitting lightweight, who has been making a name for himself the hard way,” wrote Harold Conrad (1910–1991),11 sportswriter for the Brooklyn Daily Eagle and one of the founding members of the Boxing Writers’ Association, “by eliminating the toughest men in his division.”12
Wergeles was adamant that Beau reside in New York. New York City was the central hub of professional boxing. At the time, the New York State Athletic Commission (NYSAC) and National Boxing Association (NBA) championship titles were considered analogous to a world championship. Under Chick’s guidance, Beau swiftly moved to New York. “I got him livin’ wit’ a nice Negro family in that Kingsboro Housin’ Objeck in Brooklyn,” commented Wergeles. “Cost 14 bucks a week. Plus his allowance, of courst. I make up a bill each week an’ give it to the sportsmen an’ they pay me.”13 By September 1941, Beau was living in the newly opened Kingsboro Housing Project on Albany Avenue in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn and ready to embark on the championship path.
Importance of Image
Wergeles also knew the importance of image for Beau Jack. As a black man in a segregated world, Beau needed to present an acceptable appearance if he wanted to be embraced as a champion among both black and white fans. Jack had to keep his violence inside the ring and be careful not to upset anyone outside of the ring.
Years earlier, Jack Johnson had fought the powers that were. Revered among the African American community, Johnson became the first black American to earn the world heavyweight title. Ironically, Johnson was not the best representative for integrating the heavyweight division. He verbally abused his white opponents and outside the ring and had a passion for white women, both of which were taboo at the time. Johnson didn’t care what white people thought and was consequently despised by many whites.
The world heavyweight champion, Joe Louis, and his manager, John Roxborough, knew the importance of image for the black boxer. Joe Louis, determined to avoid Johnson’s disdain, took great strides to not come across offensively to white fans. His manager John Roxborough stressed to Joe that if he wanted to be embraced by the public, he had to live and fight clean. He needed to have a positive image and a pleasant demeanor. As Anthony O. Edmonds wrote in his article, “Joe Louis, Boxing, and American Culture,” there were two dominant images that whites used to define blacks—“the ‘angry bestial’ and the ‘docile childlike,’ or, more bluntly, the ‘bad nigger’ and the ‘good Negro.’”14 Louis mastered the second image with his modest and unassuming character.
Integration was a psychological challenge in all sports. Years later a similar tact was taken in baseball by Branch Ricky. Rickey, the president, general manager, and part owner of the Brooklyn Dodgers, laid the groundwork for integrating Major League Baseball. In exchange for an opportunity to break the color barrier in professional baseball, Jackie Robinson had an agreement with Branch Rickey that he would hold his tongue and fists. Also aiding Rickey in his selection of Robinson was the fact that Robinson was educated, a nondrinker, didn’t smoke, and had competed with and against white athletes. Moreover, he was not a womanizer.
Sid Bell Joins Beau’s Team
A talented group of trainers was retained by the Syndicate to guide and instruct Beau. Sid Bell, well known for his conditioning expertise and his brash, demeaning motivational style, was Beau’s head trainer. When Sid first saw Beau fight, he proclaimed, “You are a natural-born murderer. You are a natural fighter. Any boxer who can outfight you, he is a champion.” To motivate Beau, Bell would scream at him, “You bum, you’re nothing, you’ll never be nothing. Don’t give a man a chance to do nothing. Just rip him all the time you’re in there and you’ll come out all right.”15 Years later, Jack recalled Bell’s training style. “He kept riding me, riding me, riding me,” said Beau. “He would make me spar 10 rounds straight, with no rest between rounds. He was a mean man, sir. He’s gone now, but I’m so thankful he was mean, because he got me in shape. If you don’t train, you get hurt upstairs.”16 Sid Bell was not only a master conditioner, but he was also the first trainer to utilize the concept of punching in numbered sequences.
Bill “Pop” Miller (1925–2012) served as Beau’s assistant trainer. Pop was a little black man with a loud voice. He had been a successful welterweight boxer, soldier, trainer, and manager. Miller was race-conscious and didn’t like the way black boxers were treated. Vividly, he could remember when integrated matches were not allowed, as well as when “Negroes” were dressed up in colors and paraded in front of the public as untamed cannibals in Madison Square Garden. Pop’s experience included working with such boxers as Panama Al Brown, Eugene Burton, Tiger Flowers, “Sugar” Ray Robinson, Coley Wallace, and Johnny Saxton. Unpretentiously, Miller never took credit for making anybody a fighter. “A youngster who has ambition to become something in the ring will succeed if he is given a little constructive advice,” explained Miller. “No one can make a fighter.”17
Rounding out his stable of trainers were Carmine Maurone and Larry Kent. Carmine, a former flyweight boxer from Philadelphia, worked part-time in Jack’s corner. He also worked with Ike Williams, Bob Montgomery and Pete Logue. Kent was green at the time but was a great motivator known for encouraging his fighters to box aggressively while still utilizing their best skills. He also trained numerous world champions, such as “Sugar” Ray Robinson, Georgie Pace, and Jimmy Carter.
Legendary Stillman’s Gym
In addition to hiring Chick Wergeles and Beau’s trainers, the Syndicate retained a private dressing room for Beau at Stillman’s Gym. Located on 8th Street in New York City, a couple of blocks away from Madison Square Garden, Stillman’s was legendary. If you wanted to fight in Madison Square Garden in the ’40s, you trained at Stillman’s Gym. It was the holy grail of boxing gyms. Among the many great champions which trained there were Jack Dempsey, Joe Louis, Rocky Marciano, Rocky Graziano, Sandy Saddler, Paddy DeMarco, Willie Pep, Terry Young, Ike Williams, Bob Murphy, Jimmy Bivens, Jimmy Carter, Johnny Bratton, Jersey Joe Walcott, Bob Montgomery, and Max Baer. Sportswriter W. C. Heinz once declared that thousands of boxers from every continent but Antarctica came to Stillman’s to train. Other people like Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Jerry Lewis, Buddy Hackett, and Tony Bennett would drop by just to watch the boxers work out.
The gym itself, like many boxing gyms during those days, was a dive. It was proudly heralded as one of the filthiest gyms in New York, smelling of cigar smoke and sweat. “The floor was one gigantic spittoon; the windows were dark with grime and never opened,” recalled author Jeffrey Sussman. “Stillman claimed that fresh air was bad for fighters.”18 The first floored housed the shower for the entire gym. It was a single open stall, “with a concrete floor and drain and a rusted-solid shower head.”19 The heavy bags and speed bags were located on the second tier of the loft. Journalist Irving Rudd described Stillman’s as a “narrow, dirty, airless three-story structure and ruled by a tough-talking, harsh-faced, constantly spitting martinet named Lou Stillman.”20
Initially started by Marshall Stillman, the gym was envisioned as a way to give kids an alternative to crime. Stillman hired Lou Ingber (1887–1969), a former policeman, to run the gym. Before long, boxers training at the gym began to refer to Ingber as Mr. Stillman. So, Ingber changed his name to Lou Stillman. A rough character, Ingber sat at his desk near the entrance with his big, ugly cigar that smelled like rotten cabbage stuffed into his face. Hair billowed out from the sides of his head, and he wore a shoulder holster containing a snub-nosed .38 pistol.
Beau’s first visit to Stillman’s Gym was a flamboyant affair. He showed up with his entourage of trainers and manager Chick Wergeles, creating quite the excitement. “The heavyweights peered over each other’s shoulders, the shadow boxers stopped dancing, the managers and matchmakers turned to stare,” wrote sportswriter Richards Vidmer. “The parade passed through the room and on to a private dressing room.”21
Beau loved the place. He would get to the gym at 10 a.m. and stay until late in the afternoon. Sometimes you would find him with his chin propped on the ring apron watching other fighters work in the ring. Harold Parrott, sportswriter for the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, one day asked Beau, “Learning all the time, Beau Jack,” [Parrott] asked. “Yassah,” he said, flashing a chinaware grin, “Learnin’ what-all not to do as much as what to do.”22 The former lightweight king, Benny Leonard, trained alongside Beau at Stillman’s Gym. When asked about Beau Jack, Leonard said, “He loves to fight, he loves to work. He is full of fire and ginger. He is going to go a long way.”23 Lou Stillman saw firsthand Beau’s commitment to training. “That Beau,” Lou grinned. “He used to wait for me when I opened at 10 in the morning and then I’d have to kick him out to close up the gym at 3:30. Always wanting to train.”24 Chuckling, he often teased Chick Wergeles that he should pay double the fees because Beau spent more time in the gym than any other two fighters combined.
1. Edward J. Shugrue, “Between Ourselves,” Bridgeport Post, April 8, 1962, 60.
2. “From Rags to Riches for Beau Jack,” Evening Standard, December 23, 1942, 10.
3. Edward J. Shugrue, “Between Ourselves,” Bridgeport Post, April 8, 1962, 60.
4. Dillon Graham started his journalism career at the Gainesville Daily Sun in Florida. He quickly worked his way up to the national feature sports editor of the Associated Press. He was well known for his colorful coverage of football and golf.
5. Dillon Graham, “Beau Jack Latest of Negro Fighters to Reach Big Time,” Green Bay Press-Gazette, September 30, 1942, 14.
6. Whitney Martin, “Sports Trail,” Wilkes-Barre Record, January 3, 1943, 15.
7. John Kieran, “Sports of the Times: Bubbling Over Beau Jack,” New York Times, November 13, 1942, 30.
8. “Waikiki Crossroad,” Honolulu Star-Bulletin, November 20, 1950, 4.
9. Edward J. Shugrue, “Between Ourselves,” Bridgeport Post, April 8, 1963, 60.
10. Bob Considine, “On the Line,” Tampa Bay Times, March 29, 1943, 9.
11. Conrad was one of the founders of the Boxing Writers Association. After his journalism career, he became a fight promoter.
12. Harold Conrad, “Ebbets Boxing Show Stars Crack Welters,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle, August 5, 1941, 15.
13. Harold Parrott, “Both Sides,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle, September 1, 1942, 11.
14. A. O. Edmonds, Joe Louis, Boxing, and American Culture (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co. 1973), 137.
15. Marcus Norman, “Beau Jack: The Garden’s Favorite,” Boxing.com, July 9, 2012, Accessed December 3, 2017. http://www.boxing.com/beau_jack_the_gardens_favorite.html.
16. Robert Seltzer, “Fear in the Ring: A Second Opponent for Fighters,” Philadelphia Inquirer, June 27, 1988, 19.
17. Leslie Matthews, “Leslies’ Boxing Bits,” New York Age, May 6, 1950, 19.
18. Jeffrey Sussman, “Lous Stillman’s Filthy Gym,” East Hampton Star, October 6, 2016, accessed November 20, 2017, http://easthamptonstar.com/Opinion/20161006/Lou-Stillmans-Filthy-Gym-Jeffrey-Sussman.
19. Joe Rein, “Stillman’s Gym: the Center of the Boxing Universe,” Mr. Beller’s Neighborhood, June 1, 2003, accessed November 3, 2017, https://mrbellersneighborhood.com/2003/06/stillmans-gym-the-center-of-the-boxing-universe.
20. Irving Rudd, “I Remember: Stillman’s, Oiv, Benny,” New York Times, April 7, 1974, 220.
21. Jack Troy, “All in the Game,” Atlanta Constitution, July 25, 1941, 20.
22. Harold Parrott, “Both Sides,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle, December 17, 1942, 17.
23. Ibid.
24. Murray Rose, “Lou Stillman Says Fight Racket Dying,” Daily Press, June 7, 1953, 30.