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Stillman's Gym: The Center of the Boxing Universe
Stillman’s Gym: The Center of the Boxing Universe
by JOE REIN
06/01/2003
54th Street & 8th Ave. ny ny 10019
Neighborhood: MIDTOWN
The name: Stillman’s Gym still is magical to old ring veterans–rapidly vanishing–but it’s mostly just a revered icon like Jack Johnson or Boyle’s Half-Acre that fight purists have read about in an old issue of Ring Magazine or on the internet in vintage columns of Dan Parker and Jimmy Cannon.
For me, Stillman’s isn’t like talking about Benny Leonard or Harry Greb, and taking it on faith. It’s very real to me, and as vivid now as when my dad and uncles first took me and my friends there on a weekend just after the ending of World War 2 and before the return match with Louis and Conn.
To put it in perspective, only three things mattered to a kid growing up in the Navy Yard section of Brooklyn in the ’40s: winning a world title; fighting the main-go at The Garden and Stillman’s Gym.
Every blue-collar neighborhood in New York was dotted with gyms. Every block had a fighter or a relative of a fighter. It was a sport that was accessible to us. And, sometime one of our own rose up from the amateurs, got some big wins in local clubs and made it into the Garden, impressed in prelims, and then watched his name go up in lights as the headliner on the marquee at the Garden . … like Billy Graham and Harold Green.
All we did on Friday nights was elbow each other out of the way to get closer to the radio to listen to the Gillette Cavalcade of Sports to hear the main event from the Garden. And if Rocky Graziano or Joe Louis rallied or won, you could hear the shouts echo in the streets from every open tenement window.
We all knew that the big name fighters trained at Stillman’s, but as kids, we never imagined we’d ever get to go there. So, when my dad took us, it was like going to the circus for the first time for kids still running around in corduroy knickers.
Once we were actually in Stillman’s and sitting in the gallery seeing the greats who were on fight posters tacked up on every light pole and fence, now passing only an arm’s length away doing floor excercises, warming up and sparring, it left me goggle-eyed.
And while I just tried to drink it in, guys like Sandy Saddler and Paddy DeMarco would play-fight with me..Bob Montgomery let me unlace his gloves… Beau Jack feinted punches at me. Most of the people around us just wanted a glimpse up close of not only the fighters but anybody well known to tell their friends about.
And the people in the gallery were all larger than life: Fight-greats, showbiz types glad-handing everybody, reporters talking to fighters and celebs, and scary looking guys like the ones that stood outside the social club around the corner from me.
Willie Pep and Terry Young worked the crowd, breaking everybody up wisecracking about horses that were too slow or women that were too fast… I was hooked; I knew I had to train there someday.
In the winter of ’48, I went to Stillman’s to start training myself, excited but nervous as hell; I didn’t want anybody to laugh me out of there.
There was one sight you could count on at Stillman’s– day or night– just under the faded sign over the doorway, reading:
STILLMAN’S GYM TRAINING HERE DAILY BOXING INSTRUCTION see JACK CURLEY (NO LITTERING ON SIDEWALK)
20-30 rough-housing guys with bashed noses, in tight clumps, surrounding hopeful young fighters they were trying to pump up. I always had to navigate my way through the crowd, past the heavy iron door and up the steep, dimly lit stairs to the second floor where the gym was.
Stationed right in the doorway to collect the 15-cent entrance fee was Jack Curley. He was late 50’sh and world-weary, with spectacles on the bridge of his nose. He was always in view of the gym’s tyrant-owner, Lou Stillman, so that he could be sure nobody slipped by without paying .
When I say nobody, I mean NOBODY.
More than one world champion or celebrity was embarrassed at the door because they wanted to get back in for some reason, and were told: No money, no entrance. Stillman would yell across the gym: “Pay up, ya bum!”
The ceiling on the main floor was high enough for a trapeze act. There were four rows of wooden folding chairs, with what looked like the cast of Guys and Dolls occupied with scratch sheets or spitting on the floor and biting on cigar stubs.
In front of the chairs were two raised rings, side by side, and behind the rings– against the far wall–trainers taped-up, gloved and put head gears and cups on their fighters while they sat on a wooden bench waiting to spar. The world’s elite shadow boxed or skipped rope right next to them.
I paid my money and told Curley I wanted to learn to box. He called a guy over who looked like the Penguin in a Batman movie.
He too must have been in his 50’s, about 5-7, his hair was black and kinky-curly and matted down and parted in the middle, like a bootlegger from the 20’s. His nose was much too long for his face and pointy as a dart. He had no chin and he was shaped like a pear; his stomach hiking up his trousers to his chest. He had on what must have been a white T shirt at one time and an unbuttoned cardigan sweater with a towel thrown over his shoulder.
He walked over, chest out, straight up and flatfooted, with his shoes pointing outward. The only thing he was missing was the Penguin’s umbrella. He was my trainer for the nine years I was at Stillman’s, and his name was Izzy Blanc, and he looked after me like a son.
He died just a few years ago. And in all the all the years I knew him, I never saw him dressed differently.
As long as Izzy trained me–and as good or bad as I ever got– he never allowed me to forget what he thought was unpardonable. As a teenager, I did what all the other kids did, I carried a rubber in my wallet– not that I had chance to use it– but it was expected.
Well, one day while I was changing in the lockerroom, the rubber fell out of my wallet and onto the floor and Izzy saw it. If I did anything after that that didn’t live up to his expectation, he just shrugged: “Sure! How can he fight? He’s in the saddle!”
I had to do three times what anybody else did. If I so much as breathed hard: “The kid’s in the saddle!”
One of the toughest challenges was just: Not to stare.
There wasn’t any direction you could look where there wasn’t a legend bathed in sweat, large droplets clinging to their faces where Aboline Cream had been slathered on by trainers. Once, to my surprise, Joe Louis apologized for backing into me while I was hitting a heavy bag. My mouth dropped open.
The overriding, overbearing ringmaster of all this commotion was Lou Stillman, sitting in a raised chair to the left of the rings against the wall– just under his prized clock given to him by an English promoter– he barked non-stop insults over his loud speaker: “Get the hell out of the ring, you bum! You call yourself a professional?!”
Stillman was a sour, 60’sh former beat cop, it was said, who took on the job just after World War 1, not knowing anything about the fight business, and was clearly fed up and burned out by the middle 1940’s. Stillman was no sitcom character: crusty exterior with a heart of gold… he was all crust.
Stillman seemed to be everywhere at the same time, and always yelling insults at the top of his lungs. If he said to black fighters now what he said then, no question in my mind: He would have had a short life. He used every racist epithet you could imagine.
Stillman regarded all the fighters as scum; treated some of the trainers less harshly (Charley Goldman and Ray Arcel) and barely tolerated everybody else–celebrities included– and ran roughshod over young and old.
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...
at Canelo still letting him damn near go the distance at that.
