February 17, 2011
By Staff Reporter
That little detail also demonstrated Schulberg’s own eye for the part sport played in the wider world, and his death at the age of 95 last Wednesday brought the curtain down on one of the most remarkable writing careers of the last century. This is the guy who wrote, amongst many, many other things, the screenplay for “On the Waterfront,” a movie that won eight Academy Awards and gave the world “I coulda been a contender,” the famous line uttered by failed boxer Terry Malloy. Sometime dramatist, sometime author, sometime journalist, Schulberg was also one of the American reporters who flew to Dublin in 1972 for Ali’s fight with Al “Blue” Lewis at Croke Park.
When writing a book about the fight some years back, I called Schulberg on the phone. After getting over my initial amazement at how easy it was to get his number and to get him to agree to talk, I asked him his recollections of that rather bizarre week in Ireland’s sporting history. He was 87 years old at the time yet his recall of events showed the reporter’s instincts were still sharp. With the fight promoter Hal Conrad long dead, I was hoping his good friend Schulberg would give me a sense of the chaos surrounding the organization of a fight at Croke Park in the Dublin of that time. He didn’t disappoint.
“Hal was having a very tough time,” said Schulberg. “He was complaining and bitching to me all the time that these people didn’t know what the hell they were doing and they were never going to get this fight put on. He was like that all through the week right up to the fight. He was worried about not getting paid, very worried about that. He felt that he was doing all the work because Butty Sugrue (the co-promoter) didn’t know too much about staging a major fight. And it didn’t matter to Hal whether he was talking to a king or whoever, he didn’t like to take sh-t from anybody.’
For the duration of his stay, Schulberg was domiciled in the Gresham Hotel on O’Connell Street. From the moment Conrad had booked his suite there, the Gresham became the focal point of the festival scene that surrounds every big fight. The majority of the visiting press, the various denizens of the boxing world and every other hanger-on with enough money or clout to mix it could be found in the lobby or the bar of the hotel that week. No matter what part of the world Ali went to, an eclectic cast of characters would magically appear during the build-up and lend a particular atmosphere. In a completely unrelated development, Ronald Reagan, the then-governor of California was also staying under the same roof. He wasn’t the star of this particular show however.
“In a lavish suite, the Conrads held court over that deliciously mixed company they knew how to attract,” said Schulberg. “There was the old gallant, John Huston, up from his horsey estate in Galway. Stars from the Abbey Theatre filled the room with beautiful talk. Gun-runners for the IRA were, Hal found out later, literally making deals in the bedroom. Peter O’Toole was there, and three choir-boy killers for the Provisionals, incredibly casual about a night of terror they had survived in Belfast. There were two former light-heavyweight champions, Jose Torres, now writing for The Village Voice, and Billy Conn, a cynical Irishman who had extended Joe Louis in his prime, and who was now complaining loudly of the dullness of his ancestors’ motherland.”
Even if we are always suspicious of the overly-romantic American tendency to believe too many people they meet in Ireland are in some way connected to or involved with the Republican movement, the picture Schulberg painted of the scene in the Gresham was wonderfully evocative. He was helpful too in his analysis of the incongruity of the most famous black man on the planet suddenly arriving into what was then one of the whitest countries on earth. As somebody who’d spent the previous decade chronicling Ali’s travels all over the place, Schulberg was uniquely equipped to put this in context.
“One thing that amazed me was the way the local people adored Ali,” said Schulberg. “At times, I thought the adulation was very much the same as if he was walking through Harlem or some place back home. Wherever he went, the crowd would follow him, fall in behind and start to chant ‘Ali, Ali, Ali.’ They’d be everywhere all around him. He had an amazing effect on them. Much more than I expected really. They loved him more than I would have expected. They were
really crazy about him.
“He was very much the same Ali as usual except he didn’t know quite what he was getting into and he was really pleased with the way everybody responded to him everywhere he went. He was very funny with it. The sense of humor the Irish have, I think he related very well to that. He was very much the same going down the street, stopping and talking to everybody, just like I’d seen him do before in places like Atlanta. He was really enjoying himself.”
Muhammad Ali returns to Ireland at the end of this month. He’s a different man and Ireland is a very different place, but the response he’ll get will be much the same. Schulberg would have appreciated that.