Echo Focus: Cinderella men

If McBride’s victory in Washington represented a triumph for decency and courage over a vainglorious bully, it was very much in keeping with the style of his long-ago predecessor at that weight.
For all Braddock achieved in the ring, he possessed a set of moral values that deserved to be commemorated by the recent movie and book releases about his life.
As thrilling and surprising as Braddock’s ascent to the top may have been, everything pales next to what he did when he got there.
The moment he had regained financial security, he made good on a promise to pay back every single cent of the $17 per week he had received in relief money from various government agencies when his family had been destitute during the winter of 1934.
There have been more illustrious champions and far superior fighters but that gesture alone marks him out from the crowd. Although his accent, like his upbringing, was pure New Jersey, the shamrock he wore on his shorts denoted the country that loomed largest in the family history.
His parents, Joseph and Elizabeth O’Toole Braddock, had been born in England and immigrated to the United States in 1889, but they were both much more Irish than English or American.
Though there is no evidence that either ever set foot on Irish soil, writes Jeremy Schaap in his excellent book “Cinderella Man,” upon which the Russell Crow movie is based, they were raised in impoverished Irish enclaves in and around Manchester, where the Braddocks and the O’Tooles clung to their Irishness — mostly because the English never let them forget where they came from.
Forty-five years after Joseph Braddock escaped from the poverty and prejudices of northern England and made his way to America, his son James was struggling to clothe and feed his burgeoning family.
He owed money to his landlord, the milkman, the gas and electric company, and his manager, to name just a few of his creditors.
In the bitter winter of 1933-34, he had trudged through the streets of North Bergen in shoes that were falling apart. Most of the time he was hungry.

A Cinderella story
Born on December 6, 1905, Braddock had enjoyed a prosperous enough boxing career up to September, 1933 when he broke his right hand in a bout with Abe Feldman.
Having started out in the amateur ranks as a 17-year-old, the closest he’d come to real glory during the Twenties had been a light-heavyweight title fight with the champion Tommy Loughran.
The so-called “Phantom of Philly,” Loughran gave his fellow Irish-American a boxing lesson over 15 rounds. That defeat sent Braddock into a downward spiral that matched the country’s own economic fortunes after the Wall Street Crash.
Between 1929 and the clash with Feldman, he lost sixteen out of 28 fights and the venues for his contests and the size of his purses gradually shrunk.
His own financial downfall was precipitated by the collapse of the Bank of the United States, an institution in which he had placed his savings throughout his professional career. Like millions of other Americans, he suddenly found himself penniless and desperate.
With his stock in the boxing world at an all-time low, Braddock took whatever work he could find as a longshoreman. Some days, of course, that meant no work at all.
When he did find gainful employment, the physical nature of the job had a fortunate side effect. It ensured he was improving his strength at the same time as the respite from fistic pursuits was allowing his right-hand to heal properly.
Meanwhile, his manager Joe Gould (whose real name, Biegel, obviously wasn’t Irish enough in an era when one ethnic group dominated the sport) was trying to engineer the most unlikely comeback of all.
Eventually, Gould wangled a bout with an up and comer called John “Corn” Griffin whose promoters felt that the washed-up Braddock would be easy fodder for their charge.
The fight, however, would be the start of the road back for Braddaock. His third-round dismissal of Griffin on the undercard of the Max Baer-Primo Carnera fight at the Madison Square Garden Bowl in Long Island City on June 14, 1934 launched him back into the public consciousness.
Exactly 364 days later, he was back at the same venue, challenging Baer for the heavyweight championship of the world.
A ten to one underdog, Braddock out-boxed the champion over fifteen rounds to carve out a victory that led journalist and writer Damon Runyon to dub him “Cinderella Man.”
One more sobriquet for a guy who’d always been known reverentially by his fans as “Plain Jim” or “Irish Jim.”
“Jimmy Braddock of the soft voice, twisted smile and diffident demeanor looked more like the old-time friendly Irish cop on the beat than a prize-fighter,” wrote Joe Nichols later, in an obituary for The New York Times. “His patient manner marked his everyday pose just as it did his way of going into the ring.”
It was the sort of romantic moment in sport that caught the imagination of a nation that had been through as many travails as the fighter himself.
Every American down on his luck could see their own story in the fall and rise of Braddock and that afforded him a popularity far greater than his talent.
He was one of them and they loved him all the more for that. Dethroning Baer had brought Bruddock financial security and the champion’s right to pick his next opponent.
A proposed bout with Max Schmeling the following summer was postponed due to arthritis in his right hand, or by some accounts a better financial package to fight Joe Louis instead, so he didn’t actually put the title on the line until June of 1937.
Despite having put Louis down earlier in the contest, the contender knocked him out in the eight round at Comiskey Park in Chicago. Braddock fought just once more after that and in retirement, both he and Gould enlisted in the U.S. Army.
During World War II, Braddock served in Saipan, the island later to become infamous in Irish sporting circles for very different reasons.
Back on Civvy Street, Braddock worked on the construction of the Verrazano Bridge, and was a marine equipment supplier. He and his wife Mae Fox raised three kids in North Bergen where he died on November 29, 1974.
“The Braddocks always fought,” said Jim Braddock in a 1936 interview with the Daily News. “My father was a handy fellow with his fists back in the old country. He used to hang around the boxing booths at the county fairs and stiffen those pound-a-round pros. He still boasts that he once knocked out a horse with a blow between the eyes, but sometimes I suspect maybe he picked on a pony. My uncle Jim was famous as the best rough and tumble fighter in all Ireland.”
Ron Howard’s movie starring Russell Crowe and Schaap’s book have both brought welcome and belated attention to this remarkable life. Of course, Braddock’s story has been written before, a collaborative effort by the boxer and a journalist pal named Lud Shabazian.
They finished “Relief to Royalty” in 1936 but didn’t formally release it for commercial sale.
Knowing how hard up everybody was, the pair of them just gave it away to family and friends rather than ask mendicant Americans for the $1.25 listed as the cover price. Classy as ever.