Rocky Graziano done it by himself

Everybody down here liked him

Rocky Graziano was a dirty boxer and man of questionable character. He seems to cast a spell over writers; they never run out of ways to praise him. I wonder why.

A practiced thief as a boy, he took what he wanted all his life. Yet, to reverse the trope familiar from Matthew 7:15, he aspired to be seen as a sheep in wolf’s clothing. In his 1955 autobiography, Somebody Up There Likes Me, Graziano claims to have shed his predatory exterior and emerged as a ram, if not a lamb. The book is packed with accounts of his criminal behavior, his murderous violence, and his consummate selfishness. Even so, readers accept Graziano’s sanitized view of himself and wink at the ugly facts.

The child-man

Graziano was born in 1919 as Rocco Barbella. He lived in a tenement on the lower East side of Manhattan. Who was he? As a child he learned to value only those companions and activities that served his interests. Going to school did not count. Neither did having a job. He did not finish seventh grade. For the rest of his life, he shunned discipline. Violent, quick-tempered, and monumentally egotistical, Barbella qualifies as an antagonistic narcissist, not merely vain but a man with malignant traits, hostile, arrogant, and sadistic.

Flamboyant and independent, Barbella was a rebel and a risk-taker. No matter where he was, he was determined to set the rules and to be noticed as a ringleader. In the Army he repeatedly went AWOL. It never occurred to him that, in some circumstances, training and discipline mattered—in combat, for example. Here are this thoughts about World War II: “Give me a uniform and a gun and put me wherever I can shoot at Hitler’s soldiers. . . . Right now, lead me to this here war. I got to be a hero. I always got to be the hero, the winner, the number one. I made it to the top [in the various reform schools he was sent to]. Now I am going to number one hero in the United States Army” (p. 178). He was 22 when he had these thoughts, not 12.

In the Army, he found out that there was more to being a hero than he thought, so he quit. As he see is, it’s not Graziano who has the problem but the Army, which, with its regulations and rules, is out of step with the hero’s idea of manly success. Graziano seems to have spent more time AWOL than on duty. He complained that nobody taught him about war in reform school and that, later on, he didn’t know what the war was about. The last point is easy to believe. I wonder if he was a narcissist because he was ignorant, or if he was ignorant because he was a narcissist. In either case, I struggle to find anything admirable either in his behavior or in his attempt to excuse it. I am in the minority.

The first part of Somebody Up There Likes Me describes Graziano’s early life as a tough. He and his contemporary, Jake LaMotta, whom Graziano met in prison, were both “vicious teenage hoodlums,” Jeff Sussman writes in Boxing and the Mob (p. 100). Like LaMotta, Graziano was from the lower East Side of Manhattan. His transformation into a middle-class gentleman comprises the last third of the book.

Narcissistic personalities are often said to develop in response to poor self-esteem. This observation applies to Graziano. Italian and other immigrant families on the lower East Side sometimes sent one child out every morning to steal his own food—either that or have nothing to eat. His clothes were hand-me-downs; if he wanted better things, he was expected to steal them. Among his most frequently-used verbs in are “crib” and “pinch” and other idioms for stealing. 

The young man’s career is a parade of reform schools and detention centers, including Rikers, one worse than the other. Graziano has many fights in these places. But he will not box. The first reform school he attended had weekly matches. Barbella avoided them because he would not wear boxing gloves, which he regarded as “a mark of shame.” Instead, he wanted to draw “quick blood” with his fists (p. 123). Being sent to such places was a mark of honor, a sign that a kid from the neighborhood was “on [his] way” to a successful life of crime.

But if boxing meant that he would have to “put on gloves [and] go into the ring,” then he wanted to part of it. He even met the fabled trainer Cus D’Amato and boxed in his presence. But Barbella refused to work out or get into shape for his fights (pp. 137-39). He describes his technique as that a wild street fighter who cuts up boxers (p. 150). D’Amato expected more.

Barbella  was drafted in 1941. When he went AWOL, his mother, shocked, told him that, if he did not go back, she would disown him. When he returned to his base, he learned that his unit had shipped out, gone to war (p. 189). He went AWOL again, this time stopping at Stillman’s Gym, where he met another boxing great, Irving Cohen, who would eventually become his manager. Everybody who saw Barbella knock around the gym’s boxers was impressed by his punches (p. 197). Barbella would only box for money and, to his would-be handlers’ dismay, refused to train. They didn’t know he was a GI who is AWOL (p. 196).

In one of his career’s more interesting ironies, Barbella, while AWOL, was able to line up fights that take place at Fort Hamilton, an Army base. Soldiers ready to go off to war loved to watch him fight (p. 208). Barbella himself would not see combat or leave the U.S. Asked for his professional name, he gave it as  Dominick Graziano (he couldn’t risk being known as Barbella) and then as Tommy Rocky Graziano. He became Rocky Graziano (p. 207). He was arrested, court-martialed, discharged (dishonorably), and sent to Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, for a year of hard labor (pp. 213-16).

At a certain point, Graziano realized he was a bum destined for more prison time; this is the thinking that changed his life, he insists (p. 233). He campaigned to get a spot on the Leavenworth boxing squad and became best friends with Master Sergeant John Hyland, who headed the squad. Graziano was released early from Leavenworth. Back in New York, he wanted to start a new life. It was 1942. He met Cohen again; he became Graziano’s manager. “And now Rocky Graziano’s professional career really started” (p. 241).

The man in the ring

In the ring, there was no difference between Rocky Barbella and Rocky Graziano. When he fought, Graziano relived the hatred and anger of his childhood battles. The word we need is relived, not relieved. He had no interest in transcending his hostile feelings. He did not demonstrate confidence or self-control in the ring, much less good technique. His idea of boxing was smashing another man with his powerful right hand. He was a fighter, not a boxer, as he himself knew. He aimed to knock out his opponent in the first round. Few of his fights lasted 10 rounds, whether he won or lost. Over a third of them lasted between one and three rounds.

As a pro, Graziano had 83 fights in 11 years, winning 67 (78% of those by knock-out), and losing 10, with six draws. He boxed from 1942 to 1952, when he retired at age 33; he died in 1990 at 71. Defeats were rare but significant. In 1948 Graziano was knocked out by Tony Zale in the last of their three famous matches. That was what Graziano called “the lowest point of my whole life” (p. 334). He had lost the only title he had won. He had held it just for a year.

Despite his stellar reputation, Graziano was, as a boxer, moderately but not extraordinarily successful. As I pointed out in a previous post, his record did not significantly differ from Zale’s, who was Graziano’s most successful opponent. Zale had 87 fights in 14 years, winning 67 of them; his record was 67-18-2. Few people remember Zale today, but Graziano (83 fights, 67-10-6) is revered. Some people think that the Rocky movie series, which started in 1987, was based on him. Chuck Wepner, the boxer on whom the film was based, is forgotten.

After his last defeat, Cohen tells Graziano, “Don’t worry kid. Don’t worry. We’re going to make a lot of bucks yet” (p. 334). That they did. Between 1948 and 1952 Graziano fought 23 times, winning 20, with one draw and two losses. Those losses were his last two fights, important matches against Sugar Ray Robinson and Chuck Davey. Most of the other fights, to judge by the rating algorithms of BoxigRec.com, were with no-name, lesser fighters who posed no challenge to Graziano. He owes his reputation to his career after he retired from the ring.

Perhaps it is not surprising to find adulation in articles written while the boxer was alive, such as Rex Lardner’s “The Improbable Graziano,” which appeared in Sport in 1956. Nor is the adulation in the 2018 biography written by Jeffrey Sussman surprising. Sussman once said hello to Graziano when the boxer was walking a dog. Later on, Sussman attended the boxer’s funeral in St. Patrick’s Cathedral. On the basis of these experiences, Sussman came to regard Graziano as a friend. Much of his book paraphrases Graziano’s autobiography. Graziano could not have had a bigger fan.

Lardner, Sussman, and several others to one side, I was both surprised and disappointed to find what the formidable W. C. Heinz had to say about Graziano. (Heinz’s work is the focus of one of my recent essays, “The tug of war.” In Once They Heard the Cheers (1979), Heinz reports on visits he made in 1978 to some of the athletes he had written about years before. Fortunately, Graziano was one of them (below, on the cover, upper left).

Heinz interviewed Graziano in 1947, the night before Graziano took the middleweight title from Zale, who had defeated Graziano in 1946 and who went on to win the welterweight title from Graziano in 1948. “You have to lick this guy, Rock,” Heinz said in the boxer’s dressing room. Heinz seems to have believed that Graziano was not fighting Zale but rather taking on the New York State Boxing Commission, which had suspended Graziano for failing to report a bribe, a charge that Heinz and other Graziano fans thought of as unjust (Once They Heard, p. 480). Acknowledging that reporters should struggle to be objective, Heinz admitted that the night before this fight “[he] lost that struggle” (p. 463)—but, I would say, not entirely.

Heinz was a crusty observer, a war correspondent who had been in Germany in World War II. He had a finely-tuned sense of who men were, based on how they boxed. We see this as he recalls, three times, Graziano’s fight with Mario Servo in 1946. In that fight Graziano pushed his open left glove against Servo’s throat, trapping him on the ropes, and then pounded his head with his formidable right.

This is called anchoring the head; it was possible because gloves then had separated thumbs (thumbs were not attached to the palm until the 1970s). Servo went down, of course, and the referee stopped the fight. “The brutality and viciousness of that [part of the fight] haunted me so that for hours I tossed, unable to get to sleep,” Heinz writes (p. 480). Servo was so badly injured that he boxed only twice more and had to give up the welterweight title he won just two months before (the fight with Graziano was not for the title). (Below, from “The Ring,” Servo, on the right, and Sugar Ray Robinson, Madison Square Garden, 1942; Robinson won both their matches.)

Two years later, in 1948, Heinz was on the way to dinner with Graziano and his manager. They stopped off at the bar where Servo was now tending bar. He greeted them. Graziano leaned over had pushed his left hand under Servo’s chin (as if to anchor it), “and he fakes to throw the right. Then the two of them dropped their hands and laughed,” Heinz writes. Graziano’s manager explains to Heinz that the boxer “tries to bring business into the place” where Servo works (p.481). This “business” is how Graziano compensated the man whose boxing career he destroyed. To some readers this patronizing visit might look gentlemanly. To me it is Graziano’s way of reminding us who is in charge, who is top dog and “number one hero.”

Thirty years later, at the very end of Once They Heard the Cheers, in the very last paragraph, in fact, Heinz recalled his 1978 interview with Graziano. Walking home after the interview, Heinz realized that he was not far from the apartment where he himself had been living 30 years earlier, on the night in 1946 when Graziano mauled Servo. Heinz recalled that he was “so appalled by the animalism I had seen in the fighter as he had clubbed down Marty Servo whom he liked” (p. 498). Heinz had saved Graziano for the book’s last chapter, which he concludes with a horrifying image of Graziano destroying a boxer “whom he liked,” a moment Graziano later joked about.

Heinz does not make the point, but it shines nonetheless. We see the contrast between Heinz, a man who saw war and understood the sufferings of others, and Graziano, who seems to have been a sociopath, a man lacking empathy and remorse, without inhibitions, an egotist who remained captive to childhood character traits. Heinz tells us that his struggle as a writer was to report how people spoke and looked and acted and “to get it as right as I could” (p. 489). With his third reference to Graziano’s animalism, Heinz got boxer’s character “as right as [he] could.”

I give Heinz credit for his honesty and his pain. Experienced sport writers have not explored Graziano’s malice. Indeed, some writers seem to celebrate it. I am not sure why they do, but I can see the effect their admiration has had on the boxer’s reputation.

More important, I can also see what it reveals about their view of boxing and masculinity. Graziano was the kind of man these writers think a boxer should be, not a sportsman but a killer. Of Graziano’s view of his opponents, Lardner writes that he “hated them all with consuming, fiery hatred.” It easier for spectators to understand hate than it is for them to appreciate martial art. Brutality will always triumph over finesse. That victory through violence is a sign of masculinity is a common misconception among feminists and the woke more generally.

Nonetheless, boxers do not get in the ring to kill each other. Winning a boxing match does not require “fiery hatred,” either, which has no place in martial art. Some writers blame the fans. Heinz says that boxing aficionados were as enamored of Graziano’s violence as regular fight-goers. Heinz himself is an example. When Graziano sparred at Stillman’s gym, Heinz writes, “you could breathe the tension. When he fought in the Garden, you could feel it over on Broadway” (p. 465). Graziano was proud to be recognized as a sensation. He eagerly put on a show for fans who wanted to see him inflict his undisciplined violence on his opponents, to show off his “fiery hatred.”

The man on camera

Graziano retired from boxing in 1952. He lost no time in remaking himself, although he and his biographer do not explain how this happened. Between 1952 and 1954, Graziano and Rowland Barber began writing his autobiography, Somebody Up There Likes Me, which was serialized in Look magazine in the last months of 1954. (The cover features Paul Newman, who played Graziano in the 1956 film adaptation, discussed below.) They must have begun writing in 1953. The installments in Look no doubt brought Graziano further attention. I have found no comment on how the book project got started, who suggested it, or how Graziano met Barber, but his path to subsequent success is a little clearer.

Graziano was on two television shows in 1955. The first was The Henny and Rocky Show, a comedy-variety program. It was broadcast after Wednesday night fights and involved jokes about the matches they had seen or about the boxers. The aim of the show was to fill airtime after the matches (see Sussman, Rocky Graziano, pp. 149-62). 

The show was a springboard for Youngman, who, when the program started, was less well-known than the boxer (pp. 151-52). Youngman left the show after a just a month, and it folded a few weeks after that. The program established one important fact, which was that the famously dangerous boxer was likeable and easy to laugh at. He mangled his syntax but he spoke his mind. Working class and elite audiences alike were entertained, although no doubt for different reasons.

After an interview with a sports writer on a New York station, Graziano was paired with another professional comedian, Martha Raye. Her writers wanted somebody to serve as her foil—“some stupid guy like Rocky Graziano,” one said. Nat Hiken, who directed the show, asked, “Why not get Rocky Graziano”? He went to Stillman’s Gym, got the name of Graziano’s manager, Cohen, and then invited Graziano to the producer’s office. Looking at a script there, the boxer could not pronounce some of the words, but that turned out to be a plus, another source for laughs. (Sussman, p. 154, quotes Heinz, The Top of His Game, pp. 519-48; see Graziano, p. 344; and Lardner.)

Graziano appeared as Raye’s boyfriend in the show, 90 minutes of comedy, song, and dance. It ran for about two years. The boxer was allowed to ad lib if he forgot his lines. He was soon making commercials, appearing on talk shows, and collecting big fees. He died a multimillionaire.

Whether in the ring or before the television camera, Graziano was not an artist. He was not a deft boxer, and on stage he could only play himself. Graziano claims that he boxed his way out of anger and hatred to became a simple, down-home, rough-edged media star. Curiously, he credited boxing with improving his character and lifting him from a sordid past into gentility and wealth. He believed that he boxed the poison out of himself. “There wasn’t any fight left I me,” he writes after his last fight. “I had to be a fighter to live this long and keep my place in the world. I could be a boxer if I wanted, but I wasn’t a good boxer and I knew it” (p. 344). He writes this at the end of his career; it applies equally well to its beginning.

The idea that a violent man is able to redeem himself by more violence is commonly held, part of the belief that men box to express anger and frustration. This view overlooks the difficulty and complexity of boxing as a martial art. As I point out in Boxing and Masculinity (2022), venting leads to more venting; it does not get to root causes. Muhammad Ali did not express anger against his opponents in order to get rid of it. Getting rid of it was the last thing he wanted to do. Ali vented his anger to bolster his aggression, not to release it. Graziano did the same.

The man in the movie

(Paul Newman, as Graziano, below.)

The 1956 film version makes the most of Graziano’s boyhood behavior. Always keeping an eye on him and his friends were brutal policemen, usually Irish. Added to the perpetual fights with other hoodlums, struggling grocers and news vendors, and the cops, is domestic drama. Graziano has a violent, alcoholic father, himself a former boxer; an older brother being trained to box by this father; and a mother straight out of Central Casting, praying incessantly, thanking her son as he hands her money, and pleading with him to tell her that he got it honestly—playing craps, she hoped (which was seldom the case), rather than stealing (Rocky’s usual method).

The film emphasizes Graziano’s redemption in the ring. The boxing sequences are very well done, but Graziano’s boxing history is cut short to fit Hollywood’s need for an upbeat conclusion. The film includes only two championship fights, the one Graziano loses to Zale in 1946 and the one he wins in 1947. There was a third match, in which Graziano lost the title, knocked out by Zale, just as he had been knocked out by Zale in 1946, the only times Graziano was knocked out, so far as I can tell, before he was knocked out by Robinson in 1952. Sussman, the boxer’s biographer, also omits the third fight, making no mention of it in an article he published in 2018. The writers liked Graziano more than this liked the facts.

The movie ends with a huge parade showing that the boxer’s great performance has lifted up his family and the whole of his lower East Side neighborhood. Graziano’s life is made to conform to the usual cliché of boxing fiction—bad boy makes good, in this case with the aid of a girl. A script that adhered to the facts of Graziano’s life would have made for a more troubling history of the boxer’s troubling life. A man who rises is always a good story. But the story of a man who loses, wins, loses again (Graziano’s arc with Zale), and then succeeds in the entertainment business, would have explored the boxer’s complex relationship to the entertainment world and the press.

Neither Graziano nor those who write about him explain how a man who did not finish seventh grade came to write a book. In a real sense, he didn’t write it. The book and the boxer’s television celebrity emergy after he has already moved up to the middle class and has access to image makers like Barber. He learned how to smooth some of his rough edges (no more smashing strangers in the face) but to keep enough of them (“deez,” “doez”) to hint at the dark interior behind his photogenic face.

Traces of the handling and packaging of the boxer are easy to spot. Where did the title come from, much less the book? According to the book, Graziano takes the microphone after his victory over Zale in 1947. He says, “ Hey, ma,—your bad boy done it” (p. 327). That’s the boxer’s version.

In his account of this moment in his 1979 essay, Heinz adds to the phrase: “Hey, Ma—your bad boy done it. I told you Somebody up there likes me” (p. 476). My guess is that Barber, who must have written the autobiography and who was also one of the writers of the screenplay, put the line in the boxer’s mouth. In the movie, the phrase appears as Rocky’s last words as the camera pans  “up there.” I assume that’s where Heinz got the quotation. The phrase seems to belong to the boxer, but it is doubtful that the words are his. Graziano was not a grateful guy.

On the last page of the book, Graziano (or Barber) writes, “Like I always said, Somebody up there must like me, and I will never forget where my good luck come from” (p. 349). Graziano did not “always” say that a higher power liked him. If he did say so, his book gives no evidence of it.

The boxer claims that he “will never forget” where his “good luck” came from. But what did he think luck had to do with it? On the page before the one on which he claims that he would never forget, Graziano thanks a list of people who were good to him, including his mother and grandmother. Then he adds, “But the rest I done all by myself, and now I am sitting up here on top all by myself” (p. 348). “Up here,” not “up there,” is where somebody liked him. Nobody admired the boxer more than he admired himself. Rocky never doubted that he done it all on his own.