Budd Schulberg, 1914-2009

The legendary screenwriter and novelist Budd Schulberg died yesterday at the age of 95. As you peruse his obituaries in all the major newspapers today, you may get only a passing sense of the man’s true, lifelong obsession. Yes, he was the son of Hollywood royalty, and he was briefly a Communist and then an infamous traitor to the Communist cause. He wrote the best-selling Hollywood screed What Makes Sammy Run? and also the grandiloquent screenplay of On the Waterfront. But although notoriety was his fate and writing his vocation, his greatest subject and passion was boxing. The sweet science made its way into On the Waterfront, of course, and animated the film’s most famous lines, which indeed may be the most famous lines ever uttered in the history of the movies. When Marlon Brando as Terry Malloy, a washed-up prizefighter who saw his career go down in the throes of mob crookedness, tells his gangster brother “I coulda been a contender. I coulda been somebody,” it soon became the eternal plaint of the tough guy with a soft side, the ne’er-do-well dreamer who never got his moment in the sun.

And though What Makes Sammy Run? is without question Schulberg’s most famous novel, in my opinion his best is The Harder They Fall, a classic boxing tale of shysterism and corruption that took its inspiration from the largely bogus career of the giant Italian heavyweight Primo Carnera in the 1930s. The Harder They Fall later became a movie of the same name, starring Humphrey Bogart in his final role. It twisted some of the narrative of Schulberg’s novel to suit its purpose on the silver screen, and the writer famously disowned the film in a piece called “Hollywood Hokum.”

Though I respect The Harder They Fall as a novel, I admit that I’ve always found Schulberg the novelist ultimately unsatisfying. He told one tale over and over again, the would-be noble man sinking so slowly into the quicksand of corruption that he hardly notices his own descent. It’s a brand of caricatured moralizing that I mostly can do without in my fiction.

From the heroic bouts of his beloved Benny Leonard and the epochal Louis/Schmeling fights through to the bizarre meltdowns of Tyson and the bloody rituals of Gatti and the multi-million-dollar extravaganzas of De La Hoya, Schulberg was a one-man living compendium of boxing lore. Perhaps no one who ever lived attended so many famous fights over the course of a lifetime, and certainly no one ever wrote so eloquently about such a long period of a sport’s history as Schulberg did of boxing.

The first time I ever saw him in person was ringside at a Dmitriy Salita fight at one of Lou DiBella’s boxing nights at the Hammerstein Ballroom in New York. I watched with curiosity as this old, hunched-over, mildly quivering man was led to his seat on press row by a much younger fellow (his son). Only after a few minutes of staring at him did it hit me that here was one of my writing heroes in the flesh. This was maybe five years ago. Budd was probably 90 at the time, and getting around was not the easiest thing in the world for him, especially not at the veritable circus of testosterone and chaos that is your average fight night in New York.

But he was a big Salita fan, and Salita fights back then were pretty big events in the city, certainly for a Jewish boxing fan like himself who once longed for the ringside days of his youth in Los Angeles in a piece titled “When Boxing Was a Jewish Sport.”

Budd Schulberg simply was not a guy to miss a major boxing event no matter what the obstacle. No one wrote more beautifully about the thrill of the big fight than he did, and no one communicated like he did the magnetic attraction that has drawn the fight-obsessed masses to such contests since the earliest recorded history of man.

On that note, I’ll leave you with some words from Schulberg’s preface to Sparring with Hemingway describing the fascination of “the big fight” throughout the ages, a passage so near and dear to my heart that I almost have it memorized. It feels like the most fitting way to bid farewell to this great chronicler and devotee of the fight game in all its seamy and glorious vicissitudes, a man who for many years I have cherished from afar as an inspiration and kindred spirit.

⇥“We find ourselves at one with John Milton, that most unexpected of fight fans, who wrote in Samson Agonistes: ⇥⇥I sorrowed at his captive state
⇥But minded
⇥Not to be absent at that
⇥Spectacle. ⇥

⇥⇥Let’s get it on! the old master seems to be saying if we translate him into twentieth-century vernacular. I’ll be looking for him, along with the ghosts of Homer and Lord Byron, at the next writers’ conference at Caesar’s Palace, or MGM Grand, or wherever the next epic encounter captures the imagination of the writers who see The Fight as a microcosm, an intensification of the life forces we struggle to understand.” – Budd Schulberg, 1995⇥

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