Education of Rocky

Prizefighters who retire before their brains get scrambled almost always wind up with another occupational characteristic : total recall. They can remember every minute of every fight--the amateur bouts when the gold medal or the brass watch was hocked for the price of a hot meal, the tank-town prelims, the main events when they got their turns on the big time. Ex-Middleweight Champion Rocky Graziano does even better. In his autobiography, Somebody Up There Likes Me (Simon & Schuster; $3.95), written with the help of Newsman Rowland Barber, Rocky even recalls the eye-gouging, gut-punching details of his childhood street scraps, the first wild rounds of his private bout with the world.

Two Fists & Free Love. As Rocky tells it, by the time he was old enough for school, he was on the lam from the truant officer. At twelve he knew his way around the pool halls and whorehouses of Manhattan's lower East Side. He had been hardened by a stretch in a Catholic protectory in The Bronx, where the brothers belted him with bamboo canes, and where he had to bust a few heads himself before he taught the other inmates who was boss of the yard. He had his own mob of hoodlums, snarling youngsters who hated the sight of uniformed cops, who could spot a plainclothes dick in a subway crush, who knew how to steal "anything begun with an A. A piece of fruit. A watch. A pair of shoes. A bicycle. Anything."

When the Rock and his mob got tired of "shlepping" (roaming the city and looting parked cars), or "window Bopping" (heaving a lead ball through shop windows and hooking merchandise with stiff wires), or summertime "radio fishing'' (prowling rooftops and reeling in radios from open windows by their antennas). they would swagger into one of the local Communist clubs. "We would listen to them spouting off all this stuff we didn't understand. We would sign petitions with phony names. Then all the listening and signing paid off when we took these Communist broads in the back room . . . They believed in free love. We didn't like to pay for anything either."

Inevitably, Rocky made his tour through a long series of reform schools and jails. He was a big shot, a guy who shared lice-ridden cells with drug addicts, crooked politicians, bookies, lunatics and gunmen. During his few periods of freedom he did a little "amateur" boxing for pocket money, but most of the time the thugs he traveled with had no use for padded gloves. A lead pipe was better.

A Legitimate Wheel. So far as Rocky was concerned, only one thing was worse than being in jail: being in the Army. Drafted in 1942, just as he was beginning a career in professional boxing, he rebelled against military discipline, flattened his captain with a fast right, went AWOL from Fort Dix, N.J. and wound up in the disciplinary barracks at Fort Leavenworth, Kans. A connoisseur of jails by then, Rocky found the Army brand the worst. "All I can say is, stay out of any prison run by a bunch of amateurs."

But at Leavenworth the authorities taught Rocky something beside new methods for kicking the world in the teeth. They taught him that fist fighting can be an honorable profession. As a member of the Leavenworth boxing team, he learned what it meant to be a "legitimate wheel.'' and he found that he liked it. Suddenly, at the age of 20, Rocky turned into an adult.

Jail in the Water. His debt to the Army paid. Rocky drifted back to the big city and wound up where he belonged --in the prize ring. There were distracting influences. Rocky got married, and his wife would burst into tears when he came home with his face looking like a leftover hamburger. Prosecutors badgered him, accused him of covering up bribe offers. Among his managers was Killer Eddie Coco. But Rocky won most of his bouts. In the ring the old street fighter came back. One hot July night in 1947, he knocked out Tony Zale in a celebrated pier-six brawl and won the middleweight championship of the world.

Next year Zale took the title back in another Donnybrook. In and out of trouble with boxing's bigwigs, Rocky managed to keep himself in contention until 1952. Then, in Chicago, Sugar Ray Robinson knocked him out, and convinced him that he was through. But the man who finally turned his back on the ring was no longer the wise guttersnipe, the terror of Tenth Street. He had calmed down enough to become a TV comedian.

More important, he had become a man. Today, says Rocky, "I can walk down Broadway or First Avenue or even Fifth Avenue and this is my town. My name is Rocky Graziano . . . and what's yours? I got a right to ask anybody that, even a cop . . . It's a free world and it's a big country which I know stretches away across the Jersey flats to where the jail is in the water, San Francisco. I am happy that I am Rocky Graziano and that I am living in this here country."

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