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It’s been four weeks since the opening of Ron Howard’s supposed summer ringer “Cinderella Man,” and once again it’s not looking good for James J. Braddock.

The movie version of the life of the world heavyweight champ from 1935-37 has grossed just under $50 million, and currently sits at No. 10 at the box office. But just to give an idea of the film’s poor showing this summer, “The Longest Yard” – an inferior remake of the 1974 classic, and the only other sports-related movie in the top 25 films – opened one week earlier and has taken in nearly three times as much.

In this feel-good “Rocky”-type picture about a hard-luck Schmoe who rises, then falls, then rises to the top, starring the über-manly Russell Crowe as Braddock and the menschy Paul Giamatti as his manager, Joe Gould, the casting was a stroke of genius. But the movie’s too perfect in its way, too predictable – though Braddock’s story thrilled millions struggling through the Great Depression, today’s popular culture is not so inspired by oversimplified Horatio Alger tales.

Where the film of Braddock’s life fails, three of the four recently released biographies of the New Jersey heavyweight complicate the matter – and, in doing so, are interesting and worthwhile reading. (Marc Cerasini’s “Cinderella Man” won’t be discussed here, as it is a novelization based on the screenplay, and I’m not sure a book can get less interesting and worthwhile than that.) Jim Hague came out with “Braddock: The Rise of the Cinderella Man” (Chamberlain Bros.) on April 5, followed by Jeremy Schaap’s hardback, “Cinderella Man: James J. Braddock, Max Baer, and the Greatest Upset in Boxing History” (Houghton Mifflin), in late April. Two weeks after the film opened came “Cinderella Man: The James J. Braddock Story” from boxing historian and the founder of Cyber Boxing Zone, Michael C. DeLisa, who was also tapped as the film’s historical consultant.

Each writer’s take on Braddock’s life has its own respective influences. DeLisa first became curious about the Depression-era slugger upon his death in 1974. In a Pittsburgh Post-Gazette profile, DeLisa told how what he calls his “obsessive compulsive disorder” was thrown into overdrive by the twice-told tales in Braddock’s obit – so much so that he contacted Braddock’s widow on a fact-finding mission that would eventually lead him to publish the myth-busting version of Braddock’s life.



Hague, a New Jersey-based sportswriter for 22 years, was a Newark Star-Ledger reporter in the late 1990s, focusing his energies on the Knicks and the Nets; he now writes for the Reporter in North Bergen, the hometown of James J. Braddock. Chamberlain Bros. commissioned Hague to write Braddock’s bio after an executive editor there read an article of his about the making of the movie.

Schaap was approached in much the same way – in May 2004, his agent urged him to retell the Braddock story to coincide with the release of the movie. Schaap is the host of ESPN’s “Outside the Lines” and, of course, is the son of the late Dick Schaap. In a recent New York Times feature, Schaap tells of the influence of his father on his own career, and it’s clear from reading his book how keen that influence is.

As one can surmise from its title, Schaap’s book includes a sizable portrait of Max Baer – only Schaap gives as much space to the man Braddock took the title from, and his co-starring role on this fight card makes for entertaining reading. But entertainment isn’t all it’s cracked up to be – especially when it’s at the expense of truth. One has to appreciate that Schaap went to the trouble to provide research notes here (neither Hague nor DeLisa did), but what becomes evident as a result is that the author depended almost wholly on newspaper accounts of his subjects. Not a great idea, as that era of sports writing wasn’t known for sticking to the facts. Really, the “GeeWhiz” reporters of the 1920s and ‘30s, following in the footsteps of Grantland Rice, were more interested in selling newspapers and peddling influence than in telling the truth. (For a revelatory look at sportswriters of that time, read Murray Sperber’s “Onward to Victory: The Crises that Shaped College Sports.”)

There is, for example, the story of how the teenaged Braddock came to boxing. Most biographies, including Schaap’s, picture Jimmy Braddock in a street brawl with his brother Joe, then a solid amateur boxer, after the former wore a new sweater of Joe’s without permission. After fighting him for “nearly an hour” (in rounds?), Joe realized what a great puncher his kid brother was, and voilá! DeLisa, though, waves off such stories as apocryphal, pointing out that hanging around as his older brother worked his way to a state welterweight championship in 1923 was probably all the influence Braddock needed to enter the fight game. Schaap indulges all these stories without discrimination, as if we need that hyperbole, that manufacturing of a heroic epic, in order to continue reading a book-length treatment about one fairly obscure athlete’s long struggle and too-brief triumph. Quite frankly, we don’t – the facts of Braddock’s life and times are plenty engrossing and inspiring. As the self-described “old plot-maker” Damon Runyon once wrote, “Truth in Braddock’s case is much stranger than fiction.”

All three bios lean heavily on the ropes of the episodic style to tell the story – not surprising for a biography of an undistinguished boxer. Hague settles into that mode a little too comfortably, though he has a good eye for details in his paperback. This bio gives us great little nuggets we don’t get elsewhere – for instance, that Braddock was forced to train in a tiny dressing room above a tavern because he couldn’t afford the accommodations at his old training grounds, Joe Jeanette’s gym.



Still, Hague’s Braddock, like Schaap’s, is just a little too good to be believable. In “Braddock,” our stalwart heavyweight would rather work on the docks and collect relief checks than accept money from the likes of Owney Madden, an East coast mobster with whom Joe Gould played palsy-walsy. (Madden barely merits mention in Schaap’s book, and then only as the prime mover behind the Italian heavyweight Primo Carnera.) But Madden played a bigger role in Braddock’s life than readers are led to believe. DeLisa outlines how Gould sold a share of his interest in Braddock to an associate of Madden – and though Braddock claimed ignorance of Gould’s more shady dealings, it stretches the limits of credulity to declare he was “too honest” to take advantage of such an alliance. Madden and those he worked with certainly had a hand in some matchmaking for Braddock, and even put him in the position, in 1931, of meeting Al Capone.

The blackest mark against Gould and Braddock – which all three accounts testify to – was the fishy deal that got Joe Louis into the ring with Braddock. As Hague tells it, Gould and his fighter avoided a title defense against Max Schmeling because Gould was Jewish, and they didn’t want to chance handing over the title to a rumored Nazi. The more pedestrian truth was that a Braddock-Schmeling battle promised not only a Jewish boycott, but severely curtailed ticket sales. Braddock needed one last big payday, and meeting the first black boxer to challenge for the heavyweight title since Jack Johnson was financially preferable to an embargoed match-up with the No. 1 contender. To sweeten the deal, Braddock and Louis camps shook hands on a pledge that entitled the “Cinderella Man” to half of the fight’s gate and had the Brown Bomber’s manager, Mike Jacobs, paying Gould and Braddock 10 percent of his promotional profits from Louis over 10 years. It was essentially an admission of impending defeat as well as an ethically dubious business arrangement. And who was giving his blessing in the wings? The ubiquitous Owney Madden.



DeLisa has by far provided the keenest insights into Braddock’s life, though even he admits he wasn’t able to be completely thorough. (He told the Post-Gazette that while Mae Braddock shared a good bit of her understanding of her husband with him in their correspondence, she died before he could quiz her as assiduously as he later wanted to.) The primary sources DeLisa was able to track down enrich this biography beyond the rehashing of white-washed secondary sources we get elsewhere, and this alone makes DeLisa the heavyweight here. But his storytelling skills are more refined as well, and the knowledgeable reader can sense immediately DeLisa’s experience as a boxing writer. There is no substitute for a deliberative writer who knows his beat.

With the final comeback of James J. Braddock, we are likely to see even more books written about unsung fighters – and so much the better. One fascinating theme in Braddock’s story and time that remained unexplored in the above books – but merits a closer look – is the role of race during and at the tail-end of the Great Depression. Braddock himself seemed wholly unfazed by the issue of facing black boxers, as he trained under them (Joe Jeanette) as well as fought some of the better ones (John Henry Lewis, Joe Louis) throughout his career. Until he became champ, Braddock wasn’t in a position to turn away a bout with a black fighter, given his desperate financial straits. But after taking the heavyweight crown from Baer, Braddock remained immune to the notion that race should keep a worthy opponent out of the ring. He fought any and all comers.

Along with economics, what other factors finally led to the first modern championship bout in which the champ accepted on his merits a black challenger? In terms of race and American sports, the Braddock-Louis title fight stands out as a watershed moment. And I, for one, can’t wait to read more about it.
 

 
Adrian Wojnarowski's recently released profile of St. Anthony High School and its boys basketball team in downtrodden Jersey City, NJ is a breath of fresh air in a genre that needed an antidote to the dirty atmosphere of high-profile high school sports. With "The Miracle of St. Anthony," Wojnarowski has effectively done for high school hoops what John Feinstein did for college ball with "The Last Amateurs" -- taken our understanding of the hype and corruption surrounding the game and turned it on its head with a look into a singularly pure program.



It's quite a departure from reads like Buzz Bissinger's "Friday Night Lights," Darcy Frey's "The Last Shot," and Ian O'Conner's "The Jump," as well the especially vivid movie "Hoop Dreams," that chronicles the tribulations of two poor, black Chicago high school players, William Gates and Arthur Agee. The coaches in these works come in two flavors -- they're either Sharks or Working Mothers (that is, too busy and hassled with the details of running a program in an impossibly demanding community to give the sort of individual attention and nurturing their adolescent players need to grow). In "Miracle," though, the coach, Bob Hurley, is neither. Instead, his first priority seems to be on making exceptional team players and good men out of his charges. And in doing so, Hurley has helped the Friars to over 800 wins, 22 state titles and two national championships. More importantly, he acts as a strong father figure to the many St. Anthony's players who need a responsible and caring taskmaster in their corner -- for life.

That's the crux of Wojnarowski's book, along with the secondary stories of the high school itself, with an enrollment of only 200, and the personalities involved. St. Anthony, no longer funded by the local Catholic parish, constantly teeters on the edge of bankruptcy, and readers witness that woeful balancing act as both Hurley and the two Felician nuns who run the school approach their imminent retirements. God knows the place will fold as surely as if it were under the wrecking ball once Hurley and the sisters depart. But until then, all devote their lives to the school and the team in a way that's become almost mythological in the world of high-stakes prep sports.

Hurley, the hard-driving father of ex-Dookie superstar Bobby Hurley, coaches his team as if its players are in reform school. Which, in a sense, they are -- Hurley sees his role as coach through the lens of his former job was as a probation officer (also his father was a Jersey City cop) and his players are coming to him from the poorest of poor families in a city ravaged by crime and violence. He takes no guff from them and demands they play the oldest of old-school basketball. There's no backtalk or whining -- not in practice, not in games. They play the most team-oriented ball since James Naismith invented the game, and they focus on their suffocating defense. It can't be fun to play for Hurley, one must point out, and whenever players stray from Hurley's near-Biblical rules, he enters what might be best described as the Bobby Knight Zone -- cursing, humiliating, berating and insulting the offenders until you think either the players will crumple to the floor in a puddle or Hurley himself will stroke out. Whichever comes first.

And it seems Wojnarowski has had the luck to profile what turns out to be a undefeated season that stars what Hurley never tires of pointing out is "the most dysfunctional group" he's coached in his 32-year career. He might be right about a couple of the players, though I found others more or less troubling than those Hurley continually raged at. For instance, while Hurley chronically rails on the four seniors on the team, each of whom seems to have the sort of stand-offish ambivalence about him best exemplified in the linebacker Ivory Christian in "Friday Night Lights," I was far more cranked by the only white player on the team, Sean McCurdy. McCurdy is a transplanted Friar, a product of a wealthy Connecticut family that sees Hurley's program as the perfect launching pad for their son's big-time college and possibly NBA career. And, sickeningly, though he proves to be an offensive liability on the court, McCurdy attracts the interest of an embarrassing number of Top 25 programs primarily because he's white. Wojnarowski doesn't follow up sufficiently with this touchy subject, though McCurdy is an divisive figure on the team -- not only because he's rich and white, but because the other players sense he's not being held to the same hard-ass Hurley standards demanded of them. And they're absolutely right. Why Hurley continues to give McCurdy chances when his black Jersey City players don't get the benefit of the doubt is never explained. One gets the feeling that even the writer here fell under the often intimidating influence of St. Anthony's reknown coach.

Still, one can't argue with results. Though we won't find out until Wojnarowski does some sort of follow-up in the years to come what kind of men this class of players turns out to be, we do hear from a boatload of former St. Anthony's players, who, to a man, believe in Hurley and his MO. Particularly telling are the players Hurley watches go on to decent college programs who end up making a difference on their squads because of the work ethic Hurley instilled in them. (Aside: While no Friars have gone on to have the sort of college or NBA experience Bobby Hurley had, it's noted that 100 percent of Bob Hurley's players are accepted into college, and a good many on scholarship.) Or ex-players who hear Hurley inside their heads while on the job, as one Jersey City firefighter did when faced with a life-or-death situation -- and he gives credit to Hurley after saving both his own life and that of a fellow firefighter during a fire: "Think before you react. Awareness. Alertness." When it counted, Hurley's former player knew instinctually how to manuever in the danger zone.

In the end, Bob Hurley strikes the reader as a classic mid-20th century father -- gruff, emotionally distant (unless you count his anger), and immersed in his life's work to the point of neglecting his own children (especially Bobby's brother, Danny). But he's got much more on the plus side -- a near-holy mission, an awesome understanding of basketball, an invaluable transparency, and a staff that helps smooth the rough edges of his temperment so that the boys in the program don't bolt before learning the considerable gifts he has to offer. That Bob Hurley has led this exceptional program at this school in this city is really nothing less than a miracle.