AMERICA AT LARGE:'Now they're shooting at our regiment," said Pete Hamill on Monday morning when he phoned with the news that our old friend Jose Torres had died at his home in Puerto Rico a few hours earlier.
The former light-heavyweight champion, who later became chairman of the New York State Athletic Commission, was 72 when he passed away this week. I had known Torres for more than 40 years, and Hamill’s friendship went back even further.
Back in 1962, recalled the writer, Torres had approached him with a strange request. He wanted Hamill to teach him the words to Danny Boy. “Jose was managed by Cus D’Amato, who was at odds with the people who ran Madison Square Garden, whom he considered mob stooges,” related Hamill as we flew to Puerto Rico for the funeral yesterday.
Although he lived in New York, Torres didn’t perform at the Mecca of Boxing until his 33rd pro fight, a decision Hamill reckons cost him tens of thousands of dollars in lost purses. Several of those road games took place under the auspices of Boston promoter Sam Silverman, and after Torres knocked out Al Hauser at the Boston Garden in December of ’62 to run his record to 29-0-1, Silverman promised his next bout would be against Paul Pender, who had regained the middleweight championship from Terry Downes earlier that year.
“Jose’s idea was that when he won the title from an Irish-American boxer he would then immediately win over the crowd by singing Danny Boy in the ring,” said Hamill. “He spent almost as much time memorising the words as he did in the gym.”
In the end Pender elected to retire without defending the title, and more than two years would elapse before Torres fought Willie Pastrano for the light-heavyweight title.
On the night of March 30th, 1965, at Madison Square Garden (D’Amato had by now reached a rapprochement with the boxing cartel), referee Johnny LoBianco rescued Pastrano between the ninth and 10th rounds, and Jose Torres was the light-heavyweight champion of the world.
There was jubilation throughout New York, but nowhere more so than in Spanish Harlem, where Torres capped a parade the next day by ascending to the fourth floor of a rickety fire escape to address an assembled crowd of his countrymen.
“He told them that the title belonged to all of Puerto Rico,” said Hamill. “It was a moving speech, and he won their hearts forever that day, but I remember being terrified that the fire escape was going to collapse at any moment.”
At the 1956 Melbourne Games, Torres had become the first Puerto Rican-born medallist when he won the silver at light-middleweight. (His loss in the final was to the redoubtable Hungarian three-time Olympic champion Laszlo Papp.) He would later become the first NYSAC chairman of Latin descent, as well as the first (and at the time, only) Latino to write an English-language column for a New York newspaper.
He was not only a trailblazer for his people, but, as more than one obituary noted this week, a veritable renaissance man, as comfortable in the worlds of literature, politics and journalism as he had been in the ring.
In his first fight after winning the title, Torres returned to Puerto Rico for a non-title bout against Tom McNeeley. Fighting as a heavyweight for the first and only time in his career, he was giving away 22 pounds to the former title challenger, and while he won a unanimous decision, it was a contest that would have lasting consequences.
“Jose won the McNeeley fight, but he was in hospital for two weeks afterward, with damage to the pancreas,” recalled Hamill. “That was almost certainly the cause of the diabetes problems he had later in his life – and, probably, eventually killed him.”
He successfully defended his title three times, the last against Scotland’s Chic Calderwood, before dropping back-to-back decisions to his successor, Dick Tiger. (The loss to Tiger in their 1967 rematch was as narrow as a split decision could possibly be: two scorecards had it 8-7 for Tiger, the other 8-7 for Torres.)
By then he was already an established presence at the Lions Head. He regularly rubbed elbows with Hamill, Joe Flaherty, and Jack Newfield at that gin-soaked Greenwich Village literary salon, and Norman Mailer and Budd Schulberg had become close friends and mentors, making his post-boxing transition an obvious choice.
He authored two books, in English – Sting Like A Bee, his 1972 biography of Muhammad Ali, and Fire and Fear, in which he deconstructed D’Amato’s final protégé, Michael Gerard Tyson – and proved to be an exceptional journalist, writing for both Spanish and English-language papers.
“When he worked for the Post he was the first Latino to write a column in an English-language paper,” recalled Hamill. “He was an enormously powerful voice because of that, and there wasn’t anybody of importance in New York who wouldn’t talk to him.
“But beyond that, people trusted him. They’d tell him things they wouldn’t tell anybody else. It got so I’d sometimes take Jose along with me on stories I was working on just because I knew they’d open up to him.”
Although some of his journalism was devoted to sports, most of it – as in the dispatches he filed from his two trips to Vietnam – wasn’t. In 1972 he travelled to Dublin to report on Ali’s fight against Al (Blue) Lewis, and wound up in Belfast afterward, from whence he filed several poignant and perceptive columns.
“(The late Philadelphia Daily News columnist) Jack McKinney had arranged for some Provos to drive them up there,” related Hamill, “They took all these back roads through Armagh in the dead of night, so Jose never officially crossed the Border or showed his passport. He wrote some really terrific columns on The Troubles. After he’d been there about a week the Belfast papers, who’d no doubt been tipped off by British ‘intelligence’, began to report that ‘a high-level Cuban agent’ had been spotted several places around the Falls Road.”
Throughout his life, Torres was unwavering in his support of liberal causes (tomorrow’s funeral mass will be followed by a secular ceremony at a Ponce union hall), and in his 1968 departure from boxing had been hastened by his commitment to Robert F Kennedy’s presidential campaign, for which he served as the liaison to the Puerto Rican community. In 1983, New York governor Mario Cuomo appointed him chair of the NYSAC, a role which had traditionally been a fiefdom of the Republican-controlled legislature.
His death was officially attributed to a heart attack, but Hamill remains convinced the diabetes that tormented Torres in his later years must have been a factor.
“When his wife Ramona phoned to tell me, she assured me that he’d gone peacefully in his sleep and that he wasn’t in pain,” said Hamill.
“That’s some consolation, but if there’s one thing I wish it’s that he could have lasted just 48 more hours to see the new president inaugurated.
“When we last spoke, just a few days before he died, we were talking about Barack Obama’s train journey to Washington. It had been 41 years since Jose and I had ridden on another train over the same route, with Bobby Kennedy’s body in the back car, and I said ‘Can you even believe this is happening?’” ‘Pete, I know,’ said Torres. ‘I’ve got tears in my eyes just thinking about it.’”
