Needless to say, it was love at first sight.
And so for the next two years Spiro mothered Vinnie as if he were a baby chick. He paid the rent and bought the groceries so Vinnie could quit his prestigious job as a bouncer at the women’s shelter. He paid for Vinnie’s training, Vinnie’s clothes, Vinnie’s birthday cake from Carvel, an occasion at which I was present, my first view of Irish Vinnie Teague. He was chewing a slab of ice cream cake while Spiro looked on, beaming. Snap. Flash. Page 8 over the lead line, UP-AND-COMER BREAKS TRAINING ON HIS 24TH.
He’d continued upward for the next four years, muscling his way higher and higher in the rankings until, at just the moment that he came in striking distance of the title, Irish Vinnie had thrown a fight.
There are fixes and there are fixes, but Irish Vinnie’s fix was the most famous of them all.
Why?
Because it was the most transparent. Jake La Motta was Laurence Olivier compared to Vinnie. Jake was at the top of the Actors Studio, a recruiting poster for the Strasburg Method, the most brilliant student Stella Adler ever had... compared to Vinnie. Jake La Motta took a dive, but Irish Vinnie took a swan dive, a dive so obvious, so awkward and beyond credulity, that for the first and only time in the history of the dive, the fans themselves started swinging, not just booing and weaving their fists in the air, not just throwing chairs into the ring, but actually surging forvard like a mob to get Vinnie Teague and tear his lying heart out.
Thirty-seven people went to Saint Vincent’s that night, six of them cops who, against all odds, managed to hustle Vinnie out of the ring (from which he’d leaped up with surprising agility) and down into the concrete bowels of the Garden where he sat, secreted in a broom closet, for more than an hour while all hell broke loose upstairs. Final tab, as reported by the Daily News, eighty-six thousand dollars in repairs. And, of course, there were lawsuits for everything under the sun so that by the end of the affair, Vinnie’s dive, regardless of what he’d been paid for it, had turned out to be the most costly in boxing history.
It was the end of Vinnie’s career, of course, the last time he would ever fight anywhere for a purse. Nothing needed to be proven. The Daily News dubbed him the “Shameful Shamrock” and there were no more offers from promoters. Spiro cut him loose and without further ado Vinnie sank into the dark waters, falling as hard and as low as he had on that fateful night when Douggie Burns, by then little more than a bleeding slab of beef, managed to lift his paw and tap Vinnie on the cheek, in response to which the “Edwin Booth of Boxers,” another Daily News sobriquet, hit the mat like a safe dropped from the Garden ceiling. After that, no more crowds ever cheered for Vinnie Teague, nor so much as wondered where he might have gone.
But now, suddenly, he was before me once again, Irish Vinnie, the Shameful Shamrock, huddled at the back of the Crosstown 42, a breathing pile of rags.
“Vinnie Teague. Am I right? You’re Vinnie Teague?”
Nothing from his mouth, but recognition in his eyes, a sense, nothing more, that he was not denying it.
“I was at your twenty-fourth birthday party,” I told him, as if that were the moment in his life I most remembered, rather than his infamous collapse. “There was a picture in the News. You with a piece of Carvel. I took that picture.”
A nod.
“Whatever happened to Spiro Melinas?”
He kept his eyes on the street beyond the window, the traffic still impossibly stalled, angry motorists leaning on their horns. For a time he remained silent, then a small, whispery voice emerged from the ancient, battered face. “Dead.”
“Oh yeah? Sorry to hear it.”
A blast of wind hit the side of the bus, slamming a wave of snow against the window, and at the sound of it Irish Vinnie hunched a bit, drawing his shoulders in like a fighter... still like a fighter.
“And you, Vinnie. How you been?”
Vinnie shrugged as if to say that he was doing as well as could be expected of a ragged, washed-up fighter who’d taken the world’s most famous dive.
The bus inched forward, but only enough to set the strap-hangers weaving slightly, then stopped dead again.
“You were good, you know,” I said quietly. “You were really good, Vinnie. That time with Chico Perez. What was that? Three rounds? Hell, there was nothing left of him.”
Vinnie nodded. “Nothing left,” he repeated.
“And Harry Sermak. Two rounds, right?”
A nod.
The fact is, Irish Vinnie had never lost a single fight before Douggie Burns stroked his chin in the final round on that historic night at the Garden. But more than that, he had won decisively, almost always in a knockout, almost always before the tenth round, and usually with a single, devastating blow that reminded people of Marciano except that Vinnie’s had seemed to deliver an even more deadly killer punch. Like Brando, the better actor, once said, he “coulda been a contendah.”
In fact he had been a contender, a very serious contender, which had always made his downfall even more mysterious to me. What could it have been worth? How much must Vinnie have been offered to take such a devastating dive? It was a riddle that only deepened the longer I pondered his current destitution. Whatever deal Spiro Melinas had made for Vinnie, whatever cash may have ended up in some obscure bank account, it hadn’t lasted very long. Which brought me finally to the issue at hand.
“Too bad about...” I hesitated just long enough to wonder about my safety, then stepped into the ring and touched my gloves to Vinnie’s. “About... that last fight.”
“Yeah,” Vinnie said, then turned back toward the window as if it were the safe corner now, his head lolling back slightly as the bus staggered forward, wheezed, then ground to a halt again.
“The thing is, I never could figure it out,” I added.
Which was a damn lie since you don’t have to be a rocket scientist to come up with the elements that make up a fix. It’s money or fear on the fighter’s side, just money on the fixer’s.
So it was a feint, my remark about not being able to figure out what happened when Douggie Burns’s glove kissed Vinnie’s cheek, and the Shameful Shamrock dropped to the mat like a dead horse, just a tactic I’d learned in business, that if you want to win the confidence of the incompetent, pretend to admire their competence. In Vinnie’s case, it was a doubt I offered him, the idea that alone in the universe I was the one poor sap who wasn’t quite sure why he’d taken the world’s most famous dive.
But in this case it didn’t work. Vinnie remained motionless, his eyes still trained on the window, following nothing of what went on beyond the glass, but clearly disinclined to have me take up any more of his precious time.