Alaska Employment Law

While not a real fan of boxing, I think there are some fine books about boxing, such as Mark Kram’s Ghosts of Manila, which traces the blood feud between Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier.  For a great story about a pugilist perhaps as far removed from those champions as one can be, get Two Ton: One Fight, One Night – Tony Galento v. Joe Louis, by Joseph Monninger.

Tony Dominick Galento, a second-generation Italian born in 1910 in New Jersey, was a boxing buffoon, a man built like “a taxi driving away with its top down,” according to a contemporary magazine article about him. Rotund and balding, if Galento were alive today you might find him as an extra in The Sopranos. Dubbed “Two Ton” not for his girth but because of the amount of ice he carted upstairs in a day as an ice delivery man (that was before his boxing career), Galento’s 15-year record in the ring was 79-26-5 – a lot of fights, a lot of losses.

He was a fan of Tarzan and liked to beat his chest and yell like Tarzan. He was paranoid, some said. He fought dirty. He trained on spaghetti and meatballs. He couldn’t keep a manager. During his boxing career and after he left boxing to tend bar in Orange, New Jersey, Galento tried stand-up comedy, played bit parts in movies (including Brando’s On the Waterfront, in which he played a tough), wrestled octopuses for promotions, and wagered he could eat 50 hot dogs before fighting a heavyweight match. (He won the bet, and the fight.) Diabetes killed him in 1979.

If that’s all he was, we wouldn’t remember him. In fact, we remember him because at the apogee of his career, Galento managed to get a fight with Joe Louis in Yankee Stadium in the summer of 1939. Louis, the Brown Bomber, the heavyweight champion, was the overwhelming favorite. Galento knocked him down. From Monninger: “A palooka, a thug, a vibrant appetite of a man, [Tony] scrapped his way out of the streets and into the brightest light in American life. For two splendid seconds he stood on the canvas at Yankee Stadium, the great Joe Louis stretched out beneath him, champ of the world, the toughest man alive, the mythical hero of the waterfront, of New Jersey, of an American nation….”

Two Ton weaves Tony’s story into round by round chapters about the Louis fight, a device that in this book works very well. Monninger depicts with warmth and clarity the world of New Jersey and New York City in the 1930s and 1940s. Of course, Louis was down, but he was assuredly not out. Tony’s story has to end, but this moment, Tony’s moment, famously caught by photographers, is frozen in time like a mythic cave painting.