Rubin Carter felt he had paid his dues—in prison. While incarcerated, he concluded that prizefighting was his best hope of making a living and avoiding trouble. He trained in prison yards for four years, lifting weights, pounding the heavy bag, and accepting bouts with all comers. Once he left prison and entered the ring as a professional, it was soon evident that few could match his blend of intimidation, theatrics, and might. This crowd-pleasing style resulted in his first televised fight only thirteen months after he turned pro, when he knocked out Florentino Fernandez in the first round with a right cross to the chin. A black-and-white photograph of Fernandez falling out of the ring, his body bending like a willow over the middle rope as Carter glared down at him, sent an unmistakable message: the “Hurricane” had arrived.
Carter never really liked his boxing nickname. It was given to him by a New Jersey fight promoter, Jimmy Colotto, who saw the marketing potential of depicting a former con as an unbridled force of nature. Carter’s preferred symbol was a panther. In the ring, Carter’s trainers wore the image of a panther’s black head, its mouth open wide, on the back of their white cotton jackets. The image had nothing to do with race or politics (the Black Panther organization was not formed until 1966). Carter simply admired the panther’s speed and stealth, its predatory logic.
But Hurricane stuck, and for good reason. When Carter entered the ring, he was a force of nature. His head and face were already glistening from a layer of Vaseline. He wore a long black velvet robe and a black hood knotted with a belt of gold braid. There was something ominous, even alien, about him. When the Pennsylvania State Athletic Commission ordered Carter to shave his goatee for a fight in Philadelphia, some sportswriters opined that the goatee was the seat of Carter’s power. The boxer looked foreshortened and brutally compact. The lustrous pate, the piercing eyes, the bristling beard, the sneering lips—and the violent criminal record—sent frissons of fear and delight through the crowd. Before a match, the announcer would introduce other boxing champions, past and present, in the crowd, and the conquerors would hop up in the ring, wave to the fans, and shake hands with the opposing fighters. Carter, however, refused to shake hands or even acknowledge their presence. Prowling around the canvas, he kept his eyes down and, in the words of one opponent, looked like “death walking.” When the battle began, he attacked straight on, punches whistling. No dancing, no weaving, no finesse. He rarely jabbed. Just heavy leather. Carter liked the violence.
While Carter often found trouble on the streets, his training camp in Chatham provided sanctuary. He and several sparring partners escaped to camp six weeks before a bout. They awoke at 5 A.M. and ran up to twenty miles through steep, wooded hills. Carter liked the dark frigid mornings best, when icicles formed in his goatee and the only sounds were the pounding of shoes on pavement and the stirrings of a sleepy cow.
After an eggs and bacon breakfast and rest time, Carter resumed his training in the small gym. He jumped rope for forty minutes, pumped out five hundred pushups, lifted neck weights, pounded the heavy bag and speed bag, pushed against a concrete wall to build muscle mass, and did chinups until he dropped.
A sparring session was no different from a televised fight: in each, Carter locked out the rest of the world and tried to destroy his opponent. At the beginning of his career, he lived in Trenton and trained in the same Philadelphia gym as Sonny Liston, the feared heavyweight who reigned as champion from 1962 to 1964. Liston’s heavy blows made it difficult for him to find sparring partners. One day Carter volunteered to go a few rounds, despite giving up five inches and fifty pounds. While most boxers spar to improve their footwork, punching combinations, or defensive maneuvers, neither Liston nor Carter had the patience for such artistic subtleties. Both were former convicts—Liston for armed robbery—and they rarely exchanged more than a few words. Theirs was an unspoken code of respect through pugilistic mayhem, and they sparred fiercely and repeatedly. But after one three-round session, Carter removed his battered headgear and found it soaked with blood. He was bleeding from both ears. He fled from Trenton that night and moved to Newark. He knew if he returned to the Philadelphia gym the next day and Liston needed a partner, he would do it again. He could never turn down a challenge, even if it meant risking serious injury.
Like Liston, Carter beat his sparring partners unmercifully. To soften the blows, Carter used oversize gloves and his partners wore a foam rubber protective strap around their ribs. In training camp, he sparred against three or four boxers a day, always punching against a fresh body. These sessions were followed by more calisthenics, then by a few rounds of shadowboxing, then by a shower and a rubdown. After a dinner of steak, fish, or chicken, Carter took a walk in the clean country air and thought about the next day’s workout.
Only two years after he became a professional fighter, Carter wanted a shot at the middleweight title. He had won eighteen and lost three, with thirteen knockouts. But in October 1963, he lost a close ten-round decision to Joey Archer, and he needed a victory to put him back on track for a shot at the championship. That put him on a collision course with Emile Griffith.
Griffith was a native of the Virgin Islands who moved to New York when he was nineteen. His boss encouraged him to try his hand at boxing, and he was an instant success, winning the New York Golden Gloves. He turned professional at twenty. Griffith liked to crouch in the ring, stick his head in the other guy’s chest, and pound the midsection. He could also dance and jab, backpedal and attack; he never tired. And he was deadly. In a bout at Madison Square Garden on March 24, 1962, Griffith took on Benny “Kid” Paret for the third time in less than twelve months, the decisive match in a bitter war between the two men. Paret provoked Griffith at their weigh-in by calling him maricon, “faggot.” That night, Griffith was knocked down early, but he pinned Paret in the corner in the twelfth round and felled him with a torrent of angry punches, prompting Norman Mailer to write later: “He went down more slowly than any fighter had ever gone down, he went down like a large ship which turns on end and slides second by second into its grave. As he went down, the sound of Griffith’s punches echoed in the mind like a heavy ax in the distance chopping into a wet log.”
Paret was removed from the ring on a stretcher, lapsed into a coma, and died ten days later; he was twenty-five.
At the end of 1963, Griffith was the champion of the welterweight division (for boxers 147 pounds and under) and had been named Ring magazine’s Fighter of the Year with a record of thirty-eight wins and four losses. Now he wanted a shot at the middleweight crown (for boxers 160 pounds and under), and that led to his match with Carter.
Their bout was to take place in Pittsburgh’s Civic Arena on December 20. The two men were sparring partners and friends, but in the days leading up to the match, Carter launched a clever campaign to strike Griffith at his point of vulnerability: his pride. The idea was to provoke him before the fight so that he would abandon his strongest assets—his speed and stamina—and go for a quick knockout. Carter began planting newspaper stories that Griffith was going to run and hide in the ring and hope that Carter tired. In a joint television interview the day before the fight, the host asked Griffith if he dared to stand toe-to-toe with the Hurricane.
“I’m the welterweight champion of the world,” Griffith snapped. “I’ve never run from anyone before, and I’m not about to start with Mr. Hurricane Carter now!”
“Then I’m going to beat your brains in,” Carter shot back.
Griffith laughed in the face of Carter’s hard glare. “I’ve never been knocked out either,”