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chapter 6 Climb When sixteen-year-old Ida Ramirez showed up to watch Gaspar fight at St. Nicholas Arena, she was impressed. While not quite the Garden, St. Nick’s was still a highly respected boxing venue in New York, holding some four thousand seats. The battle was also a TV fight: the Dumont television network had been broadcasting fights from St. Nick’s to New York City and a few other localities since 1954 in the Monday night time­ slot. So this was Gaspar’s first televised Monday Night Fight. Ida could not help but be nervous for Gaspar. She knew that boxing was a rough game. Plus, she might have liked him a little and didn’t want to see him get hurt. Gaspar’s opponent this evening was a man named Hardy “Bazooka” Smallwood. Like Gaspar, Smallwood was familiar with long, hard roads. He had been born in the historically Native American community of Indian Woods, North Carolina, in 1933. His parents were black but told him that his great grandma on his dad’s side was a Cherokee. He grew up poor. “We were so poor, we were ‘po,’” Smallwood laughingly recalls. “Just ‘po.’” Hardy’s rural world allowed him to learn to hunt as a child, and he still recalls tracking down rabbits with a cord on frosty winter mornings. Winter was best for rabbit hunting, since “rabbits can’t run as fast in the snow.” Hardy grew up without shoes or electricity. He was once bitten on the chest by a moccasin, and he cut the wound open with an old nail and poured snuff into it, just as he had been told to do, to stop the poison. “Even today one side [of my chest] is bigger than the other.” He once saw Chapter 6. Climb 89 a dead body too, a poor black kid from a chain gang that had been flattening out the land for a new highway. Apparently, the young prisoner had panicked upon seeing a snake and a jittery guard had shot him dead. Nothing happened to the guard. When Hardy was about six or seven years old, his dad moved them off Indian land in order to make his way as a sharecropper in Wilmington, North Carolina. This didn’t work out, so they moved again to Eaton, North Carolina, where his dad got a job at a shipyard. After America entered World War II, the family moved once again, this time to the rumored industrial bounty of the North. They got an apartment in Brooklyn, and Hardy’s dad got a job as the super for the building, scrubbing floors and repairing pipes throughout the day. Hardy helped out, and then some: “I did the work.” After the Korean War broke out, Hardy signed up for the army. He was shipped out overseas and participated as a forward observer with the Eighth Cavalry in the brutal winter campaign in 1951, fighting in Pusan and other places. He saw men shot to pieces and still recalls dying kids “telling me to ‘tell my mother.’” He remembers enemy troops (possibly Chinese) wearing white suits in the dead of winter so they couldn’t be seen in the snow. According to Hardy, he was the first black soldier in the Eighth Cavalry. Following President Truman’s 1948 Executive Order 9901 integrating the armed forces, Congress passed the Army Reorganization Act in July 1950, and by early 1951, 10 percent of African American soldiers in Korea were serving in integrated units. Hardy recalls the first day he showed up. He heard a white guy asking, “Where’s the nigger at?” and so he loudly responded , “Where’s he at?” The soldiers saw Hardy and started laughing. Someone told him, “You’re all right.” In Korea, Hardy had his brush with destiny. He was out on leave one night, “looking for sex,” when he got in a scuffle over a girl with the light heavyweight champion of the Army, of all people. The guy threatened to break Hardy’s jaw, to which Hardy answered with four or five quick rights. The big guy went down. The next day, a colonel called on him and said he had seen the whole thing from his car. The officer was impressed and asked Hardy if he was a pro. Hardy explained that he wasn’t, but that he had done some amateur fighting, mainly “for watches.” “You wanna go pro?” asked the colonel. He told...

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