Thursday, Jul 24, 2008
Rubin "Hurricane" Carter has lived a life of novelistic proportions. Unfortunately, the only fiction was the prosecutor's case.
Dec 24, 1999 | Rubin "Hurricane" Carter's 1962 knockout punch against Florentino Fernandez came in the first round, sending Fernandez flying backward through the ropes at Madison Square Garden. In five years, the Hurricane ravaged 27 foes in 40 professional fights; eight of his 20 knockouts came in the first round. At his peak, he was poised to become the champion of the world.
In 1966, while making plans for a second fight for the middleweight championship, Carter and a friend, John Artis, were charged with a triple murder that occurred in a tavern in Paterson, N.J., Carter's hometown. Both had rock-solid alibis, two key witnesses happened to be petty thieves who later recanted their testimony, and the murder weapons were never found. But Carter and Artis spent most of the next two decades in prison.
Carter published his story, "The Sixteenth Round: From Number 1 Contender to #45472," in 1974 while he was an inmate at Rahway State Prison. He rode a brief wave of celebrity in the ensuing year, after Bob Dylan made him a folk hero with a song about his struggle for justice. But after a brief flirtation with freedom, a second trial sent "Hurricane" back to prison, where he remained for a second decade, until a federal judge gave Carter his freedom in 1985.
Now Carter's story is on the big screen in "The Hurricane," directed by Norman Jewison and starring Denzel Washington. Carter's ephemeral boxing career is evoked in vivid black and white sequences, and Washington -- whom Carter calls a friend -- turns in one of his finest performances. The heart of Carter's story is his resilience, his pride, and most of all, his will to transform himself, through his prison experience, into the gentler, happier, reflective man he has become.
In a recent phone conversation, Carter, who speaks in the cadences of the preachers who fill his family tree, remembered prison as "a concentration camp, the lowest form of existence you could have." Though prison left him blind in one eye, and despite spending more than a third of his life incarcerated -- including long stints in solitary confinement -- he said, "There is no bitterness. If I was bitter, that would mean they won."
Carter first learned to speak with his fists when, as a child, a debilitating stammer tended to either elicit ridicule or keep him silent. When provoked, he lashed out. Legend has it that he punched out a bulldog when he was 10 years old, according to a childhood friend quoted in James Hirsch's new book, "Hurricane: The Miraculous Journey of Rubin Carter." At 11, Carter was sent to the State Home for Boys after he attacked a white man with broken glass and stole his watch. Carter has claimed that the man was intent on molesting one of his friends.
When he was old enough, he ran away from the home to join the Army, in 1954. As he recounted in "The Sixteenth Round," he served in a segregated corps, and when it traveled by bus from Fort Jackson, S.C., white soldiers went into restaurants for food and drink "while blacks stayed on the buses and ate cold bologna sandwiches." It wasn't the last time the shadow of racism would cross Carter's path.
By the time he learned to contain his fury in a boxing ring, in Germany, Hurricane Carter's fists spoke volumes. His opponents were pummeled swiftly and mercilessly. He won two European light-welterweight championships, and during the same period enrolled in a Dale Carnegie speech program, and began studying Islam. It was the beginning of two alternating threads -- fighting and learning -- that would run through much of Carter's career and later confinement.
In 1956, Carter was ready to turn pro: "I loved prize fighting, but I wasn't about to prolong my Army career in order to compete in nothing," he writes. "Shucks! I wanted to go home. I wanted to go back to America and find Ray Charles! Because I had missed him the first time around."
But upon returning to Paterson, he was picked up by police and compelled to serve out the remaining 10 months of his sentence at the state home. Carter writes that, when he was released, he confronted urban decay: "Many of the most handsome buildings I had known had been gutted and wantonly abandoned . . . Homes I remembered as neat and comfortable were now horrifying firetraps, forsaken by their original owners and allowed to fall into decay so that local slumlords could gobble them up cheaply."
There was a simmering anger in Carter. When he began boxing professionally as a middleweight (fighters under 160 pounds) in 1961, he went on a four-fight winning streak, including two KOs. (Denzel Washington reportedly had to learn to throw 80 punches a minute to approximate the Hurricane's gale-force fists.)
At first he lived in Trenton, where he sparred with Sonny Liston (the heavyweight champion from 1962 to 1964), despite the fact that Carter was five inches shorter and 50 pounds lighter. According to Hirsch, Carter took such a beating one day that blood from both ears soaked through his headgear. He left Trenton that night.
Carter was confident, but embittered by the role he believed race had played in his run-ins with the authorities. Now that he was successful, he was in a position to speak out. In an interview with a Saturday Evening Post reporter in 1964, he railed against the police occupations of black neighborhoods that had occurred in the summer. But in the subsequent article, his comments were boiled down to an exhortation for blacks to defend themselves, in the language of Malcolm X, "by any means necessary." Worse, the story quoted a friend of Carter's as saying that the boxer had responded to riots in Harlem with a suggestion that they "get guns and go up there and get us some of those police. I know I can get four or five before they get me. How many can you get?" (The movie depicts this comment as part of an off-the-record conversation, delivered with a potent mix of menace and humor.)
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