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Message: <br /><br /> If you are having trouble reading this email, you may view this article online at: http://www.jweekly.com/28187/full/28187/boxer-barney-ross-bio-is-thrilling-but-flawed-like-its-subject/ <br /><br /> <b>Boxer Barney Ross’ bio is thrilling but flawed — like its subject</b> <br /> Friday, January 20, 2006 | by <p>joe eskenazi </p> <br /><br /><p>King David, Maimonides and Barney Ross.<br /><br /> That’s an eclectic threesome. I don’t know what they’d talk about over drinks. But I do know who would win in a fight.<br /><br /> The unlikely trio are the subjects of the initial three offerings of the Jewish Encounters series, a collaboration between publishers Schocken and Nextbook.<br /><br /> Straightforwardly titled “Barney Ross,” the latest tome is penned by Douglas Century, a Canadian-born New Yorker, contributing editor to the Forward and obvious boxing enthusiast with a deep passion for the bygone days when names like Al Singer, Joe Glick, Sid Terris and Ruby Goldstein were more likely to be found above lockers at the boxing gym than stenciled across the frosted glass door of a Manhattan law firm.<br /><br /> Just as the current era’s incarnation of youth sports evokes images of golden-haired soccer-playing tots piling into a Plymouth Voyager, Ross’ story was typical of his time. Born Dov-Ber Rasofsky in the Chicago ghetto in 1909, Ross honed his skills breaking the noses of Italian, Irish and fellow Jewish ghetto-dwellers and then returned home to be whipped by a cat-o-nine-tails wielded by his Orthodox father, who forbade the Rasofsky boys to fight.<br /><br /> Ross ran the occasional errand for local businessmen — Al Capone most famously. With his hair combed into a pomaded onyx helmet, he perfected the bygone look of a dapper 1930s athlete: a dazzling ice cream suit, fedora tilted at a rakish angle, a foot-wide oft-broken nose with more angles than a dodecahedron and a wide gap-toothed grin.<br /><br /> He also won the Golden Gloves amateur title and was the world champion in both the lightweight and junior welterweight divisions, standing next to Hammering Hank Greenberg as the nation’s most recognizable Jewish athlete of the 1930s.<br /><br /> But Ross’ boxing career is only a fraction of this story, and perhaps not even the best fraction at that. Outside of the ring, his life played like a movie — unfortunately for Ross, a Paul Thomas Anderson movie.<br /><br /> He blew fight purses of $30,000 or more in one bad day at the track. He owed money to every bookie, loan shark or mobster in town. He drank, caroused, picked up tabs and lavished gifts upon his hangers-on with the fervency of a college student stumbling onto an open bar reception.<br /><br /> After hitting rock bottom, he decided to “go out fighting” and joined the Marines. But he didn’t “go out” — instead he single-handedly killed 22 Japanese soldiers on Guadalcanal and saved untold Americans from the advancing enemy. He returned to the States a morphine addict, graduated into heroin addiction, ran guns to the nascent state of Israel and died of cancer at 57.<br /><br /> With a life story like that and Century’s skillful writing, this book flies by faster than it took Ross to knock out Frankie Petrolle back in ‘31.<br /><br /> That’s not to say this book is perfect, however. Century inexplicably attempts to interject himself into the story (which we can’t imagine the authors of “King David” or “Maimonides” doing, come to think of it). This is often awkward and, in large measure, unnecessary. One can only shake his or her head when Century comments on the lack of second-generation Jewish prizefighters by invoking “the extinction-level events my father, a petroleum geologist, used to speak about in the ‘KT,’ or Cretacious-Tertiary boundary.”<br /><br /> Say what?<br /><br /> Century’s ruminations on his own boxing adventures with Sephardi Israelis in New York City and his family’s memories of Ross’ career are similarly clunky and out of place.<br /><br /> The exceptions, however, are the extended first-person interviews with Ross’ last-surviving brother, George Rasof, who died in 2004. The affinity between the old and young man is obvious in Century’s warm and delightful reminiscences, and Rasof is a living treasure trove of oft-ribald tales of Chicago in its gangster and Art Deco heyday.<br /><br /> Overall, this page-turning biography of one of the greatest Jewish athletes time forgot is a winner — and in no way reminiscent of the “Cretacious-Tertiary boundary.” <br /><br /> <br><br /><br /> <b>“Barney Ross”</b> by Douglas Century (240 pages, Schocken and Nextbook, $19.95).</p> <p> </p>

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