A Blow to the Head

Joe Price met Mildred Archer in 1938 during an uninspiring period for middleweights—Al Hostak was the NBA champion, soon to ousted by Solly Krieger who lost the rematch in 1939, the year that Miss Archer became Mrs Price. In 1940, another steelworker, Tony 'Man of Steel' Zale, was on top of the world, and the Price's first and only child was born: my mother, Edwardine Mildred.

The Prices made a tight couple, almost too tight for a daughter to fit. They wore suits cut from the same cloth and had their hairstyles matched, my grandmother sporting an Eton crop. Their arguments and reconciliations were equally close-quarter and intense. By the time I knew them, they still worked singly—my grandmother as a French polisher with spectacularly roughened hands—but otherwise they were rarely apart and seemed to need few friends. Milly would shop and Joe would cook and clean and bring her tea and magazines when she took her regular afternoon naps. Every Sunday he would dust the Venetian blinds and make lunch before his wife came home from church.

For many years I didn't realize the facts upon which this intimacy rested, the reason for my grandmother's anxiety when her husband was even a few minutes late home. Her marriage to Joe was her second. Mildred Price, a woman of some passion, had courted Jack Peace and loved and married him, just as she should, and they had gone to bed on their wedding night and in the morning she had found him beside her, quite dead. He had been suffering from cancer, but had told nobody.

For a while, Mildred weathered an entirely understandable nervous breakdown. She would be eccentric all her life, but now she saw ghosts. She couldn't bear to be alone and had to be put out on a chair in the street if no one was left in the house. The family sent her to London for a change of air and this gave her a lifelong fear of the place—she never liked to hear that I was there, risking a city where she'd spent so much unhappy time. She never managed to meet Joe in the unfriendly size of the capital, but did when they were both back home again, safe in Staffordshire.

Joe Price must have been the perfect man for Milly. He was demonstrably, tangibly healthy, more than ten years her junior and fiercely ready for anything. Joe was happy to be utterly devoted, despite his family's certainty that he was marrying beneath him, and he had that smile, that air of being out of the ordinary. Once he married, he even agreed to stop boxing—the risks would have made his wife entirely demented—and contented himself with training policemen in combat and self-defence. But he still took his wife and daughter to fights. My mother can remember attending a civic hall bout where an Irish Catholic boxer made a great point of crossing himself before the opening round. Then, in front of the almost exclusively Nonconformist audience, he hit the canvas unconscious, having caught the first punch.

My grandfather told the same story, it held another secret he intended to pass on—don't be too sure of God's protection. Never mind Providence, Joe Price believed in being personally prepared, from his indestructible parcels to his ease with a half nelson. To underline the point, he also told me the tale of Randy Turpin, a man who was thoroughly ready at just the right time. He was one of my grandmother's favourites—she liked the way he wore his initials, RAT, on his shorts. Turpin came out against the odds and beat the great Sugar Ray Robinson in Earls Court in 1951. Robinson had been overcommitted and was probably tired but was said to have been complacent, to have spent the night before the fight playing cards until the small hours. Turpin, a fine British middleweight with two equally useful hands, had arrived unawed and in peak condition. He fought the distance fluently and, by the end, Robinson was bleeding and the crowd was singing 'For He's a Jolly Good Fellow' to Turpin. If Joe Price had a dream, it must have been something like this, to slip in as an underdog and win the world.

I wasn't told that Turpin lost the title to Robinson only sixty-four days later in a rematch in New York, and never flew so high again, or that his last days were penniless, or that he committed suicide in Leamington Spa, the genteelly depressing town where I lived as a student. Robinson ended up equally poor and with Alzheimer's disease.