posted by Large

My lunch with Budd Schulberg never happened, and now it never will, for as I’m sure you’ve heard by now he died yesterday at the age of 95.

Back in April, I was planning to do a piece for HBO leading up to the Pac/Hatton fight in which I talked to Budd Schulberg about the current fight scene and discussed in particular the Pacquiao-Hatton showdown. As a conceit for an article, this was, of course, merely an excuse to talk boxing with Budd. The hook was something along the lines of, “talking about the big fight with a man who’s seen more big fights than anyone alive.”

Initially, everything went very smoothly. I called his house, talked to his wife Betsy, who was at first suspicious of me but ultimately understood that I just wanted to talk boxing with her husband. “Budd loves to talk about boxing,” she said. We set up a date for me to come out to their house in Westhampton. She’d make us a nice lunch, she said. Later that day, her assistant emailed directions to the house.

To say that I was excited is to put it mildly. I was going to be in town for the New York Emmys (did I tell you dudes that I won an Emmy in New York this year? I don’t know how to put this but I’m kind of a big deal…) and throwing a lunch with Budd into the itinerary absolutely blew my mind. As I mentioned in my tribute to Schulberg today at The Sporting Blog, he was probably my favorite boxing writer of all time, and the idea that we would spend a few hours together shooting the shit about the fistic arts past and present was… well, there are no words to describe what a welcome prospect that was for me.

A few days later I got an email from Budd’s assistant. The lunch was cancelled, she wrote, due to Budd’s health. His wife had mentioned that he’d recently been very sick and initially this was her primary objection to my visiting. Only when she heard that it was a boxing-related visit had she relented, mostly it seemed because she felt like talking boxing made Budd very happy.

Her assistant also mentioned in this email that if I wanted to reschedule an interview with Budd I would have to go through his agent, who I will not name, although his name is one of the great agent names that I have ever heard in my life.

That’s when the comic portion of the enterprise began. About an hour after I received that email, I received another email, unsolicited, from this agent. Here’s what it read, verbatim:

The following is what it takes to get an interview with Mr Schulberg
FEE $25,OOO
1 1ST CLASS TICKET RTT LA/NY/LA
2 NIGHTS IN A HOTEL
If the above works for you please call me in my LA office

Everything was exactly as I present it above, the capital O’s as zeroes, the whole shebang. It was a little hard to believe. I was tempted to write him back, “Dear Sir, here is my counter offer. $O. O 1st CLASS TICKETS. O NIGHTS IN A HOTEL.” Instead I wrote explaining the piece that I wanted to do and where it would run. It would be a very favorable piece to Budd, I told him, would only concern his knowledge of boxing and would be certain to get a lot of traffic on the internet. But in that HBO didn’t pay for interviews, if his outrageous fee stood I was going to have to go in another direction.

The email I received in reply read only, “The fee stands.”

And so it was. Just when I thought I was in, they pulled me back out. It was clear to me that Budd knew absolutely nothing about this communication. His agent obviously had gotten wind that an HBO guy was coming to the house and insisted that the interview be cancelled until he could negotiate a deal. And the agent’s idea of a deal for a non-filmed interview for the web was 25 grand along with planes and hotels and whatnot. This agent… my sense was that he was perhaps not dwelling in the 21st century. He seemed like a character out of a Schulberg novel, actually. One from the fifties.

I tried a few other avenues to get to Budd directly, but had no luck. It does seem like he was sick then, and on his way down. That lunch in Westhampton that never was… that was probably my last shot. I regret it deeply, because he was one of my heroes and it is my understanding that he was a pleasure to talk to and always happy to converse about the sweet science with like-mindedly obsessed fight fans.

Below is my piece today from The Sporting Blog about him. R.I.P. Budd – you are a hands-down, no-doubt-about-it, first-ballot No Mas Hall-of-Famer. I hope we meet up for that lunch in the afterlife, and if we do I promise that I’ll fill you in on all the big fights you missed, starting with Pac/Cotto.

Budd Schulberg, 1914-2009 (The Sporting Blog)
“From the heroic bouts of his beloved Benny Leonard and the epochal Louis/Schmeling fights through to the bizarre meltdowns of Tyson and the bloody rituals of Gatti and the multi-million-dollar extravaganzas of De La Hoya, Schulberg was a one-man living compendium of boxing lore. Perhaps no one who ever lived attended so many famous fights over the course of a lifetime, and certainly no one ever wrote so eloquently about such a long period of a sport’s history as Schulberg did of boxing.”