Standing Pat
The news (admittedly jaw-dropping to those of us who knew him) that the late boxing writer Pat Putnam fabricated his military history -- it seems he did not spend 17 months in a POW camp during the Korean War, did not earn four Purple Hearts and the Navy Cross, and indeed did not even serve in the Marine Corps, as he always claimed he did -- should not be grounds for the Boxing Writers of America to remove his name from their award for perseverance. After all, that Pat could keep telling that story every day for 50 years is nothing if not a monument to perseverance.
Besides, it could have been worse. He could have been a real Marine impersonating a boxing writer....
posted by Richard O'Brien @ 12:44 PM
7 comments
7 Comments:
Absolutely, Rich. Any measuring stick that assigns greater importance to some subjective moral tally board than to a person's work when contemplating inclusion/expulsion from a sports shrine is pure foolishness.
And I, for one, admire Pat now more than I did. He was a serious drinking man, and I'll bet his fabricated war record scored him decades of free rounds in bars throughout the world.
The article about this is here:
http://www.latimes.com/sports/la-spw-putnam2-2008may02,0,5138153.story
It says:
Putnam's daughter told ABCNews.com that her father always was a story-teller. "He was Irish and could tell a story," said Colleen Putnam. "Maybe this one he yarned. I don't know."
Putnam said her father's war stories began when someone asked him about the scars on his back that were from a car accident. "He said he was in the war, and it grew and grew. Maybe my father didn't know how to stop it."
I wonder if the BWAA also knows something else about him.
Charles, you're absolutely right. Though I will say for the record that Putnam paid for more than his (considerable) share of drinks.
Eddie: What do you mean "something else?" To be fair, it would seem from their point of view, in terms of naming the award after him and citing his supposed war record, that they don't really need anything else.
Rich, I don’t know what else. But one can suppose that this wasn’t the only thing he invented, and what does that say about his credibility as a journalist?
Anyway, they should name the award after me. I WAS in the antiwar movement (which no doubt tons of government records can confirm), and we DID levitate the Pentagon in the sixties.
pat never wrote down his tall tale, did he? never passed it off as journalism, did he?
This controversy has exploded all over the Internet.
George Kimball on Boxing Talk, while admitting that he, too, had been duped by Putnam, wrote an apologia, saying:
In short, if Putnam is going to be posthumously convicted of anything, it should be of slinging bullshit in a bar. If that were a hanging offense, we’d all be in trouble.
http://www.boxingtalk.com/pag/article15626.html
On the other side, on Boxing Confidential, Mike Marley wrote a scathing denunciation, which included this:
I knew Putnam for 30 years and I don’t know many times he would make biting remarks about going for Chinese food or even just seeing an Asian person walk by.
“Don’t forget how those bastards tortured me in Manchuria,” Putnam would say. And he had a million and one nasty jokes about “gooks.” He also called Asians “slopes’ and “slant eyes,” nice words like that.
And those were the good things he said about our Asian brothers and sisters!
After he had enough drinks, Putnam would recall how those nasty people put lighted matches underneath his fingernails during his terrible time as a POW in a Manchurian jail.
http://boxingconfidential.com/articles.php?id=4512
Now I’m especially glad that when I go out drinking, there are none of these guys around.
I can't imagine why anybody would be proud of being a marine in the first place, so this whole fiasco is mysterious to me. I'm astonished by the vehemence with which this unimportant story is being treated (both by pro and anti-Putnam factions.) I must say I'm disappointed in George Kimball. He's a very fine boxing writer and I essentially take his point about Putnam, but both his attack on the pathetic Schantags (sanctimonious morons with nothing better to do than snoop around) and the eagerness with which he falls on his own sword (and takes a couple of other guys, Rich included) with him, seem unnecessary and puny. And I was disheartened that he'd use the weepy masculine term "hero" at all--again not because I give a fuck about what Pat Putnam did (that was his own business), but because "hero" is precisely the kind of bullshit rhetoric we need to get away from in boxing writing. Putnam sounds like a little guy who wanted to be more than he really was. Doesn't that more or less describe all of us?
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