Clem Florio: Still riding high after all these years

“Cancer,” he said.

He sounded insulted at the thought. The tone was like: Can you believe this upstart bum trying to take me down? Me, the former Ozone Park Assassin? Whattaya, kiddin’ me?

The ex-fighter deemed himself too tough for such a punk challenger. He let the word hang in the air for a heartbeat, and no more.

“Meanwhile,” he said in the very next breath, “I got a tip on a horse at Pimlico tomorrow that you would not believe.”

And there it was: not only the consuming love of thoroughbred horse racing that made Florio one of the great handicappers of his era, but the sheer irrepressible optimism, the glad heart, that’s always marked him as the coolest and most gregarious of men.

With Preakness right around the corner, nobody around here wants to think of Florio living far away in Florida now, near Fort Lauderdale, instead of hanging out each day in the Pimlico press box the way he did for about 40 years. He was one of this town’s great sporting figures, and part of the staff John Steadman put together at the old News American that included Steady, Art Janney, Neal Eskridge, Charlie Lamb, Jim Henneman, Chuck McGeehan and others whose bylines were familiar across several decades. Then Florio handicapped for The Washington Post, then worked for several years as the house oddsmaker at Pimlico and Laurel. Along the way, he also trained a couple of pretty decent fighters, including a nephew of his named Billy Sharkey.

But it’s great, a couple of years since he was first diagnosed, to hear that the cancer’s in remission and Florio’s doing quite splendidly at 77, surrounded by his family, visiting the track regularly, singing nightly at a local karaoke bar and having his usual time living large.

“I feel like a gorilla,” he said over the telephone the other night. “Like a gorilla.”

In other words, he’s ready to take on all comers. He did it back in the day, when he fought about 85 professional boxing matches as a middleweight under a variety of names, and he did it when he was one of the nation’s top thoroughbred horse-racing handicappers.

The racing bug bit him quite early. Florio grew up in Ozone Park, Queens, a block from Aqueduct Race Track, with bookmakers on every corner. He always claimed he started haunting the track the moment he was old enough to cut school. The boxing took a little longer. He didn’t become a professional until he was 14.

The war was on, but the Depression lingered in working-class neighborhoods like Ozone Park. In need of money, Florio walked into a smelly gym over in New Jersey, finessed his date of birth and told the trainer with the dented nose that he was ready to be a professional boxer. He was big for his age.

“You had any previous fights?” the dented nose asked.

“Sure,” Florio said, approaching the truth at its margins. In retrospect, he recalls having previously “beat up a couple of sissies on the street.” Oh, yeah — and once he punched out a gym teacher and had to leave town until the heat was off.

So now he’s in this New Jersey gym, where he trains for maybe two days for his first match, a four-rounder against a guy named Hicks, who had several distinct advantages: Florio’s trunks were so big he had to pin them together to keep them from falling down, and the shoes they gave him were so big they felt like clown shoes.

Right away, he’s getting beat silly. Between rounds, the guy in his corner asks, “You ever fight before this?”

“No,” Florio admits.

“Any street fights?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, get in there and street fight,” the corner man said, “ ’cause you’re getting killed.”

Things got a little better after that. Florio got shiners under both eyes, but he won the fight. He got $25, of which $13 went to his handlers.

And the first of a whole bunch of colorful careers was born.

He fought, on and off, for more than a decade. Fought at Madison Square Garden, fought in a bunch of joints where the smoke was thick enough to cut with a knife. Fought under a bunch of different names until he was old enough to use his own. Sparred with Jake “Raging Bull” La Motta (“I hit him with my best shot. He smiled, and then he beat me like a drum”) and was stablemates with Rocky Graziano.

Most he ever won was $1,500, pretty decent money back then. Won most of the time despite some training habits currently considered dubious, such as smoking in the dressing room before bouts and eating with both hands at all opportunities.

That’s a constant. For years in Baltimore, he ate lunch with an eclectic group at Sabatino’s every Tuesday, including bookmaker Al Isella, ex-cop Puddin’ Barry, roofer John Vicchio, tile man Gus Hansen, writer Bob Blatchley, audiologist Ira Kolman, street-corner guys such as Bobo Sudano, Joe Pizza and Gus Georgilli, and various added starters. These guys could all eat. But Florio was known as the Designated Finisher. Nobody completed a meal without his help, voluntarily or otherwise.

He came here after Steadman found him handicapping at the Miami News. He was also doing public-relations work for a young comic named Lenny Bruce. Got him a spot one night on a radio station with a young announcer named Larry King. The station turned out to be 250 watts. “You’d do better yelling out the window,” Florio said, laughing.

But Miami’s where Florio picked up a little of his outlook on life. You hang around Florio long enough, at some point you’ll hear him declare, “Anybody that don’t like this life has gotta be crazy.”

The line came from an afternoon when he was relaxing in the waters off Miami. An old man floated nearby, talking to himself in an Eastern European accent. “Anybody that don’t like this life ...,” Florio heard him say. Then he noticed the old man’s forearm. He wore the tattooed numbers of a Nazi death camp. Who’s got complaints next to that?

At The News American, Florio was a natural fit. The place was jumping with horse-racing types, including the managing editor, Tom White, who studied each day’s racing charts and then strolled into the sports office several times a day. There, he’d hand over his bets, wrapped in copy paper, to a slight, stooped fellow named Walter Penkilo, who took the wagers upstairs to a fellow named Mike the Cuban, who ran a reasonably profitable gambling operation out of the paper’s composing room.

(Years later, when the deceased White lay in his casket, his pals slipped a winning Daily Double ticket into his shirt pocket.)

Florio was a hit right away. One year a national turf magazine computed the earnings of the country’s top handicappers. Florio was the only one who actually made money. Turf and Sport Digest called him the finest racing handicapper in the country.

He wrote about boxing, as well, and was one of the first to support Muhammad Ali when the champ’s title was taken away. For a while, that wasn’t easy to do. The Examiner’s Mike Marlow was writing sports at The News American back then. He remembers Florio arriving at the paper late at night, handicapping the next day’s races — and then sleeping on four chairs jammed together for a couple of hours before heading back out to the track.

It was Marlow, then a strapping (and naive) 27-year-old, who challenged the 45-year-old Florio to a boxing match. Florio had his usual comic reaction: “I’ll hit you so hard, you’ll be whispering in your own ear.”

“Come on,” Marlow insisted.

“Don’t forget your mouthpiece and your cup,” Florio said.

The fight was three rounds atop Eli Hanover’s Jewel Box on The Block. Several strippers wandered up from the bar, as did a bunch of boxers and trainers. Marlow clowned around for a couple of rounds, and Florio watched him but didn’t throw a punch. In the third round, he did. It landed on Marlow’s kisser. Marlow was whispering in his own ear for the rest of the Ford administration.

The key to good horse-racing handicapping? “You do your homework,” Florio said the other day. “You check the charts, you make your notations. But you can’t be rigid. You get a feeling for when a horse is in the right spot, when the conditions are right. You visit the stable, you take a look at these animals.

“They will show you things about themselves. Some days a horse feels like Citation, some days he feels like a mule. I learned that years ago, when I told an old guy at the track that a horse I liked had run poorly. He said, ‘Did you look at him? Did you look at him?’ He kept saying that. You can look at a creature, and he’ll tell you things. His energy level, the way he’s holding himself on a given day. Just look at him. His message will come to you.”

Florio hasn’t decided whom to pick in the Preakness. It’s still too early. But he’ll miss not being here, and miss the crowd and the characters. And miss the race.

“The Preakness,” he said, “is the greatest two minutes in sports.”

And anybody that don’t like that kind of life has gotta be crazy.

olesker@baltimoreexaminer.com