Boxer Hemingway Laced His Punches With Tips To His Sparring Partners

"I started off fighting as a kid," Roberts says. "I would hold my right guard and have my left out so anyone could come in and slip right under me. I had no defense. Hemingway told me, 'Don't ever do that. Always take your elbows and hold them in to guard your stomach.' I was just learning then. I was fighting on the reputation of my father. He used to be called the Cinderella Man, and then he was the first Iron Baby."

According to Roberts, the absence of racial prejudice in Hemingway was the norm in Key West; the bitter segregation prevalent in the rest of the South did not exist there.

"The average person in Key West didn't believe in this segregated stuff with black and white," Roberts says. "We all lived next door to each other. We didn't know anything about white sections and black sections. I was raised with white guys; Hemingway was friendly with black people. But the whole town was that way."

Roberts and Forbes recall that as semi-pros, they made $25 to $30 per fight at the Key West Arena. The arena's gate paid their wages. Ringside seats cost $3, and general admission to the grandstands that were erected in the vacant lot cost $1.25. Usually several hundred spectators attended these fights.

"Back then during the Depression, 30 dollars was real good money," Roberts says. "Back then, a man would work a whole week and make about 14 to 15 dollars." It was the era depicted in Hemingway's novel To Have and Have Not, which appeared in 1937 and is set in Key West.

Roberts later made his living in the dry-cleaning business, and Forbes became a cook at a Naval hospital and is now retired. Both have retained the stature of their youth—Roberts is big and burly like Hemingway, and Forbes still has the trim physique he had in his 20s.

Near the end of his Key West period, Hemingway threw a big outdoor Christmas party on the grounds of the Whitehead Street house. One party highlight was a boxing exhibition put on by Roberts, Forbes and other Key West fighters.

"It was on a Christmas Eve, and he had Gene Tunney [Roberts pronounces it TOO-ney] here," recalls Roberts. "So he had a great exhibition over in his yard. He had some more big-time people with him, but Tunney was the only one we recognized and the only one we talked to other than Hemingway. Hemingway told us that day that he was going off to write a book."

Hemingway left Key West for Cuba in 1940 and made his next home with Martha Gellhorn in the house called the Finca Vig�a in San Francisco de Paula, a suburb of Havana. "We were thinking that he would be back on the grounds after he finished the book," says Forbes, "because this was his home. He had a wife and children here." But the Christmas party was the last time either Roberts or Forbes saw Hemingway.