By David Greene
On the night I was born my dad was losing his shirt in a poker game and my mom informed him she would be going to the hospital, insisting that she would have me in the eighth month, he replied, "We'll can ya watch the Friday night fight's for me?"
A life of hotel rooms and smoke-filled arenas was the life of Boxing columnist "Broadway" Ben Greene who used Catherine's services of proofreading and dictating in the age before computers. If Greene needed a specific word, Catherine would quickly find it.
Their union forged in blood as the night she accepted his proposal, they watched from ringside as Emile Griffith delivered one of the most brutal beatings ever witnessed in a prizefight. Benny "Kid" Peret would succumb to his injuries a few days later.
The Greene's were both headstrong fighters which led to several separations but in the end, Catherine was by "B.G.'s" side when he sat down to watch the Kentucky Derby on May 5, 1990. He suffered a massive stroke and never saw his selection, "Unbridled," win the race.
I was with my mother in their room at the former Times Square Hotel, on her birthday, May 11 of the same year, when she coughed into a tissue and had a weird look on her face. She didn't want to show me but it was filled with blood. The cigarette smoking was catching up to her.
"Broadway" spent 23-days in a coma before he eventually died at St. Claire's Hospital on W. 52 Street, which closed just last year. Catherine immediately stepped into her new role after the calls started coming in, "Catherine, I'm very sorry to hear about Ben... do you know who won last night's fight in Scranton? She didn't but vowed to find out, and did.
For me the grief was so great, in the beginning I could not offer more than a few paragraphs of news for the weekly column, which was more of an opportunity for tradition then anything that would line the inside of the pockets of a widow--but we held the mantle high. "Nails" for her long and colored fingernails and "Dangerous," for being crazy enough to teach people how to drive in Midtown traffic, were born.
At a top weight of 115, Catherine was a body-puncher, having once slugged lightweight champion and Castle Hill resident Carlos Ortiz in the breadbasket, after he dumped me in the pool in an effort to teach me to swim. She would dive in to save me so, "Sugar" Ray Robinson, perhaps the greatest prize fighter of all time, could teach me six-months later.
It seemed a little bizarre this slight figure garnering the attention of a man 200-plus pounds and more strange to hear former heavyweight champion James "Buster" Douglas, trying to get her attention, calling out, "Hey pretty lady."
In her column, "Nails," once called out, "Iron," Mike Tyson in an effort to get him to change his downward decline she foresaw but he never responded. Just think of the possibilities in that.
With the growing access to information through the Internet and a dwindling following for boxing and even readers of newspapers, the paper dropped the column that we did together nearly every week for 14-years.
In recent years she joined, Street News, delivering articles on the plight of homeless in the city and pet causes like the LifeShares donor program. She didn't miss boxing as her original plan was to see it outlawed. She later came to the conclusion that if it was banned, more fighters would be killed or maimed in the illegal fighting that would follow.
"Nails" grew up in the Wakefield section, off of White Plains Road and in recent years has needed the assistance of a walker. But with the convenience of Access-A-Ride, I was startled a few years back, when driving down White Plains Road, I spotted her slowly making her way down the street.
Last Thanksgiving my mother was hospitalized for pneumonia and was later found to have a compressed fracture of the spine and was shuffled back and fourth from a nursing home on Riverside Drive and the hospital until the end.
Nails would soon tell me she chose this nursing home over one in Riverdale, because the nursing home was once the five-star hotel they shard together and where I was conceived on the seveth-floor of the building.
My mother was as head strong and determined as my father, so at least I see where I get it. But when she wanted something It was hard for me to say no, so I was an unwitting coconspirator on New Year's Eve, when I smuggled in a bottle of Champaign to the nursing home and when I packed up her air-tank and 200-pound wheelchair and brought her to her home to celebrate her 71st and final birthday with friends.
"Nails" went into a brief coma but mysteriously awoke for one day, on May 28, 2010, the 20th anniversary of B.G.'s death. She spent her last day talking to friends on the phone and recalling how she was the first woman to get a press pass for Madison Square Garden.
Her condition continued to deteriorate and when I visited her on Friday, June 4, she was unable to talk but aware, I'd say anything to wake her, "Mom, I just shot Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor," my mom responded angrily, "Hmmmm."
Unaware that the Boxing Writer's Association was holding their annual meeting a short distance away, I was aware of the Miguel Cotto-- Yuri Foreman fight at Yankee Stadium and had been trying to desperately to get a ticket.
Foreman and Greene each had a, "Puncher's chance," but Greene would not catch the results of the historic fight as her breathing slowed till finally it was no more. Doctors had just given her pain medication and it was a no-contest. She died on June 5, 2010, exactly 20-years and one month after B.G. suffered his fatal attack.
In 1984 Michael Marley called my dad, "The Last Fight Guy on Broadway, so today I say farewell to, "The Last Fight Girl of 35 Street," My partner, friend and confidant. Borrowing the phrase from our column, she has gone to, "The Great Beyond." Rest in Peace, "Nails."
