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HYLAND than the South Side. But on the turf where Johnny Bratton discovered that he could be somebody, however briefly, it was the stone truth. So he found a roof to cover his head during the blizzard of '79 and, no matter how ragged he was, the Del Prado boasted its first celebrity since American League teams declared the neighborhood unsafe for their precious athletes. "e hotel doesn't look like the Astor anymore," Patricia Bock says now, "so why should anyone care?" Johnny Bratton wasn't supposed to have to rely on charity, though. In the late forties and the early fifties, when he was fighting in Chicago Stadium and on TV, when it was all you could do to escape reading about him getting ready for a fight or winding down from one, he thought he had gone over the wall from hard times. He was a taxi driver's son, a Du Sable High School dropout, but he wore zoot suits and gold cuff links and cruised the city in a Cadillac bearing the name "Honey Boy" and a Jaguar bearing the name "Johnny B." And the marvel of it was, the soft life didn't make him a pushover in the ring. "I could do it all," he says, "but I had to do it under my conditions. You understand? My conditions." He had a style that would have become a man trying to sneak into the house past his sleeping wife. It was capable of turning crowds venomous even when he was beating Charlie Fusari for the old National Boxing Association's welterweight title in 1951. Still, there was something about Johnny Bratton that endured longer than the memory of his caution. Perhaps it can best be described as courage.