"Oh Jesus, I loved to fight." - Lou Ambers*

APRIL-MAY 2008

NEXT UPDATE: MAY.

ALL-TIME RANKINGS: REVISED AND UPDATED AT THE EDITOR'S DISCRETION.

FOUNDED AND EDITED BY MIKE CASEY

**** ALL ARTICLES ON THIS WEBSITE ARE WRITTEN BY MIKE CASEY UNLESS OTHERWISE STATED AND PROTECTED BY COPYRIGHT

THE GRAND SLAM PREMIUM BOXING SERVICE is dedicated to boxing historians and fans throughout the world.

On these pages, MIKE CASEY presents his ALL-TIME RANKINGS in each weight division, as well as special articles and profiles on fights and fighters throughout the history of boxing.The All-Time Rankings in each section are regularly updated when new candidates come up for consideration.

I am indebted to my good friends and colleagues in the sport who have come on board to offer their own opinions on the greatest fighters in history. My thanks to Jim Amato, Tracy Callis, Dan Cuoco, Barry Deskins, Stephen Gordon, Mike Hunnicut, Eric Jorgensen, Ron Lipton and Curtis Narimatsu.

On the CLASSIC GOLD page, you will find yet more features on the great fighters of the past by MIKE CASEY.

MIKE CASEY is a freelance journalist, author, former editor and boxing historian who has contributed to numerous trade and consumer titles in his 30-year career. He is a former contributor to the oldest boxing weekly, Boxing News, and has also contributed to The Observer Sport Magazine and Golf Monthly.

MIKE CASEY

Mike is the Special Features Writer for the CYBER BOXING ZONE (www.cyberboxingzone.com (see THE MIKE CASEY ARCHIVE) a member of the INTERNATIONAL BOXING RESEARCH ORGANIZATION (IBRO) and an auxiliary member of the BOXING WRITERS ASSOCIATION OF AMERICA. He owns an extensive collection of boxing magazines, photographs, memorabilia and films and comes from a boxing family.

He was born in Woolwich, South-East London, and lives at Romney Marsh in Kent.

Mike Casey can be contacted by fellow writers and historians at riviera918@yahoo.co.uk

HOOKS OF THE MONTH

GENE TUNNEY: THE KING OF COOL

MASTER OF THE UNIVERSE: Gene Tunney was a master boxer and strategic thinker who studied his opponents at length and carefully formulated the most effective battle plan to beat them. Gene The Machine lost just one of nearly 90 fights against the world's greatest light heavyweights and heavyweights. When Harry Greb inflicted that one scar on Gene's great record in a brutal mauling, Tunney took to his sick bed and masterminded his revenge.

It might surprise some of our readers to know that this Jack Dempsey supporter has never harboured a degree of resentment against Gene Tunney. Not that one has to be a Dempsey acolyte to bristle at the sound of Gene’s name.

Tunney was a man apart in more ways than one, and that was his unfortunate problem. He wasn’t a fighter’s fighter to some and he wasn’t a fan’s fighter to most. As a general rule, he was acknowledged for his exceptional talent through gritted teeth and with awkward shrugs of reservation. Your average fight fan in your average bar might sum it up thus: “Yes, he was great, but there was just something about the guy.”

Quite simply, Gene Tunney just didn’t fit most people’s perception of a fighting man, and for the usual trite and unfair reasons. The major gripe was that he was aloof and regarded himself as being above his somewhat primitive profession. The guys in the bar could poke gentle fun at him because it was a pretty safe bet that Gene wouldn’t be there to quaff beer and show off his muscles. He would more likely be at a high society dinner party, rambling at some length about the meaning of life. I do not entirely exaggerate. Tunney did have a grating tendency to pontificate, inducing the average Joe to emit a quiet sigh and glance at his watch.

Throw in Gene’s clean-cut handsomeness and that classic shock of hair that a hurricane couldn’t disturb, and he might have been bullied very frequently if he had been a timid librarian instead of a deceptively tough and iron-willed boxer. To cap it all, the New York smoothie went and beat Jack Dempsey twice, which really was a quite horrendous crime to the blinkered and the prejudiced. If ever a man deceived us by his appearance, it was Gene the Fighting Marine. He was indeed an intelligent and analytical soul, even if he tried a little too hard to prove it. But along with the brains and the scientific mastery of boxing came tremendous courage, resilience and determination. It is a great pity that he continues to be so misunderstood.

Many moons ago, Paul Gallico wrote of Tunney: “Anyone checking his rise from humble beginning to wealth and fame would find a man of duty, self-confidence, initiative, burning ambition, indomitable courage and complete and utter fearlessness.

“Added to this, by intelligence, study and practice, he made himself into one of the best exponents of the so-called manly art of self-defence who ever laced on the red leather gloves. He was the absolute ’ne plus ultra’ of what a boxer ought to be.

“Theoretically, the perfect boxer would emerge from every test unscathed, even untouched by any blow, while leaving the opponent bleeding and unconscious on the canvas. Again, in every theory, with speed of foot, hand and eye, it is possible to avoid every hook, cross or uppercut by blocking them with gloves or arm, or slipping, ducking, pulling out of range, making the hitter miss. No one was ever that good at the game, but among the heavyweights, Gene Tunney probably came closest to it.

“When we should have been cheering him to the echo for the perfection of his profession, we hated him instead for practicing his deceitful arts upon that hero image of ourselves, caveman Dempsey.”

Admire

 Why does this writer continue to admire Gene Tunney? For all the good reasons that Paul Gallico gave us. I love thinking fighters who dedicate their lives to educating their minds and honing their bodies in pursuit of that most elusive and impossible of all human qualities: perfection. It was often written of Tunney that he regarded boxing as a means to an end, which is quite true. But rare indeed is the man like Gene who gives a lesser love his total commitment and dedication. When the heart isn’t in it, it is very easy to jump off the bus when it starts thundering down a slope. Tunney never wavered when the going got tough, not even after receiving a brutal lacing from the great Pittsburgh Windmill, Harry Greb. Gene might just as well have been tossed into a threshing machine on that torrid New York night in the spring of 1922, the only time he was officially beaten in his 87 recorded battles against excellent opposition.

It would be no exaggeration to describe Tunney’s defeat as a pulping, for he was horribly cut and mauled as he reeled as much from the combined effects of adrenaline and alcohol poisoning in his stomach as from Greb’s ferocious attack.

As Gene would recall in later years, the problems started in the run-up to the fight. “Whilst training for the Greb match, which took place just four months after the Battling Levinsky match, I had the worst possible kind of luck. My left eyebrow was opened and both hands were sorely injured. I had a partial reappearance of the old left elbow trouble, which prevented my using a left jab. Dr Robert J Shea, a close friend who took care of me during my training, thought that a hypodermic injection of adrenaline chloride over the left eye would prevent bleeding when the cut was re-opened by Greb. At my request he injected a hypodermic solution of novocaine into the knuckles of both hands as well. We locked the dressing room door during this performance.

“George Engle, Greb’s manager, wanting to watch the bandages being put on, came over to my dressing room and found the door bolted. He shouted and banged. We could not allow him in until the doctor had finished his work. Getting in finally, he insisted that I remove all the bandages so that he could see whether I had any unlawful substance under them. I refused. He made an awful squawk, ranting in and out of the room. I became angry. Eventually I realised Engle was only trying to protect his fighter, and if I let it get my goat that was my hard luck. Moreover, his not being allowed into the dressing room made the situation look suspicious. I unwound the bandages from my hands and satisfied George that all was well.”

All was not well, however. Tunney’s problems had just begun and the doctor’s injections only served to endanger Gene even more when the perpetual motion machine that was Harry Greb started firing. Tunney quickly stumbled into a nightmare, as he would recall in typically clinical detail: “In the first exchange in the first round, I sustained a double fracture of the nose, which bled continually until the finish. Toward the end of the first round, my left eyebrow was laid open four inches. I am convinced that the adrenaline solution that had been injected so softened the tissue that the first blow or butt I received cut the flesh right to the bone.

“In the third round another cut over the right eye left me looking through a red film. For the best part of twelve rounds, I saw this red phantom-like form dancing before me. I had provided myself with a fifty per cent mixture of brandy and orange juice to take between rounds in the event I became weak from loss of blood. I had never taken anything during a fight up to that time. Nor did I ever again.

“It is impossible to describe the bloodiness of this fight. My seconds were unable to stop either the bleeding from the cut over my left eye, which involved a severed artery, or the bleeding consequent to the nose fractures. Doc Bagley, who was my chief second, made futile attempts to congeal the nose bleeding by pouring adrenaline into his hand and having me snuff it up my nose. This I did round after round. The adrenaline, instead of coming out through the nose again, ran down my throat with the blood and into my stomach.

“At the end of the twelfth round, I believed it was a good time to take a swallow of this brandy and orange juice. It had hardly gotten to my stomach when the ring started whirling around. The bell rang for the thirteenth round; the seconds pushed me from my chair. I actually saw two red opponents. How I ever survived the thirteenth, fourteenth and fifteenth rounds is still a mystery to me. At any rate, the only consciousness I had was to keep trying. I knew if I ever relaxed, I would either collapse or the referee would stop the brutality.”

The punishing loss to Greb produced what was probably the greatest example of Gene’s single-mindedness. Taking to his sick bed, he plotted a way to beat Harry with all the attention to detail of a pernickety draughtsman. There was no room for self-pity in Tunney’s game plan for climbing life’s ladder. One wonders if Gene even understood that emotion. “Well, Harry you were the better man tonight,” he told Greb after their classic first encounter. Tunney’s use of the word ‘tonight’ was quite intentional. As he later admitted with quiet coldness, “I meant that literally.” The two titans of the ring would clash four more times, and while it is something of a myth to say that Gene mastered Harry, Tunney was certainly the overall victor. Greb would later say, “I have boxed Dempsey and Tunney. You never know how good Tunney is until you box him.”

After the Greb mauling, Gene’s chief second and manager, Doc Bagley, made a decision that must surely rank with Gene Klein’s famous refusal to take a slice of the Beatles cake. Mr Klein, some will recall, felt that the Fab Four were nothing more than a fleeting fad. Doc Bagley was of the opinion that Tunney would never be the same again after being cut to pieces by the whirring blades of the Pittsburgh Windmill. One wonders if the Doc ever sat down and engaged in the masochistic exercise of estimating his lost fortune.

Somebody else thought differently. Canny old boxing stalwart Billy Roche sidled up to British reporter Jimmy Butler one day in Paris and said to him, “This youngster Tunney has got brains, Jimmy. Mark my words, he’s going to be a crackerjack – and one of these days he’s going to lick Dempsey!”

Thinkers

Boxing has spawned some great thinkers through the years, and I speak here of the special men who considered every aspect of the game and studied its every intricacy. Bob Fitzsimmons was probably the greatest of all at being able to successfully marry scientific theory to action. He learned to punch with deadly precision and dexterity and conserved his energy by studying the behaviour of animals. Joe Gans and Kid McCoy were similarly gifted and similarly blessed with naturally inquisitive minds. Tunney, in my opinion, ranks very high in that company in his ability to assimilate and analyse data and effectively act upon it. If Gene were with us today, I would wager a fair few pennies that he would be making his millions from the computer industry.

My fellow historian, Tracy Callis, says of Tunney: “He was one of the most intelligent fighters in boxing history. He fought primarily as a light heavyweight but tangled regularly with bigger men. He was patient, light on his feet, carried a beautiful left jab and a stinging right hand punch. He usually moved away from an attacker but was known to tie up his foe in a clinch if the adversary got too close. Gene rarely engaged in toe-to-toe exchanges.

“He studied his opponents in depth and knew their every move before he entered the ring. He worked up a plan for each fight and followed it to the letter.

“Fighting in an era of lighter heavyweights, who tended to be quicker and slicker than those seen today, Tunney bested some of the greatest all-round boxers ever in Battling Levinsky, Harry Greb, Tommy Loughran, Jack Delaney, Jeff Smith, Tommy Gibbons and Jack Dempsey.”

Hawaiian historian Curt Narimatsu, an excellent analyst of boxing styles and technique, says, “Gene Tunney, to his credit, always praised Jack Dempsey. Gene said that if Dempsey got inside Joe Louis, Jack wins. If Louis keeps Dempsey outside, Joe wins. By implication, Gene accedes to the superhuman strengths of Dempsey and Louis over his own legacy.

“Gene’s greatest strength was his defence. Legendary fight trainer Ray Arcel worshipped Gene and talked tons about Tunney’s mental strength and acumen. As with any contact sport, defence is what triggers offence. Naturally, Gene stands among the greatest ever counter punchers. The best mirror image of Tunney is Benny Leonard, whose vaunted defence actuated his great offence and counter punching. It’s no surprise that Gene, Benny and Ray Arcel were bosom buddies, synergetic triplets born from the same advent.”

Some time ago, I was eager to probe the lively and knowledgeable mind of sports writer and fellow IBRO member, Mike Silver, on how Tunney would have fared against Larry Holmes. Mike didn’t need long to think about it. “Tunney was smarter than Holmes and would have outpointed him. I mean, who is smarter than Tunney? The guy thought out every single move. Anybody that can figure out how to beat Harry Greb is tops in my book. Nobody is outsmarting Tunney. He was a methodical, brilliant tactician who would have studied Holmes in one fight and figured him out.

“I’m taking nothing away from Holmes, who had one of the best left jabs in heavyweight history. But he benefited from an extremely weak division. Holmes was not as consistent as Tunney, nor was he as well rounded a boxer. Other than Norton and Cooney, all of Holmes’ fights were against second and third rate opposition. I can see Holmes in the top twenty, but not in the first ten. Too much consistent talent there.”

Hours

My good friend, Mike Hunnicut, who has studied countless hours of film of the great fighters, is no less generous in his assessment of Tunney’s ability and mettle. Mike is convinced that Jack Dempsey remains the heavyweight for all seasons, but rates Tunney very close behind.

Here is Mike’s reasoning on Jack, Gene and a few others: “If the fate of the world depended on a 15-round fight against some alien pugilist, the road leads to Dempsey as the man you would want to do the job. Jeffries would be a bit too slow and a catcher. Johnson would be too defensive. Max Baer wouldn’t be serious enough. Marciano would have problems with his short arms and lack of height. Liston would be too slow and might quit. Ali would be too open to the left hook and too light a puncher. Holmes would have too limited a repertoire and not the greatest of chins. Tyson might simply quit and was never the body puncher he should have been.

“Dempsey had maniacal determination, hit hard, had a great chin and fought to the death. That’s the guy I want in there if the fate of the world depended on it.

“Gene Tunney, though, scores very highly for me. He was an upright boxer and his defence could be porous. But he was probably the greatest technical boxer the heavyweights ever saw. Aside from his skills and ring intelligence, he was one of the toughest ever in body and mind. For me, he was the greatest light heavyweight ever bar none and the third greatest heavyweight ever. By the second Dempsey fight, when Gene was finally filling out, he would have defeated more of the top 500 heavyweight fighters in history over the 15-round limit than anyone – with the possible exceptions of Dempsey and Louis.

“A must buy for any historian is the complete film of Tunney’s last fight against Tom Heeney. From any boxing standpoint, Gene did as much as could possibly be done in that battle. For cleverness and all round ability, he was above even Tommy Loughran or anyone else among the light heavies or heavies. Gene’s conditioning was fantastic and he was always in shape from the many fights he’d had. His speed over the long stretch and his ability to recover from adversity were admirable. The glowing testaments of so many fighters and trainers also attest to Gene’s stature as a great boxer and fighter.”

Mike Hunnicut’s reference to Tunney’s excellent recuperative powers brings an eternally fascinating old chestnut back into play. The perennial question concerning that memorable Battle of the Long Count at Soldier Field is whether Tunney couldn’t have beaten the traditional toll of ten seconds after taking that rapid fire blitz of punches from Dempsey in the seventh round. I have never believed so and I simply point to the film of the fight as the evidence. Gene was glassy-eyed and shattered and I strongly dispute the claim that he knew exactly where he was and what he was doing from the time he hit the deck.

Tunney needed that extra time and Jack obliged him by blowing a golden chance of unexpected glory. Gene got the big break that all champions get at some point in their careers and calmed his racing brain to take full advantage of the precious extra seconds. Let us not accuse him of being a lucky so-and-so. Dempsey, ever the instinctive lion, needed to get back into his agreed cage of the neutral corner and was too consumed by the smell of fresh meat to do so.

What Gene showed in that memorable encounter was his mental and physical toughness. He wasn’t fragile of chin, jaw, fighting spirit or anything else. He proved that repeatedly and emphatically during his thirteen years in the professional ring. Had he carried the definitive knockout wallop, he might just have been the perfect heavyweight, the all-time ace. Not that Tunney’s punching power should be dismissed. He could still clout with jarring authority when his tail was up. He knocked out or stopped 48 of his opponents during a near perfect career in which he defeated the very cream of the light heavyweight division and then set about conquering the heavyweights with equal efficiency.

The final victory over Tom Heeney was a classic example of Gene at his very best. When the brakes were off and the punches were truly flowing, there was a machine-like and quite frightening precision to his work. New Zealander Heeney, the so-called Hard Rock from Down Under, was a tough and extraordinarily brave man faced with the task of trying to trap a ghost carrying two hammers. Avoiding Tom’s rushes with speedy and elegant grace, Tunney darted in and out and ripped his challenger with ramrod jabs and thudding straight rights. Hardened observers winced as Heeney’s head was repeatedly snapped back on his shoulders. Only in the far more tolerant days of 1928 would that battle have been allowed to go into the eleventh round. In 22 more fights before his retirement, Tom was able to notch only five wins.

Interest

My interest in Gene Tunney began in earnest many years ago after programming my tape machine to record a documentary on Jake LaMotta in the early hours of the morning. To my delight, the channel slipped in a following bonus hour of Tunney’s fights against Georges Carpentier and Tommy Gibbons. It was akin to stumbling into an Aladdin’s Cave. I had read much about Gene, but now I was actually seeing his sublime skills, his precise punching and his fleetness of foot. At the time, Muhammad Ali was being described as a ‘unique’ heavyweight for his speed of hand and foot. Had everyone missed Tunney? Had they simply forgotten about him? Gene was as fast as Muhammad, if not faster, and he was certainly more skilful and scientific.

Tunney was simply brilliant in his quietly ruthless dismantling of French ace Georges Carpentier at the old Polo Grounds in New York. Reporter Jimmy Butler wrote: “The pair put up one of the finest and most thrilling displays ever seen in America. Tunney that day was a man of ice. A calm, emotionless, sphinx-like fighter against whose rock-like defence the Frenchman’s brilliance shattered into a thousand pieces.

“And as the fire flickered out of Carpentier’s attack and his speed began to slacken, Tunney, meticulous, prim and precise, began to weaken him with copybook punches. Gene hardly made a single mistake. His long left, rigid as a bar of iron and just about as unpleasant to encounter, kept poking itself into his opponent’s face, and for round after round he played on a deep cut over the French fighter’s right eye.”

Carpentier was floored four times in the tenth round of that fight, the end eventually coming in the fifteenth when Gene disabled the game Frenchman with a short jolt to the solar plexus.

With typical foresight and calculated planning, Gene Tunney had been tracking Jack Dempsey for some time. For five years in fact. When Jack knocked out Georges Carpentier at Boyle’s Thirty Acres in July 1921, a young Tunney watched Dempsey’s every move from ringside. Gene had fought on the undercard and been booed for a very poor performance against the crude and free-swinging Soldier Jones. Despite halting Jones in the seventh round, Tunney hardly shaped up as a threat to Dempsey.

But Gene would entertain no negative thoughts, even though he knew he would have to hurdle many more obstacles before booking what every hopeful contender both wanted and feared – a fiery dance with the Manassa Mauler. Patiently and methodically, Tunney set about climbing the long ladder. In his spare time, he studied Dempsey’s fighting style in great depth and acquired every available film of Jack’s fights. Again and again, Gene practised the straight, crashing right that he believed to be the key to taking the steam out of Dempsey’s attack.

There were mental barriers to overcome too, and here was where Tunney demonstrated his incredible strength of mind. It is impossible to understand now just how much Jack Dempsey put the fear of God into prospective opponents. Gene’s demons came to get him, as they so often do, in the dead of night when all his positive thoughts were suddenly smashed by Dempsey’s chilling spectre.

Recalled Tunney, “One night, in a lonely cottage on Mount Pleasant, I had a nightmare. I was in the ring with Dempsey. He was battering me frightfully. I was bloody and only half conscious and he came at me snarling He knocked me down. I got up and he began pummelling me again. The referee stopped the fight. I woke up. The bed was shaking. I was practically out of it. After that, I stopped reading the newspapers and maintained a calm approach to the fight.”

Like all great men, Tunney found his ‘four o‘clock courage’ and executed his battle plan with icy resolve when he challenged Dempsey at the Sequicentennial Stadium in Philadelphia on a rainy night in September 1926.

British sportswriter, Denzil Batchelor, who produced an engrossing book called Big Fight in 1954, wrote the following of Gene’s performance: “It was typical of Tunney that he should have won his most important fight in so cool and calculating a manner. It was not his way to stand toe-to-toe slogging it out in the tradition descended from Belcher and embraced by most of the latter day past masters all the way up to Dempsey. Tunney was the Moltke of heavyweights, if not the Schlieffen.

“He was probably inferior to several of the men he fought when it came to a hammering match at close quarters; therefore he saw to it that his fights never came to such a pass. He kept his men at long range with punches which, in spite of his brittle hands, were still power-driven at the very limit of his considerable reach. He used his feet to frisk around the maulers and man-handlers. Above all, he used his head.”

Some forty years before Steve McQueen hit his glorious peak as a steely movie icon, Gene Tunney was the King of Cool. It just wasn’t cool to say it, and perhaps it never will be. A man can have it all and still have something missing through no great fault of his own.

 
BLOOD, GUTS AND GREATNESS: THE INCREDIBLE KID LAVIGNE

ROUGH COMPANY: George (Kid) Lavigne, didn't believe in half measures during his furious reign as the world lightweight champion. Incredibly tough and ferocious, the Kid went all out for victory and engaged in some of the bloodiest and most exciting battles ever seen.

Somewhat reassuringly, perhaps the favourite indulgences of fight fans haven’t changed radically down through the centuries. From day one, our curious and enduring breed has adored the ritual of engaging in endless and inconclusive argument that generally sweeps us straight up a back alley leading to nowhere.

More often than not, it is impossible to prove our opinions or reach a definitive verdict on what was the greatest fight and who was the greatest fighter. We just know that it feels good to chase our own backsides when there is nothing much else going on in the world. There is nothing quite so curative as a good old barney with our favourite sparring partners. God forbid that they should come over all magnanimous and actually agree with a single word we are saying.

Ad Wolgast and Battling Nelson certainly started something back in 1910 after their phenomenal battle of endurance at Point Richmond. Logically, Ad and Bat should have been carted off to the cemetery after that one. It surely had to be the greatest battle ever seen in the eternally fabulous lightweight division. The cries of dissent were not long in coming – oh no it wasn’t!

Those of a greater vintage argued that for sheer savage intensity, sustained excitement and historical importance, there was nothing to match the brutal first battle between George (Kid) Lavigne and Joe Walcott at Maspeth, New York, on December 2, 1895.

That fight marked the thunderous arrival of Lavigne on the world stage.

Few men could go head to head with Walcott, the great Barbados Demon, in a straight punching battle for survival. But Lavigne, the young Michigan tornado known as the Saginaw Kid, did just that and joined Walcott among the select ranks of men to be feared.

It was a fight that was already cooking long before the contestants got into the ring and it established Sam Fitzpatrick as one of the shrewdest and most astute matchmakers in the game. Lavigne and Walcott produced fifteen of the fiercest rounds of fighting ever witnessed, their epic union cleverly engineered by Fitzpatrick.

Walcott, described by Nat Fleischer as “a short, thick-necked furious fighting man”, was being managed by Tom O’Rourke and had compiled a mightily impressive record. O’Rourke was able to provide Joe with constant training with the masterful Little Chocolate, George Dixon. Walcott became such an accomplished and dangerous fighter under the guidance of O’Rourke and Dixon that few people doubted the Barbados Demon was the best lightweight in the world.

Around the same time, Sam Fitzpatrick took Kid Lavigne under his wing. The Kid wasn’t renowned for his love of training, but O’Rourke recognised the youngster’s class and tremendous fighting spirit. Lavigne quickly progressed as he defeated tough opponents in George Siddons, Jerry Marshall, Johnny Griffin and the tragic Andy Bowen, who died from his injuries after the Kid knocked him out in eighteen rounds in New Orleans. Lavigne also gained a highly creditable eight rounds draw with the gifted drunken genius, Young Griffo.

Lavigne was considerably under the lightweight limit and it wasn’t at all unusual for him to give away significant weight to his opponents. However, such was his progress that Joe Walcott and Tom O’Rourke grew more than a little annoyed with the attention and praise being lavished on the Kid. Lavigne became as irritatingly irresistible to them as a slippery salmon does to a hungry Grizzly Bear.

O’Rourke couldn’t help but take the bait. It proved to be one of the few career blunders that wise old Tom ever made. Not only did O’Rourke announce that Walcott would fight Lavigne, but that Joe would agree to forfeit his entire purse if he failed to stop the Kid inside fifteen rounds.

Sam Fitzpatrick snapped up the offer but insisted that Walcott made the lightweight limit. Walcott and O’Rourke readily agreed.

Fitzpatrick took an iron grip on Lavigne in the run-up to the fight and insisted that the Kid didn’t skimp on his training. Lavigne behaved himself and his conditioning improved rapidly. Interest in the fight grew and betting was lively in the east, where much money was wagered on Lavigne failing to last the agreed course. Such was Walcott’s reputation as a wrecker of men that it was becoming increasingly difficult for the Barbados Demon to secure matches.

Fitzpatrick and a few of the Lavigne faithful countered by betting that the Kid would not only last the distance but would defeat Walcott. Barbados Joe was supremely confident that he would halt Lavigne and entertained no thoughts of losing. Walcott stormed into the Kid from the start of the contest, but met with terrific resistance as Lavigne hit back on even terms. Joe seemed taken aback by the opposing force he had encountered, and the Kid’s tenacity didn’t diminish as a gargantuan battle took shape and the rounds raced by.

Lavigne stood toe-to-toe with Walcott through some withering, brutal exchanges, staying on top of Joe all the time. One writer would later comment that the Demon had been out-demoned. The pace of the fight was astonishing, as was the punishment suffered and the injuries borne. The ring was stained crimson from the blood of both men’s wounds. Lavigne would inherit a cauliflower ear from one of Walcott’s slashing rights.

Incredibly, the two titans didn’t seem to notice the outer limits to which they were hurtling. Lavigne eventually outpaced Walcott to earn the referee’s decision after a barn-burning battle of powerful hitting, courage and perseverance in the face of terrible punishment.

Hooked

When Kid Lavigne and Joe Walcott hooked up for their return match on October 29, 1897, the Kid was the lightweight champion of the world and was repeatedly astonishing the boxing public with the near frenetic pace of his attacking style and his extraordinary toughness. It seemed that no man could hurt or deflect the non-stop wonder from Saginaw.

Once again, Lavigne proved Walcott’s master in mayhem, with Joe being pulled out of the contest at the end of the twelfth round by Tom O’Rourke. The crowd of 10,000 at the Occidental Club in San Francisco could scarcely believe how little effect the tremendous blows of Walcott had on the relentless Saginaw Kid.

Walcott entered the ring in his usual determined mood, adorned in a salmon-coloured robe and attended by Tom O’Rourke, George Dixon and Joe Cotton. Lavigne was second into the ring, his handlers including his brother Billy, Teddy Alexander and Billy Armstrong. Billy Jordan was the master of ceremonies and Eddie Greaney was the referee.

As in the first battle between the two greats, Lavigne set a blistering pace and maintained it. Walcott did extremely well to fight back and landed many a hard blow when he was able to adequately time Lavigne’s rushes. But the Kid had taken charge of the fight by the fifth round and Joe was unable to turn the tide thereafter.

The seventh round was one of the fastest seen by reporters of the day. Lavigne bulled Walcott into the ropes and scored with a big left uppercut to the face. The Kid followed with a right to the jaw that shook Joe badly and forced him to clinch. Lavigne was merciless in such a situation and would just keep hammering at his opponent. He wouldn’t leave the troubled Walcott alone and struck him again with rights and lefts to the head.

Joe tried desperately to summon all his ring smarts and weather the violent storm around him, clinching whenever he could. But when he was sent to his haunches near the ropes, it became apparent that he was living on borrowed time against the rampaging little killer before him. Lavigne chased and harried Walcott all over the ring in the eighth and ninth rounds, landing some thudding blows over the heart.

 Walcott limped back to his corner at the end of the ninth round with muscular cramps in his legs, a condition which often plagued him. His handlers worked on the legs, but it was apparent to all that Joe required a major recovery and a big rally to overturn the significant points lead that the charging Lavigne had compiled.

Walcott was still limping when he came out for the tenth round, and his torment was only worsened by repeated shots to the jaw that sent him staggering. By the twelfth session, Joe was doing little more than surviving by calling on the last reserves of his guile and instinct. The Demon fought with great gameness and heart, but it was his heart that Lavigne continued to target with vicious and well placed blows. By now Walcott was in no position to defend himself or fight back effectively. When he returned wearily to his corner at the end of the round, Tom O’Rourke told referee Eddie Greaney that the Demon could not go on.

Punishment

George (Kid) Lavigne’s capacity to absorb punishment was so incredible that it seems almost mythical to us now, much like the gruesome hardship and deprivation of his savage era.

The stories piled up about Lavigne and the evidence of their truth was in the footprints of spilled blood, bashed bones, clotted noses and misshapen ears that led to his door. In later years, as we shall see, the Kid spoke most humorously about the grisly souvenirs he collected and their deceptively positive effect on his well-being.

On October 27, 1896, Lavigne defended his lightweight championship against Jack Everhardt at the Bohemian Sporting Club in New York. It was a fight that might be described as par for the course in Lavigne’s turbulent and violent career. He knocked out Everhardt in the twenty-fourth round, but the bare detail of such a result could never hope to convey the full flesh and bones of a Kid Lavigne punch-up.

Jack Everhardt was a classy and educated ring mechanic and comprehensively outboxed Lavigne for much of the way, punishing the Kid badly in the process. Lavigne’s eyes were partially closed and his face was a swollen mess from all the attention it received from Jack’s accurate punching. Finally, in typically heroic fashion, the Kid caught up with Everhardt and knocked him out with a big blow to the jaw. However, one found it difficult to tell the winner from the loser. So badly battered was Lavigne that he had to be led from the ring after his triumph.

The Kid had already endured another taxing marathon after locking horns with Englishman Dick Burge at the National Sporting Club in London on June 1, 1896. Lavigne had gained recognition as the lightweight champion of the world with a dramatic seventeenth round knockout of Burge, but Dick gave the Kid plenty to remember him by.

Burge was a conundrum. His brilliant talent was frustratingly offset by a Jekyll and Hyde personality. James (Jimmy) Butler, the great British boxing reporter, wrote of Dick: “His superb skill – for he was one of the cleverest boxers at his weight the world has ever seen – kept Burge in the limelight for many years, yet he always remained an enigma.

“Sometimes he would box with a brilliance that would have won him a world title and sometimes he would appear as lethargic and dull as any novice. You could never be sure how he would shape.”

James (Jimmy) Butler was a fortunate man who enjoyed some wonderful experiences in a golden age. He never forgot a three-rounds exhibition he saw between Burge and the legendary Jack McAuliffe in 1914. Burge had been out of the ring for fourteen years by that time. McAuliffe hadn’t seen action in eighteen years.

Could they still fight? Here is what Mr Butler wrote of their little set-to: “Those three rounds between Dick Burge and Jack McAuliffe I shall never forget. The details of so many of the big fights I have witnessed have long faded from my memory, but the recollection of their marvellous exhibition is still vivid.

“Not for a fraction of a second did they clinch. They stood toe-to-toe, as upright and straight as poplars, feinting, leading, hitting, countering and cross-countering, with a speed and skill that left us open-mouthed in wonder.”

Of  Burge’s fight with Lavigne, Butler commented: “Burge stepped into the ring a 2 to 1 favourite, but before the bout had progressed far it was evident that his efforts to make the weight had left him weakened. The old snap and fire were missing from his punch, and although he put up a desperate and plucky effort to avoid defeat, it was of no avail.”

At one point during that torrid battle, Lavigne mistimed one of his rushes at Burge and charge headlong into a ring post. Typically the Kid regarded this as a minor inconvenience, another honourable scar to add to his burgeoning collection.

Boxers As Surgeons: The Kid’s Theory

Kid Lavigne rarely felt bad about the lumps he took. Very often he was quite grateful for them. They reinforced his intriguing theory that boxers could be as surgically gifted as doctors.

Here is what the Kid had to say about his bloody business: “You hear a lot about injuries done in the ring, but you have never heard about the counter-irritant one blow is to another, have you?”

Lavigne pointed to his left ear, a classic cauliflower job of his era, and continued: “Look at this ear that I’m carrying. It is a memory of one fight. My old pal Joe Walcott gave it to me in our first fight and almost at the start of it. Some people think that Walcott can hit. It got past the imagination place with me before we boxed one round.

“I knew it was true the first time he landed. And the first time he put one fair on this left ear, he sent me back to my corner wondering if I’d ever forget that poke. That was where I got my ear. In a round or two it puffed up and filled with blood so that it looked like a raw tomato. It felt worse than it looked. There was a whole comic opera chorus in my head, singing songs that sounded like the music you hear in the dentist’s chair just before they wake you up.

“What would have happened if Walcott hadn’t played surgeon for me, no one can tell. But along in the fourth or fifth round, he brought his glove over on the bad ear, pulled the heel across it and burst the ear. The songs stopped, the pain went, the ear shrank and Mr Walcott was stopped in round fifteen.”

Walcott’s ‘surgical’ punch certainly had a deceiving effect on some reporters at ringside, who initially thought they had seen Lavigne’s ear come off. Some time later, The Kid was no less obliged to Dick Burge for a spot of skilful handiwork.

“Dick Burge, the English fighter, performed another operation for me. It was the year after the Walcott affair and Richard attended to my nose. Through being hit on the bridge in other fights so many times, a little lump had formed. It wasn’t painful, but it didn’t look pretty and it didn’t help me any in my breathing. But I didn’t pay much attention to it until Burge and I got well warmed up in our mill in London.

“The fight went seventeen rounds and we hadn’t gone half of that route when Burge came to me with a straight right on the nose that carried me part way to the sleeping quarters. No one ever hit me as hard on the nose. I had to guess where my corner was at the finish and I steered for it by the voice of my handlers. When I cleared my nose, a thick clot of blood was discharged. That clot must have been the lump that had been bothering me, and my nose was good as new when I went out for the next round.

“I beat Burge and he gave me a present of a straight nose to boot.”

No fighter, however, played havoc with Lavigne’s nose more than the great but tragically flawed boxing master, Young Griffo. The two men fought out two draw decisions, which itself is testament to Lavigne’s class. Hitting the brilliantly gifted Griffo was akin to trying to hit a ghost, irrespective of whether the alcoholic Griff was sober (which was rarely) or drunk (which was often). Here was a man who would keep himself in drinks later in life by spreading a handkerchief on the floor of his local saloon, placing a foot on one corner and challenging any man in the bar to punch him off it.

Here are Lavigne’s recollections of the Australian maestro: “He was like a dozen arms. He threw a hodful of arms at me every time I went after him. I’d start out and would lead one that looked as if it ought to land and send the Australian over the ropes. So far as I could see, Griffo never moved. But I didn’t see much, for as soon as I led and started in, six or eight gloves would land on my nose and knock my head back so that I was looking at the ceiling.

“He had my neck in a hinge until the fight was about half gone, when I gave up anything that seemed like boxing – just rushing wildly and trying to bear him before me. I couldn’t hurt him much because he was too shifty, but he tired so that he couldn’t stop to do any boxing himself – and that, when you had him throwing a lot of gloves at you, was worth something.”

Fighting

Fighting the way he did, George (Kid) Lavigne was destined to wear down and wear out before most others. He had been campaigning for just under three years when he lost his lightweight championship in the blazing and defiant manner that one would have expected of him.

The Kid’s conqueror was the Swiss-born Frank Erne, a fast and clever ringman, who got his big chance in his adopted hometown of Buffalo on July 3, 1899. The match took place at the Hawthorne Athletic Club in the suburb of Cheektowaga, with Erne capturing a 20-rounds decision in a lively and fast-paced battle. Both boys were in terrific shape and the Kid started favourite.

While the fighting was fierce between Erne and Lavigne, the duel was also shot through with speed and skill from both combatants. In all the rip-roaring stories about Lavigne, it is sometimes forgotten that the Kid was no slouch for ring cleverness.

Certainly, however, it was the Kid’s trademark courage that shone through more than anything else in his last championship stand. He battled Erne on even terms for the first six rounds, but things went awry for Lavigne in the seventh when he ran into a hailstorm and received a bad lacing from Frank. The sound of the gong probably saved the fading champion from being knocked out in that session.

Erne was never quite so effective thereafter, unable to finish Lavigne. This was a puzzle to many until it was discovered at the fight’s conclusion that Frank had badly injured his left hand in that seventh round onslaught.

By the final round, the Kid had been beaten virtually to a standstill by the precise punching of Erne. Lavigne’s eyes were shut but he continued to chase Frank, even though Erne’s punches were more plentiful and hurtful.

Lavigne’s Greatness

George (Kid) Lavigne was a natural and wonderful successor to the great Napoleon of the Prize Ring, Jack McAuliffe. The Kid needed to be colourful and special to follow in the footsteps of Jack.

McAuliffe had ruled the lightweights when John L Sullivan bossed the heavies and Nonpareil Jack Dempsey held sway over the middleweights. The three men were great friends and referred to fondly by the American sporting public as the Three American Jacks.

McAuliffe was intelligent, possessed of great humour and loved the good life. His weight would often be nudging 175lbs when he entered his training camp.

But Kid Lavigne carved his own special reputation and did so magnificently. For a great many years after his career was over, there were many boxing observers who believed that Lavigne was the greatest of all the lightweights. Interestingly, as late as 1944, by which time the career of Benny Leonard was done and dusted, the debate as to who was the all-time lightweight king was not between Benny and Joe Gans, but between Gans and Lavigne. Joe, the Old Master, got the majority of votes. But the Kid claimed a healthy share of the poll.

But what of Jack McAuliffe’s opinion on Kid Lavigne? Here are Jack’s thoughts on the Kid from 1928: “Natural fighters always have had the better of book-made boxers in the lightweight division, although Benny Leonard was one of the latter class and he certainly fought his way up from a club fighter to a worthy champion.

“A natural fighter, particularly a hitter, has the advantage. John L Sullivan was a natural fighter. So was Jack Dempsey. I think Kid Lavigne was the greatest of them all. I picked him as my successor when I retired undefeated and I made a good selection.

“Lavigne’s (first) fight with Walcott was one of the classics of the ring. The Saginaw Kid had courage, stamina and was a natural fighter.”

McAuliffe once fought a gruelling 64-rounds draw with a fighter called Billy Myer, who carried the nickname of the Streater Cyclone. It is doubtful whether Billy ever forgot Jack or vice-versa. Billy’s brother and near fighting equal, Eddie Myer, certainly never forgot Kid Lavigne.

Eddie was knocked out by the Kid in 1893 after taking a vicious right to the temple. Myer was still suffering the after-effects of that punch thirty years later. In 1923, Eddie did a little shiver as he told a reporter: “Often I can feel that blow now, especially if I catch cold. Then the spot where he hit me gets sore and aches like fury.”

 

TOUCHING THE VOID: THE HAWK AND THE SCHOOLBOY IN LATE '82

THE DESPERATE HOURS: Bobby Chacon couldn't sleep the night before his titanic battle with Rafael (Bazooka) Limon in Sacramento. Pumped up and ready to go, the adrenaline-charged Schoolboy climbed into the ring to produce arguably his most incredible performance as he charged over the finishing line to capture a memorable points victory. Those who saw the 1982 classic between Bobby and Rafael still shake their heads in disbelief at the astonishing courage and willpower shown by both men.

I’m tired of living and scared of dying. So go the famous old words of Ol’ Man River. It’s funny how people see life and death in different ways. We all have our fears and our phobias.

During my long career in journalism, I have had the good fortune to meet many men of courage from various walks of life, be they boxers, soldiers, firefighters, policemen or humble nine-to-fivers who never imagined they could be Superman for a day.

Few have been tired of living, yet they have been strangely scared of it. They can only live joyously when life is spiced with danger and the price of failure is savage.

Understand that such men do not harbour a death wish. What they need is the challenge and the adrenaline charge of venturing into the valley of death and daring it to swallow them up.

We should not be too harsh on our heroes who fall apart and lose themselves when there are no more titanic battles to wage. What else does a man do, where else does he go, once he has touched the void and taken a peek at that mystical halfway house between the present and hereafter that mortal men only get to see at the moment of dying?

He can perform the impossible when he is lost in that magical world. He can beat anyone or anything. Then the bubble bursts, his theatre of dreams is dismantled and suddenly he is being eaten away and driven mad by the ticking of a clock in a lonely house.

Bobby Chacon knew all about the monotonous ticking of clocks. I suspect that Aaron Pryor did too. Both were fast and dangerous fighting men, forever barrelling towards the next target in life at breakneck speed. There is no greater curse for such warriors than a pregnant pause or an empty space.

In the early hours of December 11, 1982, the day when he would go out and win the greatest fight of his career, Bobby Chacon couldn’t sleep. His wristwatch kept beeping out the time as the hours passed with agonising slowness. Chacon knew only one way to struggle through the darkness. Focusing on his opponent, the formidable Rafael ‘Bazooka’ Limon, Bobby kept saying to himself, "I can’t lose, I can’t lose."

By this time, Aaron Pryor’s work was done. A month before, on November 12 at the Orange Bowl in Miami, the whirlwind of a man they called The Hawk had swooped through the valley of death and somehow emerged victorious against a living legend in the great Alexis Arguello.

None of us could quite believe what we had seen in that fight. It had soared and dipped and charged along like a violent, rocking rollercoaster, fuelled by courage, heart, passion and an almost disquieting brand of commitment.

Aaron took the cheers of the screaming crowd. It was Hawk Time, just as he always liked to tell us. Did he sleep that night? Had he slept the night before? And what would such a volcanic and hyperactive man do when there were no more wars to be fought? Nights can be killers, but days are even longer.

Perpetual

Perpetual motion is a thrilling and dangerous condition in human beings. Thrilling because we love to see it and wish we had it. Dangerous because it is finite. A neighbour of mine in our Kentish haven here recently passed comment on a tireless woman in our community who charges around the place organising outings, garden parties, theatre trips, you name it. She is greatly admired and rightly so. But my neighbour’s take on her kept coming back to me: "It’s almost as if she’s afraid to stop in case she discovers she has nothing else to do."

Well, those of us who know our boxing are all too aware of the personal demons that came to claim Aaron Pryor and Alexis Arguello after the final bell had sounded. Reams have been written on how the two titans of the ring were yanked from the heights to the depths. We call them ‘human interest’ stories in journalism and your writer tends to steer clear of them. However well intentioned, they still end up smacking of glorification and sensationalism.

So forgive me for being sentimental and singin’ in the rain like Gene Kelly. This little forum has been roped in to include only the glory days of late 1982, when Aaron Pryor and Bobby Chacon were kings of the hill and monarchs of all they surveyed.

With typical melodrama, they left it late and then left us with one heck of a bone to chew on. Around November time, as every boxing fan will know, we start picking our fight of the year. We figure that it’s pretty safe to do so, that everyone has done what they are likely to do.

In 1982, having pretty much finalised our neat little lists, we got beaned by two of the most vicious curveballs ever thrown. Pryor overwhelmed Alexis Arguello in the fourteenth round of an almost impossibly fast-paced and brutal battle. That clinched it, surely. The fight of the year beyond question. Then Chacon outlasted Rafael Limon at the Memorial Auditorium in Sacramento in a primitive and surreal war of attrition that didn’t seem to take place in the real world. Those who personally witnessed that spectacle reeled uncertainly into the streets and the parking lots when it was all over, bearing the stunned expressions of alien captives who had been whisked off to another star system for a few quick experiments and then tossed straight back.

The fight of the year? Definitely. Well, definitely maybe.

Pryor and Chacon just kept punching, just as Ad Wolgast and Battling Nelson had done decades before, just as Stanley Ketchel and Joe Thomas had done in their thunderous classic at Colma. Where do such men go at such times? They seem to stop that ticking clock that they fear and slip into a private heaven where everything is constant and makes perfect sense.

I remember vividly how Aaron Pryor charged to the fore with remarkable haste. What a wonderful breath of fresh air The Hawk was. His progress through the professional ranks was as fast and as furious as his fists. Suddenly the ferocious kid from Cincinnati just seemed to be there, knocking at the world championship door before most of us had managed to peruse his application form. Twenty-four wins in just under three years, twenty-two knockouts, and he was ready for the mighty Colombian Antonio Cervantes. Pryor was a living embodiment of Jack Kerouac’s freefall prose, where full points and commas are regarded as unnecessary inconveniences. Don’t stop the flow! Keep charging on!

Aaron had roared out of the amateurs with a 204-1 record and he just kept roaring as he made the transition to professional in 1976. Only Jose Resto and Johnny Summerhays managed to take The Hawk the distance on his charge to the championship.

The great Antonio ‘Kid Pambele’ Cervantes was a fading but still formidable WBA junior-welterweight champion when he journeyed to the Riverfront Coliseum in Cincinnati to defend his championship against Pryor. By the time Cervantes journeyed home again, his manager Ramiro Machado was saying, "We are finished. No more fights."

In fact Cervantes would have five more fights and win four of them. But he would never touch championship heights again after being brutally swept asunder by Pryor. The 5’ 10" Cervantes had seen off eighteen challengers to his crown with his height and great punching power. As a junior-welterweight, only those classic boxing masters, Nicolino Locche and Wilfred Benitez, had inconvenienced the stately Colombian by way of silky skills and finesse. Overpowering Cervantes was another question entirely and not recommended to fighters of good sense.

Aaron Pryor, however, could never be truly profiled or bracketed. He was his own raging storm, blowing every which way and defying classification. He was quite simply glorious. He took the breath away as the special ones always do. And he took the fight out of Cervantes inside four rounds.

It all started well enough for Antonio, who wasn’t accustomed to being batted around and might have come to believe that it couldn’t happen. He looked his old lithe and dangerous self in the opening two rounds, hurting Aaron in the first and then sending him down on one knee in the second. Pryor claimed he slipped but the official ruling was a knockdown. Not that The Hawk dwelt upon the incident. He never did pay much attention to adversity in the ring, sweeping it aside like a troublesome bee.

Pryor’s endurance matched his fire and fury. His ability to absorb punches with apparent immunity would be seriously questioned two years later against Arguello. But it was Aaron’s cyclonic offence that ultimately crushed Cervantes. Like a rabid version of Henry Armstrong, Pryor would just keep firing.

In the third round, Aaron cracked home a left hook to open a one-inch gash over Antonio’s eye, and the old champion was suddenly looking uncertain and vulnerable. Always a demon at finishing a man in distress, Pryor wasted no time in going to work in the fourth round, chasing Cervantes into a corner and letting fly with a barrage of blows. A final right to the head sent Antonio to his knees and left him clutching the lower ropes. A magnificent champion had finally been toppled and unceremoniously ripped apart. "I was sad about the knockout," Cervantes said. "If I don’t get cut, maybe it would have been mote interesting."

Possibly but unlikely. Pryor was now approaching the raging prime of his life as a fighter and quickly established himself as a dominant champion in his own right. The challengers to his throne quickly came and quickly went: Gaetan Hart in six rounds, Lennox Blackmore in two, Dujuan Johnson in seven, Miguel Montilla in twelve and Akio Kameda in six.

Then it was the turn of the mighty Alexis Arguello in the electric atmosphere of Miami’s Orange Bowl. What a match-up! Most of us sensed that a meeting of Aaron and Alexis couldn’t fail to be a very special and thrilling spectacle.

What can one say about the great Arguello by that time in his career? There he stood, the lanky Nicaraguan known as El Flaco Explosivo (The Explosive Thin Man), with three titles in three weight divisions already on his ledger and an eye-popping record of 77 wins in 82 fights, including 62 knockouts. Yet Arguello was much more than merely a destructive puncher. He was wily, intelligent, a cool master boxer into the bargain.

He could outbox his rivals when the occasion demanded or knock them out with a strike of frightening suddenness. When he tore the WBA featherweight crown from the head of Ruben Olivares in 1974, the big bomb came late in the day and stunned the Inglewood Forum crowd into momentary silence. A single, cracking left hook to the jaw unhinged Olivares, just when it seemed that the Mexican ace had solved the Arguello puzzle and found the path to victory. The punch sent Ruben’s mouthpiece flying and dropped him like a man who had been hit by a car. Bravely he got to his feet, but he was quickly knocked out by Arguello’s concluding combination.

However, it was as a junior lightweight that Alexis found his true domain, winning the WBC title from Alfredo Escalera and seeing off eight challengers before making an equally smooth transition to the lightweight division and taking the WBC bauble on a commanding decision from the hardy Scottish southpaw, Jim Watt.

Arguello was moving up through the divisions with all the smooth assurance of a finely tuned Ferrari and was no less confident of his ability to dethrone Aaron Pryor. There was an elegant and almost royal air about Alexis. He was a natural born killer of the ring, yet his class and sportsmanship never cast him in the role of the marauding villain. Arguello’s idea of the ultimate fight was an ever-shifting chess game, not a slam-bang affair of little depth or intelligence.

His shrewd old trainer Eddie Futch saw many comparisons between Arguello and a certain other former pupil: Joe Louis. Talking to reporters in the run-up to the Pryor fight, old Eddie said of Alexis: "He reminds me a lot of Joe Louis in and out of the ring. In the ring, he keeps the pressure on you with that hard, straight left hand. Out of the ring, he is the same quiet gentleman Joe Louis was."

Then Alexis met Aaron in a chess game that combined skill, nerve and an oddly poetic form of brutality. Arguello was the grand master looking to put the young pretender in his place. Pryor was the charging cavalier looking to clear the board as soon as he could.

Private War

One wondered how they managed to extend their private war to the fourteenth round. Even people in the crowd of 23,800 were physically and emotionally drained at the finish. They had seen everything that constitutes a wonderful and competitive prizefight: skill, courage, passion, perseverance and incredible physical and mental strength. They had seen hard hitting, durability, defiance and glorious rallies in the face of adversity.

Pryor, the shorter man by three inches at 5’ 6 ½" started fast, rattling Arguello with rapid-fire combinations to the head and showing great hand speed. Alexis displayed tremendous coolness under fire and great resilience in weathering these storms and firing back with his own formidable artillery. Pryor exerted great pressure through the first five rounds, but thereafter began to mix his slugging with some intelligent boxing. Arguello, a marvellous counter puncher, always looked the more precise and damaging hitter, but could not match Aaron for volume.

Nevertheless, the balance of power constantly tipped back and forth as each kept the other in check. The eleventh round was a rocky session for Aaron, as he seemed to wobble and lose his way momentarily after taking a big right to the head and a debilitating left to the stomach. Yet this was one exceptional man that the lethal Arguello simply couldn’t put in the ground. Alexis must have wondered if a falling chunk of masonry would have had any greater effect on Pryor.

Aaron kept coming and kept rifling home punches. He stepped up the pace again in the twelfth round and maintained his forward march in the thirteenth, despite taking another cracking right from Arguello. In the ferocious and fateful fourteenth round, The Hawk finally broke the great man from Nicaragua. No longer could Alexis ward off the runaway train as he suddenly wilted from a heavy right to the jaw and a follow-up left. As he staggered back into the ropes, Aaron leapt on him and fired off a succession of fast and hard blows to the head. Some counted twenty-three in all. South African referee Stanley Christodoulou jumped between the fighters and called off one of the great modern wars of attrition.

Arguello fell slowly to the canvas and lay there with his nose broken and blood running from his left eye. It was some minutes before he was able to leave the ring to a thunderous ovation.

Well, as our fellow historians will know, the big fight was followed by the big controversy. Had Pryor been flying through that titanic battle on something more than pure adrenaline? Arguello’s agent, Bill Miller, certainly thought so, claiming that no post-fight urine samples were taken from Pryor. That didn’t sit at all right with Miller, who added that Aaron’s trainer, Panama Lewis, was heard on cable TV asking for a bottle with a special mixture. Pryor’s cornermen were also seen breaking capsules under their fighter’s nose during the contest.

Arguello, ever the gentleman, expressed surprise at is opponent’s ability to take the hardest punches with little visible effect, but didn’t want to press the matter. "I don’t know what happened," Alexis said. "I don’t want this thing to go too far. I was beaten by a great champion. There is no doubt in my mind. I don’t want to question his ability or honesty."

Panama Lewis, for his part, claimed the bottle with the ‘special mixture’ consisted of Perrier and tap water. There was a disturbing sequel to the story on June 16th of the following year, which may or may not tell us something. Nashville welterweight Billy Collins Jnr, whose father had been a top ten 147-pounder in the sixties, was savagely beaten by Lewis’ charge, Luis Resto. Young Billy’s eyes were pounded shut and his nose and mouth were horribly gashed and bashed.

It was subsequently discovered that Resto’s gloves had been cut and half the padding removed. Lewis and Resto were banned from boxing for life and Resto served a prison term for assault and other related charges.

Billy Collins Jnr never did recover from the incident. Plagued by bouts of depression and drinking, he died nine months later at the age of twenty-two.

The kid From The San Fernando Valley

It was somehow typically perverse of Bobby Chacon that he should come along as a grizzled and gnarled veteran of thirty-one and show Mr Pryor and Mr Arguello what a REAL fight was.

Even at that age, even after a tumultuous, helter-skelter life of joy and despair, we were still calling Chacon The Schoolboy. We were still thinking of him as the pugnacious young kid from the San Fernando Valley.

I do not intend to recount Bobby life story here, since I, along with many others, have already done so. Well documented are Chacon’s many trials and tribulations and his need to fuel his fire by constantly dancing with the Devil.

Worth remembering, however, is just how highly regarded Chacon was in the twinkle-eyed days of his youth, long before he walked through fire and came back to bring his career to a roaring climax at a time in his life when many of us had thought he might already be dead and gone.

After just two professional fights, Chacon was already being noticed by reporters and hailed as Southern California’s best prospect since Mando Ramos. Frankie Goodman, boxing columnist of the Van Nuys News, said: "Bobby Chacon is the Valley’s most sensational fighter in a long time."

Bobby was living in Sylmar at that time and training at the Main Street gym and at the downtown Elk’s Club Gym, where he was crossing swords with some illustrious ‘sparring partners’. Among those who showed the kid some tricks of the trade were Ruben Navarro, Danny Lopez, Arturo (Turi) Pineda, Fernando Cabanela, Romy Guelas, Romeo Anaya, Octavio (Famoso) Gomez, Julio Guerrero and Antonio Gomez.

Ruben Navarro said of Chacon: "Bobby is one of the best fighters around. He’s strong and he fights strict. I like to spar with him because he gives me a good workout."

Sure enough, Bobby Chacon was sensational. He was still two months shy of his twenty-third birthday when he won the vacant WBC featherweight title from Alfredo Marciano in 1974. But it was Chacon the old hand, the blistered veteran bruised and battered by the lumps of a turbulent life, who would thrill us with a succession of never-say-die epic performances.

The undisputed apex of that cycle was his fourth and final set-to with old foe Rafael Limon. Their first battle had ended in a decision for Limon, their second in a technical draw, their third match in a split decision victory for Chacon. Feelings ran high between the two warriors, and they were not feelings of immense affection.

Some mischievous soul, I swear, must have visited Bobby and Rafael before their Sacramento finale, run them the film of Pryor-Arguello and said: "Beat these guys for thrills and spills and you will never be forgotten."

Somehow, some way, Chacon and Limon stepped up to the plate and just kept hitting home runs. My good friend and fellow scribe, Ted (The Bull) Sares, who doesn’t wax lyrical when the waxing isn’t justified, has never forgotten where he was and how he reacted as Chacon and Limon hacked and chopped their way through their staggering 15-rounds marathon.

Recalls Ted: "First one would get rocked, then the other. Both would be floored. Bobby was cut, bleeding profusely, pummelled and ready to go – only to come back and score his own knockdown. Chacon got up bleeding after knockdowns suffered in rounds three and ten to drop Limon in the closing seconds of round fifteen to take a close but undisputed decision.

"Surely, had Limon not gone down, Bobby would not have won. I lived in Boston at the time and recall leaping up from my chair, spilling beer and food all over the place and on my friends, and screaming unabashedly at the top of my voice, ‘Get him, Bobby, get him, knock him out!’ And get him he did. The scoring was: Judge Angel L Guzman, 142-141, judge Carlos Padilla, 143-141, and judge Tamotsu Tomihara, 141-140.

"This was the fight that turned me from dedicated boxing fan to full fledged addict. This fight, the essence of which was toe-to-toe, ebb and flow, back and forth action, was breathtaking and I mean that quite literally. It was as close as two fearless men can get to death, to the edge if you will, and still survive.

"Limon actually had a strange smile on his face as he was knocked down for the last time and was getting up. I swear on a stack of bibles that he smiled at the crowd. It was almost mystical, surreal, whatever label you could put on it. All I know is, I will never forget the fifteenth round of that fight.

"I remember Bobby saying, ‘I broke down after the Limon fight. I didn’t like that guy to begin with, and with everything that happened…. I couldn’t sleep, couldn’t eat….’"

Chacon, in typical storybook fashion, couldn’t have timed his final charge more finely or dramatically. He staggered Limon with a right to the head in those dying seconds and then knocked him down with two more short rights in mid-ring. At the bell, Limon was on his feet, taking an eight count and hovering with strange and numb pleasantness in his own private twilight zone as blood ran from his mouth.

"I wanted to win any way I could," said Bobby Chacon.

The fight of the year for 1982? Yes, I believe it was. No doubt others will tell me I’m wrong and cast their vote for the storming battle between Mr Pryor and Mr Arguello at the Orange Bowl.

C’est la vie!

 

BREATHTAKING: THE 10-MONTH TRIPLE TITLE BLITZ OF HOMICIDE HANK

OH HENRY: One writer described Henry Armstrong's perpetual motion style as a 'quiver'. It was some quiver indeed. Homicide Hank was a relentless puncher, beating the very best fighters of his day and achieving the incredible triple of winning three undisputed world championships in the space of ten months.

A man asked me recently how great Jack Nicklaus was. Pressed for time, I told him to look up Jack’s record, study it carefully and put it into perspective with regard to the tools he had at his disposal in a far less technical era.

My answer is pretty much the same when I am asked about Henry Armstrong. I do not dole out such advice willy-nilly, since we know that the record book is not always a wholly accurate judge of a sportsman’s talent and achievements. In boxing, this is particularly the case.

It’s just a nice fact of life that the truly great fighters have truly great records that do not generally mislead us. Now look at the sprawling record of Henry Armstrong and look at the names of the men he fought and defeated. If you do not know those names, if you do not know the circumstances and cannot be bothered to acquaint yourself with their significance, then you really shouldn’t ask the question.

In the days of eight traditional weight divisions and only one world champion presiding over each of them (yes, junior, such a pleasant state of affairs did once exist in our violent and unprincipled little arena), Henry Armstrong won the featherweight, welterweight and lightweight championships in that order. In doing so, he defeated Petey Sarron, Barney Ross and Lou Ambers respectively in the space of ten months.

Not bad for a starting reference point, eh? But before we start throwing around the names of Henry’s many other illustrious opponents, let us revisit that important word, ‘perspective’.

Armstrong, in the almost unanimous opinion of my esteemed fellow historians, was never a more destructive force in the ring than when he reigned in his natural domain of the featherweight class. I concur fully. Henry never truly stopped being a featherweight, hence the magnitude of his achievements. He blistered his way through that division before wrecking Petey Sarron with a single punch to win the world crown.

Yet more often than not, Armstrong is classified as a welterweight in the various all-time rankings due to his multiple defences of the 147lb crown. Winning that championship from another all-time ace in the wonderful Barney Ross, Henry defended it eighteen times in the stunningly short space of seventeen months before he finally ran out of gas and bowed to Fritzie Zivic in two brutal contests.

In the midst of his barnstorming welterweight reign, Armstrong gave Lou Ambers the chance to regain the lightweight crown. Lou did so on a highly controversial decision, snapping a 46-fight win streak for Henry.

Fouling, especially low blows, would cost Henry a great many penalty points throughout his career, and he was punished severely by referee Arthur Donovan in this return match with Ambers. All of five rounds were taken away from Armstrong, yet neutral observers still had him winning the fight handily.

Among their ranks was the steaming Henry McLemore of the Associated Press, who handed referee Donovan the following prosaic pillorying: “Arthur Donovan is the new lightweight boxing champion of the world. He is a bit fat for the title, particularly in the head. But he won it in Yankee Stadium last night. He won it for Lou Ambers by rendering a decision as questionable as a mongrel’s paternity.”

Stunning

Why are these latter achievements of Armstrong’s so stunning?  Because in the opinion of many writers of the day, Henry was on the wane when he stepped up to begin that grand and prolonged assault on bigger men. He had already campaigned with almost ridiculous regularity against umpteen world class opponents. By the time he graduated from the featherweights, he had compiled what would now be regarded as a career’s worth of fights and then some.

His high-octane style of relentless attacking required him to work virtually flat-out for every round. That many fights and that brand of commitment eventually erode the skills and durability of even the hardest cases. The old-time writers felt similarly about Mickey Walker when he graduated from the welterweights to the middleweights. Mick was jaded, they said, shop-worn, over the hill. That is hard for us to believe when we examine Magnificent Mick’s achievements thereafter. Such was the extraordinary toughness and resilience of men like Walker and Armstrong.

Henry, like most fighters of his era, quite probably had more fights than his official career count of 180. Of those we know, courtesy of those admirable and tireless gentlemen from BoxRec, Armstrong won 149 and achieved a knockout total of either 100 or 101. When Henry was way over the hill, he was outpointed by his young admirer, Sugar Ray Robinson, at Madison Square Garden. Robinson waged a retreating battle out of respect to his idol, claiming that he didn’t wish to hurt Armstrong. The compliment wasn’t greatly appreciated by Henry, who argued that Robbie retreated out of fear!

As to the overall quality of Armstrong’s opposition, well, if some of the aforementioned names aren’t enough for you, there are plenty of others to pick from. Henry’s ongoing series with the fiery and dangerous Baby Arizmendi was loaded with thrills, controversy and sub-plots, which cannot be done justice within the confines of a general feature. Then there were victories over the sterling likes of Frankie Klick, Benny Bass, Chalky Wright, the clever Ernie Roderick, Pedro Montanez, Ceferino Garcia, Lew Jenkins, Tippy Larkin, Beau Jack, Sammy Angott, Willie Joyce and the Brownsville Bum with the killer left hook, Al (Bummy) Davis.

Armstrong’s ring style was all his own, even though it is easy at first sight to group him with other famous fighters of a similarly relentless attack. Henry bobbed, weaved, ducked, rolled, jinked and fired a constant hail of punches from all angles, but always in his uniquely herky-jerky way. One writer described Armstrong’s perpetual motion as a ‘quiver’. When the referee broke the action, Henry would jig and jog straight back into the fray like a tenacious little pre-programmed robot. It was a style that won him many colourful nicknames, but perhaps Homicide Hank was the favourite of most. It sounded so much meaner than Homicide Henry or other imaginative inventions.

Describe a fighter as a ‘whirlwind’ and many get the impression of a man who flails away at random and hits the target by the law of averages. Armstrong’s style was often frenetic and he could certainly miss the target. But Henry was a canny and educated puncher and expert at hunting an opponent and cutting him off. Henry could jab, hook, cross and throw uppercuts with damaging speed and force. He was also deceptively adept at slipping punches, as was Roberto Duran. Fighting the peak Armstrong could crush a man’s spirit and will, because Henry was simply unstoppable. The little dynamo just kept boring in all night long, seemingly impervious to return fire.

He was a punishing puncher who said of his third and final fight with Fritzie Zivic, “I made him bleed inside. I hit him to the body, oh, how I hit him.” Armstrong was on the slide when he delivered that merciless beating to Zivic in their non-title confrontation at the Civic Auditorium in San Francisco in 1942. Henry’s equation for success was blissfully simple in his own mind: “I hit you in the middle, your chin comes down. I hit you in the chin, you go down.”

Extraordinary

Sportswriter Rollan Melton met up with Armstrong in 1958, when the long retired Henry was still in pretty good shape. Here is what Melton wrote: “Henry Armstrong, for the benefit of the young generation, was a fighter of extraordinary talent and action. He campaigned in the 1930s (and early 40s), when some folks stood in line for bread and salt pork or told a guy at the bar entrance, ‘Joe sent me’. As far as many of the young generation’s elders are concerned, Henry was just about the finest thing that happened since Prohibition.

“Today’s steady TV diet looks like love-making. Today, if a writer is among the more gentle set, he writes, ‘It was a scientific bout’. Invariably the winner, be he a bum or no, will immediately call for ‘a shot at the champ’.

“Armstrong wasn’t a vocal champ. He just fought – all comers. He won three world titles – featherweight, lightweight and welterweight – from October 1937 to August 1938 and held all simultaneously. No other fighter has accomplished the same.”

Born Henry Melody Jackson Jnr. on December 12, 1912, America was teeming with hungry fighters when Armstrong left high school and decided he would join the great fistic gold rush. The year was 1929, America was reeling from the Wall Street crash and Henry recalled, “It was jumping-out-of-the-window season. I was a $15 a week railroader. One day I picked up a wind-blown Global-Democrat newspaper and saw where Kid Chocolate got $30,000 for a half hour’s work against Al Singer. That did it. I quit on the spot. It was boxing from then on.”

Accompanied by friends Eddie Foster and Harry Armstrong, Henry began his ring career as Melody Jackson and travelled all over the country looking for fights, starting in Pittsburgh, moving on to Chicago and then out to Los Angeles.

Chicago didn’t hold fond memories for the future triple-weight champion. The drinking water gave Henry a bad stomach and then he was rebuffed by a famous manager. Armstrong’s pal Eddie Foster tried to talk Jack (The Deacon) Hurley into taking a look at Henry, but Hurley replied, “Take the kid back home, send him back to school.” The rejection of Armstrong was one of the few mistakes of The Deacon’s illustrious career.

In California, Henry ditched the name of Melody Jackson and Henry Armstrong was officially born. His progress through the ranks in the years to follow would prove to be every bit as fast and sensational as his non-stop style of fighting.

In 1936, singer Al Jolson and actor George Raft bought Armstrong’s contract for $10,000 (believed to be the most accurate of the many sums quoted), just as the days of milk and honey were approaching. Henry was shrewdly steered by his worldly manager, Eddie Mead, whose salty friends and associates included the likes of Bugsy Siegel, Frankie Carbo and siren Ruby Keeler.

Homicide Hank didn’t disappoint anyone. There was no such thing as a boring Armstrong fight. His fists would keep pumping relentlessly and many of his shots would stray south of the border or conveniently jam thumb-first into an opponent’s eye. It was a tough old game in Henry’s era and every seasoned pro knew all the tricks and committed similar offences. Fritzie Zivic’s hyperactive thumbs would give Henry permanent cataract problems in his right eye.

Petey Sarron: October 29, 1937

It was somehow fitting that Henry Armstrong’s three world championships were all won in boxing’s one-time capital city of New York. It was the perfect stage for gods and greatness. In the humble opinion of this writer, it still is. Henry was the 4 to 1 underdog against Petey Sarron before a crowd of 12,000 at Madison Square Garden, but the feeling among those in the know was that Sarron, fast pushing thirty-one, was ready to be taken after campaigning busily abroad in England and South Africa.

One punch was enough to win the fight for Homicide Hank in the sixth round, when Sarron’s legs caved in under the force of the payoff blow and sent him to the floor for the first time in his career. Struggling on his hands and knees, Petey appeared to lose track of referee Arthur Donovan’s count in the great roar of the crowd. Sarron argued later on that he could have continued fighting, but his uncertain movements on rising betrayed him. Dazed and unsteady, he had to be assisted by Donovan.

The two fighters were involved in a tremendous exchange when Armstrong pulled the trigger and uncorked the overhand right that unhinged Sarron and finished his evening. Petey had fared well through the first three rounds of the scheduled 15-rounder. An awkward and unconventional fighter, described by one reporter as having “… an eccentric, pin-wheel style”, he fired in punches from strange angles that knocked Henry off balance and seemed to have him puzzled.

But ringsiders noticed the snarl on Armstrong’s face and more significantly the menacing glint in his eye. While Sarron’s volume of punches was making life difficult for Henry, the quality blows were coming from the relentless little challenger. Armstrong opened the third round by doubling the right hand to body and head and clearly hurting Sarron. Henry would lose the round on a foul, but the sufferance of penalty points for stray blows had already become meat and drink to him. That second right to the head sent Petey careering into the ropes and drained him of his speed and evasiveness.

Armstrong was now in the ascendancy and Sarron could only enjoy his brief moments of success and delay the killer wave that would swamp him. It was a game show of resilience from Petey, especially after being lashed with a right to the head and a debilitating left to the body in the fifth round.

Sarron continued to spit defiance in the fateful sixth round. The balding little champ from Alabama always had a look of fragility about him and now he began to look frighteningly vulnerable. Armstrong trapped him on the ropes and larruped him for a good minute before Petey fired back. His revival did not last for much longer. Henry’s constant pressure was forcing Sarron to make mistakes, and Petey committed the cardinal error in the frantic exchange of punches that preceded the knockout. He dropped his left hand and Armstrong finished him in a flash with the booming coup de grace.

Barney Ross At The Long Island Bowl: May 31, 1938

Barney Ross was a fabulous fighter and the proud owner of a spectacular career. The gifted, New York-born Chicagoan was the reigning world welterweight champion who had also worn the junior-welterweight and lightweight belts. He had lost just three of his 80 fights and had never been knocked out. Somehow he wasn’t knocked out or even knocked down against Armstrong. But what a dreadful shellacking Ross received. He never fought again after those fifteen hellish rounds against Homicide Hank.

To this day, when we see the film of that brutal encounter, we marvel in equal measures at the ferocity of Armstrong and the fighting courage of Ross; a form of extreme courage that today’s referees probably wouldn’t permit.

It is said that Henry took to the scales for the Ross fight with lead in his boots. Many onlookers might have been forgiven for thinking it was Henry’s gloves that were loaded. Armstrong was jumping straight from featherweight to welterweight for this audacious challenge, which presented him with a problem in the run-up to the fight. A naturally small man, he had to puff himself up from 126lbs and get as near to 147 as he could. At his training camp at Pompton Lakes, he began to drink copious amounts of beer, which, in turn, would galvanise his appetite. So went the theory, which a great many journalists have tested through the centuries for no practical purpose.

The pounds piled on, but Armstrong was still short of the mark on the day of the fight. He had to weigh in at noon, and at nine o’clock in the morning he and trainer Eddie Mead asked their doctor, Alexander Schiff, for advice. The solution was simple, albeit intense: a steak breakfast with plenty of potatoes, followed by the binge drinking of water.

Henry was nearly floating at the weigh-in, where he claimed he hit the scales at 139 1/2 lbs (he was a reported 133 1/2 for the fight). Even Eddie Mead couldn’t believe it, while Commissioner Phalen was aghast. Phalen asked Armstrong if he had weights under his feet or if Eddie Mead was perhaps performing some crafty magic with a magnet. Both men laughingly dismissed foul play. The room was cleared, Henry was weighed in private and the result was still the same. It was a good thing that Commissioner Phalen didn’t stick a pin in Armstrong to see what would happen. Phalen would have likely been drowned.

In a serious vein, Armstrong’s weight-making ability, much like that of Archie Moore, was a constant source of fascination. Drastic measures never seemed to affect Henry’s performance, and he produced a real lulu against Ross. It was a wonder that Barney was able to stay upright through the torrid 45 minutes of action. Twice his handlers pleaded with him to let them stop the fight. Even hardened referee Arthur Donovan wanted to halt the one-way traffic.

Barney would have none of it. At the end of it all, the big crowd at the Long Island Bowl was almost silent when the inevitable decision was announced. Ross was hugely liked, to the point of being almost a saint in many people’s eyes. Much like a kindly priest, he was not supposed to get so viciously mugged.

Before the storm broke and the leather rained down, Ross battled Henry on even terms. For six rounds, the fight was competitive and exciting. Then Armstrong began to move and punch in earnest, scaling those giddy heights that few others could reach. Outweighed by more than nine pounds, he seemed immeasurably bigger and more powerful than Barney as the one-sided contest rumbled on. It is a constantly intriguing mirage of boxing that a beaten fighter shrinks in physical stature by the minute.

The beating began in the seventh round, even though Barney won that session after a point deduction from Henry for a low punch. Ross was all at sea thereafter, a man cut off from his sunny little island and tossed into a violent maelstrom. His right eye was banged shut for the last eight rounds, representing just a percentage of the facial damage he inherited from Armstrong’s whirring fists. At the finish, the right side of Barney’s face was horribly swollen, the left side covered in welts and his nose and mouth were leaking blood.

It was a minor miracle to most how he had managed to navigate his way through the last three rounds, for in the twelfth he seemed to be on the verge of total collapse. His knees sagged and his body bent fully over after Armstrong had battered him with a volley of rights to the head.

In the fourteenth round, Ross was spun around by a big left hook and the air turned to a red mist from the spray of his blood.. Henry closed in on Barney, weaving, hooking and slamming away for the knockout, but the fighting instincts of Ross again prevailed as he tucked up and blocked many of the follow-up blows.

Determined to close the fight out like a champion, Barney somehow found the reserves to rally back at Henry in the fifteenth and final round. But while Armstrong was finally tiring, there was no steam in the fading champion’s punches. Henry, once again, had proved himself a master of short-range punching. He missed his share of blows, but the majority that hit the target were withering in their force and accuracy. Barney couldn’t box Henry and he couldn’t fight him. There were not too many men who could.

Lou Ambers: August 17, 1938

It was a split decision win for Henry Armstrong over Lou Ambers at Madison Square Garden. Henry had made history. The magnificent little titan was the simultaneous holder of three world championships. But he had needed to summon up all his phenomenal energy and determination to dethrone the fiery Ambers in a bloody and spectacular fight for Lou’s lightweight belt.

Such was the intensity of Henry’s effort, he finished the fight with leaden arms and close to exhaustion. He looked terrible in his dressing room, with cut and bruised eyes and a damaged lip that required stitches. It was some time before he could haul himself off the rubbing table and walk to the shower.

Armstrong lost three rounds for low blows and then had to contend with a mighty rally from Ambers down the stretch. Henry benefited from a barnstorming start, in which he compiled a significant points lead. Few writers disputed that he was a deserving winner, even though Ambers survived near disaster to charge back and whittle down Henry’s points advantage.

Lou was nearly bowled out of the fight near the close of the fifth round, when he was saved by the bell after being hammered to the canvas by an explosive right to the jaw. Things scarcely improved for Ambers in the sixth, when he was cut down again for a count of eight. Both knockdowns occurred as Lou was trying to escape from close quarters, where Armstrong was in his element as he dug away with his favoured combination of a left to the body and a right to the jaw.

But Ambers was a tough and clever man, a great champion in his own right, who could tilt with the best of them. The so-called Herkimer Hurricane from upstate New York never did know how to blow out gently.

Henry kept punching. He always did. Failure to finish an opponent after an early success never dispirited Armstrong. He believed that if you chop at a tree for long enough, it will eventually fall. In a ferocious eleventh round, he tossed everything he had at Ambers, but Lou would not go and was still full of fight. He fought back to take the next three rounds, two of them due to Armstrong’s infractions. But then Lou faced another major onslaught in the fourteenth as Henry raced for the wire. A right hand catapulted Ambers into the ropes, which saved him from his third trip to the canvas.

In the fifteenth and final frame, Armstrong butted and pounded Ambers into the ropes as blood ran down Lou’s right leg from Henry’s cut mouth. The crowd of 18,240 was roaring as a right to the jaw shook Ambers, but it was Lou who came on strong in the final seconds as the two great warriors traded punches beyond the bell in the bedlam.

Ambers, once again, had shown himself to be a remarkably durable and determined man with excellent recuperative powers. But his brave resistance and spirited counter offence were not enough to save his championship. Most people in the pro-Ambers crowd booed the decision. They had been particularly swayed by Lou’s stirring comeback from adversity, which had resulted in Armstrong walking groggily to the wrong corner at the final bell. Lou said that he had suffered no damage from Henry’s low blows, though manager Al Weill was sufficiently riled to complain to referee Billy Kavanagh at the end of the tenth.

The Associated Press awarded Armstrong a decisive victory.

Freaky!

Was Henry Armstrong a physical freak for his amazing stamina? This little ‘dusky fellow’ sure was something! What with Jesse Owens and Joe Louis also running riot, there seemed no end to the athletic capabilities of these sepia supermen. Did the rest of us need to worry and retire to underground bunkers? Doctors and scientists of various capabilities were asked to investigate.

Well, I can’t say what else Homicide Hank might have had in his genes, but he did have the not unique gift of a slow heartbeat. Vicente Saldivar, another superb featherweight champion of later years, was similarly blessed.

In May 1939, Henry travelled to England to defend his welterweight championship against Ernie Roderick at the old Harringay Arena in London. It was a good chance for the eggheads to probe this American destroyer of men.

Armstrong was examined by various medics, including a doctor hired by the Daily Express, who concluded: “Armstrong is a freak of a generation. He is so perfect a human dynamo that he is scarcely a fair opponent for any normal man near his weight. He must have an oversized heart, not to the point of pathological enlargement, but above normal.

“His pulse beat is fifty-nine, compared with the normal of seventy-two, which makes him capable of astonishing endurance. This was the secret of the runner, Paavo Nurmi of Finland. Both Nurmi and Armstrong should will their bodies as cadavers for research workers to examine.”

Henry Armstrong outpointed Ernie Roderick over fifteen rounds and went back home. He didn’t live forever, dying at the age of seventy-five in 1988. What instructions he left for his cadaver, your writer doesn’t know.

 

HIT BY BRISCOE: WHEN BAD BENNIE CRUSHED THE GOLDEN BOY IN PARIS

WHEN THUNDER STRUCK: Bennie Briscoe, the eternal tough man from Philadelphia, moves in ominously on Australia's talented but fatally flawed middleweight hope Tony Mundine in their middleweight clash in Paris in 1974. Bennie nailed his man in the fifth.

Bennie Briscoe, ever gracious and still mildly dazed by his violent night’s work, was full of praise for Eugene (Cyclone) Hart’s left hook after their epic ten-rounds draw. Bennie reckoned that Cyclone could knock down the walls of Jerusalem with that punch if he had a mind to.

Hart was no less impressed by the immovable object he had encountered. The Cyclone was grateful, he said, to be back in the sanctuary of his dressing room and able to talk about the fight. The way Briscoe had been hitting him, Hart figured he might be going some place else.

So, then, just another vicious, life-or-death war at the Spectrum in the Philadelphia of 1975. What was it like to be Bennie Briscoe? Well, for some twenty years, you got to lay your life on the line by jousting with the likes of Mr Hart, Stanley (Kitten) Hayward, Tom Bethea, Billy Douglas, Luis Rodriguez, Rodrigo Valdez, Marvin Hagler, Carlos Monzon and Emile Griffith.

You got one shot at the middleweight championship for all your hard labour and came up short against an Argentinian iron man who chain-smoked his way through life and might just have been inhuman.

But once in a glorious while, you got to set off a mighty explosion that was heard around the world….

Blessed

Had Tony Mundine, Australia’s Aboriginal stylist, been blessed with a solid chin, we might now be comparing his name to those of middleweight greats such as Mickey Walker, Harry Greb, Sugar Ray Robinson or Carlos Monzon. During his peak years in the early seventies, Mundine was a majestic boxer-puncher who seemed destined for world championship success. When he journeyed to Paris in 1973 and outpointed former five-times champion Emile Griffith, the fight media lavished praise on the smooth-moving, skilful youngster.

By that time, Griffith was past his best, but he was still a formidable campaigner, a wise old general whom few men could outsmart. Mundine’s timely performance pushed him into the top bracket of the middleweight rankings and suddenly the world championship was within his reach.

At the beginning of 1974, only one man stood between Mundine and world champion Carlos Monzon, and that man was a source of worry to Mundine’s more sceptical critics. His name was Bennie Briscoe, a tough and rugged thirty-year old slugger who had campaigned against the world’s top middleweights in a colourful career that spanned more than a decade.

Born in Augusta, Georgia, but a product of the notoriously tough Philadelphia fight school, Briscoe was a hard, ruthless puncher who always came to fight. His ring reputation as a man of violence hardened the reservations of those observers who had long doubted Mundine’s durability.

There were two skeletons in Tony Mundine’s closet, two jarring defeats that had been so sudden and emphatic that the balance of his record (44 wins and a draw) couldn’t bury them. The first loss had occurred in 1969, Tony’s first year as a professional and a mixed year for two of his illustrious countrymen. Johnny Famechon won the world featherweight title from Jose Legra in January, but seven months later, Lionel Rose, another greatly talented Aborigine, lost his bantamweight championship on a fifth round knockout to the sensational young Ruben Olivares.

Mundine turned professional in March of that year and quickly impressed Aussie fight fans as he reeled off ten successive wins in seven months. It seemed another Australian world champion was in the making. Then the first bomb was dropped in Melbourne on November 10, and the seeds of doubt were sewn. Matched with Kahu Mahanga, a less talented but hard punching prospect, Mundine was shockingly knocked out in the ninth round. Had Tony been stopped on his feet or forced out of the fight by an injury, he might have been spared a further mauling by his critics. But he was counted out and the vultures always begin to circle when a coming boy is crushed so comprehensively.

A fighter’s chin is one of the most important yardsticks of his potential, because ruggedness and endurance are such essential ingredients in the fight game. Those men devoid of natural skill, those who don’t possess a knockout punch or an innate gift for slipping and blocking, are recognised as lacking in special qualities, yet their limitations rarely incite panic. But a man with a susceptible chin is so often administered the last rites before he is even out of the starting blocks.

Managers, trainers and fans quietly dread that first time when a young fighter has his chin tested, because his reaction can instantly foretell his future in the sport. The special few, such as the unlucky and those in the wrong place at the wrong time, can meet with violent defeat and survive the crisis. But not those whose weakness is inherent and permanent. They can only bluff and duck and weave their way to the highest point on the ladder they can reach.

On the surface, Mundine didn’t appear badly affected by his defeat to Mahanga. Tony quickly returned to his winning ways with a knockout victory of his own just a month later. Indeed, his confidence seemed higher than ever the following year as he combined skill and power to restore the faith of his supporters by chalking up eight consecutive wins inside the distance.

In January 1971, he challenged Bunny Sterling for the Commonwealth title in Sydney, and looked impressive in forcing the evasive, underrated Sterling to a 15-rounds draw. It seemed that Mundine was on his way, but then came another bolt out of the blue. He was matched with veteran contender and former world welterweight champion Luis Rodriguez in Melbourne, and once again Tony’s vulnerability was exposed as he was sensationally blasted out inside a round.

It was a damaging reverse for Mundine. For while Rodriguez was still a top class campaigner, he was considered ripe for the taking after suffering a stunning knockout defeat to world champion Nino Benvenuti a year earlier. How far had Rodriguez gone back? Just a month after his decimation of Mundine, Luis travelled to the Royal Albert Hall in London, where he looked awful in dropping a points verdict to Bunny Sterling. The prime Rodriguez had plainly disappeared over the horizon. He looked badly trained, off balance and his reflexes were poor. The defeat sent Luis tumbling from third to fifth in The Ring magazine’s revised ratings, but he should have been lower. He was all but gone as a world class force.

Now Tony Mundine had to answer his critics all over again. He had been blitzed by a jaded maestro who should have been little more than a stepping stone.

A first round knockout loss is arguably the ultimate humiliation for a boxer. Confidence is eroded and despondency can quickly set in. The victim is not only haunted by his own mistakes, but by the withering verdicts of those who sit and judge him. And, of course, ‘golden boys’ like Mundine get the stick more than most others, mostly in the form of sledgehammer sarcasm from the ivory tower pundits who only bleed when they are careless shaving.

Mundine, however, was a strange animal and one to be greatly admired. The bitter irony in his case was that his attitude to adversity had all the steel and resistance that his jawbone lacked. Far from causing him to lose heart, defeat seemed to spur him to greater effort and commitment. Such is fate, he proceeded to enter the finest phase of his career as he compiled a sparkling run of twenty-one successive victories that elevated him into world championship contention.

In a return match with Bunny Sterling, Tony scored a thrilling final round triumph to win the Commonwealth title. Then he punched with authority to stop such respected men as Denny Moyer, Juarez DeLima, Matt Donovan, Luis Vinales and Nessim (Max) Cohen.

For good measure, Mundine even stepped up a couple of weights to win the Australian heavyweight title from Foster Bibron. Mundine was on a roll and when he capped his 1973 campaign with his highly acclaimed victory over Griffith in Paris, the stage was set for Tony’s final drive towards a world title challenge.

On February 25, 1974, he was back in Paris again to confront the formidable Briscoe, and the public’s imagination was caught. It was a pairing of two of the world’s most exciting middleweights, a young lion against a battle-scarred, street-fighting tiger.

Characters

Bennie Briscoe was one of the game’s great characters, whose imposing, shaven-skulled appearance complemented his simple and brutal fighting style. Like so many hardened ring mechanics from poor backgrounds, Bennie’s career read like fiction. His aggressive, uncompromising style was a legacy of his wild days as a youth. As a fourteen-year old newcomer to Philadelphia, he joined a teenage gang and inevitably got into trouble with the law.

A local parole officer advised Briscoe to take up boxing and Bennie quickly took a shine to the sport. He became a US amateur champion and was good enough to be selected as a reserve for the 1960 American Olympic squad in Rome. But it was in the professional ranks that he made his name and acquired his reputation as a man to be feared.

Briscoe turned pro in 1962, and through the sixties and seventies he met the best talent in his domain. He seemed to labour for an eternity before establishing himself as one of the division’s top contenders Bennie was always dangerous, but he could be foiled by the more scientific boxers and dropped a number of decisions on his way up the ladder. It is a worrying sign of how things have changed that such educational defeats were not frowned upon in Bennie’s era. Indeed, they were rightly seen as positive grist to the mill if the beaten fighter learned from his mistakes and doubled his reserve.

Win or lose, Briscoe was a physically and mentally tough cookie who never gave up and who personified excitement. As he progressed up the ladder in his gloriously determined way, so his record became sprinkled with the kind of fights that fans love to recall. His fiercely contested duel with the highly regarded Stanley (Kitten) Hayward in 1965 was a case in point.

Bennie was apparently instructed to ‘box’ Hayward for the first seven rounds of their scheduled ten-rounds encounter and fell some way behind on points. From the eighth round, the game plan was belatedly revised and Bennie was told to go out there slugging. He gave Hayward such a beating that Stan was taken to hospital with concussion. Alas, the big charge came too late and Briscoe dropped a split decision.

Bennie had also been involved in a short-lived but violent encounter with another renowned puncher, Mexican Rafael Gutierrez, in which Briscoe survived a rocky first session to score a dramatic second round knockout. It was a slugfest that was rife with controversy.

Hitting the tank-like Briscoe broke Gutierrez’s right hand and bruised his left, but Rafael came close to breaking the bank in a whirlwind first round when he decked Bennie twice with vicious rights to the head. The pendulum swung back to Biscoe when he clearly hurt Gutierrez with a body punch on the bell.

Gutierrez was being handled by Sid Tenner, a Sacramento furniture dealer, who insisted that Briscoe’s punch was low and that Rafael was in no fit condition to come out for the second round. Whatever the truth of the incident, Bad Bennie was the consummate pro as ever and quickly finished the job. He sank another right into Gutierrez’s body and put him down for the count.

Sid Tenner was not a happy man. “I wish now I would have held him (Gutierrez) back and protested the fight – but I know how far that would have got me. We got zilched – very bad.”

By the spring of 1972, Boxing Illustrated magazine rated Bennie Briscoe the number one middleweight contender to Carlos Monzon’s world championship, ahead of Emile Griffith, Denny Moyer and Frenchman Jean-Claude Bouttier.

Bennie was in blistering form and showing his opponents no mercy. Earlier that year he had ruthlessly despatched Buffalo’s Al Quinney in two rounds at the Philadelphia Arena. The scheduled 10-rounder featured something of a surprise in the opening round, as the tall Quinney clearly fancied his chances against Bad Bennie and tried to seize the whip hand. Jabbing and firing right crosses, Al quickly discovered, much like Rafael Gutierrez, that Briscoe’s head could be as damaging as his fists. Scoring with a right, Quinney split his glove and had to pause for a replacement.

It was an ill-timed intermission for Al. One can only imagine that the time-out made Bennie irritable, for he promptly steamed into the attack when the battle re-commenced. A beefy right to the jaw sent Quinney tumbling for a count of nine and there was no reason to believe that the scheduled minute’s rest would save him.

Briscoe, coming into the ring at an even 160lbs, was all business in the second round. The game Quinney continued to pump out the jab but quickly began to resemble a man trying to extinguish a fire with a water pistol. Another right to the jaw crashed home from Bennie and another nine count followed for Al.

John Lennon once had a number nine dream, but poor Quinney was having a number nine nightmare. A right uppercut spilled him once more for as many seconds. Lanky Al never stopped trying to survive, but he finally reached the number ten when Briscoe’s final assault culminated in the payoff punch, a slamming overhand right to the jaw.

Reservations

One could understand why so many of Tony Mundine’s supporters harboured serious reservations about their man going in with Bennie Briscoe. A powerful left hooker, Briscoe’s punching power and determination had brought him victory against a string of high ranking contenders and tough journeymen. Quality fighters such as Art Hernandez, Tom Bethea, Carlos Marks and Juarez DeLima had failed to subdue Bennie, while Briscoe’s supporters will forever remember their man’s epic eights rounds victory over the tough Billy (Dynamite) Douglas for the North American championship.

While Tony Mundine’s durability was suspect, Briscoe’s had never been questioned. Bennie traded heavily on his toughness, and a condition of his no-nonsense attacking style was that he was able to absorb punishment. He was one of the few men whose strength and ruggedness nearly rivalled that of the mighty Carlos Monzon, and Bennie twice took Monzon the distance in gruelling fights. The two iron men drew over ten rounds when they were both rising contenders in 1967 and it would be five years before they came together again. By that time, Carlos was the king of the division. Briscoe, ten months after his quick victory over Al Quinney, gave Monzon a spirited challenge before being outpointed in a stirring battle.

As he prepared himself for his meeting with Mundine, Briscoe knew he needed a convincing victory to re-establish himself as a threat to Monzon. Five months previously, Bennie had lost ground in the world rankings after being narrowly outpointed by the fast improving Rodrigo Valdez.

But Briscoe had that rare ability to change his fortunes with one sudden explosion of power, his record serving as a chilling reminder of his punching prowess. In a 62-fight career, he had knocked out or stopped 41 of his 48 victims. Mundine’s supporters and critics knew that this was the man to make or break the young Australian.

Superb

Both fighters were in superb condition for their eagerly awaited contest. As they joined battle, the packed Palais Des Sports Arena in Paris crackled with that special air of excitement that is synonymous with big fight occasions.

Briscoe’s game plan was to pressure Mundine, just as Bennie pressured every opponent. The Philadelphian looked menacing and purposeful as he marched forward, gloves held high. But it was Mundine who caught the eye as he set about the most demanding task of his career in a sure and confident manner.

One might have expected Tony to start cautiously in view of Briscoe’s reputation and the crucial importance of the battle. Yet there was almost a touch of arrogance about Mundine’s work as he peppered his oncoming opponent with rapid jabs and followed up in style with hooks and uppercuts. On more than one occasion in those opening minutes, Mundine’s silky, evasive skills had Bennie missing badly, but Briscoe continued to press forward, as if mechanically geared to move exclusively in that direction. He struggled to find the range, but when his punches did connect, they looked solid and hurtful.

However, the early advantage definitely belonged to Mundine. In the second round, the Australian produced some of his finest boxing as he repeatedly checked Briscoe’s advances with beautifully precise counter punches. Tony was keeping just the right distance between himself and Bennie, a safe but effective distance that still enabled the versatile youngster to strike home with his own blows.

Both fighters had now warmed to the job at hand, and the hard punches gradually began to fly. Mundine’s jaw underwent its first serious examination as Briscoe scored with a pair of heavy rights, but Tony took the blows well and rallied back to stun Bennie later in the round with a hard right uppercut.

As the gripping duel progressed, the tension increased and so too did one’s admiration of both fighters. They differed so much in style, yet each possessed that certain touch of class that distinguishes the top-flight ringmen. Mundine’s boxing was a joy to watch, and though Briscoe’s approach was far more primitive, it was no less entrancing.

Blood flowed in the third round as both fighters suddenly sported cuts over the right eye, but it was Mundine who seemed perturbed by this sudden development. Initially, his injury appeared to have no effect on the quality of his work as he continued to fence cleverly with Briscoe. However, as the fight moved into the fourth round, it was noticeable that Bennie was beginning to have more success with his bulling, hustling tactics. He punched hard to the body and looked increasingly threatening with long rights to the head, one of which appeared to stagger Tony.

Mundine looked uncomfortable whenever Briscoe found his way inside, but Tony’s punch rate was still superior to Bennie’s. With the fight approaching the halfway stage, Mundine was a good way ahead on points.

As the fifth round opened, the cat-and-mouse game was becoming ever more intriguing when Briscoe suddenly struck with a hard right to the chin that tipped the scales dramatically in his favour. Mundine’s legs quivered under the force of the blow and Bennie saw the chance for which he had been so patiently searching. He surged forward, forcing Mundine against the ropes and driving in wicked blows to the head and body as Tony desperately sought a way out of the trap.

Hunter

Briscoe was now in his element, a hunter at last in charge of his prey, and one could see Mundine wilting as Bennie seized his chance with clinical efficiency. Unable to turn the tide, Tony sank to one knee, his head and right arm outside the ropes, as referee Paul Tallyrach moved in to start the count. It was a count Mundine failed to beat.

The Australian’s collapse was a sad spectacle. It confirmed people’s worst fears that, for all his marvellous talent, Tony Mundine did not have the physical make-up to survive and prosper at the giddiest heights. Briscoe was blessed with that special quality, and there was the difference.

Evergreen Bennie, with his usual brand of controlled violence, had once again surfaced to cast his ominous shadow over the world middleweight championship.

In that romantic city that runs the gamut of human emotions, it had truly been a night of heartbreak and joy.

 

 GOLDEN OLDIE: DICK TIGER'S AUTUMN MASTERPIECE

TRUST ME, I'M STILL PRETTY GOOD: Teak-tough Dick Tiger was the Ol' Man River of boxing when he moved up to the light heavyweights in 1966 to dethrone Puerto Rico's Jose Torres on a debatable decision. But Dick had plenty left as he outscored Torres in their return and then gave gutsy Roger Rouse quite a lacing in Las Vegas.

The computer said it and a lot of people believed it. Roger Rouse would beat Dick Tiger and win the light heavyweight championship of the world.

If you think we are all computer-mad now, you should have been around in the late sixties. Ordinary people didn’t have computers then. The technology was confined to the intelligence community, large companies and mysterious research firms peopled by folks in white coats and very serious spectacles. They carried clipboards and monitored computers the size of houses.

These machines were the cat’s whiskers and could do anything. Then the eggheads got a little bored with seeing the same old data and decided to pick on boxing. A computerised tournament to determine the greatest heavyweight champion of all time was announced, in which sixteen famous title holders were matched in an elimination contest.

The results began to cough out and those who knew their boxing began to wobble and reach for a reviving shot of Scotch. One could almost see the steam coming out of Ring editor Nat Fleischer’s ears as Max Baer found a way to outpoint the maestro, Jack Johnson. Rocky Marciano emerged the tournament winner, somehow managing to knock Jack Dempsey down six times in the process.

A similar middleweight tournament followed, in which Sugar Ray Robinson outscored Stanley Ketchel in the grand final. Now this one r