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

AUGUST 2008

NEXT UP SOON: ALL-TIME RANKINGS UPDATE.

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

THE ORIGINAL SLICK WILLIE: PRIME PASTRANO

DON'T OVERDO IT, WILLIE! Willie Pastrano, the likeable rogue from New Orleans, was never the greatest trainer, but he was a sublime boxer when he knuckled down to business and fought a succession of quality heavyweights and light heavyweights throughout his long and successful career. Finally, he got his big chance when he outscored Harold Johnson for the 175lb crown in Las Vegas in 1963.

My father, who has always shared my love for the purest form of boxing, has seen many a sublime exhibition between the great practitioners of the Noble Art in his 60 years around the fight game. To this day, he picks out one contest above all others that exemplified pure boxing at its finest and subtlest, and his choice will probably surprise you as much as it did me. You might not even know of it unless you have some silver in your hair or are just an incurable boxing geek. It was the 10 rounds heavyweight bout in which Joe Erskine of Wales outpointed Willie Pastrano of New Orleans at Wembley Stadium on February 24, 1959.

Now there are a couple of names to send the blood-and-thunder brigade running for the hills! Joe and Willie, bless them, couldn’t punch their way out of the proverbial paper bag. And that’s the point. They were artists. They were painters with boxing gloves for brushes. When you can’t hit, you’ve got to be pretty darn well schooled in all other areas of the game in order to skip around the lions and tigers.

Years after the wonderful fencing duel between Erskine and Pastrano, Angelo Dundee acknowledged Erskine as a master of his trade. Dundee had been confident that his man Willie could come back from England with a nice little win on his ledger. “No excuses,” Angelo said. “No cop-outs. Erskine was brilliant and the better man on the night. I was surprised at his skill. If he had only been a bigger man, and if he could have developed a heavier punch, he would have been a world beater. As it was, he beat Pastrano and a lot of other good fighters. Willie and I left England knowing we had to re-think our plans for the future.”

My father, explaining why that fight continues to stand out in his mind, said, “It was the finest exhibition of classic boxing I have ever seen. They tricked and slipped and feinted each other all night long. They baited each other with all manner of subtle shifts and manoeuvres. It was a master class in boxing at its best and you didn’t want it to end. It was televised at the time and I don’t know whether it is still available or lost in the archives. But it would serve as an excellent training film for any young professional.”

For Willie Pastrano, the defeat was a psychological blow which continued to nag at him on his return home. He entertained serious thoughts of quitting the game and pursuing less rigorous pleasures. Angelo Dundee had other ideas. Joe Erskine’s lack of size and a commanding punch kept coming back into Angelo’s mind. Pastrano was no less handicapped and he was hardly likely to win the world heavyweight championship. Floyd Patterson was on the throne, Ingemar Johansson had all but killed Eddie Machen and Sonny Liston was thundering across the plains like a charging buffalo. “I boxed heavyweights for four years till I realised Sonny Liston wasn’t my cup of tea,” Willie later recalled.

The comparatively peaceful waters of the light heavyweight division seemed a far more sensible place to dwell.

Fat Ain’t Beautiful

Weight had always presented a problem for Willie Pastrano, right from his painful youth, when the cruel taunts of other kids placed him in a no-win situation with his dad. When Willie ran away from street fights, Papa Pastrano would threaten to beat his son unless he stood his ground and fought. Willie would recall those torrid times with his typically colourful humour. “I used to run from fights, when guys would run up and punch me behind the head, bop, and I’d say, ‘Cut it out’. I was anywhere from ten, eleven, twelve. And Papa would see it from the steps, he’d take his fuckin’ belt, he’d say, ‘All right, me or him?’ and I’d go beat the piss out of the kid. I’d say, ‘Enough, Dad?’ ‘No, keep going.’ And the kid, I’d have him down, I was punching him, and I was pulling my punches and he was crying, the same kid who belted me. ‘Enough, Dad?’ He’d say all right. I had to be pushed to fight.”

Much like his great contemporary, Emile Griffith, who was similarly averse to fighting as a youngster, Pastrano was staggered by the way that boxing and training quickly seduced him. He would compare the great pull of the sport to the hard drug habit that would take its place when he finally retired and didn’t know what to do with himself. Delightfully self-effacing, Willie kidded about preserving his looks (and he was indeed a handsome so-and-so) and winning a few trophies to impress his girlfriend. But behind the humour and an eternally rampant desire to seduce any passing female, Pastrano was one of the great boxing troubadours of his golden era. When I was a boxing-mad like lad in the late sixties, I could never help coupling Willie with that other great ‘forever’ man, Joey Giardello. Both were tough cookies, both were sublime boxers at their very best and both suffered bitter disappointments before reaching the top of the mountain. They fought anywhere and everywhere and never seemed to have an easy fight. They countered adversity and bad decisions with wry humour and very rarely squawked about being screwed, gypped or victimised by their modest ethnic backgrounds. Being white never made these two guys fireproof.

In an era when the competition was white hot, Pastrano and Giardello were often referred to by the writers of their day as ‘in-and-outers’. Now go and look up their records. It is hard to be anything other than an in-and-outer when you are fighting men of equal and near equal talent every time you go out there.

Fellow writer, Ted Sares, has many positive memories of Pastrano. Says Ted, “The thing that stands out in my many memories of this very tough guy was the level of his opposition. Like Ralph Dupas, Willie fought everyone and the combined win/loss record of his opponents would be astounding.

“In fact Pastrano’s first pro fight was against a guy with 29 fights under his belt. Seven fights later, he fought Al (Kid) McCoy, 17-13 coming in, and iced him in two!

“Of course, coming off his great win against Terry Downes in Manchester, England, Willie then lost to Jose Torres, and the thing I remember about that one is that Torres threw the most vicious body punches I have ever seen. Ouch!

“In 1960, Willie fought a guy I knew from the Army, George (Peppy) Kartalian and stopped him on cuts.

“Willie never had a bad patch in his career. He always fought well, started his career strong and finished it strong, albeit with a loss. He was truly a warrior.”

To this day, Pastrano strikes a chord with many around the fight beat. Drop his name and the reaction is always favourable. Gifted with a killer smile and the staying power of a tiger in the bedroom, perhaps Willie was the kind of dashing, freewheeling spirit we all yearn to be. When I mentioned to a few select friends that I was writing about the man from New Orleans, I pretty much anticipated their reaction. “Willie Pastrano was my kind of guy,” said my fellow historian from New York, Mike Hunnicut. One could almost see the twinkle in Mike’s eye, since he holds Harry Greb, Mickey Walker and Max Baer in similar esteem in his gallery of likeable rogues who also happened to be pretty good scrappers.

Stephen Gordon, editor-in-chief of the Cyber Boxing Zone, who is kind enough to give this hack a room at the inn, says, “Pastrano was absolutely one of a kind, and most people don’t realise what a big influence both he and Luis Rodriguez were on Muhammad Ali. Makes sense since they were all trained by Dundee.”

Stephen makes a very relevant point here. The young Ali, or Cassius Clay as he still was, hit it off immediately with Pastrano and the transplanted Cuban ace, Rodriguez, and was all too eager to learn from the two masters. Never make the mistake of omitting Rodriguez from the list of genuine Cuban greats. His star should shine much more brightly than it does in the pantheon of boxing legends. Willie, needless to say, found Ali a hoot from day one, discovering a playmate of similarly mischievous energy.

Stylist

It was Ralph Dupas, another great stylist of the age, who encouraged Pastrano to persist in the early days and ignore the jibes about his weight from fellow gym mates. It is hard to imagine Willie ever being shy, but so self-conscious was he about his ‘Fat Willie’ image that he only agreed to accompany Ralph if they could be granted a special key to go into the gym late.

The excess pounds began to fall off Pastrano as his love of food was replaced by a growing passion for the Noble Art. He loved to do, in his own words, a ‘beautiful job’, where he would come out of the ring with the satisfaction of knowing that he had created his own little masterpiece. Willie was no hypocrite. He didn’t enjoy getting bashed around and took little pleasure in bashing lumps out of others. The challenge, for him, was to outmanoeuvre the opponent.

The lovable thing about him, from the beginning to the end, was that he never stopped being genuinely modest. In his own mind, he was just a scared cat who kept getting away with it. Much in the way of Paul Newman’s classic and playful portrayal of Butch Cassidy, Pastrano could do the business when it came to the crunch but much preferred it if the crunch never came.

Willie was lazy too. Incorrigibly so. If a five minute walk down the street was required, he would still take a cab. As for that training business, man! It was OK for losing weight, but it was darned tedious when you had to do it every day. Angelo Dundee never ceased to be both frustrated and amused by this side of Willie’s nature. There is an old story, and I have no idea whether there is a grain of truth in it, that Dundee pushed the elevator button in his hotel one fine day and found Pastrano inside, on his knees with his pants down, in the hot embrace of an air stewardess. Willie claimed he was doing his roadwork. He did quite a bit of roadwork with air stewardesses. In the ‘Fly Me’ era of the jet age, Willie might just have flown them all.

“Willie was a great athlete, but keeping that guy in shape was a pain in the butt,” Dundee said in later years. “We had been together since 1952 when he was just a 16-year old kid. Willie and I had a lot in common. We were both of Italian extraction, we both loved Italian food and we were both married, although Willie never let his wife interfere with his idea of marriage. I once asked him what Faye would do if she caught him fooling around. He was quite serious when he answered that it was a compliment to Faye, he missed her so much he had to have substitutes.”

If ever a man looked the part, it was Pastrano. Like Max Baer before him, the kid from New Orleans was tall, perfectly proportioned and possessed of charisma and a sparkling wit. Dundee noticed that women would look at Pastrano with positive lust in their eyes.

Willie was a lightweight when he first joined Dundee, but quickly matured into a finely chiselled heavyweight of the era. He seldom scaled more than 190lbs and his lack of a knockout punch would have eventually found him out in the dreadnought division as Liston and the other bigger heavyweights came to the fore.

As it was, Pastrano competed well among the heavier men and regularly held down a place in the world’s top ten. He possessed delightful skills, an instinctive touch and was rugged and durable into the bargain. He proved his mettle many times, notably in his first win over an established contender in Utah’s rugged Rex Layne in 1955. Outweighed by just over 23 pounds at 185 to 208 ½, Willie scored an impressive, bloody decision over Layne at the Municipal Auditorium in New Orleans.

Pastrano comfortably outboxed Rex, opening an old cut over Layne’s left eye in the fourth round. Willie may have been a gentle soul by nature, but he was a businesslike professional in the ring who wasn’t hesitant in taking advantage of a good break. From the moment Layne began to bleed, Pastrano rapped him in the face continually with sharp jabs and crosses. The victory was an emphatic one for Willie. He got the vote of all three officials with referee Francis Kercheval giving Pastrano seven of the ten rounds.

Willie’s toughness should never be underestimated. His ‘pretty boy’ image tended to mask his physical hardness and grit. Only in the last battle of an honourable 83-fight career was he legitimately stopped inside the distance. Tired and ‘old’ at 29 after nearly thirteen years of consistent campaigning, Pastrano was battered into retirement by the ferocious body punching of the young Puerto Rican tiger, Jose Torres.

Pastrano might not have been naturally inclined towards hard work, but he never quit on the job. In his 1957 fight with the experienced and dangerous John Holman in Louisville, Willie was cruising along quite pleasantly in the opening round when Johnny belted him square on the nose with a left hook. The nose was broken and began to bleed heavily. Angelo Dundee worked his magic in the corner and sent Willie out for the second round with instructions to dance and move. For the remaining nine rounds, Pastrano didn’t just dance and move, he made himself virtually invisible. Holman could barely lay a glove on the young maestro, who picked up a unanimous decision before a packed house.

Jackie LaBua And Other Toughies

Pastrano never forgot Jackie LaBua and their little set-to under southern skies. “Jackie LaBua is a tough son of a gun, man. I fought him in Miami Beach. Jimmy Grippo came into his dressing room and hypnotised him and told him he was Jake LaMotta, gave him Jake’s leopardskin robe, and coming through the crowd he looked like Jake. I’m in the ring and I’m looking down and I see this guy mauling through the crowd with that leopardskin robe and it’s Jackie LaBua. Jake’s behind him.

“What a night I had! This motherfucker gave me more than I could handle, believe me, man. I won the fight on like a point. He was a bull. He was crazy, he was wild that night.”

I’m sure there must have been times in his early career when Willie, in the tradition of every carefully nurtured hopeful, had an easy time of it against opponents who were never likely to hurt him. But once he graduated to the deep end of the pool, it seemed he was locking horns with fellow contenders and fringe contenders all the time. Just the other day, I refreshed my memory on the records of Joey Giardello and Dick Tiger. Why? Because both of those mighty logs are a virtual A to Z of any contender who mattered in the fifties and sixties. Willie Pastrano’s record is a similarly excellent point of reference. Take out the men he fought in title contests and you are still left with the likes of Del Flanagan, Italo Scortichini, Al Andrews, Willie Troy, Joey Maxim, Chuck Spieser, Paddy Young, Pat McMurtry, Charley Norkus, Jerry Luedee, Sonny Ray, Chic Calderwood, Jesse Bowdry, Archie Moore, Wayne Thornton and Mike Holt.

Willie also became a very popular visitor to England, where he scored points victories over Joe Bygraves, rugged Welshman Dick Richardson and split a couple of fights with the temperamental and notoriously unpredictable Brian London. Willie outpointed Brian in their first meeting before suffering a cuts defeat in the fifth round of their return. This was the only other occasion, aside from the Torres TKO, that Pastrano was stopped inside schedule. Then, of course, there was the aforementioned classic with Joe Erskine. Willie would return to the British Isles much later to defend his light heavyweight championship against Terry Downes, and we will come to that dramatic contest a little later.

Pastrano did it his way, which didn’t always please Angelo Dundee. Like so many ‘wired’ men who can’t abide the mundane and have to keep moving along, it seemed that Willie was always looking for something to pep him up and take the boredom out of the every day grind. When he was building himself up to a heavyweight, Dundee encouraged him to drink lots of milk. A great idea, but milk doesn’t exactly rate with whiskey as a kicker. Put the two together, however, and you have yourself a drink that makes the world seem a terrific place. A carton of ‘milk’ became a permanent fixture in Willie’s right hand until Dundee discovered why such a simple drink was making Willie so blissfully happy.

How great could Pastrano have been if he had drilled diligently himself all the way? At his very best, he would prompt Dundee to think, ‘How good this guy could be’. One loved Pastrano but one wanted to give him a good shake at the same time. Much like that other master boxer of yesteryear, Philadelphia’s Jimmy Slattery, Willie was born to the game but could never seem to grasp the significance of his great blessing. For all that, he was  still poetry in motion when everything clicked.

Seeing The Light

The decision to quit the heavyweight class and go hunting for the light heavyweight championship was a wise one. After years of going nowhere fast on a highly competitive treadmill, Pastrano began to make meaningful progress and see the light at the end of the tunnel; although he seemed to be slowly fading from contention when the unexpected breakthrough came against the already legendary Archie Moore at the Sports Arena in Los Angeles on May 28, 1962. For all his years, old Archie was in cracking form and somewhat bristling at having been deprived of the last vestiges of his light heavyweight championship by the boxing authorities. His old foe Harold Johnson was now the undisputed champion.

Archie’s indignant reply was to floor poor old Pete Rademacher eight times in a sixth round TKO victory and then knock out Alejandro Lavorante and Howard King. Many believed that Moore would inflict similar damage on Pastrano. Willie was drifting. He hadn’t won for nearly two years since outpointing Sonny Ray in Chicago in June, 1960. Since then, Pastrano had dropped decisions to Chic Calderwood and Jesse Bowdry and hacked out a draw with Lennart Risberg in Sweden.

Moore and Pastrano were the equivalent of chalk and cheese as ring mechanics. Archie was the crafty old spider trying to catch the fly. Willie was more than happy to be the fly, flitting in and out, dancing all around and pecking away with the jab. He boxed quite beautifully and Moore couldn’t find the one hammer blow that would end proceedings. Not that Pastrano escaped without experiencing Archie’s special brand of kidology. Chatting away to Willie in the second round, Moore repeatedly complimented his opponent on his dancing skills. “You’re looking good, kid. You’re the next champ. Dance, dance pretty, Willie.” Flattered and mesmerised, Willie danced and really began to put on a show. It was classic hypnotism. Then he heard the barking command, “Stand still!” and his brain went into gridlock. He stood still and Moore smashed him with a right hand that left Willie sitting on the bottom rope. Pastrano didn’t stand still after that. He shut his ears to all further praise and boxed his way to a very creditable draw.

Thirteen months later, after splitting a three-fight series with Wayne Thornton, Willie got his championship chance against Harold Johnson at the Convention Center in Las Vegas. Knuckling down completely, seeing that this was now or never, Pastrano employed his best boxing and evasive tactics to ghost and skip his way to a split decision victory over one of the great modern day ring mechanics. The scores in Willie’s favour couldn’t have been closer: 69-68, 68-69 and 69-67.

Fans were equally divided on who won the fight. I still have my copy of Boxing Illustrated, in which Johnson’s fans rained in letters of protest. One enraged individual got particularly personal and suggested that Willie Pastrano sounded like something you put in a sandwich. But Willie was the new king and the rightful winner in the eyes of many others.

Ups And Downes

Perhaps it was sheer relief or just the accumulative affects of a long and gruelling career coupled with a pretty racy lifestyle; but once Willie had scaled the peak, one got the feeling that he was holding on to the crown by his fingernails. The tank was nearly empty and Pastrano had to navigate his way through his two successful title defences with all the skill, bluff and guts he could muster, as well as some good fortune. He outscored Ollie Wilson and Mike Holt in non-title fights, but dropped a wide decision to the tough and wily Gregorio Peralta at Miami Beach. Greg had earned himself a title shot and he got his big return against Willie seven months later in April, 1964, in New Orleans.

What a shame that contest ended prematurely, for it was shaping up as an intriguing and possibly classic encounter. A cut over Peralta’s right eye ruled him out in the sixth round, but was the cut really so bad that it warranted a stoppage? Not in the opinion of Peralta’s manager, Charley Johnston, who was quoted as saying, “I’ve never seen a fight like this stopped for a cut like this.” The two camps differed on how the cut was inflicted in the fourth round. Reporters felt the injury was caused by a solid right. Peralta and Johnston claimed a butt.

Pastrano’s boxing was rarely more sublime than in the early going of this bout. ‘PASTRANO AT HIS VERY BEST’ trumpeted The Ring’s headline. Editor Nat Fleischer, sitting at ringside, believed he had witnessed some of Willie’s finest work. It was indeed impressive stuff while it lasted. Willie was technically masterful as he made himself a slippery and elusive target and struck Peralta with accurate blows. But Peralta was a tough, persistent and knowledgeable fighting man who would go on to hold his own with the formidable likes of George Foreman, Oscar Bonavena and Ron Lyle. Greg was really beginning to come on at the time of the stoppage with a steady body attack. The fifth round saw the Argentinian step on the gas and bang Pastrano hither and yon with a sustained assault. One judge, Pete Giarrusso, scored the fight even at 2-2-1 when it was waved off.

It was a big night for Pastrano, who said joyfully, “I’ve always dreamed of winning a championship fight in New Orleans and now I’ve done it.” However, the going was getting ever tougher for the Don Juan of the light heavies. I wondered then, as I wonder now, if Pastrano’s body was slowly winding down in that fight after a long and tough career. A desperate, see-saw struggle with Terry Downes would follow, and then Jose Torres would tear the crown from Willie’s head with a savage performance at Madison Square Garden.

The sapping war with the bullish Downes was the tip-off that Pastrano was teetering on the brink. Downes, the English former world middleweight champion and ex-US Marine (a whole story in itself!), had stepped up to the 175lb class with relish and threw everything he had at Willie for the first ten rounds at the Belle Vue Stadium in Manchester. Tired and wilting, Pastrano received the verbal lashing of a lifetime from Angelo Dundee prior to the bell for round eleven. Angie’s fatherly lecture did the trick. Something finally clicked inside Willie’s tired brain as he burst into life and opened up on Downes with a burst of punches that culminated in a hard right that unhinged Terry and dropped him for a count of eight. It was Downes who looked suddenly weary as he arose, and Pastrano wasted no time in moving in for the kill. He fired in another combination to score a second knockdown and referee Andy Smythe had seen enough. “I was coasting,” Downes said bitterly, protesting the stoppage.

Sunset

Willie was heading for his fistic sunset and he was gunned down brutally in his final face-off against Jose Torres. Tough as ever, though, the great old pro wouldn’t be counted out. It was a torrid end to a noble career in which Willie was floored for the first time as a professional in a tortuous sixth round. Torres, a fabulous fighter when inspired, was all over Willie and decked him with a terrific left hook to the jaw and a following left under the heart. Like an old actor reluctant to leave the stage, Pastrano seemed to crumple to the canvas in slow motion as the pain and shock of the blows kicked in. Forever etched in my memory is the picture of him clutching the ropes on his knees as he stares out to the crowd and gasps for breath. He would say that nobody hit him in the body as Torres did that night.

Pastrano courageously avoided another knockdown before the one-sided fight was finally called off by referee Johnny LoBianco at the close of the eighth round. Said Johnny, “Pastrano was taking too much punishment. He had nothing left. Dr Harry Kleiman had told me to stop it if he took any more after the eighth round.”

LoBianco had asked Willie at one point if he knew where he was. Humorous to the end, Pastrano replied, “You’re damn right I do. I’m in Madison Square Garden getting the shit knocked out of me.”

Willie never fought again. “I retired,” he said simply, “I guess I was tired.”

Wilfred Raleigh Pastrano wasn’t one of the greatest light heavyweight champions. But for a man who would rather have been out on the town at fight time, he did pretty darn well. And the self-effacing humour always masked an inherent toughness. He was tough enough to beat his heroin addiction when the empty days of his post-boxing life began to chew at his nerves and eat into his brain. He died all too young at the age of 62 in 1997.

“I’m one handsome Wop,” Willie once proclaimed. And indeed he was.

 
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 stretc