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

SPRING-SUMMER 2009

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) and a contributor to EAST SIDE BOXING (www.eastsideboxing.com). He is also 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 also writes and edits BOXING OLD GOLD at www.boxingoldgold.blogspot.com

PROFILES OF THE GREAT BOXERS

JACK SHARKEY: READ HIM AND WEEP

CRUNCH TIME: Jack Sharkey was boxing beautifully and on his way to beating the fading Jack Dempsey in their unforgettable Yankee Stadium clash in 1927. Then the temperamental Sharkey turned his head to complain about low blows and even the 'old' Dempsey never passed up a chance like that. One crunching left hook ended the fight.

It was October 12, 1931, at Ebbets Field in Brooklyn and the real Jack Sharkey was standing up. Curbing his often volcanic temperament as best he could, Jack was confidently firing punches through the chill air and showing 30,000 shivering spectators his enviable talent as he set about exploding the myth that a 262lb giant called Primo Carnera was invincible. Then Sharkey almost blew it.

The turning point came in a dramatic fourth round that was loaded with excitement and farce. It was also a round that reminded us how quickly the forces of darkness could take hold of Sharkey’s soul and prevent his great talent from reaching full bloom. Carnera was boxing quite well and keeping Jack at bay when Sharkey unleashed a left hook that dumped Primo in a neutral corner. Those in the know had long cottoned on to the fact that strange things began to happen whenever Carnera was found out and hurled into choppy waters. This time it was a long count that put Dempsey and Tunney in the shade. Visibly hurt and bewildered, Carnera looked to his corner for advice as he hauled himself on to one knee and grabbed the top rope. Up on unsteady feet at the count of ‘six’, he noticed his second gesturing at him madly to go back down.

Primo duly obliged, to the amazement of Sharkey and the crowd. A fine old mess was taking shape, with referee and former heavyweight contender Gunboat Smith right in the middle of it. Sharkey, with much justification, erupted in very Sharkey-like fashion as he tore across the ring to remonstrate with Smith and point out the rule infraction “He went down without being hit,” Jack yelled above the commotion. “He’s disqualified – count him out!”

Gunboat did no such thing as he waved Sharkey away and then waved at Carnera. Gunboat seemed to do a fair bit of waving in those hectic moments, much like a lost man on a busy beach. He waited for Carnera to complete his leisurely ascent, which some writers timed at 19 seconds. Sharkey pleaded again to the Gunboat, who would hear none of Jack’s bitter protests. Now Jack’s famous temper boiled over as he hit the self-destruct button and performed a passable imitation of a human rocket. In an incredible fit of pique, he ran across the ring and tried to throw himself right out of it. Fortunately, his path was blocked by his portly manager, Johnny Buckley, before Sharkey could fully escape and storm off down main street.

The fight resumed and Jack was able to control his rage as he comprehensively pasted Carnera with clever and intelligent boxing. Suddenly, Jack was the cold and fiercely determined ring mechanic who is still rated by some observers as one of the finest of all the heavyweights when he hit the right switches. He repeatedly snarled and sneered as he moved in and out and rifled Carnera with hard and accurate blows. Outweighed by nearly 60 pounds, Jack finished the fight powerfully, battering Carnera constantly in the last two rounds. The general consensus was that Primo won just one round that night.

Writer Edward J Neil was greatly impressed with the lean and mean Sharkey he had seen. “Sharkey came back to smash his way to a one-sided decision as he plastered the giant with every bit of fistic punishment one man can inflict on another. He floored the Italian for an uproarious count of from nine to 19 in the fourth round and left him wobbly, starry-eyed, a huge robot with arms frozen in the position of defence at the final bell. Sharkey again was the grim, merciless warrior of the days when his name was the most feared of all the heavyweights.”

Flawed

It is a cruel and somewhat unfair fact of life that flawed fighters of an erratic nature and unfulfilled talent frequently fire the imagination of writers and broadcasters far more than the dedicated professionals who do everything right. Ask a character actor whether he would rather play a perfect hero or a tortured soul and he won’t need too long to give you an answer.

Perhaps it is the ‘what if?’ factor that so fascinates us about the man who has everything apart from that one ragged scar in his mental make-up. Boxing, for perfectly obvious reasons, has always been a rich and fertile ground for such emotionally wayward characters. What if Jimmy Slattery, that glorious Philadelphia maestro of yesteryear, had really stepped on the gas and given it all he had? Even at half throttle, Jimmy was still pretty great. He was dangling his arms by his sides and daring opponents to hit him forty years before Cassius Clay was doing likewise. What if Max Baer had played it serious and really let rip with that awesome physique and wrecking ball of a right hand? What if the precociously talented Wilfred Benitez had not been so mentally fragile?

Jack Sharkey, arguably, was the biggest conundrum of them all, a veritable melting pot of simmering emotions and personal demons. Everyone had a favourite nickname for Jack, who was born Joseph Paul Zukauskas to Lithuanian parents in Binghamton, New York, but adopted Boston as his hometown. He became most famously known as the ‘Boston Gob’, but perhaps the ‘Weeping Lithuanian’ was the most appropriate indicator of his volatile temperament. Tears would often flow from Sharkey’s eyes in times of rage and frustration. A Navy man, Sharkey changed his birth name after a Boston fight club manager asked him how on earth he got a name like Joseph Zukauskas. Jack idolised Jack Dempsey and great admired another famous sailor in Tom Sharkey, so a new and more appealing name didn’t require much thought.

It wasn’t very long before Jack Sharkey was being highlighted as a man to watch. Like so many of his generation, it seemed he was fighting tough opponents almost from the start. Indeed, one of the constant themes running through his career is the exceptional quality of his opposition. While this might sound a little trite in a ferocious era where nobody had it easy, Jack rates very highly among the dreadnoughts in this category.

Consider the number of fights – to the best of our knowledge – that Sharkey’s opponents had registered at the time of meeting him: Harry Wills (89), Mike McTigue (138), Jack Dempsey (81), Jack Delaney (85), Young Stribling (240), Tommy Loughran (104), Phil Scott (80), Mickey Walker (105) and Tony Shucco (86).

In his sixth fight, at the Mechanics Building in Boston in 1924, Sharkey was outpointing the worldly Floyd Johnson, who had mixed with the likes of Willie Meehan, Jess Willard, Fred Fulton and Bill Brennan. Two months later, at the same venue, a titanic battle with Chilean Quintin Romero Rojas ended with Sharkey being knocked out in the ninth round. But Jack was not wrapped in cotton wool. In his next bout he battled to a 12-rounds no decision against the vastly more experienced Charley Weinert, who had clocked up more than 80 fights. Weinert twice got the better of Sharkey, but Jack was getting the level of priceless education to which the young prospects of today simply don’t have access.

The Gob suddenly began to win consistently, beating good men in Jim Maloney, Johnny Risko and the hulking George Godfrey, who had a 33-pound weight advantage over Sharkey. Note well that Jack, an average 195-pounder, made hay against the goliaths of the division throughout his career with his speed, skill, expert counter punching and greater athleticism.

Sharkey was steadily gaining a reputation as a graceful and accomplished fighter of deft skills and a commanding punch. His left hand in particular was consistently accurate and damaging. He was also fast on his feet and a master of many manoeuvres. Harry Keck, a respected boxing observer of the era from the Pittsburgh Gazette Times, said of Jack, “Sharkey is one of the fastest big men in the ring. He is much faster than Gene Tunney on his feet. And he is almost as graceful in his manoeuvres as Jack Delaney, who is just about poetry in motion. In addition, Sharkey possesses rare fighting generalship.

“Also, Sharkey has one of the best left hands in the business – a sticking, stabbing, cutting, slashing instrument.”

Jack showed the withering effects of that left in his fourth and final fight with Jim Maloney at Yankee Stadium in May, 1927. Maloney was so tortured by the repetitive blow that he was forced to turn his head away and expose himself to the fast rights that decked him three times before the fifth round finish.

Today’s historians and film collectors are no less flattering in their appraisal of Jack Sharkey, although an odd little theme recurs here. It is that of Sharkey being somewhat forgotten and only rediscovered as a dust-covered jewel when somebody drops his name. As we shall see, Jack played no small part in tarnishing his own legacy, but it is quite wrong that he should so often be the invisible man among the true heavyweight champions.

Sports writer and film collector Mike Silver, author of the excellent The Arc of Boxing, says of Sharkey, “I think you have to look at fighters in the context of their time. Sharkey came up in the 1920s when pure boxing skills were emphasised, taught, understood and appreciated. That decade produced a cornucopia of skilled boxers in every weight division. Sharkey was trained, as so many others were at that time, to incorporate the ‘sweet science’ into his ring work and not merely rely on strength and power to overcome an opponent. How good a boxer did Sharkey become? The answer to that is that I really am not sure who would win if – at their best – Tunney had fought Sharkey in 1927.

“The old time greats influenced their contemporaries. Dempsey, I believe, popularised the bob and weave technique. Benny Leonard popularised sophisticated boxing skills that involved creating openings to set up special punches. Feinting and footwork were integral to his cerebral approach to the game. Fighters and trainers took notice. It was important in those days for a fighter to learn how to think in the ring. And Sharkey was one of the best.

“He took to his profession like a fish to water – a natural whose repertoire of punches was built around his outstanding left jab. Sharkey, who was extremely fast for a heavyweight, incorporated all the skills that master boxers of his day utilised. The Sharkey of 1927 to 1932 ranks, in my opinion, as one of the best heavyweight boxers of the 20th century.

“If you shrunk Sharkey down to middleweight or lightweight, he would have the all round boxing skills to compete in those talent laden divisions of the 1920s. What confidence and ego the man displayed in his prime! How sure he was of his skills! Look at the disdain he had for Dempsey when they fought. True, the old Mauler was past his prime, but he was still a feared puncher. Sharkey was not intimidated at all and correctly predicted that he would easily outbox the old champ – as he did until he looked the wrong way.

“How would the 195-pound Sharkey do against the giant heavies of today? Check out his first fight with Carnera to see the answer to that question. He would totally befuddle them with his speed and boxing skills.

“Almost 30 years ago, I met Sharkey at a boxing writers’ dinner. It was the same Sharkey I had read about, although he was bigger and taller than I had expected. He’d had a few drinks and was holding court, joking around and appearing to be somewhat loud and unpredictable. You could see he liked being the centre of attention. And I couldn’t take my eyes off him. Here was a piece of living boxing history right in front of me. Then – and I don’t remember why – he started throwing left jabs. The man was in his mid-seventies. I’d seen many fighters shadow box and throw left jabs, but to this day I can tell you I still remember how that big fist and long left hand moved – with power and straight from the shoulder. It was a thing of beauty. That was Jack Sharkey on his game.”

 Fast

Sharkey had entered his prime years as a fighter after his impressive stoppage of Jim Maloney. Over the span of nine months, Jack had also scalped George Godfrey, the jaded Harry Wills, Homer Smith and former light heavyweight champ Mike McTigue. Sharkey was fast closing on a shot at Gene Tunney’s heavyweight championship. All he had to do – to coin an age-old phrase of frequent understatement – was beat Jack Dempsey. Sharkey was heavily favoured to do so. Eight years to the month after his epic charge to the championship at Toledo, Manassa Jack was a reluctant and rusty warrior with marital troubles and a love of the easy life he had never known in the brutal days of his youth. Even the chance of gaining revenge over Gene Tunney barely lit a flame in Jack’s soul. It took canny Tex Rickard to do that by way of constant goading and teasing.

Sharkey, typically ebullient, had no doubts and certainly no fears about the fight. Dempsey had long been his inspiration, but this was old-fashioned boxing business. There were only two ways it could go and the Gob had both bases covered in the sweetly uncomplicated haven of his own mind. “If Dempsey rushes me from the start trying to break through quickly, he is doomed to disappointment. I will be waiting for him with more punches than he ever saw before.

“Dempsey said once he saw a dozen Firpos (Luis Angel Firpo) after taking the South American’s first punch. Well, he will be trying to pick out a dozen Sharkeys after he has sampled my wallop. If Dempsey doesn’t open up at the start but lays back looking for an opening, I’ll left hand him to pieces and knock him out anyway.”

The much celebrated fight came to pass at Yankee Stadium on July 21st, 1927, and its pattern for the first six rounds suggested that Sharkey was a clairvoyant who could predict the future with unerring accuracy. He was indeed Dempsey’s master as the old champion chased and hustled and visibly bristled with frustration at his inability to trap his prey.

Then came that unforgettable seventh round, when both men shared a shattering moment that defined each of them perfectly. Sharkey showed his major weakness and Dempsey showed his major strength. Tired of the resourceful Dempsey digging a few meaty shots south of the border, Sharkey turned his head to complain to the referee – an act of carelessness akin to a matador waving to a friend in the crowd when the bull is feeling particularly aggrieved at being poked about. The left hook that Dempsey crashed into Sharkey’s jaw sent the Gob airborne before his body righted itself and collapsed to the canvas.

In later years, Sharkey said of Dempsey, “He was a perpetual motion, kept punching and punching. If there was anything open in the direction he was punching, he’d hurt you. I came home and I went in the hospital. I passed blood there for a long time.”

The defeat, however, failed to lull others into a sense of false security about Sharkey’s ability. Ironically, Jack’s stock had risen to the point where he was getting the dreaded cold shoulder from the top dogs. Dempsey wanted no further part of him and teasingly told Sharkey so. Champion Gene Tunney also dismissed the Gob as a potential challenger. Sharkey, very much an inspirational soul, seemed to lose his motivation for a while as he drew with tough New Zealander Tom Heeney and dropped a split decision to Johnny Risko. But then Jack went on the seven-fight winning run that would take him to a fight with German ace Max Schmeling for the championship vacated by Tunney. A month after the Risko reverse, Sharkey shattered the heavyweight aspirations of the brilliant light heavyweight master, Jack Delaney, by knocking out Delaney in one round at Madison Square Garden. Quality victories over Young Stribling, Tommy Loughran and Phil Scott also featured in Jack’s sprint to the top of the ladder. He needed just three rounds to beat the devilishly clever Loughran, with a right hand crack to the head that had Tommy believing he had won the fight when he came to his senses in his dressing room.

The fight that did Sharkey no favours was his win over Englishman, Phil Scott, who would forever become known as Fainting Phil after going down in the third round and claiming that he had been fouled by low blows. Well, he had indeed – to the extent of being in great discomfort for months after taking Sharkey’s smashing blows to the groin. But Scott had won several previous contests on fouls, and that kind of reputation inevitably rebounds on a fellow at the wrong time. Phil’s protests were dismissed by the Miami Boxing Commission, but Sharkey also now suffered from a stigma of sorts and one could imagine a cunning little fellow called Joe Jacobs filing away those details at the back of his clever mind.

Jacobs managed Max Schmeling and when Max squared off against Sharkey for the vacant championship at Yankee Stadium on June 12, 1930, it quickly became apparent that Jack was at the peak of his powers and very much the better man. For three rounds, he gave Schmeling a rare old boxing lesson. This was Sharkey’s hour, surely. What could possibly go wrong this time?

In the fourth round, one of the most famous in heavyweight boxing history, utter chaos ensued as Sharkey slipped Schmeling’s jab and shifted neatly to plant a crunching left hook to the stomach. According to Jack, Max raised his body at this point and a good blow became a bad one. In the mayhem, nobody was truly sure of who had done what as Schmeling went down and claimed that he had been struck by a foul punch. As if referee Jimmy Crowley wasn’t sufficiently confused, his mind was sent into a complete tailspin by the high octane histrionics of Joe Jacobs, who tore hither and yon around the ring screaming about the injustice done to his charge. The upshot was that Schmeling was awarded the fight and the world championship. “Ill fortune follows Gob” said United Press sports editor Frank Getty aptly.

Two years

It would be two years before Sharkey got his second chance at Schmeling. At least Jack finally got some luck in the rematch, winning a highly controversial and undeserved decision. Max had improved greatly in the interim period, and Sharkey, always a fair critic of his opponents’ talents, described the German as “a methodical, cruel, terrific puncher.” Jack added, with his wry humour, that he made a point of not hitting Max below the chin.

Sharkey’s coronation should have heralded the golden times at last and showcased him as the supreme and sublime boxer puncher that he was. But Jack could never cement over that big split that his temperament had inflicted on his talent. Character weaknesses always breed ill fortune which can be further aggravated by sailing too close to the wrong crowd. Sharkey was never the same after that fight and almost certainly not his own man. His first defence against Primo Carnera in 1933 should have been a repetition of their first match and another stroll in the park for the Gob. It was anything but that as Jack meekly made his exit in the sixth round, hitting the deck from a right uppercut that clearly didn’t land.

Astonished ringsiders estimated the gap between the projectile and the target to be a foot or more. As one angry sports writer reported, “Rotten fish has a bad smell but nothing could stink so much as the Primo Carnera-Jack Sharkey fight.”

Sonny Liston, for all his theatrical falling about in the fight with Muhammad Ali at Lewiston, had at least been visibly struck by a deceptively hard punch. Jack Sharkey, for the rest of his life, would have to explain how he had been pole-axed by what most regarded as a medium breeze.

Mike Silver believes the explanation to be basically simple: “Sharkey went downhill quickly after losing his title to Carnera. I don’t ascribe this to a physical breakdown. It is generally conceded correctly that Sharkey threw that fight for a huge amount of money. Was it greed? Not entirely. Sharkey was a mobbed up fighter, as was Carnera. A deal was made and Sharkey probably had no say in the matter. But I believe his throwing the fight affected Sharkey mentally. He seemed not to care whether he won or lost after that ignoble defeat.”

For all the mental baggage and other complications that he brought to the table, Jack Sharkey would still shape up pretty well against past heavyweight champions according to film historian, Mike Hunnicutt. “Jack Sharkey is interesting mainly because he was so very good,” says Mike. “Whenever anyone watches films of his fights, the eyes always automatically focus in on Sharkey, no matter who he is fighting. He is simply wonderful to look at.

“He had that build of a brick yet always that fine co-ordination of everything – hands, body, feet, feints, tricks, fast hands, solid punching, different positioning and the occasional whistling right hand. He could fight out of a half crouch and be very aggressive, but mostly he was perhaps the finest technical boxer of all the heavyweights since his time. He had an expert jab, great counter punching, every smooth move possible and a keen strategic boxing brain. However, Jack just didn’t seem interested in fighting sometimes and I do not know why.

“That being said, he came up in a very tough era and might not have lasted that much longer as champion even if he hadn’t been so erratic. Along with Max Bar, Sharkey might have been the most talented heavyweight between Tunney and Louis.

“Going down the post-Sharkey list of champions, I feel that Jack would do very well in the various match-ups. I give Baer a slight edge in that he may just land that right good enough to win – maybe. Braddock loses to Sharkey by decision, Louis still wins by knockout in a prime-against-prime match-up, while a fight with Jersey Joe Walcott would be even odds. Sharkey boxed a bit better than Joe, but both had moves and feints that could knock your socks off and Walcott was the heavier hitter.

“I would pick Rocky Marciano by KO over Jack, while Ezzard Charles’ footwork would win him a close decision. I would take Liston by a split decision over Sharkey, with Sonny’s jab and infighting ability giving him the edge. Ali would win by his footwork but barely. Frazier would win by decision over Sharkey, but Foreman and Tyson would get out-boxed. Larry Holmes would lose as Sharkey would set up too many traps for him, as Jack would do to Lennox Lewis. Evander Holyfield gets bewildered but still takes a decision.

“Jack Sharkey wasn’t just good – he had it in spades. By that I mean he was genuinely gifted. Get his films and see for yourself – he is great to watch!”

Curtain

The final curtain came down for Jack Sharkey in 1936 when he made a half-hearted attempt to stop the force of nature that was Joe Louis. Jack did pretty decently too until the Bomber began to unleash the kind of adversity that truly tests an old lion’s resolve. The fight was over in three rounds as Louis took another step toward becoming a revered legend and Sharkey slipped into that grey file that we reserve for the eccentrics and the nearly men.

We all have a pretty good idea as to where Joe Louis stands in the pantheon of heavyweight greats. But what on earth do we make of the gifted enigma that was Jack Sharkey?

To his dying day, Sharkey maintained that his loss to Primo Carnera was on the level, just as Jack maintained that Dempsey was the greatest of all the heavyweights – better than Louis, Marciano, Ali, Frazier, Tyson or any of them. “Dempsey could hit you in the shoulder and dislocate it,” Sharkey observed. Did the Gob ever look at the Mauler and wonder what it was like to be able to marry a magnificent talent to a cool head and a disciplined mind?

 

BENNY LEONARD: GOLDEN TALENT OF A GOLDEN AGE

KING BENNY: A true golden product of boxing's much mourned Golden Age, the brilliantly gifted Benny Leonard compiled a sprawling record of glittering quality as he surged through the ranks and established himself as the greatest in the world. He is still widely regarded as the king of all the illustrious 135-pounders, a near perfect mechanic of the ring who mastered all the essential elements of his trade. Together with Jack Dempsey and the other great sportsmen of the era, Benny would personify the so-called Roaring Twenties.

In his new book, The Arc of Boxing, my fellow historian Mike Silver has produced a masterful study of the rise and decline of the great sport we once knew as the Noble Art. Mr Silver sets out by drawing a definitive line in the sand and argues his case from that boundary. He does so with eloquence and great truth. Very simply, he believes that boxing’s golden age ran from approximately 1925 to 1955 and that we have seen nothing but a steady and depressing dilution of quality and knowledge ever since. He is quite correct and I salute his courage for stating his case and fending off the ‘my way or the highway’ crowd who choose to shield their eyes and plug their ears for fear that their own fragile reasoning might be shot to pieces.

I have been saying for longer than I care to remember that the once great discipline of boxing has long been shed of its golden robe. Its priceless secrets have been forgotten, shunned or watered down into meaningless sound bites by too many trainers of dubious qualifications and too many fighters of pedestrian talent. It is of some consolation to me that I have a small band of brothers who are kind enough to remind me from time to time that I am not mad, deluded or old enough at 52 to be classed as prematurely senile.

Boxing analyst Mike Hunnicut, who has studied and patiently analysed dozens of fight films from all eras, explains some of the major reasons for the slow demise of technical quality and versatility: “From the mid 1950s until the 1960s, many professional fight club venues began to close. Boxers began to get more experience in the amateur ranks and turn professional at later age. Often acquiring 100 amateur bouts, most boxers received most of their experience as well as skills, in the amateurs. Combination punching, headhunting, lateral movement became increasingly emphasized while infighting, body punching, short and short middle range techniques, compact punching and a mixture of fighting and boxing began to erode. 

 “What was once fluidity and adaptation in bouts in overall offense and defensive skills had become predictable and rigid. Head shots with combinations tended to be the main course of action as one opponent would throw his combination and then his opponent his. This comparative lack of style and technical versatility remains today, as while there are many great exceptions to this strategy, there is no doubt in objective observation that prevailing ‘amateur’ style has produced less well rounded performers and performances.”

 Now let us talk of Benny Leonard, for there are many relevant reasons to do so. Those who don’t know much about Benny really shouldn’t go throwing stones in glass houses. So let me hand the stage back to Mike Silver for the official introduction on Leonard from The Arc of Boxing: “Benny Leonard used the same stand-up fencer’s stance as Jack Johnson, but employed a great deal more footwork and speed (after all, he was 70 pounds lighter than Johnson). Leonard took the science of pugilism to another level entirely. He fought as if playing a physical game of chess in which the object was always to be mentally and physically one step ahead of an opponent. Fighting on his toes, he jabbed, circled and sidestepped. He ducked, rolled, slid in, slid out and feinted – all the while looking to create openings for a variety of punches.

“A skilled infighter, Leonard was just as formidable at close quarters as he was at long range. He was also famous for the accuracy and timing of his punches. Leonard’s proud boast was that no fighter could muss his hair in a fight.”

Analytical

Benny Leonard was one of the great students of the game, possessed of a brilliantly analytical mind. He is comparable in so many ways to his illustrious predecessor, the Old Master himself, Joe Gans. Joe shared similar gifts of perception, anticipation and what so often appeared to be effortless execution. Benny and Joe were never too proud to study other boxers and root out little gems of information. Both men were master boxers, but, more importantly perhaps, master thinkers. It remains almost impossible to state with any great degree of conviction who was the greater of the two. Leonard was faster and undoubtedly fitter. Let us not forget that Joe was already being dogged by ill health in the last years of his prime as well as handicapped by the odious circumstances of his day. Yet still he was fighting off the other titans of the era.

In his savage marathon with Battling Nelson in the searing heat of Goldfield, Gans weighed 133lbs stripped before being required to make the same weight in his street clothes following a cynical, additional clause demanded by Bat’s handlers. Weight drained to a potentially fatal extent, the already ailing Gans vomited a number of times between rounds.

Leonard and Gans were cerebral brothers in an age when every trick of their dangerous profession needed to be mastered by any boxer who yearned to be the king of the hill. They possessed an insatiable thirst for knowing the answers to every question and taking their already formidable skills to higher levels. For such men, the great and ever elusive search is for perfection. No athlete ever attains this Holy Grail of course. But the special few get tantalisingly close to it.

It is said that golfer Ben Hogan, whilst recovering from his famous and near fatal car crash, woke up in hospital one night in a terrible mood after a vivid dream. He had dreamt that he had birdied seventeen holes in succession and then seen his birdie putt at the eighteenth lip out. That one little miss, in Hogan’s view, had rendered all his previous brilliance redundant. Ben wasn’t being trendily obscure when he said in later years that the greatest golf swing he had ever seen was that of an unknown golfer on a driving range. Hogan watched all sorts of golfers and all sorts of swings in his belief that something could always be learned even from the unlikeliest of sources.

Benny Leonard and Joe Gans possessed similarly inquisitive minds and the ability to assimilate and act upon the information they absorbed. Such was the similarity of their range of skills, we could often be talking of the same boxer. Both men were wonderfully correct hitters (a not so obvious art in itself). They knew everything about proper weight transference, perfect balance and always being ready to strike. They mastered the disciplines of leverage, pivoting, timing, snap, slipping, blocking and feinting. They studied human behaviour and how quickly the brain of an opponent could be scrambled and gridlocked. Leonard would give his foes a little tap on the shoulder at appropriate moments to disorientate them. An old trick, yes, but a boxer of Leonard’s quality could amplify its effectiveness no end.

What else bound Benny Leonard and Joe Gans together? Toughness, grit and great courage when the tide turned against them. Both were tried and tested many times and neither was found wanting in the prime of their careers.

Soldier Bartfield

Benny Leonard and legendary trainer Mannie Seamon virtually lived at the famous old Grupp’s gymnasium in New York during Benny’s glory days. Said Benny, “I must spend eight hours a day in Grupp’s, it’s my place of business.”

One fine day, when Benny had finished his training session, he and Seamon were watching Soldier Bartfield working out. Leonard gave Seamon a little nudge and said, “Bartfield’s dropping his left hand every time he jabs. Anybody could drop him with one shot.” Bartfield didn’t appreciate this observation at all when it was inevitably relayed back to him. “What are you trying to make a clown out of me for?” he yelled at Leonard.

Benny’s response only stoked things up: “That’s not hard.”

The two men hade it out in the ring and what followed was a painful experience for Bartfield. Moving into Leonard with bad intent, Soldier sent out a range finding jab and Leonard countered it with a hard and fast right. Bartfield’s legs turned to jelly, but the message was still lost on him. He jabbed again and another snapping right bowled him over.  Leonard looked at Mannie Seamon and said, “The lesson’s wasted. Wait for me, we’ll be leaving for downtown in a few moments.”

When trawling through his extensive collection of fight films, Mike Hunnicut never cease to be in awe of Benny Leonard’s many gifts. “Leonard, along with one other boxer, is my all time favourite to watch, study and enjoy on film,” says Mike. “There is so much to appreciate, it’s impossible to get bored. His balance was simply impeccable. If there is one thing that all good boxers must do in their daily ring work – right to the time they hang up their gloves – it is to slowly and conscientiously work on their balance. Some boxers never attain good balance, because it is not easy to do.

“Leonard was as good as it got at this discipline. Linked with this balance was incredible footwork. You never really knew where he was, he was always in and out, to the left and to the right, back in and then out to the left or right again, circling and mixing it all up in mysterious ways. He had his great jab with great combinations and a wicked punch. And Leonard could feint you with every part of his body. Jimmy McLarnin once remarked that his eyeballs nearly popped out of his head the first time Leonard really feinted him.

“You can almost see the wheels turning as Benny puts everything together whilst studying his opponent with never surpassed boxing skill, ring intelligence and generalship, tempered against incedible opposition. Benny Leonard may have become the greatest fighter that ever lived.”

Gambler

It is important to establish that while Benny Leonard knew all the evasive tricks, he wasn’t a ‘runner’, any more than was Joe Gans. Along with the great care and precision that Benny brought to his ringcraft was the essential nerve of the gambler. When Leonard saw his chance to end an evening’s work inside schedule, he rarely paused to smell the roses for a while longer. His lightning fast right hand would shoot from his chest like a snake’s tongue when his intuitive brain told him the time was right. He loved the challenge of being the first to draw in a battle of wits, waiting for the opponent to lead before stepping inside with that devastating right counter.

Leonard’s judgement of distance was uncanny. This is an instinctive and innate gift among the true greats of any profession, who never seem plagued by the necessity to clutter their heads with pre-set plays or mind triggers. Centuries ago, a doubter asked Giotto, the famous Italian artist who started life as a shepherd’s boy, to prove his genius. Giotto responded instantly by picking up his brush and painting a perfect circle. In one brilliantly impudent move, he proved himself not only a genius painter but also a genius draughtsman. Benny Leonard, in the earthier and more urgent arena of the Noble Art, would frequently perform similar tricks. When that countering right hit the mark, it generally did so with machine-like accuracy.

This is not to say that Leonard was never caught out. They all are from time to time. But that famously acute brain, along with plain old fighting courage, proved equally adept at getting him out of a hole. Richie Mitchell struck first and had Benny seriously on Queer Street in the first round of their barn-burner of a fight at Madison Square Garden in 1921, but Leonard dug himself out of the mire to stop Richie in the sixth. Six months earlier, at Benton Harbor in Michigan, Chicago great Charley White tested his famous left hook on Benny and very nearly knocked the maestro out. But it was Charley who took the full count in round nine.

Lew Tendler was another who glimpsed everlasting fame against Leonard before coming back to earth. In the first battle between the two men at Jersey City in 1922, Tendler, one of the greatest southpaws ever, had Benny in desperate trouble.  Employing classic kidology, Leonard wriggled from the crisis by talking Lew into a state of self doubt and uncertainty. The fight was a close affair in the days of newspaper decisions, but most felt that crafty Benny had edged home after 12 lively rounds.

Arguably, the young Leonard gave his greatest exhibition of raw fighting courage in surviving terrible punishment to outlast one Evert Ivar Hammer, a remarkable tough Scandinavian brawler who carried the strangely chilling and appropriate ring name of Ever Hammer. Head down and smashing away to Benny’s body all the time, Hammer would have broken most other fighters that night with his near suicidal assaults. With great heart and soul, Leonard emphatically endorsed the old adage that appearances can be deceptive. Dapper he certainly was. Lacking in toughness and courage he certainly wasn’t.

To Leonard, this was all business and nothing more. He had little time for the term, ‘killer instinct’, which had entered the boxing language in earnest on the heels of his great contemporary, Jack Dempsey. “I don’t want to hurt the other guy,” Benny once said. “I want to stop him. But that does not mean I am eager to cut him up and murder his self respect. The credo of the professional ring is to win with speed and your best means of execution. As for that ‘killer instinct’, I never had it as a kid when bringing home the pay was very important, and I never had it as a champion.

“I have read a lot of stuff about Jack Dempsey and his killer instinct. Well, that guy really is a softie. Killer instinct left boxing with bare knuckles and so-called revenge fights. I never sought a revenge bout in my career, not even when they offered me return fights with Mickey Finnegan, Joe Shugrue and Frankie Fleming, the only lightweights who stopped me during the first three years of my career.”

Many felt that Benny ‘carried’ Rocky Kansas, for whatever reasons, in a lightweight championship defence at Madison Square Garden in February, 1922. In the eleventh round of their 15-rounds match, Leonard unhinged the teak-tough Kansas with a cracking left hook to the chin, but appeared to make no concerted effort to chase the knockout. Quite to the contrary, Benny’s famous punching accuracy seemed to mysteriously desert him as he repeatedly missed Rocky by fractions for the remainder of the fight, prompting ringside reporter Damon Runyon to wryly observe, “It takes as much skill to miss by just so much as it does to hit.”

The natives were not amused. Disgruntled members of the crowd pointed out that the betting was 2 to 1 on Benny knocking out Kansas inside 10 rounds, but then switched to 5 to 1 at the eleventh hour on Kansas not being knocked out. Well, something might indeed have been going on. But as Runyon reminded his readers, “Rocky Kansas is as tough as rawhide. No one knocks him out. A man can break his hands battering at the marble chin and the iron flanks of the Buffalo Italian. It may be that his amazing stamina was keeping him afoot in the eleventh round rather than any deliberate inefficiency on the part of Leonard.

“It is an old cry among Leonard’s following, a cry that he himself resents, that any time Benny fails to stop an opponent he is ‘carrying’ him. Sometimes it is a great injustice to his opponent.”

However, five months later, as if to prove a mischievous point, Leonard pierced the marble chin and the iron flanks of Rocky Kansas by stopping him in eight rounds.

Return to Tendler

Almost exactly a year after letting Benny Leonard off the hook in their first fight for Benny’s world title in Jersey City, Lew Tendler must have felt confident about his chances gong into the return match at Yankee Stadium on July 23, 1923. Lew was a tough and dangerous man of his hard era. Still two months shy of his 25th birthday, he had already been a pro for nearly 10 years after making his debut as a 15-year old. More than 120 fights adorned his sprawling record, of which he had lost just three legitimately. A shrewd southpaw with a hammer of a left cross, it was Tendler’s unfortunate destiny to be Leonard’s contemporary.

There was no joy for Lew at Yankee Stadium. In fact Benny barely left him a scrap with which to console himself. It was one of Leonard’s finest nights as he showed the full range of his skills to some 65,000 customers paying half a million dollars. Some attendance for a couple of small fellows, eh? That was boxing in the Roaring Twenties. Right from the off, poor Lew was chasing a ghost that wasn’t at all reticent and could make contact into the bargain. And how Benny made contact. Tendler tried manfully to wreak damage with his famous left hook, but found the experience as fruitless as trying to thread a baseball bat through the eye of a needle. All the while he was being struck every which way by Leonard’s unerringly accurate punches. Tendler was quickly made to look like a novice and he was anything but that. It took him a good six rounds to strike Benny with a meaningful blow. In his mounting frustration, Tendler’s work grew ever wilder as he missed repeatedly with despairing rights and lefts. Leonard’s evasive skills and precise counter punching were majestic. Lew, to his great credit, never stopped hunting Leonard in the hope of finding one magical punch that would turn the fight upside down. All too often, however, the game challenger looked like a man trying to fend off a hail of stones.

Benny’s cultured attack was ever varied. He jabbed, hooked and moved around like a man on castors as he worked both the head and body. In the 13th round, a powerful left hook to the stomach had Tendler in distress and he went to his knees shortly afterwards from a flurry of blows as the two boys were engaging in a torrid exchange. In an age where boxing fans didn’t enjoy the technical luxuries of replays and pos analysis, Leonard’s more subtle inside work (much like that of Jack Dempsey) was often missed and unappreciated. The telling punches would be fired short and fast and the opponent would suddenly be disabled.

The courageous Tendler survived to the final bell, but only in the way of a man staggering through a blizzard as Leonard drilled home punches from all angles. One reporter described Lew’s plight thus: “He did not seem able to hit a barn door with a handful of buckshot.”

The Coronation

Before the reign of Benny Leonard, there was the reign of the great Freddie Welsh, who appropriately hailed from Wales and was acknowledged as the master of the left jab. Freddie was a boxing wonder in his own right, as well as being an astute and canny observer of his prospective opponents. He kept a constant eye on those who might be capable of storming his castle. Welsh quickly recognised Benny Leonard as the most talented and dangerous of the contenders and began to put out feelers.

In the days when world champions were afforded greater protection and leeway, Freddie made the common decision to test the water without putting his crown on the line. He engaged Leonard twice in 1916, first at Madison Square Garden in March and then in Brooklyn in July. It was apparent from those meetings (so often described as chess matches) that Welsh and Leonard were the two titans of the lightweight division. The general consensus was that Benny edged the first affair at the Garden, but Freddie was hailed by most as the clear winner of their Brooklyn engagement as he opened up his box of tricks and showed Leonard much more. Perhaps that was the champion’s mistake, for many believed that Benny was keeping his heavier artillery under wraps that night.

Welsh was still covering his back when the two men clashed in earnest for the third and final time in New York on May 28, 1917. Very simply, Benny had to stop Freddie to win the championship. At 31, Welsh was almost exactly 10 years older than Leonard and an ‘old’ campaigner by the ferocious standards of the day. But beating Freddie was still a mighty order.

Pasty faced and willowy limbed, there was an oddly intimidating air about Welsh when he went into battle. Brilliantly schooled in all areas of the game, he would often wear a confident smile that was more of a sneer. He would sway gently from the hips, always protecting his chin, looking a picture of assurance. He surely couldn’t have anticipated the storm that was to follow, for this was a different Benny Leonard who laid his best cards on the table from the outset and dared Welsh to better the glittering hand. A younger and fresher phenomenon was about to trump the fading king.

Leonard set a cracking pace and made Welsh’s lean body the principal target. Punching hard and fast, Benny fired in accurate shots to the ribs and stomachs as he pursued Freddie constantly. Seeking to smash through the champion’s ring of confidence, the sprightly challenger cheekily stuck out his chin as an inviting target. Welsh was a boxer who rarely miscued tactically, but now he was being lured into errors by a similarly clever and agile mind. In the fourth round, Leonard nailed him with that flashing right counter that would become a potent trademark of the brilliant New Yorker. Freddie’s head was thrown back and his knees dipped from the force of the blow. He couldn’t make his legs work for a few desperate seconds, but then he showed all his ring savvy as he bluffed and hustled his way through the crisis.

But Benny had made a big statement and severely shaken Welsh’s great confidence. Freddie was still wearing that odd, mocking little smile when he joined battle for the fifth round, but now he knew for sure that the new kid in town was seriously knocking on the door. A quite definitive pattern was now taking shape. While Welsh’s famous left jab was still scoring points for him (he rarely missed anyone with that textbook blow), Leonard’s punches were considerably more destructive. After eight rounds, those educated punches of the Jewish ace had all but drained the resistance out of a grand champion. Welsh was for the taking and Leonard knew it. He was on Freddie in a flash at the start of the ninth, knocking the Welshman down with a right that cut straight through his defence. Stubborn pride got the better of Welsh, who jumped up without taking a count and walked straight into a firestorm.

Leonard knew it was his hour and swept straight through Freddie’s brave defiance, cutting him down for the second time with another cracking right. It was a blow that sent Freddie’s mind into an inescapable fog. He was an easy target when he got to his feet and the final driving blow from Benny – a left this time – left the broken champion in an eerie limbo. Somehow he remained upright, but he was gone as he grabbed the ropes and staggered drunkenly against them. Leonard moved in to apply the coup de grace, but the referee intervened and stopped the fight just as it seemed that Welsh would tumble through the ropes.

A glorious reign had ended. And the fabulous era of Benny Leonard had begun.

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.

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