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The Fourth God Of War: Ezzard Charles
By Springs Toledo
“He has shown you, o man, what is good.
And what does the Lord require of you?
To act justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God.”
~ Micah 6:8
Lou Ambers landed a shot to the jaw and as Tony Scarpati went down, his head bounced off the canvas. He died three days later. “Every once in a while,” Ambers remembered, “I’d look in that corner and I’d see like a picture of Tony, God rest his soul.” Sugar Ray Robinson had a grim premonition before fighting Jimmy Doyle and lived to regret going through with that bout. “I was busted up,” Robinson said after Doyle died, “and for a long time after that I could fight just hard enough to win.” Twenty-year-old Sam Baroudi had another kind of premonition. In the summer of 1947, he knocked out Glenn Newton Smith in the ninth round. Smith collapsed in the dressing room and succumbed to a cerebral hemorrhage.
Six months later Baroudi fought light heavyweight Ezzard Charles.
Baroudi had never been stopped in any of his fifty-two previous bouts. He was fighting out of a crouch in the tenth round when Ezzard landed three hard shots to the head which caused his eyes to glaze. A left to the body sent him down. He was carried out of Chicago Stadium on a stretcher and died five hours later. The boxer who did it was distraught.
The day after the fight a middle-aged man arrived in Chicago from Akron, Ohio to claim the body. It was Baroudi’s father. “This was a terrible accident,” he told Ezzard, “our family bears no bitterness at all towards you. Don’t give up on your career.” A charity match was set up at Ezzard’s request and a certified check of $15,880 was given to the Baroudi family. Ezzard donated his entire purse.
Reluctantly, the number-one light heavyweight contender continued with his career, but he would never again compete in his natural division. He’d only fight heavyweights, as if afraid of injuring men his own size. A.J. Liebling got the impression that he suffered from emotional blocks in the heat of battle, and saw in him an “intuitive aversion to violence” that would “set in like ice on a pond.” Once feared for his “black-out” punches, his clean KO percentage of 44% before the Baroudi fight dropped to 28% after it.
His popularity dropped with it.
Ghosts, guilt, and the evaporation of the ‘killer instinct’ –these are symptoms almost every boxer deals with after their hands kill an opponent. For Ezzard Charles the symptoms were acute.
He was named after Dr. Webster Pierce Ezzard, the obstetrician who delivered him in 1921, and was raised by his grandmother Maude Foster and a great grandmother named Belle Russell who was born a slave. They taught him to pray, to read the Bible every day, and place no value on human applause.
Ezzard had a smile that was radiant enough to melt ice, but he wasn’t raised to be charismatic. As the press found out soon enough, a conversation with him could be about as mutual as brushing your teeth. He wasn’t raised to avoid a challenge either, and he didn’t, though others failed to extend him the same courtesy. He was ducked for years by the same light heavyweight champions who ducked Archie Moore despite the fact that he cleaned out the contenders, including Moore. His prime ended with no laurels and no belts; it ended with Sam Baroudi’s last breaths.
Ezzard is most remembered for the beatings he took in two wars against Rocky Marciano. The stand he made was unexpected; he fought hammer and tong, even giving up reading his books because they had become “a distraction.” “Rough and crude,” he told Budd Schulberg, “I gotta be rough and crude.” After the first fight, photographs of his face were presented in eighteen different degrees of contortion at the end of Marciano’s fists in LIFE. “This Is What Charles Took” proclaimed the title.
By 1955, symptoms of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) were becoming evident. “Looking back now,” recalled Ray Arcel, who watched him train at Stillman’s gym, “it’s easy to see that Ezzard was in the early stages of the illness that eventually killed him. But at the time I just thought he was getting older. He wasn’t able to do the things he’d always done. He’d get tired. His coordination wasn’t there.” It affected his legs first, which explains why this once versatile technician struggled with stumblebums as his career waned. The crowds booed.
Sportswriters picked up on his childhood nickname of “Snooky” and started calling him “Snooks,” but with disdain, not affection. Television audiences missed his prime. Most never saw what he was –what he was before the face of Sam Baroudi looked at him behind every opponent’s guard, what he was before his body began to betray him. They saw only an aging fighter struggling to hold on to his dignity and perhaps win more than he lost, and that is the image that has persevered for decades.
That image is a false one and should be undone. At his best, this unpretentious man was one of history’s supreme boxer-punchers. In his capable hands, ‘the manly art of self-defense’ was baptized by fire into something godly …and this is his transfiguration.
INHERITING THE EARTH
At the beginning of his fistic career, sportswriters called him the “Cincinnati Schoolboy,” but with affection, not disdain. With a fledgling record of 17-1, he faced Hall of Famer and former middleweight champion Teddy Yarosz. Yarosz’s record was 106-16-3. The fact that the clever Yarosz had beaten a parade of dangerous fighters made no difference. Ray Arcel himself was in his corner; but that made no difference either. Yarosz only landed “about three good lefts” and Ezzard cruised to a decision win. In January of 1942 he fought a former light heavyweight champion in Anton Christoforidis (35-10-6) and handed him his first stoppage loss, shocking everyone except for those in Cincinnati who already knew great he was. In March, he fought to a draw with a third former champion, Ken Overlin (130-19-7). Overlin took a split decision over him the previous year –when Ezzard was a junior at Woodward High School.
His principal remembered seeing him arrive for classes with a shiner or two the morning after a fight. It impressed him how Ezzard was almost always on time, though he was moonlighting.
