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t was the Colorado Boxing Commission that gave him his first break. It turned out that they did not permanently suspend him because his boxing career soon resumed. Still campaigning as Young Joe Louis, Chase wasted no time. On June 30th, he was scheduled to face a white fellow Coloradan named Roy Gillespie at Denver. Like Chase, he lost his father early. Gillespie’s father died when he was a boy, and before he turned eighteen he took out a boxing license. He had a reputed 77 bouts under his belt.

Five men were knocked out in the preliminaries that Monday night in Mammoth Gardens. The Louis-Gillespie bout was upgraded to main event status due to a cancellation and it proved to be more brutal than anyone was prepared for. The balding twenty-five year old middleweight, who had bummed a ride to see his mother the day before, was knocked down in the first round. He went him down twice more in the second round for two counts of nine. Chase heard the crowd yelling “stop the fight! after he knocked Gillespie down the second time. Gillespie might have heard it too, because for the next three rounds he fought back hard and on even terms against the faster, lighter man. What happened next was examined and re-examined by the police. “Staggered by hard blows to the chin, the Post reported, Gillespie “collapsed on the ropes. The referee noticed his glazed eyes and stopped the action at about one minute into the sixth round. Chase helped the stricken fighter to his corner, where Gillespie lost consciousness and fell onto his stool. Two doctors examined him and called for an ambulance.

Sports editor Jack Carberry talked to Chase the next morning. “I, over many, many years in which a reporter’s job has carried me to countless scenes of tragedy, he wrote, “never met a boy whose sincere sorrow over what occurred, touched me more.

Gillespie spent Tuesday hovering near death in the Denver General Hospital. An operation was performed to remove a blood clot on his brain and his temperature climbed to 109 degrees. The winner of the match had since returned home to Walsenburg. Local police soon showed up at his door to take him into custody at the order of the investigating detective in Denver. Paroled only a month earlier, Chase was back behind bars.

The next afternoon at 12:10, only hours before Joe DiMaggio safely hit for his forty-fifth consecutive game and broke a sports record, Roy Gillespie died in a hospital bed.

Both events made front page news.

Chase was ordered transported from the Huerfano county jail back to Denver to stand before a coroner’s jury. “Young Joe Louis, wrote Carberry, “-and life’s breaks have been pretty much against him as of late –was in there doing his best to make a comeback –to earn a few dollars. A very few dollars I might add.

The day before the bout, Gillespie told his mother that he was promised $40 for the fight; that is, forty dollars less the manager’s cut of 40%, less the licensing fee of $5, and less $2 per second. That left his corpse with less than $20, which his mother hadn’t received as of Wednesday. Chase’s purse was about the same. He too had yet to receive it.

The city pathologist testified that the dead boxer had suffered a brain hemorrhage on some previous occasion, most likely in a boxing match. The victim, he said, probably suffered a temporary loss of vision and the loss of control of his arms or legs at that time but didn’t grasp the danger. No one else did either and he was cleared to fight.

Chase was exonerated and set free.

Undoubtedly, he was shaken by what he had done to Roy Gillespie. This experience changed him. When he reached his peak two years later, Chase was asked whether he liked to fight. His answer? “No.

After the tragedy, he may have started pulling his punches. He went on to win a decision and then dropped one to a man he had already beaten -a man who should never have beaten him. Did he have another identity crisis? He seemed ambivalent about using the Young Joe Louis moniker again and alternated between that and a variation of his given name. As 1941, a year of tragedies, closed, Isaiah Chase bid it good riddance. By the end of January he left Colorado for the Pacific Coast and began calling himself a name that he would use for the rest of his life -Jack Chase.

California was breeding and attracting some of the most dangerous fighters in the country during the early 1940s. Chase, who the now-deceased Reddy Gallagher quipped entered “a lion’s den when he fought Eddie Peirce, was headed into a war zone.

He went armed -not only with his fists, but with the determination of a man who had nothing else.