The GODS OF WAR

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That rematch between Saddler and Pep is considered one of the greatest fights of the 20th century. Pep, only three years away from a ghost ride in the sky, and four months removed from a devastating knockout, followed orders. The New York Times reported that Saddler was a 5 to 7 favorite on the books, but ate thirty-seven consecutive jabs in the first round. He was a “baffled and bewildered” slugger shadow boxing in Madison Square Garden. But then, Sandy’s long arms were like whips and whips can take a cigarette out of a mouth at twelve feet if handled by an expert. Sandy managed to cut Willie below his left eye and above and below his right eye. In the fourth round he landed a straight left, in the ninth, a straight right, in the tenth round a right to the jaw that saw Pep teetering like a drunk. In the fourteenth it was a left hook, then another right. Pep somehow shook it off and “gave no quarter… pelting Saddler with every blow known to boxing.” In the last round, it was Pep who was “fighting Saddler all over the ring.”

It was the greatest triumph of his career. It remains one of the greatest triumphs in the history of the ring.

…
Thanksgiving Day 2006, Rocky Hill, Connecticut. In a room at the West Hill Convalescent Home, Willie Pep finally kept still long enough for mortality to land a shot. His mischievous spirit emerged from a body stooped with age …and climbed a stairway.

The stairway was not the familiar four steps leading into a boxing ring, nor did it lead into a plane like the one he boarded sixty years earlier. It was a golden one, as brilliant as the belt he wore for so long, so long ago. It was a wide one, wider than that wooden stairway headed up to a certain gym in the New York City of his dreams.

It was a stairway lined with many who departed before him –more than a few ex-wives, two great featherweight rivals he never forgot, and the curmudgeon who loved him, Lou Stillman.

[IamInuit]

The Eighth God Of War: Benny Leonard

By Springs Toledo




“To be a Jew is a destiny.”
~ Hedwig Baum

The Jews of medieval Spain were famous for their fencing skills.

Fencing, like boxing, evolved out of brutal origins into a sport that retained its aggressiveness but added gentility. The fencer salutes his opponent. The boxer extends a glove. The combatants in both sports engage one another under a clear set of rules to show dominance, and the similarities do not end there. Fencing relies on foreknowledge. A fencer will look for patterns in his opponent’s reactions and invite that reaction with the idea of countering it with an effective thrust. The boxer does the same. Competing well in either sport relies on reaction-time and speed, agility, coordination, and self-confidence. The ability to mount an attack while being acutely aware of defense is critical. Strategy is critical.

Legend has it that a bare knuckles boxer from the 18th century named Daniel Mendoza (1763-1836) was descended from those Jewish fencers and incorporated some of their skills into his fighting style. What is more certain is that the man who preferred to be announced as “Mendoza the Jew” was a true pioneer of the Sweet Science and helped redefine it as a thinking man’s sport, using strategies such as jabbing, side-stepping, and blocking to compensate for his small size. In an era where fighters had more cauliflower ears than eyebrows, his style was more refined, even graceful. Mendoza revolutionized boxing.

Like a stone tossed into history’s pond, his influence rippled across a century into the golden era of Jewish-American boxing…

And what an era it was. Between 1910 and 1940 there were twenty-seven world champions of Hebrew descent. At the end of the Roaring Twenties, a time when boxing was a major sport and clubs were everywhere, fighters with names like Goldstein, Rosenbloom, and Schwartz were the dominant ethnic group filling the ranks. Many of them came out of the lower East Side of Manhattan, the rough-and-tumble sons of immigrants who had poured in from Eastern Europe during the 1880s clinging to hope and carrying mezuzahs. Their parents had fled persecution. They fled from no body.

One of them lived on Eighth Street, the son of a garment presser.

There was nothing intimidating about the appearance of the man born Benjamin Leiner. Standing only 5’5 with features that could be considered handsome in a delicate sort of way, he called to mind David strumming a lyre more than he did the Samson-like Mendoza. As a proud product of a culture that publically frowned on prizefighting, he would take pains to hide his profession from his parents, out of respect. But he would not hide his identity. Jews beamed when they saw the familiar six-pointed star emblazoned on his trunks. In time, he became more than a champion –he became Benny Leonard, the “Great Bennah,” “the Ghetto Wizard,” the shayner Yid who convinced many graying heads under prayer shawls to embrace the muscular Judaism of the prize ring.

5 July 1920, Benton Harbor. The fifth round of the world lightweight champion’s fourth defense was underway and Benny Leonard had his hands full with Charley White.

White boasted a record of 73-9-4 and had already defeated five Hall of Famers over fifteen years as a professional. He had a left hook that was a thing to fear and it distracted Leonard from applying the boxing brilliance he was already known for at age twenty-four.

Leonard shot a pristine left jab to the head of the charging challenger, who responded with a right hook followed by four more rights to the face. All those rights were a set-up. While Leonard was roughly lulled into expecting another right, he almost went nighty-night when a left hook slammed into his chin. The champion fell through the ropes and landed hard on the ring apron. Ray Pearson of the Chicago Daily Tribune reported that the dazed boxer couldn’t get up because his legs were “dangling over the lower ropes while his shoulders reclined outside the hemp.” The referee counted to four before Leonard’s corner men managed to push him back into the ring. White got all over him like a cheap suit.

Before the ninth round, Charley White was doing so well he may have been daydreaming about whether Leonard’s championship belt would have to be taken in or let out when he won it. Meanwhile, Leonard was engrossed in mathematical calculations. He was inviting and gauging White’s biggest weapon so he could make it work against him. White’s daydream was even encouraged by the champion who began the ninth round with what the New York Times described as a “light exchange.” But Leonard had his eureka moment. He found it in simple geometry; specifically, a line inside an arc. When he saw White setting up to throw his left hook, Benny quick-stepped inside it and fired a straight right hand. White teetered for a moment, pondering who it was that put the jawbone of a lion into the offending glove and then collapsed to his hands and knees. He got right back up like a good yeshiva student, but the rabbi threw a sequence of textbook shots and sent him sprawling again.

White was up at the count of eight and Leonard sent him through the ropes, shaking off a grudge he’d been nursing for four rounds.

It was a thoroughly beaten man who climbed back into the ring. Another right welcomed him. Down he went. Up he got. The fifth time he went down, he got comfortable. His left-hook, so fearsome only moments earlier, lay inert on the canvas. It was the first time Charley White was counted out in over 140 fights.

The arena went wild. According to the New York Times, barriers were torn down and seats were broken as a mass of humanity pushed its way toward the ring. Several spectators were trampled and the police could not hold back the crowd from the champion’s corner. Leonard was forced to stand in the ring for almost thirty minutes and receive the hearty handshakes and congratulations of a multitude.

10 February 1922, Madison Square Garden. Benny Leonard’s nose was bleeding in the fourth round after it was dented inwards by a right cross. Worse than that, his hair was mussed up. To a man celebrated in the press for his primping vanity, this was downright rude. Rocky Kansas, an Italian slugger out of Buffalo, New York who had lost only 4 times in 53 decision bouts, was fighting wild but landing big shots.

Benny Leonard was fighting Rocky Kansas on Rocky Kansas’s terms; much like pundits from another generation accused another Leonard of doing in his first fight with Roberto Duran. The currency with which both paid for their choice of strategy was in bumps and bruises. As the fourth round ticked by, Benny was visibly weakening under the strain, and Kansas encouraged his decline by battering his body in clinches and throwing haymakers at range. Leonard’s sharpshooting skills were on display anyway as he shrewdly countered Kansas with short lefts to the stomach. It was a thrilling slug fest. By the eleventh, the tide was turning. Leonard’s investment downstairs was taking a toll on Kansas, and his neck became an accordion stretching from sneak-jabs. Kansas went down for a count of nine after absorbing a right over the heart and Leonard stepped in for the finishing touches. According to the Los Angeles Times, he “worked around the Italian like a cooper around a barrel, nailing him with lefts to face and body.”

Leonard took a decision in a thriller. The two would meet again five months later, only this time Rocky Kansas, a 2010 International Boxing Hall of Fame inductee, would not see the final bell. “He whipped, he whipped me,” Kansas would say after he was stopped, “and oh can he hit.”

THE SOUTHPAW
Color-coordinated searchlights were installed at Yankee Stadium in July, 1923 to direct the crowd to the different subway transit lines after the second Benny Leonard-Lew Tendler title fight. It was the first time in history that such a lighting system was used for boxing after dark. The crowd numbered almost 65,000 –the largest since Jack Dempsey fought Georges Carpentier in Jersey City in 1921. Twenty dollars got you ringside. Leonard was a 2 to 1 favorite due mainly to his superior boxing ability, strategic capability, speed, and hitting power. Philadelphian challenger Lew Tendler was the other best lightweight on the planet. He had only one advantage –but it was an alarming one…

Lew Tendler was a southpaw.

From the moment that breed crawled backwards out of the primordial ooze, campaigns have erupted throughout history against them. And why not? The English word “sinister” is derived from the Italian “sinistra” which means “from the left” or “evil.” There is indeed something unnatural about them. They seem to exist as a mirror-image of the right-handed population, operating like Bizarro configurations that do everything backwards. To be sure, the left-handed among us may argue that it could just as well be the right-handed who are mirror-images for them; but this is America. Majority rules. It’s a right-handed world. Need proof? Watch a southpaw write with a ballpoint pen. They don’t pull it across the page; they push it, and smudge ink all over their hand. They put belts on upside down. And they can be downright dangerous. Congress should ban their unfit hands from handling sharp items never designed for them –such as scissors. Prefer blood on your bread? Ask one to cut the loaf. And if you see a left-hander in the cockpit of heavy machinery, run for your life.

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Cont...

Boxing managers recognize the danger. “Them southpaws,” jibed Jim Wicks, “should be drowned at birth.” For decades a left-handed novice would be converted to the conventional stance. Some trainers still do, although most see real advantages for southpaws.

And there are. Approximately 12% of people are left-handed. This means that southpaws are far more acclimated to sparring with conventional boxers than conventional boxers are to southpaws. Conventional fighters are often confused by southpaws because the left-handed attack comes from opposite angles. Some would even argue that they are inherently stronger. The greatest active fighter today happens to be a southpaw, but it was Lew Tendler who was the first great, and quite possibly the best southpaw in boxing history.

Benny Leonard’s own prejudices may have been on display over those few years that Tendler had to wait for a title shot. Public clamor grew to fever pitch before the champion finally agreed to meet him in Philadelphia, but that bout was cancelled after Leonard broke a bone in his hand during training. Tendler promptly took the $5,000 forfeit put up by both fighters as a guarantee to show up and fight. Leonard demanded that the money be returned but was rebuffed. Tendler’s manager then propped him up as an alternative claimant to the lightweight throne without consulting the man who kept the seat warm since 1917. Tendler became a mirror image with a make-pretend crown and the Bizarro world of the boxing southpaw was writ large.

Leonard and Tendler met for their first title bout in the summer of 1922. It was a rude introduction. Tendler crossed a left onto Leonard’s right eyebrow in the opening round and blood streamed. Leonard’s shellacked hair was a disaster area in no time at all, and his face resembled a child’s first finger-painting. Before it was over, he’d be missing teeth too.

The second round was Tendler’s.

The third round was Tendler’s.

By the fourth round Benny was wishing that boxing, like polo, would ban lefties from the sport altogether.

Eventually, inevitably, Leonard’s brilliance enabled him to start solving the painful puzzle before him. He began to find the range with lead rights –the foil for the backwards boxers, and started stepping around Tendler to force him to reset. Tendler, who also happened to be one of the greatest body-punchers in history, disrupted Leonard’s progress by sinking a deep left into his stomach. Ringsiders heard Leonard gasp.

The fifth round was Tendler’s.

He took the eighth round as well after landing a left to the head that made Leonard’s knees sag. Benny clinched, spun him, angled off, and threw shots as if he could still see straight. According to the New York Times, there was laughing afoot in the clinch. It was another indication that Leonard was a yiddisher kop; he was talking to the fierce man in front of him –cutting jokes and making remarks to convince Tendler of the lie that he wasn’t hurt. Ringside observers heard him talking to Tendler in the ninth round as well. He was bluffing to buy time.

As the bell clanged for round ten, Leonard smiled and those at ringside saw a gap where a front tooth had been earlier.

Most ringside scribes had the Ghetto Wizard very slightly ahead after twelve rounds, some saw it as a draw. It was a no-decision bout, which meant that Tendler had to knock the champion out to take the title. He didn’t. A relieved king with an uneasy crown admitted that even his royal boxing I.Q. was barely enough: “Southpaws are hard to solve,” he said, “I found difficulty in solving Tendler’s style from the outset.”

The rematch, held under the blue and white lights of Yankee Stadium on July 24th 1923, was a fifteen round title bout. Babe Ruth was among those cheering at ringside. He witnessed how great a slugger Leonard was, and watched him leave the ring with barely a mark on his face and get hoisted up onto shoulders in the crowd. “Tendler,” Leonard remarked after his most decisive victory over his most dangerous opponent, “is the greatest southpaw and one of the greatest lightweights I have ever seen.” The southpaw also had something to say. It was as sincere as the cut over his eye and the pulp of his nose:

“Benny,” he said, “is a master ring general.”

With that resounding in the ears of fight fans everywhere, the champion vacated his seven-year rule over a fearsome division, with a wink and a smile.

…The stone that Daniel Mendoza tossed into history’s pond generated a small army of great Jewish fighters in the opening stanzas of the twentieth century. Charley White and Lew Tendler were in those ranks. But it was Benny Leonard who ascended higher than them all, higher than just about any ring general who ever lived, ultimately reaching a place where the reflected brilliance of the Star of David shined upon him …and he upon it.

[IamInuit]

The Seventh God of War: Mickey Walker

By Springs Toledo



“It’s not the size of the dog in the fight, but the size of the fight in the dog.” ~ Mark Twain



Mickey Walker was born with a pug nose; “A throwback from the old breed of game,” said the legendary journalist Westbrook Pegler, “fighting Irish who fought for hours and days and weeks with anything at hand merely to see which was the better man.”

The man who called himself “Toy Bulldog” was all of twenty-one years old when he challenged Jack Britton for the world welterweight title at Madison Square Garden in 1922. The champion had been fighting professionally since Mickey was a four-year-old sporting a propeller on his cap. Five months earlier, Britton faced the “Ghetto Wizard” Benny Leonard and was in command when Leonard hit him when he was down and got disqualified. Against Mickey Walker, Britton barely won a round. He took a knee about six times and paid homage to conquering youth. Before the decision was even announced Britton knew he’d been beat and so walked over to the opposite corner to congratulate the new champion. “I wish you luck, boy,” he said.

The victor was smiling from ear to ear as if he had shamrocks in his socks. He usually did.

After four defenses of the world welterweight title, he jumped up two divisions to outclass light heavyweight champion Mike McTigue, and then bit off more than even a bulldog could chew when he faced middleweight champion Harry Greb six months later and lost a decision. Mickey withdrew back to the welterweight division and licked his wounds. Exactly six weeks after Greb was safely dead, he re-emerged and took the title from Tiger Flowers.

MICKEY 1, THE WORLD 0

The first time the Toy Bulldog met the Nebraska Wildcat Ace Hudkins was at Chicago’s Comiskey Park in the pouring rain. Walker took the judges’ decision; he did not, however, take the crowd’s decision. The more outspoken among them gave vent to their dissent by throwing bottles and shattering the arc lights overhead. Most of the boxing writers scrambling at ringside preferred the skill displayed by the judges’ pick, even if it was Hudkins who had forced the fight.

Ace Hudkins had been forcing fights almost from the moment he came out swinging from his mother’s womb. He was one of nine siblings from the wrong side of town. We all knew him –he was that kid with ill-fitting clothes and a chip the size of Gibraltar on his shoulder. Frank Roche of the Los Angeles Times met him at his training camp for the return match and said that Hudkins was the kind of man who could “chew iron and spit rust.” His pen trembled just a bit when Hudkins snarled at him, “You can put this down right now, I’ve ruined more fighters than any other guy in the ring today –any other guy in the ring today… nobody can lick me… Maybe Mickey Walker would like to read that.”

If Walker’s training camp up in the Ventura Hills was a delivery stop for the Times, we can be assured that the sports pages held up in his meaty paws were steady –barring a breeze.

Come fight time, those meaty paws steadily de-clawed the ripping, slashing brawler. Any lingering doubt about Mickey’s supremacy over all middleweights was banished for good when he took every round against Hudkins, save one scored even. The bulldog tamed the wildcat, took it for a walk, yanked its tail, booted it until it screeched, and showed it who’s boss. He did so less like a bulldog and more like a park ranger who set bait and sprung traps in every round. Hudkins’ relentless, devil-may-care attack was reduced to impotence this time. “Come on and fight! Come on!” Hudkins yelled between left hooks that cut his eye and tore his lips. Walker staggered Hudkins repeatedly, picking off his strenuous swings with ease and countering to the body and head with short, powerful shots. It was the worst beating Hudkins absorbed in 103 career bouts. After the final bell, Hudkins was a bloody mess as he lurched over to congratulate his conqueror.

After the fight, the fans went home and read the evening edition of the Times, which blared an alarm: “[Stock Market] Crash Severest Recorded in Modern History…Bottom Drops Out.” The date was October 29th 1929, Black Tuesday. The Great Depression had begun.

Feeling blue at the dawn of a new decade? Don’t. Eighty years ago your grandparents had it much worse. Breadlines stretched for blocks as the proud were humbled and the humble were hungry; speakeasies were full, and so weren’t the churches where mothers lit candles and men in suits sobbed in pews. Radio personality Will Rogers remarked that people had to stand in line to get a window to jump out of and speculators were selling space for bodies at the bottom of the East River. Everything in the country seemed to crash at once.

Poor Ace Hudkins teetered but did not himself crash to the canvas the night he faced a peaking Mickey Walker. He crashed later. His boxing career wound down quickly after 1929 and he became a roaring alcoholic. He was sued twice, once for fracturing the skull of a pedestrian and another after his live-in girlfriend accused him of assault; he was arrested no less than ten times for drunk driving and drunken brawls, including one with the police. In 1933, at the height of the Depression, his bank account was shot, and so wasn’t he –twice in the chest.

Meanwhile, Mickey Walker, who at fight’s end sported a pinkish hue on his cheeks from the moderate exercise, would become an artist.

Indeed, Walker’s prudence at Wrigley Field stood in stark contrast to both the feral fighting method of Hudkins and the panic that wrecked Wall Street. He’d need such prudence where he was going. Big investments bring big risks. Big purses do too. It’s nice to get rich but one must be careful when dealing with large sums… or large someones…

The bulldog got out of the yard and went charging into the land of the giants.

SNAPPING AT THE HEELS OF HISTORY

“When I got in the ring and got a look at him,” Mickey Walker recalled about Bearcat Wright, “I nearly fainted before I got out there to throw a punch.” Bearcat Wright was no little middleweight wildcat like Ace Hudkins. He was a big, bad, black heavyweight who stood over six feet tall and weighed a rock solid 210 lbs, by some reports he was over 250. He fought out of Omaha, Nebraska and held wins over faded legends Sam Langford and Jack Johnson. Mickey stood only 5’6 ½ with his shoes on and was outweighed by at least 42 lbs. When they stood facing each other at ring center, Bearcat looked liked he could pick him up like a favorite nephew and give him a kiss.

“It was my idea to fight the big guys,” Mickey said, “The big guys were slower.” In other words, after almost 125 bouts in twelve years, and just as youth and speed were beginning to fade with age, Mickey began fighting heavyweights as a matter of course …because they were easier.

Bearcat Wright took offense to that big idea, and he began his quarrel with Walker the way that every heavyweight should when little guys have aspirations –he went straight at him. A monstrous shot spilled Walker onto the canvas like a bucket of paint. But Walker not only got up, he carried the fight to his opponent from that moment on. Along the way he must have borrowed a ladder because it was Bearcat who went down in the second round. At the last bell, Mickey had the heavyweight cornered and was still snarling and snapping at the bell.

Mickey trotted fearlessly in his new yard. Sometimes so fearlessly he’d forget to be prudent. He’d blow off training, put on his glad rags, and hit the gin mills. On the eve of the Kentucky Derby in 1930 he was scheduled to fight heavyweight Paul Swiderski, but it was called off that afternoon. So off he went pub crawling with a few boxing writers (including Hype Igoe) and “really tied one on.” Negotiations went on without him and ended well. The fight was back on, but half the main event (i.e. Mickey Walker) wasn’t even found until 8pm. No coffee was black enough and no shower cold enough to sober him up before fight time. He wobbled down the aisle; half held up by his manager Doc Kearns and crawled into the ring. Sure, the dailies will tell you that Walker went down several times in round one, but there should be an asterisk attached. Swiderski had less to do with it than the bartenders around Louisville. In the first round, Walker was on one knee and when the count reached nine, the bell suddenly clanged. Kearns had grabbed a water bottle and reached over to hit the bell with thirty seconds still left in the round. An enraged Swiderski ran over and socked Walker in the nose. Bedlam broke out and cops flooded through the ropes. Dizzy Mickey thought he was in a street fight and started swinging at whomever –and popped Kearns on the jaw. The fighter had to drag his manager to the corner.

In the next round Walker was down again, and then the lights went out. It was strongly suspected that Kearns had hired someone to do it. After the delay, Walker went out to blast –and burp– his way to a decision win.

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Cont...

All told, Mickey whipped about sixteen big dogs –“big bums” he called them, including ranked contenders Johnny Risko (sixth) and King Levinsky (fourth). The biggest among them was Arthur De Kuh who was 6’3 and 223 lbs. The best among them, though far from the most popular –was number one contender Jack Sharkey.

22 July 1931, Ebbets Field. Westbrook Pegler watched as Mickey Walker walked confidently past press row and stepped into the ring to face Jack Sharkey. Pegler just sat there and shook his head, not only because of Walker’s age and size, but also because of his lifestyle: “During the last four or five years,” he wrote in the days before the bout, “Mickey has been a member of the night side, so, for one thing, there isn’t enough of him and, for another thing, what there is of him isn’t as good as it would have been if he had always gone to bed at 9 p.m.”

Pegler didn’t hide his cynicism under a spit bucket. “Naturally,” he quipped, “in promoting the prizefight, the shrewd thing to do is keep on suggesting this remote possibility [that Walker can win] until, by force of reiteration, it becomes a live, tingling hope.”

His lucid mind then drifted to horses:

“Often times, at a horse track, a party will bet more or less money on some poor weary steed at odds of 50 to 1 or some such figure and, just by wishing alone, will develop a beautiful picture of that horse winning the race by the time they go to the post. Then the horse jumps a few yards and sits down to bat a whisker of hay out of his ear with a hind foot and finishes nowhere at all, but the customer had the fun of hoping, anyway.”

…Evidently, Pegler didn’t take a trip to Orangeburg, New Jersey to watch Walker train. Now pushing thirty, Walker was in better shape than he’d been in for years. By the end of the first round Pegler’s eyebrows were askew. By the third round, he sat in silence with the rest of the scribes watching his elegant cynicism evaporate under the lights. Yesterday they were laughing behind typewriters, setting their own odds against Walker at 50-1. Today they sat with invisible dunce caps squinting at ring-wise brilliance while twenty-five thousand fans cheered behind them. The short ones stood on their chairs.

In the seventh, Pegler watched Walker come “swinging in under Sharkey’s cautious defensive works with the low roll of a vaudeville baboon on roller skates” and land a right that sent Sharkey stumbling backwards to the ropes. Mickey took a right flush on the chin in the eleventh but shook it off and landed an uppercut that sent Sharkey to the ropes again on rubber legs. For fifteen rounds, he treated giants the way that little guys should –with a persuasive prescription of overhands in combination and in close, where long arms get in the way and short arms rule the day.

Walker’s style was once compared to watching major surgery done with a boat oar. This was the observation of a neophyte who confused aggression with mindlessness. This performance spoke for itself. Mickey was as highly skilled as he was ferocious. He bobbed and weaved while the future heavyweight champion of the world missed and missed again “–in the manner of a man throwing shoes out a window at a singing tomcat,” wrote Pegler. “Walker blocked many of these blows, squatted under many others,” he added, “and soaked up some with a curious rolling away motion which eased the impact.” As the bells tolled and the rounds waned, Sharkey grew desperate.

He landed low blows. Mickey ignored them.

He put his hands up to protect his face. Mickey switched the attack to the body.

He stood straighter or leaned back to draw on his height advantage. Mickey jumped.

Sharkey, known for a high level of skill in a division never so acclaimed in that department, was facing a superior ring general hell-bent on exploding the stubborn myth that bigger means better.

After the bout, the humbled heavyweight was unusually gracious. Mickey Walker, he said, “is a great little fighter and don’t let anyone tell you he can’t hurt.” Walker was still chomping at the bit. “I could fight fifteen more like it right now,” he said as his eyes twinkled over a contagious smile, “I thought I won all right but that don’t matter.” The official result of the bout was a draw, but it was Walker who gave Sharkey a “pretty thorough licking” outscoring him “by the difference between fifteen dollars and fifteen cents”; so said the scribe who compared Mickey to a poor weary steed only the week before.

Westbrook Pegler may not have realized it yet, but he had just witnessed Mickey Walker’s greatest performance; and the assumption here is that Pegler promptly became an enthusiastic convert to the cause of short people, fighting Irish, and long odds.

The next afternoon he was almost certainly spotted ten miles west, jumping up and down at Jamaica Racetrack… where he lost his shirt.

[IamInuit]

The Sixth God of War: Archie Moore

By Springs Toledo





“Time is a strange brew.”
~ Archie Moore

Archie Moore may have needed smelling salts to revive him after hearing that he was finally getting a crack at the light heavyweight title after 160 professional bouts. He was lucky he didn’t break his hip when he fell. The “Old Mongoose” turned thirty-six years old four days before he stepped into the ring against champion Joey Maxim during the Yuletide season of 1952.

Moore was aging all right, but he was an aging puncher, and that meant something. His legs were stuck in cement, which only made it easier to plant his feet and launch the dynamite in his fists. Do you remember your grandfather’s vice-grip of a handshake? Men get stronger as they age.

Moore was always a powerful fighter and partially because of that, an avoided fighter. He had been ranked as a middleweight from 1940 through 1944 and ranked as a light heavyweight for the next eight years. Two of his most dangerous opponents had already retired by the time he fought Maxim: Charley Burley in 1950 and Eddie Booker in 1944. Neither of them was able to get a world title shot and all three had to take jobs outside of boxing at one time or another: Burley at an aircraft plant, Booker as a red cap porter, and Moore as a night watchman. “I am often asked why, when both Burley and Booker beat me, neither one got to the top whereas I did,” the introspective Moore said, “Well, I guess it’s the way I sized things up. I felt I had two opponents –other boxers and Father Time.” Discouragement, he said, “can KO a boxer even before he has a chance to step into the ring.”

Moore may have had a main event against Father Time, but he never forgot those preliminary brawls early in his career. After a three month, seven fight jaunt in Australia in 1940 he dropped anchor in California at the age of twenty-three and joined the round-robin ranks of other great black boxers then campaigning on the west coast. Moore and the set remembered as ‘Murderers’ Row’ fought among themselves like lions for peanuts not far enough from the San Diego Zoo. All told, Archie Moore, Charley Burley, Eddie Booker, Jack Chase, Lloyd Marshall, Tiger Wade, Bert Lytell, as well as Holman Williams and Cocoa Kid fought each other 79 times. Archie’s record against them was 10-5-3 with 4 knockouts, which was about as good as it got.

Those internecine wars furnished each of them with a wealth of experience but their purses weren’t even enough to furnish a house …and they opened no doors.

A frustrated Charley Burley hung up the gloves and took a job as a garbage man for the city of Pittsburgh. Eddie Booker retired after an eye injury got progressively worse. Bert Lytell had his last fight when he was just twenty-seven years old. In 1951 he was at Grossinger’s gym in New York sparring with world middleweight champion Randy Turpin before Turpin’s rematch with Sugar Ray Robinson. Jack Chase, Lloyd Marshall, Holman Williams, Tiger Wade, and Cocoa Kid retired in their mid-30s due to fading skills, a devastating loss, or both.

Bitterness was a contagion for ignored fighters like the Mongoose and Murderers’ Row. Perhaps Moore’s greatest triumph was an emotional one. He had developed ulcers that ruptured the day after a brutal bout with Booker and landed him in the hospital for thirty-eight days. He was close to death. After self-diagnosing the spiritual causes of his ailment, he picked up a mirror and saw a face etched with tension. It was the face of millions of African American men seething under the surface, held down by invisible chains. Moore found that he was holding on to negative feelings in his heart and it had done a number not only on his health, but on his character. He wrote his own prescription for healing remedies that predated the New Age movement by three decades –he listened to jazz, learned to take therapeutic naps, mastered his pseudo-scientific theories of “breathology,” “escapism,” and “relaxism” and overcame what ailed him.

It was an achievement that stands as a monument to inspire us all. Moore went deep into an internal cave and battled the dragons lurking in his own humanity. What emerged was a philosopher-king who took hold of a grand mission and slung it on his back. He would not only honor an old promise made to his aunt to refrain from drinking, smoking, or “doing anything shameful in the ring,” he also made a new one to himself. Before George Foreman was even born, Archie Moore would ignore time and its creaking warnings and force his way through the gates of a kingdom that was rightfully his.

“I know I can beat Maxim,” he told reporters, “I always did believe I could beat him.”

A.J. Liebling agreed. Moore reminded him of “a supreme exponent of bel canto who sees himself crowded out of the opera house by a guy who can only shout.” The perennial top contender took matters into his own hands and began writing letters to sports editors all over the country. “I pleaded, I cursed,” he remembered, “I demanded a shot at Maxim's crown.” Joey Maxim’s manager was the go-to man and it just so happened that Maxim’s manager was Doc Kearns, the same Doc Kearns who once managed Jack Dempsey and Mickey “Toy Bulldog” Walker. By this time Kearns had snow on the roof, but his greediness was evergreen; he finally yielded and allowed a title shot but only after he received a guaranteed purse of $100,000 for Maxim. Moore signed, even though his end turned out to be a measly $800.

Most fight fans knew what was what and who was who and the odds reflected that –twelve to five against the champion. Losing was unthinkable for Moore, who remembered well the trials of Charley Burley. “I’ve been waiting a long time,” he said with quiet intensity, “I’ve got to win.”

He had another reason to win, another motivation that fluttered deep inside of him. He took the time to make arrangements for his divorced parents to sit ringside at the arena in St. Louis. A man who banishes bitterness from his heart does funny things, and this man forgave them for sending him away to his aunt and uncle when he was barely a year old. “I just wanted my father and my mother to see me win the title, together,” he told Sports Illustrated in 1989. “I wanted to look down on them, next to each other, at that moment. And I did.”

Moore then turned his attention to the king on his throne, on his throne.

The bell rang. In a few minutes it became clear that it was ringing for one and tolling for the other. A right hand dented Maxim’s square jaw in the first round and he forced a clinch. Maxim, born Giuseppe Antonio Berardinelli, had a repeating left jab that recalled a Maxim machine gun; thus the name. As the all-time knockout leader (Moore had at least 131 career KOs) applied his hardware and demonstrated superior technical know-how, Maxim’s own considerable skills were neutralized and his jab shot blanks. After the seventh the champion was hurt in every round. “Time and again,” said the Associated Press, “Moore unleashed the full fury of almost a decade of frustration as the ‘uncrowned champion.’”

Kearns may have finagled a $100,000 retirement fund for the inevitable dethronement of his boy, but some of those funds had to be earmarked for medical bills. Joey Maxim was gashed and swollen when his crown fell off. Moore caught that crown with nimble hands. His manager attempted to lift him in the air to celebrate but Moore would have none of it. “Just slip my robe on my shoulders,” he ordered, “There's nothing to get excited about. I could've won this thing 12 years ago if I'd had the chance.”

Only minutes after his victory, the new old champion announced his intentions. “I’m going to put some life in the division. Any contender who deserves a chance will get it.” And the Old Mongoose was every bit as good as his word. His predecessors’ sins of avoidance were spotlighted by Moore who faced all-comers including Maxim, twice.

With this remarkable victory, Moore was escorted out of what he called “the murky twilight” and into the radiance of fame and celebrity. It was long overdue. The charismatic light heavyweight king was interviewed often and would not allow the public to forget the names of those fierce, forgotten men he faced in his youth. He would tip his crown to them and his humanity shined when he did.

It is poignant when you think about it. But for his longevity and acute single-mindedness, the name ‘Archie Moore’ would surely have been added by history to the ranks of Murderers’ Row –as another great coulda’ been. Instead, he became the unlikeliest of destiny’s children, an old man spanking top contenders for the sheer fun of it.

[IamInuit]

Cont...

Late wars followed his ascension to the purple, including the street fight against Yvon Durelle and memorable campaigns in the heavyweight division against Rocky Marciano and Muhammad Ali. The names on Moore’s resume read like graffiti at the Roman Pantheon. One of those names was Jimmy Bivins whom he had beaten three times. When asked who was the greatest of the eleven world champions he faced, Bivins told The Ring, “the one guy who stands out –and he stands out in everyone’s mind –is Archie Moore. I thought he was the greatest fighter in the world. He could punch and he could box. But he could really punch. He wasn’t afraid of nobody.”

Archie came out of boxing’s golden era, when men fought more often for less money and the working conditions were more hazardous than they are today, to say the least. He managed to defeat world-class middleweights, light heavyweights, and heavyweights, though he was essentially only a natural middleweight with a paunch. He overcame six Hall of Famers. The record should read seven; a prime Willie Pastrano escaped with a hotly disputed draw after Archie chased him around the ring on forty-five year old legs. That was in 1962. Archie had his first professional fight in 1935.

Many civilians cannot understand why anyone would choose Archie’s profession for a living, and even fighters themselves would be hard-pressed to explain how a man could fight 220 times over twenty-eight years. Placing one’s health and wellbeing at such risk so often for so long seems to be utter folly, if not madness. Moore was an exception that proved the rule. He was the antique that out-performed newer models, a well-mannered eccentric who would show up at weigh-ins resplendent in a top hat and tuxedo, twirling a walking stick. At times he’d step onto the scale buck naked. And even had he been a bit mad, there was a touch of genius in it –the old man’s showmanship compounded the staggering skillfulness of his craft and boosted box-office receipts.

In the end, Archie Moore’s motivation was neither madness nor money.

It was love.

“Boxing is magnificent,” he told a journalist late in life, his eyes softening with affection. “It’s beautiful to know. Oh, the price can be very dear. You’ve got to marry it. And so I did. Boxing was my lover. It was my lady.”