The GODS OF WAR

[IamInuit]

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.

In May, when he fought the feared and avoided Charley Burley (51-5) in Pittsburgh, he had to short-change training to cram for his final examinations.

Burley was installed as a 10-8 favorite.

Ezzard outpunched him.

New York City was abuzz about the defeat of Burley and the name of his conqueror was spoken with reverence in the hallowed halls of Stillman’s gym. As for the conqueror, Ezzard hurried back home to Cincinnati in time to graduate with his class. He also got his car keys back. His grandmother had taken them away for two weeks after Ezzard, one of the most dangerous fighters alive –missed his curfew. With grandma smiling again, the proud high school graduate hopped a train back to Pennsylvania to prove that the win over Charley Burley was no fluke.

The return bout was even money.

Ezzard outboxed him.

No man alive had defeated Burley twice in a row. Ezzard did it with a combination of power shots off the front foot and sheer ability off the back foot. Even Arcel was in awe. Those two victories, he said, were “the first time I realized Charles was a great boxer.” His next four victories were almost as impressive and launched him into serious contention for both the middleweight and light heavyweight crowns. Four straight knockouts of serious fighters (three of whom were never counted out in a combined total of 92 fights) were tough to ignore. It was the summer of ’42, Ezzard Charles had come of age, and managers were hiding under their hats. It took fellow-great Jimmy Bivins to alleviate anxieties with a decision win; and then Lloyd Marshall cooled him off with an eighth round stoppage.

Within two years the “School Boy” would evolve into “The Cincinnati Cobra” and strike through his natural habitat like no one ever had before or probably ever will again. Atop the heap of casualties was a mongoose: Archie Moore could neither outslug nor outwit this cobra despite three desperate tries. Ezzard also avenged his losses to Jimmy Bivins (four times) and Lloyd Marshall (twice, by knockout).

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Cont...

In a ten year span he faced down a platoon of ring generals in three divisions eighteen times, and then dethroned an idol whose color photograph was tacked to his bedroom wall –Joe Louis. The newspapers were forced to finally acknowledge something insiders always knew, that Ezzard Charles was a “much better fighter than the world had thought he was.” And that wasn’t all. When Ezzard won a decision over Louis, he became universally recognized as the linear heavyweight champion. It was September 27th 1950.

Sixty-five-year-old Maude Foster’s phone rang that night. On the other end was Ezzard:

“Grandma, I won it for you and the Lord.”

“God made you a champion,” she said, “and don’t forget to thank Him out loud.”

He didn’t forget.

DAYS OF GRACE
As his undiagnosed debilitation began to cripple him a few years later, Ezzard Charles’ win-loss ratio tilted sharply for the worse. His last professional bout was in the summer of 1959, the very summer that Lou Stillman closed up his legendary gym on Eighth Avenue.

Citizen Ezzard’s decline only continued. Within two years he had no job, no telephone, and a house that was about to be foreclosed. His garage was empty after he sold his cars to buy food for his family. He managed to get a job working with disadvantaged youth for Mayor Daley’s Youth Foundation in Chicago; though after 1967 he couldn’t even walk the block from his house to get there because the disease had begun to stiffen his legs. It was only the beginning. Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis is a neuromuscular disease that affects the brain’s ability to send messages to muscles, including those used for respiration. Half of ALS patients die within 18 months of diagnosis. There is no known cure.

“Oh, it’s tough all right,” Ezzard said as his health trials began, “not being able to walk like I used to or talk so well. It’s a feeling you sort of have, of being all by yourself. That no one can help you.”

Ironies abounded. His doctors told him that boxing may have actually benefitted his health by delaying the progression of a disease that had begun to develop in his childhood. Long after his days of war, Ezzard found himself doing sit-ups and struggling again with the existential loneliness of a man who fights alone. Only now the sit-ups were an agonizing part of physical therapy, and the garish lights of the arena were turned off.

A police officer and friend named John McManus turned those lights back on.

With the help of Joe Kellman and Ben Bentley he organized an event to raise money and defray the mounting medical bills of the ex-champion. “The Ezzard Charles Appreciation Night” was held on November 13th 1968 in the Grand Ballroom of Chicago’s Sherman Hotel. For $15 the guests were treated to a sit-down dinner and fight films that they themselves could request through the Chicago Daily Tribune. Many bent noses were in the crowd of 1300 –several of them bent by the guest of honor. Rocky Marciano, whose nose he split into a canyon, was a featured speaker. “I never met a man like Ez in my life,” he said as he turned and looked into the eyes of his old foe, “Ez, you fought me about the very best of anybody. I couldn’t put you down and I don’t believe anybody can put you down. You’ve got more spirit than any man I ever knew.”

It was a glorious night. The benefit would raise about $15,000 for Ezzard. It was almost the same amount to the dollar that Ezzard raised for the Baroudi family after that tragedy twenty years earlier.

Boxing made a triumphant return into Ezzard’s life and like a good corner man in a tough fight, it gave him a lift off the stool.

His stool was a wheelchair now. As he struggled to stand up at the podium, Marciano and Archie Moore rushed to his side and lifted him to his feet. “This is the greatest thing that’s ever happened to me,” he could only whisper, “I just want to say ….thank you. Thank you...”

Eventually the disease silenced him. Then it paralyzed him. He lay on his back for fifteen months in the Veteran’s Administration Hospital as his body wasted away. He had his memories; Grand memories that only former fighters are privileged to have, other memories that only the cursed among them must endure. Less than a mile north was Chicago Stadium, where the image of Sam Baroudi collapsed again and again.

As leaves fell to the ground outside the window during the last autumn of his life, the man whose photograph once hung on his wall appeared at the door of room B-804. Joe Louis stood for a moment, and then walked over to the bed. “I could lick you now, champ,” he said gently, “…I could lick you now.”

Ezzard Charles smiled. The radiance of it filled the room.

[IamInuit]

The Third God of War: Henry Armstrong

By Springs Toledo




“Batten down the hatches…!”
~ Chambers Journal, 1883


Henry Armstrong’s grandmother was a slave in Mississippi. She was owned by his Irish grandfather whose eyes twinkled at the sight of her. Their son grew up and married a woman who was half-Cherokee. Her name was “America.” The couple had fifteen children. The eleventh, Henry, inherited his father’s short stature and his mother’s strength and work ethic.

The family moved to St. Louis when he was still a small child. At sixteen years old, he put on his father’s cap and overalls and walked down to the Missouri-Pacific Railroad and got a job –driving spikes with a sledgehammer like John Henry. One day a fateful gust of wind carried a discarded newspaper to his feet: “KID CHOCOLATE EARNS $75,000 FOR HALF HOUR’S WORK,” the headline declared. He quit the job, ran home, and told his grandmother that he was fixing to be a champion of the world. She looked him up and down and said “you ain’t no Jack Johnson!”

And she was right. The kid with the baggy overalls and a hammer in his hand would become something else, something greater than Jack Johnson.

Henry Armstrong would become a force of nature in the boxing ring. Like those boll weevils that came up and under his family’s crops back on the plantation, he’d come up and under his opponent’s guard and do to ribs what those critters did to crops. Like the Tombigbee River that overran its banks and killed their cattle, he’d flood his opponent. Press row would watch his relentless attack and compared it to a hurricane…

It began as a tempest in a teapot in 1931, when the underfed teenager lost three out of his first four professional fights. Over the next five years he fought seven draws and suffered eight more setbacks, but stronger frames were getting knocked over. Quite suddenly his elements converged with swirling momentum, and the forecast turned severe for anyone in his path. Between January 1937 and October 1940, Armstrong posted 59 wins, 1 heavily disputed loss, 1 heavily disputed draw, and 51 knockouts. In only three years and ten months, Armstrong fought 61 times. That’s exactly how many fights Muhammad Ali had over the length of his career; and they weren’t scale versions of “bums of the month” either –his blows had multiple contenders and seven Hall of Famers spinning sideways in the ring.

Armstrong reached peak intensity the same year that one of the most powerful natural events in recorded history slammed into the east coast of the United States.

The Great Hurricane of 1938 made landfall on September 21st and cut a swath through Long Island, New York, and New England. Only a junior forecaster saw it coming, but his frantic relay was slapped down by his superiors at the U.S. Weather Bureau who wrongly expected the storm system to continue on a seaward path. So there was no notice, no preparation. It hit Long Island at a record speed and changed the landscape of the south coast forever. Over the next three days, the Blue Hills Conservatory in Massachusetts measured peak gusts at 186 mph and 50 foot waves crashed into the Gloucester shoreline. By the time it was over and the statistics were computed, seven hundred people had died, 63,000 were left homeless, and 2 billion trees were uprooted.

“Hurricane Henry” cut another kind of swath –through three weight divisions. His three managers, the famous Al Jolson, film noir actor George Raft, and Eddie Mead, came up with an idea to pilot him toward three crowns. In an era where boxing recognized only eight kings, toppling three of them would be an unparalleled feat …if he could do it.

This is what it would take, they told Henry, to compete with the rampaging Joe Louis in a depressed market. “It sounds pretty good to me,” he replied.

THE WORLD FEATHERWEIGHT TITLE, 29 October 1937
Petey Sarron had been a professional for a dozen years and looked it, wrote Paul Mickelson, “his eyes are cut, his ears are hard and flat, and he’s broken his left hand three times, his right once.” He also happened to be the National Boxing Association featherweight champion, and in his prime at twenty-nine.

Madison Square Garden’s 1937-1938 boxing season opened with Sarron matched up against the twenty-four-year-old Armstrong for recognition as the world featherweight champion. Sarron trained at Pioneer’s gym in Manhattan while Armstrong trained at Stillman’s gym, which may partly explain the 2½ to 1 odds favoring the challenger –that or the fact that he was on a fifteen fight knockout streak. “This talk don’t scare me,” Sarron said, “I’m used to it. I found out in America, Africa, and Europe that nobody can beat me at 126 pounds.” Sarron was confident that Armstrong would fade. He reminded all and sundry that while he himself had gone fifteen rounds fifteen times, the challenger never had. “Armstrong isn’t fighting a punk this time,” he said.

The veteran may have been expected to let youthful joie de vivre sap itself and then take over, but he defied that idea and waded boldly in to meet Armstrong on his own terms. He even managed to outland him with left hooks in the first round. He won the next few as well by inviting Armstrong to open up and then countering him. Armstrong made the mistake of trying too hard against a man who knew too much –he got stars in his eyes, went for a spectacular knockout, and got stars in his eyes. His wound-up shots breezed by the moving target although when they did happen to connect, they hurt. Before long, Sarron’s ribs began rattling like wind chimes under the blustering body attack, and by the fifth round his shutters were blown open. Armstrong mercilessly lashed him in a corner until the bell rang.

A heavy right landed downstairs to begin the sixth and Sarron faced another surge. “Recovering somewhat,” The New York Times reported, “Sarron jumped at Armstrong and traded willingly with him.” His pride only preceded his fall. Armstrong shot a left to the body and then launched an overhand right that crashed on the champion’s jaw. Sarron “slumped to his knees and elbows” as if looking for a storm cellar under the ring, and was counted out.

Petey Sarron fought a total of 151 times. The record indicates that he was stopped only once. Armstrong called the signature shot that did it “the blackout.”

THE WORLD WELTERWEIGHT TITLE, 31 May 1938
Armstrong’s managers intended to take the three world championship belts in an orderly fashion, but Al Weill, manager of the lightweight champion Lou Ambers, asked for a rain check. Welterweight king Barney Ross wasn’t about to give up a payday because of stormy weather.

With a record of 72-3-3, Ross was an established master-boxer who, like Sarron, was never stopped. Born in New York City’s lower East Side, he stood second only to Benny Leonard among the celebrated Jewish champions who reigned from the 1910s through the 1930s and virtually disappeared after that. Barney Ross (nee Barnet David Rasofsky) was the last of the great ones.

As a welterweight, he had not lost since the “Irish Lullaby” Jimmy McLarnin defeated him in 1934 –and Ross beat him before that bout and again after it. By the time he signed to face Armstrong, ennui had settled in because of the lack of challenges. He’d sneak tokes of a Chesterfield in the rubdown room and swig straight vodka at night after training. Not this time. Ross’s best fighting weight was 142 lbs and that was precisely what the scale said at the weigh-in. It was also the contractual limit for this match.

Armstrong was having problems with the scale; simply put, he was no welterweight. In a sport where boxers ritualistically dried out, weighed in on the day of the fight, and then gorged at supper, Henry hurried to the scale with a belly full of water and beer, weighed in at only 133 lbs, and made off for the nearest toilet.

The vast Jewish contingent in New York bet heavily on Ross, who entered the ring as a 7 to 5 favorite. The fistic fraternity was polled and Ross was favored by Jew and Gentile alike, 50-36, to outbox the smaller man.

Every radio in the lower East Side was blaring as Barney Ross glided out of his corner at the opening bell. Working behind a varying jab and boxing at angles, Ross’s eyes were wide open in the early rounds as he strained to measure the bobbing and weaving whirlwind. Armstrong’s body attack was withering –he turned his fist around, crashed it into the champion’s ribs, and mixed it with left hooks and overhand rights. Ross’s strategy was to step inside the eye of the storm –inside the looping shots, and shift Armstrong off balance. The strategy was masterfully executed and Ross can be seen on film pivoting and turning Armstrong, but two problems soon became painfully clear.

[IamInuit]

Cont...

First, Ross assumed that his superior size would matter. It didn’t. The second was a question of pace. Henry could keep a hellish pace indefinitely. Barney could not. By round seven, the featherweight champion was overpowering the welterweight champion. Ross was still throwing that right uppercut-left hook combination, but he was wavering like a weather vane in November.

It has become a convention among boxing historians to accede that the twenty-eight year old Ross got old in that bout, that he could no longer move as lively as he once did. That claim ignores what the film confirms –Armstrong’s physical strength and pressure wore Ross out, just like it did Sarron. By the end of the tenth round, Barney Ross was in big trouble.

Only his heart and Armstrong’s favor allowed him to finish on his feet. Late in the fight, arguments abounded in both corners. Ross’s chief second had the towel in hand and was ready to throw it in when Ross warned “–don’t do it. I’m not quitting.” The referee came over and Barney had to make a promise to alleviate the official’s conscience. “Let me finish like a champion,” he said, “and I promise I’ll never fight again.” In the other corner Armstrong wanted to knock him out. “I don’t want to crucify him,” he said, “I don’t want to hurt him no more.”

Armstrong would later claim that his seconds had gotten a signal to carry Barney for the last four rounds, and that the two champions had a conversation during a clinch that went something like this:

Armstrong: “How you feel, Barney?”
Ross: “I’m dead.”
Armstrong: “Jab and run, and I’ll make it look good.”

As the last bell clanged, Barney embraced Henry. “You’re the greatest,” he said. Close to it… Armstrong emerged from a battle against one of the finest boxers of the Golden Era with nothing more than a bruised knuckle.

THE WORLD LIGHTWEIGHT TITLE, 17 August 1938
New York’s own Lou Ambers was as tough as old boots. Known as the “Herkimer Hurricane,” he was a trainer’s dream, sighed Whitey Bimstein, because the closest thing he had to a vice was going to the movies. Ambers was also a supremely skilled in-fighter whose pride still swelled his chest decades later, “Oh Jesus,” he said in retirement, “I loved to fight.”

Ringside seats for the Ambers-Armstrong title fight at Madison Square Garden cost $16.50, same-day admission was $1.15, and soon eighteen thousand were fidgeting in the seats. A collision of two hurricanes was imminent. Would Armstrong emerge with three simultaneous crowns? The odds said 3 to 1 that he would.

Al Jolson plunked down a grand that said Ambers wouldn’t even see fifteen rounds. But Ambers was ready. “I’ll cut up Henry Armstrong so badly,” he predicted, “the referee will have to stop the fight.” Reporters chewed on their pencils at this. “Don’t worry about me,” he snapped, “wait until we’ve gone 15 rounds and then ask Armstrong how he liked it.”

The two champions were standing toe-to-toe and slugging it out for a full minute by round two as the crowd screamed and hats flew. Ambers clinched effectively inside and landed sneak shots, but it was Armstrong who caught him pulling back in the fifth round with a long right. Ambers tumbled down. The referee counted to three when the bell rang and his corner men rushed out to revive him. In the next round, Armstrong threw combinations that didn’t end. Down went Ambers again.

He took an eight count but nodded to his chief second, who by now had the spit bucket over his head.

Then Ambers found an answer; as Armstrong bent forward and barreled in, he stood his ground and shot uppercuts one after another. Armstrong hurled punches low and the referee penalized him four rounds while Ambers knocked his mouthpiece out twice and severely split his lip. It was a war. In the fourteenth, Armstrong landed a right and Ambers reeled across the ring like a drunk chasing his hat, but he wouldn’t go down again.

Armstrong said it as the “bloodiest fight I ever had in my life.” The canvas, according to Henry McLemore in press row, “resembled a gigantic butcher’s apron” and the fight was almost stopped. “I’m not going to bleed no more,” he promised the referee, and then spat out his mouthpiece and got back to work. He ended up swallowing about a pint of his own blood along with the iodine and collodion used to congeal the cut in his mouth. Delirium set in sometime in round fifteen.

In Lou Amber’s dressing room, McLemore suspected that the fighter’s screws were punched loose. Lou sat naked, covered with welts, his eye an egg, croaking the old favorite “I Want a Girl Just Like the Girl That Married Dear Old Dad” –and talking ragtime. Swaying to and fro, he was still ducking overhands that weren’t coming anymore. “Whoop-a-doopy!” he said as McLemore made tracks for the other dressing room. Armstrong couldn’t even remember the fifteenth round. His handlers would tell him later how they had to peel him off of Ambers. A strange calm swept over him as he sat nursing a swollen left eye, five cuts over both eyes, and a mangled lip that would take fifteen stitches. Flashbulbs exploded in his face.

Hurricane Henry had reached his peak –the fistic equivalent of a category five. After storming three divisions and dethroning three champions in less than a year, the man was spent …and the boxing landscape would never be the same.

On 52nd Street the next morning, yellow cabs honk their discontent and clusters of pedestrians bustle to work outside Madison Square Garden. A gust carries a newspaper through space and time, sailing, swirling until it lands at the feet of a tall and rangy teenager in Central Park. “TRIPLE CHAMPION!” he reads, and his eyes flash with ambition. He finishes stretching and starts running down the winding bicycle path, against the wind.

[IamInuit]

The Second God Of War: Sugar Ray Robinson

By Springs Toledo




A junk wagon pulled by a clopping nag lurches down 110th street in New York City. Beside it walks a peddler whistling a Cab Calloway tune, his eyes jaundice yellow. In the distance a bouncing figure approaches out of Central Park. It is a young man about seventeen, boxing shadows in steady stride. He stalls and skips in place, shoulders hunched, chin down, and lets fly a shoe shine combination that ends with lightning left hooks. Spinning off the last of them he runs on into Harlem, into the morning sun.

In the afternoon, he heads over to Grupp’s gym on 116th street. Old-time fighters loiter there, bound together by an uncommon past –“All they did was talk boxing,” he would remember, “and all I did was listen.” Harry Wills would teach him balance, Soldier Jones the difference a good jab can make. Among them is William Ward, who fought under a name dreaded in the 1920s –Kid Norfolk. Ward regales him with war stories about the blood-spattered men of a bygone era.

The phenomenon that would become Sugar Ray Robinson began at the feet of masters, and was forged from the inside out. The future was his.

YEAR ONE~
He still had jumpy legs after his professional debut on the undercard of the Henry Armstrong-Fritzie Zivic title fight at Madison Square Garden. Showering quickly, he hurried upstairs from the dressing room to see his idol make the twentieth defense of the world welterweight title. What he saw he never forgot. Armstrong, the Triple Champion the press was calling invincible, was bludgeoned, jabbed blind, and cracked with short shots until he had nothing left but courage. Zivic was ruthless. “I pulled my trunks up and went to work on him,” he recounted, “I busted him up, cut him here and cut him there…when the eye was cut, I’d rub it with the laces to open it a little more.”

In the cab ride home to Harlem, the young lightweight had vengeance on his mind. “Mom,” he said “I want to fight Zivic. I’ll fix him for the way he beat Armstrong.” His mother was having none of it –“Junior, I don’t want you ever to fight Zivic.”

Four days later, Junior was in Georgia to add a second round technical knock out to his budding record, and after that he had matches in Philadelphia, Detroit, New Jersey, and Washington DC as often as three times a month. His opposition was unusually tough. His fifth opponent as a professional was Norment Quarles, a one-time protégé of Jack Dempsey. Quarles had faced several champions in 108 professional bouts –yet couldn’t finish half the eight scheduled rounds against this prodigy. Four days after that he was back at the Garden handing Oliver White his first stoppage loss in 50 fights.

It is said that in Philadelphia even the winos know how to hook off a jab. Robinson was already good enough to flatten Philly fighters like they were barley in a field or grapes in a press. Jimmy Tygh, an aggressive lightweight who had never been stopped in 60 bouts was stopped twice –once cleanly and once after falling down five times. Mike Evan’s career was in recovery when a left hook left him in a stupor in June 1941.

Robinson was back in Philadelphia in July to risk his 20-0 record against a seasoned veteran with 80 fights, the National Boxing Association world lightweight champion Sammy “The Clutch” Angott.

It should not have been so easy.

Robinson was expected to be overmatched in close against a man with the fighting style of a squid, but he soon found answers. In the second round he sprang back and threw a looping right hand that parked on Angott’s chin. Down he went. His eyelids fluttered for six seconds before he got to his knees and then his feet as the count reached nine. Robinson said that the only reason Angott woke up was because his head was near the time-keeper’s hammer as it pounded on the ring apron. Angott had some success with left hooks to the body, but the long range blasts were too much and he lost a wide decision.

Many were now convinced that the victor, who had just turned twenty, was already the best fighter in the world. And despite his being acknowledged as the next logical challenger for Lew Jenkins’ lightweight crown, it was Angott who got the title shot, and the title.

With an uneasy crown atop his head, “The Clutch” whipped two top contenders and then got whipped himself in another non-title bout against Robinson. Angott tried again a few years later, and got whipped again.

By September 1941, the boxer the scribes were calling Ray “Sugar” Robinson faced U.S. sailor Marty Servo, who was undefeated in 44 fights. Like Angott, Servo was the boss on the inside, but Robinson slid back and lit him up at range. To the delight of the Philadelphia crowd, Servo fought as if Robinson was an English king and he a cranky colonist. Like the Liberty Bell Servo’s head was rung (though unlike that national treasure, it never cracked) and his revolution was thwarted.

On Halloween night, speed and talent glided into the ring at Madison Square Garden to confront a diabolical 142 fight veteran. The chance to beat the conqueror of Henry Armstrong had arrived.

No pundit worth his weight in smelling salts would have confused Fritzie Zivic’s style with artistry, while Robinson’s fights were already being compared to recitals. Barney Nagler quipped that he “boxed as though he were playing the violin.”

If he had a violin, Zivic would have snatched it and broken it across his knees.

To boxing historians, the mere mention of Fritzie’s name conjures up a rag-bag of felonious tricks. “I’d give ‘em the head, choke ‘em, hit ‘em in the balls… I used to bang ‘em up pretty good,” Zivic proudly conceded, “You’re fighting, you’re not playing the piano you know.”

In the first round, he scraped the inside of his gloves so hard against Robinson’s face that the laces felt like “steel wool.” He also had a way of uncannily forcing his opponent to head butt himself by looping his lead hand around the back of the neck in a clinch and jamming his opponent’s head into the top of his own. Then he’d looked to the referee with an unconvincing plea in his eyes. Robinson couldn’t believe what was happening. At the end of the round, he flopped on the stool in his corner. George Gainford splashed him with a sponge and said “don’t let him get close –keep him away with the jab.” He did as he was told and things got easier. Fritzie was impressed: “Everything I done, he done better” –everything legal that is.

Not only did Robinson avenge his idol, he began to outshine him. Henry Armstrong was fading while Robinson’s learning curve became a straight line pointing to heaven. “Year One” saw 26 victories, including the defeat of a world lightweight champion, an undefeated future world welterweight champion, and a former world welterweight champion. Two of them were Hall of Famers in their prime. Robinson wasn’t yet near his, but he didn’t have to be.
…
By the close of the decade, he would ascend to the welterweight throne. Jimmy Doyle would die at his hands, and traumatized, he would never again ignore his instincts or listen to anyone who disagreed with him. To insiders and former friends he became a prima donna, out of reach and obsessed by self-interest. More than a few hated his guts, though none could deny the greatness of a fighter whose record soared to a breathtaking 128-1-2 with 84 knockouts.

Sugar Ray Robinson is usually remembered today for winning the world middleweight title five times, but that accomplishment isn’t half the story. What prevented him from taking Joey Maxim’s world light heavyweight title on a blistering summer day in 1952 was nothing human. With an insurmountable lead on the scorecards after thirteen rounds, he collapsed with heat stroke. “God wanted me to lose!” a delirious Robinson declared in the dressing room at Yankee Stadium, “God beat me!” The truth wasn’t far off.

Had circumstances –boxing politics and the weather, been different, might he have been the first and only fighter in history to win the lightweight, welterweight, middleweight, and light heavyweight world titles? The answer is clear enough to force a startling conclusion.

Despite all his accolades, the man born Walker Smith Jr. is even greater than we know.

[IamInuit]

Cont...


~YEAR TWENTY-FIVE
“Whom Fortune wishes to destroy,” Publilius wrote, “she first makes mad.” At forty-four years old, Sugar Ray Robinson had his 200th professional bout. “I am telling you I am going to win the title again,” he insisted. He planned to do it the old-fashioned way, by challenging a top middleweight contender in fourth-ranked Joey Archer.

The books had Robinson a 2 to 1 underdog against Archer for the Pittsburgh bout. It was his fourteenth fight in 1965, four of which he had lost. Nat Fleischer said what is always said at the end of a boxer’s professional life: “His legs are gone.” Once rivaling fellow Harlemite “Bojangles” Robinson, those gams still looked good, even if they were about as light and lively as the winter blues. That aura of beautiful danger surrounded him as he ascended into the ring, conked and svelte like the days of old …but Robinson knew better.

Aging ex-champions always know, even when they lie to themselves, or go mad with delusions. Grandeur seems to dangle over their graying heads like a star on a string, but they can’t jump anymore to reach it, and their gloves, like arthritic hands, can no longer hold it. It all slips away; until the earth-bound god-in-denial is publically humiliated.

As the bell tolled the end of ten one-sided rounds in the Civic Arena, a battered Robinson embraced Joey Archer. Archer escorted him to his corner and he stood facing it with his head bowed. And then something happened. The fans at ringside who had been hollering “Joey! Don’t hit him!” over the last few rounds began standing up and drifting over to Sugar Ray’s corner. First a scattered few and then dozens of fans gathered beneath him, applauding with something that approached deep reverence. Robinson’s eyes met theirs and the ovation washed over him. His defeat was being sanctified.

Fickle Fortune had changed her mind… this fighter would not be condemned to humiliation, not now, not ever.

The next afternoon he was stretched across a bed at the Carlton House Hotel, his aching head propped up on a pillow. No man had ever stopped him. The time had come to stop himself. With reporters scribbling on notepads, he quietly concluded his career.

Harry Markson, the director of boxing at Madison Square Garden called him a few weeks later. “Ray,” he said, “it just doesn’t seem right that a man of your stature should be allowed to retire so quietly… we’d like to throw a farewell party for you that will pay you the tribute you deserve. What do you say?” It was dubbed “Farewell to Sugar Ray” and scheduled just before the main event on December 10th 1965 at 9:30pm.

“He’s the greatest fighter there ever was, and for me that’s saying something.” Muhammad Ali said that night, “When I was a little kid I’d watch Sugar Ray Robinson on the TV, and when I started fightin’ I copied his moves …and I still do. When I go into the ring now he’s on my mind.”

The crowd was on its feet as he made his way down the aisle. They were still cheering as he climbed into the same ring where he began his career twenty-five years earlier, where he avenged an idol and became a greater one.

Four former middleweight kings were announced and soon they stood in the corners surrounding their common opponent. Among them were Carmen Basilio, Gene Fullmer, Carl “Bobo” Olson, and Randy Turpin who flew in all the way from England. Barbara Long of the Village Voice mused that they “could have rushed him and got him good,” and “tough old Carmen looked like he was entertaining the thought.” They closed in on him slowly –or warily, and lifted him up. Sugar Ray’s smile reflected the lights; and he extended his open hands not unlike a messiah.

At the end, he stood illuminated in a single spotlight, his terrycloth robe dazzling white. All were moved. The African Americans scattered throughout the crowd were more than moved. For them it was a spiritual experience. The man had his faults, to be sure, but the image of this champion was a reflection of something larger than himself –the strength and passion and brilliance of his people. It still is. With tears streaming down his face, he began to speak, and then faltered. A young man in the crowd was heard to whisper “Talk to me, daddy.” An elderly man said, “Let us hear you son,” and wept openly. The boxer’s voice trembled as he spoke into the microphone: “I’ll miss the applause that makes a guy get up off that stool one more time.”

Ducking his head, Sugar Ray Robinson slipped through maroon ropes that served as boundaries for his kingdom. He stood on the apron staring at the top rope for a moment, then kissed it and descended from the ring.

The gods themselves throw incense.

[IamInuit]

The God of War

By Springs Toledo





Next him… [a] scepter’d king,
Stood up, the strongest and the fiercest spirit
… now fiercer by despair.
~ Paradise Lost, bk. II, l. 44

19 April 1924, Boston. Trolleys spark and screech as they rumble down the split on Huntington Avenue. Fedoras bob past the Boston-Albany Railroad yard and darkened storefronts, clamber out of Model Ts, and hurry across the street after dinner at Sunning Restaurant. Everyone seems to converge at the main entrance of the Mechanics Building where they funnel in like sand through the narrow of an hourglass. Inside the sprawling Victorian façade is a great hall. There, beneath the balconies and sloping orchestra sections, a boxing ring looms in the light. The buzzing crowd glances downward as they squeeze between rows.

Tension is building around that empty ring.

Three preliminary bouts opened the card that cool spring evening. Local boys duked it out until bragging rights belonged to Somerville, East Boston, and South Boston. Chances are excellent that all six of them were white. William Ward wasn’t. He was as black as Newgate’s knocker, and about as ominous as the old English prison behind it. At the age that you were building forts in the woods or playing stick ball in the street, he was blindfolded, fighting and bleeding against a dozen other black boys in battles royal. As an adult, he lived to knock heads –black, white and every hue in the middle in undocumented contests down in Panama before punching his way through American ranks.

He was dangerous, this man who fought under the name “Kid Norfolk.” He trained at Grupp’s gym on 116th street in New York and was a superior counterpuncher with a piston jab. His back was a wall, his legs stout, and he understood leverage as well as future juggernauts Marciano, Frazier, and Tyson. Despite blasting his way up to the third rung of the light heavyweight ladder, insiders knew that Gene Tunney wasn’t going near him. Hall of Famers Billy Miske and Tiger Flowers took a risk and were defeated. Former white hopes Arthur Pelkey and Gunboat Smith joined them. Standing only 5’9, he was strong enough to whip Big Bill Tate three times. Tate was 6’6½ and 235 lbs. Only five months earlier, Kid Norfolk manhandled the world-famous Battling Siki before a crowd of 12,000 at Madison Square Garden. By fight’s end Siki was choking on his own blood.

Every eye in the house is on him as he emerges into view and walks down the aisle, deadly serious. He is aware of the crowd’s thoughts, their prejudices, but after putting his life on the line ninety-six times in similar venues, he has learned to detach from such incidentals and disconnect fear. Kid Norfolk stands in the middle of the ring bowing low to the crowd …then waits.

Two nights before, he stepped off the New York train at South Station. A large contingent of African Americans from the South End stood on the platform waiting for him. Harry Greb was on the same train. The middleweight champion probably saw the cheering crowd as he walked by carrying his own bags, unnoticed. He wouldn’t have cared. Greb feared no crowd, no color, and no man. Like Norfolk, he was unconcerned with weight divisions and found it amusing when he was afforded an opportunity to attack someone he stood eyes-to-chest with. Greb had already thrashed several heavyweights. Within two months he’d face a fighter who stood 6’6 and win every round.

These giant-killers had already crossed paths in August 1921 for “one of the fastest and most grueling” battles that Pittsburgh ever saw. Norfolk outweighed Greb by 17½ lbs and landed shots with such force that the iron-jawed champion was spinning on Queer Street in the opening minutes. A manager of a preliminary boxer who had come upstairs for the main event was astonished: “Never before have I seen two first-rate boxers rip and tear as they did,” he recounted to the newspapers, “how Greb ever survived that first round is beyond me.” Norfolk dropped Greb in the third “like a sack of oats” and both men were cut and bleeding as they came out for the last round. But that was the least of it. The victory may have cost Greb an eye.

In those days, boxing gloves resembled leather mittens; barely five ounces with movable thumbs. Bill Paxton identified the first Greb-Norfolk bout as the one where the Pittsburgh native first suffered an injury to his retina. Medical science hadn’t advanced enough to prevent eventual blindness, so Harry kept it a secret and fought on –ruthlessly, to offset his handicap. Since then he had fought forty times and defeated three of the greatest light heavyweights who ever lived, ruining the virgin records of Tommy Gibbons (39-0-1) and Gene Tunney (41-0-1), and defeating the great “Phantom of Philly” Tommy Loughran. The right field of his vision was swimming when he seized these victories. By the time he arrived in Boston for the rematch against Kid Norfolk, he was completely blind in his right eye.

No one else knew what Norfolk had done. But Greb did.

He walks toward the ring, steps up the stairs and slips through the ropes. A corner man stands behind him and takes his robe as the fighter scuffs the soles of his shoes in the resin box. Greb is wearing green trunks, his hair in well-oiled retreat from the mug below.

Had Harry stayed employed at Westinghouse and become an electrician he may have been passable as a Rudolph Valentino stand-in. Alas, as it was, old scar tissue swelled his eyebrows, his nose had more dents than a backyard jalopy, and the rare times that he smiled for a photograph he looked like he was about to eat your liver with fava beans. Valentino may have had the “look-at-me” physique of a movie star, but the cabled muscles up and down Greb’s arms, and a torso like ribbed plaster made it clear what he was –a fighter not a lover.

He was also a widower. This night marked thirteen months and one day since Greb’s wife Mildred died at home in Pittsburgh. He stood by her bedside, watching her go.

Referee Jack Sheehan stands between both boxers and eyes them nervously. Both Greb and Norfolk look right through Sheehan, one glaring at the other and the other glaring back. They know who the threat is in this ring and the bespectacled guy in the middle, in the way, ain’t it.

What follows is less a match and more a firestorm. The most feared light heavyweight in the world rushes out of his corner and forces the middleweight champion into the ropes. Greb clips him with a short hook to the chin. They clinch. Norfolk’s strategy becomes clear early: he’s shooting to the body to slow Greb’s demon speed. Two go south of the beltline. Regis Welsh of the Pittsburgh Post is ringside watching Greb retaliate “by clubbing and mauling [Norfolk] about.” In the second round, Greb is swarming all over his man from every angle and turns Norfolk around with lefts and rights to the body. Norfolk suddenly puts his head down and charges, ramming Greb headlong through the ropes and out of the ring. He lands sideways in the press section.

The crowd is beside itself as Greb climbs back into the ring and tears into Norfolk. In the third, Greb realizes that Norfolk is too strong and tries boxing at range, jabbing hard and landing the better shots, though he is still being forced backward. It’s an alley fight in the fourth round. State boxing officials in attendance don’t know what to do –both men are “wrestling, clubbing, charging, and butting” and the referee is losing control. The African-American’s mouth is running red as the fifth begins and the crowd is standing on chairs yelling “let ‘em fight the way they want!” Norfolk bangs the left side of Greb’s ribs while Greb attacks at full speed. Welsh watches Norfolk hook three hard shots to Greb’s groin though he carries on as if waiting for a chance to get even. Norfolk is now holding and hitting as Greb tries to wrest free and attack from the outside. Soon Greb is doing it too, grabbing Norfolk by the neck and punching the daylights out of him with his free hand.

The bell –which Welsh notes might have been salvaged from some old church belfry, clangs, and Norfolk throws a left hook anyway. Greb responds in kind before walking back to his corner, looking menacingly over his shoulder.

The old church bell clangs again. Norfolk drives the smaller man to the ropes when Greb suddenly spins off and lands a combination upstairs. Norfolk again tries to physically prevent Greb from getting outside, holding and whacking away while Greb mauls and maneuvers. The referee is now impotent in his attempts to prevent what has become a free-for-all. After the sixth round ends, Norfolk half-turns toward his corner and then unleashes a right hand. It’s a flagrant foul and the third such offense. Greb has had enough. Enraged, he whirls in with punches flying while Norfolk gets down low and rips shots to the body. A pop bottle flies in from a balcony and shatters at their feet as state officials and policemen jump into the ring to break the fighters up and escort them to their corners.

[beenKOed]

Great, glad I finally read it.