Dangerous Ring Rivalries

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By Ray Schultz

Gil Clancy, the former gym teacher who trained fighters, had a gruff manner, and I could imagine him greeting a boy’s gym class by sneering, “Hello, girls.” He was all charm, though, when Oscar said I was writing Garcia’s biography. “Garcia is a great fighter, one in a million,” he said. “He’s fought everyone and knows what to do in the ring.” Then he threw this damper on it: “He’ll never make any more money.” 

Clancy’s biggest success, Emile Griffith, joined him in praising Garcia. “That man there is the only man who’s been fighting longer than I have—four more years,” Griffith said one day. Oscar returned the compliment. “This man was five times a champion.” Yes he was: Three times welterweight and twice middleweight champ, the Virgin Islander was the only fighter at the Solar Gym with his own dressing room. 

Now a grizzled 39, the once-handsome Griffith had a long history with Garcia’s countrymen. Having decisioned Luis Rodriguez and Florentino Fernandez in early bouts, he was matched with Benny Kid Paret for the welterweight championship in Miami in April 1961. Paret was the first of the new Cubans to win a title—he’d beaten Don Jordan for it in May 1960–and he was a likeable champ. The words “true love” were tattooed on his bicep, and his “ebullience was infectious,” Sports Illustrated wrote.

Paret was “not a naturally hard hitter or a consummate boxer,” the magazine continued. Yet he never gave an inch, and Griffith had trouble with him. Then Gil Clancy smacked Griffith at the start of the thirteenth round. Griffith went out and landed a good left hook, then another, then a right, and Paret went down for the count.

A rematch followed at Madison Square Garden in the fall, and Paret won it by a split decision after 15 grueling rounds—how happy he looked as his cornermen hoisted him aloft. Then came the third bout—at the Garden—in March 1962. The weigh-in was ugly—Paret called Griffith a “maricon”– and the ill feeling went into the ring with them. I saw it on TV. Paret floored Griffith in the sixth, but Griffith recovered and in the twelfth, he staggered Paret with a right. Paret “reeled onto the ropes,” Bob Waters reported. “His head was on the top strand of ropes and his right arm was crooked around the middle strand. Griffith hit him with a series of right uppercuts and then threw hook after hook for about 10 seconds until referee Ruby Goldstein grabbed Griffith and tugged him away.” 

In the dressing room, Clancy “allowed Griffith half an hour to be jubilant over his victory,” Waters wrote. “Then he broke the news that Paret was badly hurt” (brain dead, in fact).  Waters was moved by what he saw the next day. “A Methodist, Griffith prayed for Paret in a Roman Catholic church. Paret is a Catholic. ‘I prayed for Benny,’ Emile said. ‘I asked God, to please save him…make him well. I broke down. I wanted to regain the title very much, but no title is worth this.’” 

Despite those prayers, Paret died on April 3, and on the Fight of the Week that Saturday, the bell was tolled ten times for him. The non-boxing world was unmoved by this demonstration, and there were calls for abolition of the sport. Critics pointed out that Paret had taken a savage beating from the middleweight champ Gene Fullmer only a few months before. “Paret was one of the toughest guys I’d ever fought as far as actual tough,” Fullmer told Peter Heller. “I never hit anybody more punches harder than I hit Paret.”

The threat of death or injury didn’t deter Garcia. Fighting the Corsican Saveur Chiocca that fall, he caught a “shattering right to the jaw,” and went down for six, then hit the floor again a moment later. But he “gained control of his rapid feet” and won the fight, The Ring wrote. Next, he fought the ranked French welterweight Jean Josselin. “Josselin belted away unceasingly, always moving forward,” The Ring reported. Garcia retaliated by “roughing things up whenever he got the chance.” The heavier Josselin was “badly marked, Garcia undamaged, but utterly exhausted at the finish.” 

I asked Garcia about Paret the night we drank at the Beauburn bar. He answered, more or less, that Benny was tough, but that he didn’t think it could happen to a fighter with his own defensive skills. 

Maybe not. But a year after Paret died, two Cubans fought for world titles on the same program in Los Angeles. Welterweight Luis Rodriguez outpointed Griffith in a close one, reversing his earlier loss, and Garcia’s friend Sugar Ramos kayoed Davey Moore for the featherweight crown. Ramos was a stalker, who concentrated on “blows to the mid-section, and stinging lefts and rights,” Sports Illustrated wrote. The end came in the tenth. Moore was “knocked to the canvas twice and reeled helplessly against the ropes as the round ended,” Bob Waters wrote. In his dressing room, Moore said, ‘This just wasn’t one of my nights. It was a bad night.’” Then he collapsed, and Waters reported the next day that Moore was near death. The scene was a strange replay of the one the year before. 

“‘I am very, very sorry,’ Ramos said to the clusters of people who were standing in the hospital lobby,” Waters wrote. “’We are friends outside of the ring. I wanted to see Davey. I wanted to tell him I am sorry.’ Moore’s manager, Willie Ketchum, said, “‘Don’t worry, Kid. He’s in good hands. He’s in God’s hands. And you gotta trust God.” 

Griffith sent Ramos a telegram: “Don’t worry. It wasn’t your fault. You’ve got to pray; you’ve got to have faith.” But Moore died and boxing was again condemned. In a song titled, “Who Killed Davey Moore?”, Bob Dylan mocked the excuses of every party to it, including Ramos, “who came here from Cuba’s door where boxing ain’t allowed no more.” 

I personally resented those lyrics when I read them years later. How could you condemn a man who fought at age 12 for extra helpings of food and faced the same dangers in the ring as Moore? But the verse that upset me most seemed aimed at Bob Waters himself:

“Not me, said the boxing writer

Pounding print on his old typewriter

Saying boxing ain’t to blame

There’s just as much danger in a football game” 

Of course, the deaths depressed me—I grieved for Paret and Moore. But I felt protective toward boxing. I was sickened later when a radical newspaper tied Barney Ross to Jack Ruby and possibly to the Kennedy assassination. Barney Ross, the three-time title holder and hero of Guadalcanal? How dare they? And I agreed with Red Smith’s defense of fighters: “It is hard to believe that a nation bereft of such men would be the stronger or better for it.” 

Once again, the tragedy didn’t stop Garcia. He kayoed the Jaguar of the Sahara, Aissa Hashas, in Tunis, and won another war with Sauveur Chioca in Paris. And assuming he heard it, he ignored the commentary coming from Havana on the “criminal methods of professional boxing—boxing being run by real gangsters who are interested only in filling their bags with dollars and do not have the least regard for the lives of the fighters.” 

Sparring With Roberto Duran

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By Ray Schultz

It seemed like just another Monday at Gleason’s Gym. “Feeling good?” Sammy Morgan asked a fighter coming in. 

“Yeah.”

“Well, that’s the main thing. You’ll do alright.” 

When the fighter was out of earshot, Sammy said, “He’s gonna get his (b—-) ass kicked. I saw this South American he’s fighting—a killer. He’ll knock him all over the ring.” 

Suddenly there was a commotion at the door, and Roberto Duran entered with his retinue. All eyes turned to the Panamanian. Wearing a fisherman’s white cap and a red-and-white ensemble, his eyes flashing, he greeted several people and disappeared into the locker room, returning several minutes later in his workout clothes: a plastic sweatshirt with a sleeveless yellow sweater over it. Training for a title defense against Edwin Viruet, of Puerto Rico, Duran loosened up, joked with Panama Lewis and Eddie Gregory, and sparred a round or two with a regular kid from the gym.

Then they brought in Tony Danza, an aspiring fighter and future actor. Danza was wearing tennis shoes instead of boxing shoes, and Duran was amused. But he was raging with unfocused energy. Freddie Brown grimaced and said, “No, damn it,” when Duran threw a wild right. Duran roughed Danza up a little inside, and landed a hard shot to Danza’s body. Freddie shook his head. Duran allowed himself to be maneuvered into a corner. Freddie said, “Move, move.” 

Finished with Danza, who had stood up well to it, Duran took on his next victim. He threw more body shots, and in the second round dropped the fighter with a glancing right. Freddie Brown was not impressed. “When are you gonna start moving?” he asked. 

Duran then shifted to the heavy bag, “cawing” when he threw hard shots into it. The father of the Olympic champion Howard Davis approached him and asked if he wanted to spar a few rounds with his son. This enraged Duran. “You give me the money for a 15-round fight, and I’ll fight him,” he said, then followed Davis Sr. to the front of the gym and repeated it. “Enough, get back here,” Freddie Brown said. 

Wearing new leather boxing shoes with the inscription “Rocky” on them, Duran sparred again on Wednesday. By this time, he was working with anyone who had the nerve to get in there with him. One young fighter, more poorly equipped than Danza, lacked even a protective cup. Duran made threatening faces, then aimed a shot at the kid’s groin and pulled it at the last second. Some joke: Most of us gasped. 

The moment had arrived. I approached Duran as he was leaving. “Duran, I’m from the New York Times magazine,” I said, lying. “Can you tell me about your fight with Angel Robinson Garcia?” Duran thought about it for a moment, then answered, in uncertain English, “I win a decision. He was very smart, a good fighter. I was out of shape.” Panama Lewis elaborated. “Duran fought Robinson Garcia when he was young, before he was champion. He was very fast, Garcia.” He added that Garcia drank the night before the fight. “He  wasn’t really drunk,” Lewis said. “But he had some drinks. He was, you know, hanging out.”

The lightweight fight took place in Panama City in January 1972. And Garcia showed from the start that he was not intimidated by Duran. “Garcia was knocked down by Duran by the first assault in the first round, but he raised himself from the canvas to make a true exhibition of good boxing before the desired evidence of the young Duran gaining success,” said an article on the “Gran Pelea” in Estrella de Panama. Even Duran was impressed. “Cuban, you know a lot,” he said during a clinch in round two. “The Duran fight was complicated,” Garcia said through Oscar. “I can’t explain it. The knockdown was a slip.” Duran’s one-time manager Nestor Plomo Quinones said that “Duran was all the time throwing his punches, but Garcia was blocking him all the time,” Christian Guidice wrote in his Duran biography: Hands of Stone.  

Win or lose, the Duran fight was Garcia’s ticket back to the Americas. He had beaten Bunny Grant in November In his return to Paris after seven years, but lost a month later to Jonathan Dele in Barcelona–his last fight in Europe. “The promoters didn’t want to use him after so many losses,” Oscar said. And he had little personal reason to stay. “He blew the money and blew the marriage,” Angelo Dundee said. As Chino Govin described it, “He sent his wife back to France.” 

Financed by his purse from the Duran fight, Garcia holed up in the Hotel Peral in Caracas, and tried to regroup, but he didn’t fight again for four months—maybe he was getting his paperwork in order. In April 1972, finally, he lost to Reymon Reyes in Maracaibo, and in June was matched with the new lightweight sensation Esteban DeJesus, from Carolina, PR, in Madison Square Garden’s Felt Forum. DeJesus dropped out with an impacted tooth, though, and was replaced by Cemal Kamaci, of Turkey, who had beaten Garcia in Vienna in 1970. “The turnout was so meager that Garden publicist John Condon said, ‘There’ll be no attendance announced tonight. Instead, there’ll be individual names and addresses,’” wrote sportswriter Leonard Cohen.     

That was one of several indignities. Another was the press coverage of the fight, if anyone read it to him. “Garcia’s main resemblance to Sugar Ray was the fact that Ray once reached 35, too, and, despite Angel’s ring savvy, he appeared to have neither the reflexes nor the stamina to neutralize the attack of his younger opponent,” the New York Daily News reported. Garcia cut Kamaci, but was also cut himself. And he irritated the commission doctor, Dr. Edward Kleiman, by demanding a butterfly bandage instead of stitches—he knew the stitches wouldn’t work. 

Kleiman got his revenge, as shown by this entry in Garcia’s New York record: “Ill & unavailable indefinitely—laceration. Dr. Kleiman.”  And the news reports said Garcia was a Venezuelan.  

Garcia returned to his room at the Penn Garden Hotel. As it happened, Duran was at the Concord Hotel in the Catskills, training to fight Ken Buchanan for the world lightweight title. He called Garcia and hired him as a sparring partner. Garcia lasted two days, all he could take, Quinones told Guidice. But I doubted that. Garcia had gone ten with Duran in a real fight. And he had a big bout of his own coming up: a rescheduled fight against Esteban DeJesus in San Juan. 

Oscar, who was present that night in PR, was impressed by Garcia’s performance. Garcia won several of the later rounds, and easily evaded DeJesus’ punches, but he didn’t throw many of his own and lost the fight. “DeJesus was a hard hitter,” said Oscar. “But then I saw the way Garcia moved his head and defended himself for ten rounds, and the condition he was in.” That wasn’t all he saw: Before the bout, Garcia was drunk in the Attic, a nightclub in the Hotel Borinquen. That’s where Oscar met the Cuban with the close-cropped hair. 

Less than two weeks before that bout, Duran scored a controversial TKO over Buchanan. “The record will say that Ken Buchanan lost the lightweight championship of the world after the 13th round as he rolled in pain on the canvas, holding his groin,” Bob Waters wrote. “Ken Buchanan really lost on the second punch of the first round last night at Madison Square Garden. Buchanan landed the first punch, a jab that flicked back the head of the contender, Roberto Duran of Panama. The second punch was Duran’s, a right hand led that bounced off Buchanan’s shoulder and still had enough power to drop Buchanan after it ricocheted off his jaw.” 

DeJesus soon joined that elite circle. In November, he floored and outboxed Duran in a non-title fight—Duran’s first loss. Duran got his revenge in 1974 when he kayoed DeJesus in a title defense, and again in 1978. But the fact that Garcia had gone the distance with Duran, Buchanan, DeJesus and Napoles looked good on paper in 1972. 

Fantasy Boxing: Ali Vs. Frazier In 1967

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By Ray Schultz

More than most sports fans, boxing enthusiasts like to fantasize about hypothetical matchups: Would Dempsey have beaten Louis, would Louis have whipped the Klitchkos, would Duran have gotten to Benny Leonard?

I’m guilty of it, too. But I mostly wonder about two men who actually did fight—Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier.

What would have happened if they’d fought when Ali was in his prime in 1967?

To consider this, one has to crawl out from under the weight of history.

The first bout between this pair took place in 1971 when Ali was just back form his 3 ½-year exile. He was rusty, and no longer had the legs that had once carried him. Frazier was at his best: He had Ali in serious trouble in the 11th and floored him in the 15th. It was a clear win for the man from Philadelphia.

Three years later, after Frazier had lost to George Foreman, Ali won a close 12-round decision over Joe in a fast-paced bout. He staggered Frazier in the 2nd but had to survive savage left hooks later in the fight.

Still, his legs held out and most pundits agree he had outboxed Frazier. In 1975, when both were shopworn, they fought the Thrilla in Manila, a brutal fight that Ali won by TKO at the end of the 14th round after they had pummeled each other incessantly.

The common wisdom is that Ali’s last fights before his exile were his best—he destroyed Cleveland Williams in three, dominated Ernie Terrell in 15 and kayoed Zora Folley in 7. Angelo Dundee wondered where he could have gone from there.

That’s clear in hindsight. Frazier was rising in the rankings in 1967, having stopped George Chuvalo and Eddie Machen. He was already a threat, although not quite as seasoned as he would later be.

That spring, though, Ali refused induction in the Army, and was convicted of draft evasion, stripped of his title and forbidden to fight.

To envision an earlier Ali-Frazier fight, you have to accept one of several unlikely scenarios. One is that Ali served in the Army. But that would have put him out action, too, for a couple of years, so he might have been just as rusty when he met Frazier.

Or, to create an alternate universe, you could imagine there was no Vietnam war and no racial injustice and that Ali just breezed through his career.

I feel a little guilty even thinking about this—it’s irresponsible, given the state of the world and what happened to both of them. But let’s imagine that they ought early in 1968—in fact, maybe on March 8, the date they fought on in 1971. Would Ali have dominated the fight and knocked Frazier out?

No.

I suspect that Ali would have fought Frazier much the same as he did in 1974, dancing and throwing combinations, only more effectively, jarring his opponent with rights, swelling his face and staying away from him on surer legs.

But Frazier would have applied enormous pressure, driving in with his left hooks. Ali might have won a lopsided decision, but it would not have been easy.

Picture this alternate scenario, though: That Ali, who had been champ for four years and might have been a bit jaded, would have underestimated Joe. Maybe he wouldn’t have gone down from a left hook as he did in 1971, but he could have run out of steam at some point, losing points while clowning around.

It has been said that Ali had mostly faced older fighters. Here was a younger one who could give and take enormous punishment.

The fight would have been a classic, and it doubtless would have led to a rematch and maybe to a three-fight series, the outcomes being much the same as they were years later.

Styles being what they were, Frazier would have given Ali hell at any time. And both men would have emerged damaged.