Articles of 2010

CHASING JACK CHASE, Part 5: Fade to Black

Published

14 years ago

August 31, 2010

William Faulkner once said “the past is not dead, it isn’t even past. Jack Chase might have added that it is especially so when you drink too much booze.

Chase, his live-in girlfriend, and Aaron “Tiger Wade were sitting in a bar on Fillmore Street in San Francisco the night after Christmas 1943. Just before midnight, Chase shot Wade in the left shoulder with a .32 caliber pistol. All three, including Wade, said it was an accident. Chase had reached in his pocket for cigarettes and somehow the gun fell out of his shirt, hit the table, and went off. Or so the story went. The police confiscated the gun and noticed that the serial numbers had been filed off. Chase was arrested and charged. It was his third setback, the third time he sat in a jail cell since boxing gave him a second chance.

Chase was freed on $1,000 bail and eventually cleared of the charges, but the curtain rapidly descended on his career. He turned thirty on January 27th and lost a step just as things were heating up. In 1943 he went 3-1-1 against fellow members of Murderers’ Row. In 1944 he went 1-8-1. It wasn’t for lack of trying. After losing a ten-rounder against master boxer Holman Williams in a showcase of skills that old-timers in the crowd raved about, Chase demanded a rematch over twelve rounds and got it exactly two weeks later. This time, he moved less and missed more. Williams eclipsed him as the premier middleweight of the west.

He was face-down on the canvas after Charley Burley’s rapid-fire right hands put him there in April. Earlier in the bout, Chase had to find it in him to beat the count. Now the count beat him and he needed help getting to his corner. It was the first time he suffered a knockout in almost seven years.

Insiders saw it coming. A few days before the Burley fight, Chase was in Los Angeles sparring with a squat heavyweight named Turkey Thompson. That was his first mistake. His second mistake, according to the word on the street, was in somehow offending the 218 lb. Thompson. Thompson retaliated with a colossal blow. Chase was unconscious for thirty minutes and woke up with a dislocated jaw. He was lucky he didn’t wake up dead.

He met Williams for the third time in Denver only two weeks after losing to Burley. Chase was going backwards in this fight for the first six rounds, then in the seventh he and Williams stood toe-to-toe with Chase appearing to get the better of it. By the eighth, the damage was mounting. Chase’s left eye was closed shut and that was the least of it. The Denver Post’s Jack Carberry witnessed a disturbing spectacle from ringside:

“[Chase’s] jaw, which was re-dislocated in the sixth, began to hurt frightfully. He would put his hands up to protect it. You could read the pain on his features.

Williams reminded Carberry of a Yankee machine gunner as he shot that jab at Chase’s eye, and the sickening sound of wet leather smashing into a swollen hematoma made him wince. After Williams noticed Chase favoring his jaw, he aimed for that. Ringsiders thought that Chase might faint from the pain. In the thirteenth, he fell through the ropes and climbed back in as the referee’s count reached eight. Chase went down again in the closing minutes. Somehow –God knows how- he got up and finished fifteen rounds.

All told, he fought Williams no less than four times that year and couldn’t defeat him. He faced Cocoa Kid in October and lost every round. Chase may have had trouble anyway with supreme stylists like Williams and the Kid but it was clear that he had slowed down. His style relied on swift feet and as nature stiffened his joints, he could no longer move in and out fast enough to escape the ferocity of his peers on Murderers’ Row. Burley stopped him again and Lloyd Marshall managed to outpoint him to even up their series. Tiger Wade recovered from his gunshot wound and gave Chase a thrashing until he suffered an injury in the last round. Either a raking glove or a punch or both temporarily paralyzed an optic nerve in Wade’s eye, forcing a stoppage.

Knowing Chase, this is suspicious.

Like the rest of the human race, Chase had his devils and his angels. Sportswriters who spoke to him seemed to like him -at times they would get protective when he had no cause to deserve it. They glossed over his crimes and his criminal record and readily acknowledged his good manners. Eddie Muller of the San Francisco Examiner never even mentioned the Wade shooting in his column. The Denver Post sports editor wrote that “Jack Chase is a gentleman to his fingertips.

He does not fit neatly into anyone’s box; he was too complicated for such niceties. We all are. Dig deep in any man’s history and you’re sure to come up with surprises. Chase, for example, sought to better himself in ways other than boxing. In early February of 1944, a fellow passenger on a Los Angeles train noticed him reading a book. The passenger quietly leaned in and saw the title -it was the Iliad. Homer’s ancient masterpiece is a bloody memorial to themes like glory in battle, consequences of ego and rage, homecoming, and destiny. How appropriate. His description of the central warrior of the epic could just as well describe Chase (“Achilles of the swift feet).

By 1946, Chase was thirty-two years old and fighting less. He briefly retired “to his books according to the Los Angeles Times. Perhaps the Iliad had something to do with it. “Like the generations of leaves, the lives of mortal men, Homer wrote,

Now the wind scatters the old leaves across the earth,
Now the living timber bursts with new buds
And spring comes round again. And so with men:
As one generation comes to life, another dies away.

This veteran wasn’t dead yet. He was diversifying. When the wind scattered old leaves across lawns, he was ready with his rake. “Let Jack Chase (Former Calif. Boxing Champion) Fight Your Lawn, Landscaping Problems, read his business card, “PERSONAL SERVICE, REASONABLE RATES, GUARANTEED SATISFACTION.

On the occasions that he did lace up his gloves, those swift feet of his were stuck in mulch. A teenager with thirty fights beat him with, of all things, a jab and speed. Twice. In their next two matches, Chase evened the score, albeit just barely. Press row saw all the signs of an aging fighter –he was clinching more and moving less, swelling up more and punching less.

It was his will that saw him defeat Costello Cruz again and then battle Archie Moore to a stand-off at the end of 1946. These performances earned him a place on the third rung of the light heavyweight ladder. Alas, such heights are precarious when your balance goes. He lost his next three and fell down the ladder.

The last time he fought in Colorado was at Mammoth Gardens in what turned out to be a haunted homecoming. A St. Louis preacher named Deacon Logan was in the opposite corner. “Both fighters incurred the displeasure of the audience reported the Denver Post, after it became clear that neither was trying to hurt the other. The “waltz without music was declared a no-contest forty-five seconds into the sixth round. The Colorado boxing commission fined both $200 and suspended them for 90 days for “not giving forth their best efforts. Chase’s unwillingness may not be hard to explain. The last time he fought hard at Mammoth Gardens, Roy Gillespie collapsed and died.

Chase continued on, but it made less and less sense. He’d don his blue silk trunks to fight for purses almost as small as when he began. Soon, his career came full circle. His first win was at a high school auditorium back in Walsenburg and his last was at a high school field in Oregon twelve years later, a lifetime later. High schools, small auditoriums and fields, armories, union halls; these are the places where has-beens meet never-weres in matches that are only competitive because the respective skill sets (one declining, one never advancing) finally meet in the middle. It’s boxing’s pension plan.

Jack Chase retired from the ring for keeps in 1948.

An enduring complaint of aficionados is that so many notable fighters of the golden era were not filmed. Not so in Chase’s case. He appeared in a film called So Dear to My Heart (1948) and then in the noir classic The Set-Up (1949). Hollywood not only bit him but shot him with an arrow. He was married for a time to Lillian Randolph, a cast member on the Amos ‘n Andy radio show.

The gym was as close as he ever got to a permanent home, so it is no surprise to learn that he became a trainer. Boxing historian Hap Navarro was the Assistant Matchmaker at Hollywood Legion Stadium in 1949 and watched Chase work with the popular Art Aragon. “Chase, he remembered, “had a soft-spoken but very effective way of instructing Artie during the sparring sessions in the Legions permanent ring. In 1958, he moved to Spokane, Washington where he became something of a wintery sage for a new generation. He earned rave reviews as a “superior teacher by the Spokane Review for his work with a local heavyweight. He also trained an undefeated middleweight and a lightweight named Kaley “Kelly Sonners who won five of six by knockout before going off to Vietnam where he was killed in action.

It was poignant to learn that he worked for Goodwill Industries. Goodwill is a nonprofit organization that provides assistance for the less privileged -including young men just released from prison. He drove a truck for them for fourteen years until illness forced him out in the fall of 1971.

The illness was fatal.

He sat alone in his apartment on South Pine Street and waited, though he wouldn’t wait long.

On March 23rd 1972, the fifty-eight year old former boxer slumped in his chair. His visage, mashed and marred under brows heavy with scar tissue, betrayed his vigorous past. That past swirled in his mind like the morning mist atop the Rocky Mountains. This is Jack Chase of Murderers’ Row, good enough to defeat the best of that fabled set, ducking none. This is the fresh-faced “Young Joe Louis who rose up out of southern Colorado in the 1930s like one of those black blizzards and buried his competition. This is Isaiah, a fatherless boy whose striking maroon eyes looked up with promise at his mother.

Boxing rescued Isaiah, of that there can be no doubt. It offered an alternate route to the dead end that seemed to be preordained for him; a dead end that he was careening toward until the day an anonymous trainer at a state reformatory taught him how to wrap his hands. After that, his definitions began to change for the better. He became something special. Like those other black men exalted and condemned by their remarkable skills, battling among themselves on the West Coast, he was never granted a world title shot and never got rich. But boxing gave him something better. It gave him something –heroic- to reach for.

He battled desperately in that ring, as if everything depended on it. It mattered that much. Now and then he made a mistake and was knocked down. If he was too hurt to get up with dignity, he’d crawl to his feet without it. It mattered that much. Somewhere along the alternate route he chose decades earlier, somewhere between a wayward son’s rage and a great fighter’s singular glory, he learned how to care. Perhaps his redemption, a long-time coming, had come along and those scars on his soul were healed by the scars on his face. Who can say?

Spring’s new buds were beginning to burst outside the window when he slumped in that chair. There, with old regrets lightened, I hope, by a pride that swelled his chest

…Jack Chase breathed his last.

…..
The series of photographs opening this essay was taken by O.A. Sealy for the Denver Post, 4/29/44.

Many early fights involving “Young Joe Louis were covered in the World-Independent and the Denver Post. Statistics regarding the Dust Bowl found in Surviving the Dust Bowl: Timeline of the Dust Bowl, 1931-1939 by Joseph Tovares (PBS Online). Quotes and information regarding Archie Moore found in Dr. Marilyn G. Douroux’s Archie Moore: The Ole Mongoose and Moore’s Any Boy Can: The Archie Moore Story. Information regarding the Dust Bowl and the Great Plains derived from The Worst Hard Time by Timothy Egan and The Great Plains by Ian Frazier. The late Eddie Muller of the San Francisco Examiner deserves much credit for his coverage of those tournaments fought among the fighters later known as “The Black Murderers’ Row. I am indebted to Editor Michael Woods for his patience and expertise; to Barbara Dey of the Colorado Historical Society and to the staff at the Denver Public Library, especially Wendel Cox; as well as to Dan Cuoco, Hap Navarro, and Harry Otty for their help. Special thanks to the staff at Colorado State Archives, particularly Erin McDanal.

Springs Toledo can be contacted at scalinatella@hotmail.com.

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Articles of 2010

Judah To Fight Mbuza March 5 In NJ

Published

14 years ago

December 31, 2010

The Sweet Science

Totowa, NJ – Kathy Duva, Main Events CEO, announced their promotional firm won the purse bid held at IBF headquarters in East Orange, NJ, Thursday. The bid was for the right to hold the IBF's junior welterweight title fight between Zab Judah of Brooklyn, NY and Las Vegas, and South Africa's Kaizer Mabuza.

IBF Championships Chairman, Lindsay Tucker explained, “It is a 50-50 split of the earnings between the two fighters. Kaizer is ranked No. 1 by the IBF, and Judah is No. 2. Where the fight will be held is up to the winning bidder.”

Judah (39-6, 26 KOs) is promoted by Main Events and his own firm Super Judah Promotions, and Branco Milenkovic, of South Africa, promotes Mabuza (23-6-3, 14 KOs).

Kathy Duva confirmed the fight will take place at Prudential Center in Newark, NJ, late February or early March this year as part of Main Events' Brick City Boxing Series. (Saturday Update: the fight is March 5th, in NJ at the Pru Center. The bout will be part of a PPV card.)

“We are very happy that Zab has the opportunity to fight for the IBF Junior Welterweight title right here in New Jersey. Winning this fight will put Zab right in the mix with the winner of Bradley-Alexander and Amir Khan.” Duva elaborated, ” Zab will work very hard to win this fight so that he will be one step closer to his ultimate goal of unifying all of the Junior Welterweight titles by the end of 2011!”

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Articles of 2010

UFC 125 Preview: Frankie Edgar Vs. Gray Maynard

Published

14 years ago

December 31, 2010

David A. Avila

UFC_Edgar_and_Maynard_Dec._2010
Few predicted Frankie Edgar would grab the UFC lightweight championship last year but he did. Most felt he would eventually win it but Edgar not only took the title, he beat one of the best mixed martial artists in history to do it.

Edgar (13-1) has emerged from the milieu of nondescript MMA fighters to become one of the more brilliant performers for Ultimate Fighting Championship. Next comes a rematch with Gray “The Bully” Maynard (11-0) tomorrow at the MGM Grand Casino in Las Vegas. UFC 125 will be televised on pay-per-view.

All it took was not one, but two victories over BJ Penn.

If you’re not familiar with Penn, he’s one of the most versatile fighters in MMA history and had been nearly unbeatable in the 155-pound lightweight division. That is until he clashed with Edgar. Until he met New Jersey’s Edgar, the Hawaiian fighter chopped down lightweight opponents with ease. It was only the heavier welterweights he had problems against. Namely: Canada’s Georges St. Pierre.

Edgar showed poise, speed and grit in defeating Penn in back-to-back fights. The world took notice.

“You know, if I keep winning fights, the respect will come eventually,” said Edgar during a conference call.

Now Edgar will find out if he can avenge the only loss on his record.

“I just think I grew as a fighter. You know, mentally, you know, physically I, you know, possess differently skills, increased – you know, I think I boxed and got better, my Jiu-Jitsu got better and, you know, just have much more experience now,” Edgar says.

Maynard seeks to find out if Edgar has added any more fighting tools to his repertoire. Back in April 2008, the artillery shelled out was not enough to beat the Las Vegas fighter.

“It’s a perfect time. He had the chance and, you know, he took it and the time is now for me and I’m prepared,” said Maynard (11-0). “Any time you’re going up against the top in the world, you evolve and change and so I’m prepared for a new fight, so it will be good. I’m pumped for it.”

Though Maynard’s record indicates he is unbeaten that’s not entirely true. He did suffer a defeat to Nate Diaz during The Ultimate Fighter series and subsequently avenged that loss last January.

The UFC lightweight title is in Maynard’s bull’s eye.

“Looking to take the belt for sure,” said Maynard. “We’ll see on January 1.”

Edgar versus Maynard should be a good one.

Other bouts:

Nate Diaz (13-5) faces Dong Hyun Kim (13-0-1) in another welterweight tussle. Diaz is the only fighter with a win over Maynard. Anyone watching TUF remembers Maynard tapping out from a Diaz guillotine choke. The Modesto fighter has a tough fight against South Korea’s Kim.

Chris Leben (21-6) fights Brian Stann (9-3) in a middleweight fight. Leben is a veteran of MMA and if an opponent is not ready for a rough and tumble fight, well, that fighter is not going to win. Stann dropped down from light heavyweight and we’ll see if the cut in weight benefits the Marine.

Brandon Vera (11-5) meets Thiago Silva (14-2) in a light heavyweight match up. Vera is trying to rally back to the promising fighter he was tabbed several years back. Silva is a very tough customer and eager to crash the elite. A victory by either fighter could mean a ticket to the big time.

Clay Guida (27-8) versus Takanori Gomi (32-6) in a lightweight bout. Guida has become one of the most feared fighters without a title. No one has an easy time with the long-haired fighter. Gomi lost to Kenny Florian but knocked out Tyson Griffin. Can he survive Guida?

Marcus “The Irish Hand Grenade” Davis (22-8) clashes with Jeremy Stephens (18-6) in another lightweight fight. Davis is a go-for-broke kind of fighter and is looking to get back in the win column after a tumultuous battle with Nate Diaz last August. Stephens needs a win too. In his last bout he lost to Melvin Guillard.

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Articles of 2010

Borges Looks Back, And Forward With Hope

Published

14 years ago

December 30, 2010

Ron Borges

PacquiaoClottey_Booth_6

As the end of another year approaches, there’s no need to invoke Charles Dickens to describe what went on in boxing. It was neither the best of times nor the worst of times. It was just too much time spent on The Fight That Never Took Place.

For the second straight year the sport could not deliver The Fight, the only one fans universally wanted and even casual fans craved – the mix between Floyd Mayweather, Jr. vs. Manny Pacquiao. No one has to be singled out for blame for that failure because this time there’s plenty to go around on both sides. The larger issue is what does it say about a sport when it cannot deliver its top event?

What would the NFL be without the Super Bowl? Where would major league baseball be without the World Series? Golf without the Masters? College basketball without March Madness?

They would all be less than they could be and so it was with boxing this year. Having said that, the sport was not without its signature moments. It was not bereft of nights that left those of us with an abiding (and often unrequited) love for prize fighting with good reason to hope for the future.

Three times promoter Bob Arum took the sport into massive stadium venues just like the good (very) old days and each time boxing drew a far larger crowd than its many critics expected. Twice those fights involved the sport’s leading ambassador, Pacquiao, who brought in crowds of 40,000 to 50,000 fans into Cowboys Stadium against inferior opponents Joshua Clottey and Antonio Margarito. Imagine what he might have done had Mayweather been in the opposite corner?

While both fights were, as expected, lopsided affairs, they showcased the one boxer who has transcended his sport’s confining walls to become a cultural icon and world celebrity. Pacquiao alone put boxing (or at least one boxer) on the cover of TIME and into the pages of such varied publications as Esquire, GQ, The Wall Street Journal, the American Airlines in-flight magazine and even Atlantic Monthly.

As history has proven time and again, that is what happens when boxing has a compelling personality to sell it and Pacquiao is that. Mayweather is such a person as well, but for different reasons.

The one night he appeared in a boxing ring, he set the year’s pay-per-view standard against Shane Mosley while also leaving a first hint of dark mystery when he was staggered by two stinging right hands in the second round.

Mayweather was momentarily in trouble for the first time in his career but the moment passed quickly and Mosley never had another. By the end he had been made to look old and futile, a faded athlete who’d had his chance and was unable to do anything with it. So it goes in this harsh sport when the sands are running out of the hour glass.

As always there were some surprising upsets, most notably Jason Litzau’s domination of an uninterested and out of shape Celestino Caballero and Sergio Martinez’s one-punch demolishment of Paul Williams. The latter was not so much an upset as it was a stunning reminder that when someone makes a mistake against a highly skilled opponent in this sport they don’t end up embarrassed. They end up unconscious.

SHOWTIME did all it could to further the future of the sport, offering up a continuation of its interminably long but still bold Super Six super middleweight tournament as well as the launching of a short form bantamweight tournament which already gave fans to two stirring and surprising finishes with Joseph Agbeko decisioning Jhonny Perez and Abner Mares upsetting Victor Darchinyan in a battle of contusions.

While the Super Six has had its problems – including several of the original six pulling out – it also lifted the profile of former Olympic gold medalist Andre Ward from nearly unknown to the cusp of universal recognized as the best super middleweight in the world this side of Lucian Bute. If Ward continues winning he’ll get to Bute soon enough because that’s why SHOWTIME signed a TV deal with the Canadian and America may get its next boxing star if Ward proves to be what I think he is – which is still underrated and underappreciated.

HBO and HBO pay-per-view put on 23 shows, few of them compelling and many of them paying big money to the wrong people while doing little or nothing to grow the sport that has helped make their network rich. But they did have the knockout of the year – Martinez’s second round destruction of Williams – and some fights in the lower weight classes that were left you wanting more.

Two new names popped up who are causing the kind of fan reaction that also gives us hope for 2011 – American Brandon Rios and Mexican Saul Alvarez. They are two of the sport’s brightest young prospects because each comes to the arena the old-fashioned way – carrying nothing but bad intentions.
Aggression and knockouts still sell boxing faster than anything else and each exhibited plenty of both this year and left fans wanting to see more. Alvarez is already a star in Mexico without having yet won a world title and Rios is the definition of “promise.’’ Whether the star will continue to shine and promise will be fulfilled may be answered next year and so we wait anxiously to find out.

Backed by Golden Boy Promotions, there is no reason 2011 shouldn’t be Alvarez’s year and if it is people will notice and remember him because he has a crowd-pleasing style that is all about what sells most.

That is what boxing needs more of – fresh faces and new stars… so as fans we should root for guys like Alvarez, Ward, Rios and young Brit Amir Khan, who is a star in England but still a question mark with a questionable chin but a fighter’s heart here in the U.S.

Those guys and others not yet as well known are the future of boxing, a sport that for too long has been recycling the likes of Mosley (as it will again in May for one last beating against Pacquiao in a fight that's a joke), Bernard Hopkins (who can still fight although it is unclear why he bothers or where it’s all headed), Roy Jones and, sadly, even 48-year-old Evander Holyfield, who continues to delude himself but not many other people into believing he will soon unify the heavyweight title again.
If fighters like Ward, Alvarez, Rios, Khan, WBC welterweight champion Andre Berto and middleweight king Sergio Martinez continue their rise they could be the antidote for the art of the retread that Arum and Golden Boy have been forcing fans to buy the past few years at the expense of what boxing needs most – fresh faces.

The heavyweight division, which many believe determines the relevancy of boxing to the larger world, remains a vast desert of disinterest here in the US. The Klitschko brothers, Vitali and Wladimir, hold 75 per cent of the title belts but few peoples’ imaginations in the US, although to be fair they are European superstars and don’t really need U.S. cable TV money to thrive economically.

Each defended their titles twice this year, Vitali against lame competition (Albert Sosnowski and Shannon Briggs) and Wladimir against better fighters (Sam Peter and Eddie Chambers) but not competitive ones. Sadly, there is no American on the horizon to challenge them, a comment on the division and on our country, where the athletes who used to be Joe Louis or Muhammad Ali now opt for the easier and frankly safer road of the NFL or the NBA. Who can blame them considering all the nonsense a fighter has to go through to just make a living these days?

The one heavyweight match that would be compelling and might lift the sport up for at least a night would be either of the Klitschkos facing lippy WBA champion David Haye. The fast-talking Brit claims to not be ducking them but he’s had more maladies befall him after shouting from the rooftops how much he wants to challenge them that you have to wonder if Haye is simply a case of big hat no cattle syndrome.

For the sake of the sport, we should all be lighting candles each night in hopes our prayers will be answered and Haye will finally agree to meet one of them. It may not prove to be much of a fight but at least it will give us something to talk about for a few months.

Whatever Haye and the Klitschkos decide the fighter with the most upside at the moment however seems to be Sergio Martinez. He has matinee idol looks, a big enough punch to put Paul Williams to sleep with one shot and a work ethic second to none. The Argentine fighter had a year for himself, starting with a drubbing of Kelly Pavlik followed by his demolishment of Williams. Those kinds of victories, coupled with his Oscar De La Hoya-like looks, are the type of things that if HBO or SHOWTIME would get behind him could allow Martinez to capture the attention of both fight fans and more casual ones.

In general, Hispanics fighters continued to dominate much of the sport’s front pages with Juan Manuel Marquez’s two victories in lightweight title fights leading that storyline. His war with Michael Katsidis is a strong candidate for Fight of the Year and his technical skill and calm demeanor make him the uncrowned challenger to Pacquiao. The two have unfinished business that should be settled this year if Arum stops standing in the way.

Two other fighters who gave us moments to remember in 2010 were Juan Manuel Lopez, who knocked out three solid opponents including highly respected Mexican warrior Rafael Marquez, and Giovani Segura, who won four times (that’s three years work for Mayweather) in 2010, all by knockout. Along the way, Segura defeated one of the great minimum weight fighters in history, slick Ivan Calderon, to win the belt on Aug. 28.

Lastly, boxing gave us another magical cinematic moment as well with the release of “The Fighter,’’ a film based on the life and hard times of junior welterweight scrapper Micky Ward. The film has won rave reviews and many awards and seems likely to have several of its actors nominated for Academy Awards, most notable Christian Bale for his sadly humorous portrayal of Ward’s troubled half brother, former fighter Dickie Ecklund.

Boxing has a long history of providing the framework for memorable movies and it did it again with “The Fighter,’’ a film that did more for boxing than any promoter did all year.

All in all, it wasn’t the best of years for boxing but it was a good year that picked up speed in the final months and, like that great golf shot you finally hit out of the rough on the 18th, left us with reasons to hope for a better year in 2011. If somehow it gives us Mayweather-Pacquiao, the emergence of Alvarez and Rios, the ascension of Martinez and Haye vs. the best available Klitschko in addition to the kind of solid performances that always come along, it could be a year to remember.

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