The Beast of Stillman’s Gym, Part 2

Published

13 years ago

January 16, 2012

The Beast of Stillman’s Gym

PART 2: THE NATURAL

“The joint always smells wrong,” A.J. Liebling said about Stillman’s Gym. Even so, he could look at the soot covering its brick façade and see ivy –-“The University of Eighth Avenue,” he called it. Joe Rein calls it “The Center of the Boxing Universe” but something stayed in his nose too. He remembers the windows, “opaque with thirty years of grime” and sealed shut. Gene Tunney once demanded that someone pry them open, figuring the fresh air would do some good. “Fresh air?” said one of the regulars, “Why that stuff is likely to kill us!”

All the greats from boxing’s golden era trained at Stillman’s and thirty-five cents was all it took to rub shoulders with them all. Sometimes a king with an upcoming title defense would make an entrance and the price of admission would be raised. It was worth it. The artistry that unfolded in the exhibition rings was enough to make everyone forget the stench.

When Bernie Bernstein laced the gloves on a garage attendant he picked up on King’s Highway, no one gave him a second look. When he shoved him into one of the rings with a serious professional middleweight, you bet they did.

Urban crowds have found spectacles like this amusing since martyrs were shoved into Roman rings with serious lions. ‘Damnation ad bestia’ they used to call it and it’s never pretty. Here’s how it works: a bumpkin novice walks into a boxing gym. Eagle-eyed managers size him up to see if he’s an easy mark, a confidence-builder for his fighter. One of them approaches the novice with interest. The novice has faint misgivings but is too polite to turn back once his ears are filled up with fast-talk and the headgear is strapped on. Fifteen minutes later, a traumatized bumpkin leaves the gym. If he looks back it’s only because his head is spinning.

Bernstein’s bumpkin turned out to be something else altogether.

Calvin Coolidge Lytle, who had “boxed a little” in the navy “and wanted to get back into it,” beat the living hell out of a good middleweight right there in Stillman’s, right there in front of a snickering crowd. After that eye-opener, Bernstein would speak to savvy Sammy Aaronson and turn him professional. Tiny Patterson was selected as his manager of record, though she had a trainer’s license in only a few states. Bernstein would fill in everywhere else.

That was in the flag-waving spring of 1944. The truth of Calvin’s military service record could only hurt him, so the Aaronson office got right to work revising it. His bad conduct discharge became a medical discharge. All those captain’s masts, confinements in the brig, and the court martial were exchanged for a new narrative: Calvin was recast as a patriotic example who saw so much action in the European and Caribbean theatres that he was called “Lucky” for cheating death.

Calvin was indeed lucky. He was lucky enough to be close to the action in New York City and luckier still to have the backing of the Aaronson office, which had the largest stable of fighters in the world at the time. They took him over to Newark where he made his pro debut at the Meadowbrook Bowl.

He did not fight under his real name. Twelve years earlier, another fighter who eventually signed with the Aaronson office was fighting under the moniker “Cocoa Kid” in honor of the then-streaking Kid Chocolate. His right name was Herbert Lewis Hardwick and he was in New Haven at the same time that the famous Cuban was making headlines 75 miles away in Manhattan. News reports of the time parroted a claim concocted by managers that Cocoa Kid was also from Cuba, though he was born in Puerto Rico. By the summer of 1944, he had moved to Brooklyn after an honorable discharge from the Navy. He trained at Stillman’s and took Calvin under his wing. It is an aging Cocoa Kid’s fingerprints that can be seen all over that pro debut on July 17^th 1944: Twenty-year-old Calvin was introduced to the fight mob as “Chocolate Kid of Cuba.”

The opponent was Artie Towne.

Towne was 9-0 and a stable mate of none other than Sugar Ray Robinson. He was already a highly skilled boxer-puncher who would later become what was called a “policeman” for Robinson. When solicited by certain opponents, Robinson’s management would reroute them to Towne before any contracts were signed. Towne was counted on to clear the field of low-yield threats and thereby allow Robinson to pursue more lucrative bouts. It worked well enough for Robinson, though not for Towne, who was strictly a preliminary fighter for most of his career. “Robinson was too big then,” he recalled, “They didn’t have any time for me.”

Not three years into his professional career he was already using aliases to get fights. Managers were getting cold sweats –-most managers, that is. Sammy Aaronson and company were braver than most. Sending their fresh-faced prospect into the ring against Towne strongly suggests that Calvin had done more than beat up a contender or two at Stillman’s Gym; he was doing it regularly enough to make two suits and a skirt giddy with confidence–-

Aaronson, Bernstein, and Ms. Patterson were convinced that what they had was a natural fighter.

They miscalculated. Natural talent is usually not enough to deal with experience, and the Towne-Chocolate Kid match seemed to confirm that axiom. Towne was given the decision over six rounds.

A week later, Calvin faced a fellow southpaw with 44 fights and only 9 losses. Joe Curcio was not only far more experienced than the 0-1 prospect; he was good enough to stop Towne later that year. “The Chocolate Kid,” read the Newark Evening News, “bashed” him.

One week after defeating Curcio, Calvin was in the ring against Lew Perez, “the fighting clown of Puerto Rico.” Perez constituted the first “opponent” that Calvin faced. In boxing parlance, an opponent is good enough to test a new prospect but not good enough to beat him; he lies somewhere between a journeyman and a bum on the respectability scale. Perez’s prowess was not enough to earn a following (he would end his career with almost twice as many losses as wins) so he became an entertainer. The Evening News reported that he “supplied the fans with plenty of laughs in his match with Chocolate Kid of Cuba, but when he ran out of gas in the fourth round he also ran out of laughs, and was counted out.”

Calvin began his career facing three distinctive styles in a boxer-puncher, a southpaw, and an unorthodox fighter. He was on a greased track in a new city with big-time managers, fleeing his past with a narrative that would change yet again. The moniker “Chocolate Kid” was never used after the Perez fight; perhaps because with both the memory of Kid Chocolate and the skills of Cocoa Kid receding, the moniker’s marketability receded with them. All that remained of his past was a name given him by an auto mechanic almost three years dead in honor of a president dead longer than that. ‘Calvin Coolidge Lytle’ was an old tag on a new suit.

Five days after the Perez fight, he was announced as someone else from somewhere else at Mechanic’s Hall in Worcester, Massachusetts. Although Bernstein is credited with coming up with his latest ring moniker, odds are good that it was showgirl Tiny Patterson who recalled the silent screen star with a similar surname. And just like that Lytle (pronounced L?t?l) became Lytell (pronounced L?’-t?l?). The Worcester Evening Gazette introduced him as “Bert Lytell,” a “highly touted newcomer” with a reputation made in California “where he rated among the best on the Coast.” Thus began the most durable of his evolving mythology; one so convincing that he himself believed it.

When a reporter for The Ring asked him where he was born, Calvin “smiled mysteriously” and said he was born in Fresno, California on May 24^th 1924. He said he was a graduate of San Petersburg High School and an all-star athlete, a half-back and quarter-back on the football team and a center fielder with a batting average of between 360 and 375 on the baseball team. The Boston Evening News was told he was from Fresno, while the Providence Journal heard he was from Oakland. A few years later the San Francisco Chronicle was told that he was born in Oakland and went to Oakland High School. The Times-Picayune couldn’t stay consistent with itself –-they had him from Fresno one day and Oakland the next.

The truth is he was born four months earlier than claimed, attended a “colored” school in Texas called F.W. Gross High School and never made it past ninth grade.

In the summer of 1944 the press was trumpeting his “26-0 record with 23 knockouts” though he only had a handful of professional bouts at that point. Even the date of his pro debut was pushed back from July to March –-9^th to be exact, which was actually the date of his bad conduct discharge. But padding the record wasn’t the problem. The problem was that no one could keep the cock-and-bull straight. Reporters got suspicious. Speed Reilly of The Referee and the Redhead spoke to gym rats in the Oakland area during what he called “Operations Whosis” and only ended up more confused. Arthur Susskind, Jr. relayed his suspicions about this “mystery man” after discovering that the California Boxing Commission had no record that the fighter ever applied for a license.

His style of fighting proved to be as flexible as his back story, and twice as confusing.

By his fifth bout he was drawing comparisons with Harry Greb, a frenzied middleweight from the 20s who fought all-comers in almost 300 recorded bouts. By early 1945, Bert was approaching Greb’s frantic schedule, fighting an average of once a week through March. Swarmers cannot be expected to maintain such a schedule without coasting at times but Bert did better than that; he changed styles whenever the spirit moved him. In one fight report he would be described as a fighter of the “‘bore in’, perpetual motion variety” while in the next he conjured up Cocoa Kid by appearing to be “an exceedingly slick ringman” who could dominate a fight behind a constant jab and movement. Johnny Finazzo, whose decision win was avenged within four months, had the best view to describe his style. “Lytell,” he said, “is a fast, clever fellow and keeps coming at you every second.”

Hard men were wilting under a relentless attack that was as flexible as his narrative, but something else was becoming plain, disturbingly plain –-an inflexible jaw. Punches bounced off Bert like tennis balls off a bus.

Tiny Patterson was cheering herself hoarse as the “sharpshooting southpaw” dominated Joe Reddick in Providence, Rhode Island despite being outweighed by 11½ pounds. It was April 20^th 1945 and a win here would clinch a date in Boston on the 27^th with the top-ranked middleweight on the planet. According to the Providence Journal, Bert landed “so many left hands off Reddick’s head –-jaw, chin, nose, ears, forehead–- that it was almost sickeningly repetitious.”

Reddick took the ninth round and no more, and that because Bert was distracted by a shadow on the wall.

It was the shadow of a man hunched over like a bull.

____________________________

The “Raging Bull” Jake LaMotta, at his nastiest, faces the surging southpaw in PART 3 OF “THE BEAST OF STILLMAN’S GYM.”

Graphic: (from left to right) Bert Lytell, Speed Reilly, and Sammy Aaronson. Courtesy of Harry Otty.

Two eyewitness accounts of Stillman’s Gym, A.J. Liebling’s “The University of Eighth Avenue” and Joe Rein’s “The Center of the Boxing Universe” came in handy here. Tunney and Dundee’s vignette found in Ronald K. Fried’s Corner Men: Great Boxing Trainers, p. 37. The Fresno-Oakland issue illustrated in The Times-Picayune 8/31/, 9/1/45. Dick Friendlich’s “Boxing Briefs” in San Francisco Chronicle undated. The Berkshire Evening Eagle 9/11/47. “Ray Robinson’s Policeman To Make First Main Fight,” by Jack Hand 10/14/55. New Jersey Star Ledger 7/17/44. Newark Evening News 7/31/44 for the Curcio bout, Perez in 8/1/44. Claim of 26 fights in Worcester Evening Gazette 8/18/44; 40 fights claimed in Providence Journal 2/18/45. Patterson fight in Worcester Evening Gazette 8/5/44, compared to Greb in 9/1/44 edition, “bore-in variety” in 9/15/44. “Slick ringman” comment in Providence Journal 2/25/45. Finazzo comments in Boston Evening American 3/1/45. Reddick in Providence Journal 4/21/45.

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

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Avila Perspective, Chap. 289: East LA, Claressa Shields and More

Published

1 day ago

July 25, 2024

David A. Avila

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Avila Perspective, Chap. 289: East LA, Claressa Shields and More

East Los Angeles has long been a haven for some of the best fighters around if you can keep them out of trouble. For every Oscar De La Hoya or Seniesa Estrada there are thousands derailed by crime, drugs or drinking.

Boxing has always been a favorite sport of East L.A. Every family has an uncle or two who boxes.

On Friday, 360 Promotions’ Omar Trinidad (15-0-1) fights Viktor Slavinskyi (15-2-1) in the main event at Commerce Casino, in Commerce, CA. UFC Fight Pass will stream the fight card.

The City of Commerce used to be part of East L.A. until 1960 when it incorporated. It’s still considered to be part of East Los Angeles, but informally.

Plenty of fighters come out of East L.A. but few make it all the way like De La Hoya and Estrada. Will Trinidad be the one?

The first world champion from East L.A. or “East Los” as some call it, was Solly Garcia Smith back in the late 1800s. Others were Richie Lemos, Art Frias and Joey Olivo. There is also 1984 Olympic gold medalist Paul Gonzalez.

Once again 360 Promotions brings its popular brand of fights to the area. On this fight card includes two female bouts. One features Roxy Verduzco (1-0) the former amateur star fighting Colleen Davis (3-1-1) in a featherweight fight.

All that action takes place on Friday.

Elite Boxing

The next day, also in East L.A., Elite Boxing stages another boxing card at Salesian High School located at 960 S. Soto Street in the Boyle Heights area of East Los Angeles.

Elite Boxing has promoted several successful boxing cards at the Catholic high school grounds. The area is saturated by many of the best eateries in Los Angeles. Don’t take my word for it. Check it out yourself and grab some of that delicious food.

Boxing has long been a favorite sport of anyone who lives in East L.A. It’s a fight town equal to Philadelphia, Brooklyn or Detroit. There’s something different about the area. For more than 100 years some of the best fighters continue to come out of its boxing gyms. Some will be performing on these club shows.

For tickets or information go to www.eliteboxingusa.com

Claressa Shields in Detroit

Speaking of fight towns, pound-for-pound best Claressa Shields who won two Olympic Gold Medals in boxing, moves up another weight division to tackle the WBC heavyweight world champion Vanessa Lepage-Joanisse on Saturday, July 27, at Little Caesars Arena in Detroit, Michigan.

DAZN will stream the heavy-duty fight card.

Shields (14-0) cleaned out the super welterweight, middleweight and super middleweight divisions and now wants to add the big girls to her conquests. She will be facing Canada’s Lepage-Joanisse (7-1) who holds the WBC belt.

The last time Shields gloved up was more than a year ago when she fought Maricela Cornejo. Don’t blame Shields. She loves to fight. She loves to win. The last time Shields lost a fight was in the amateurs and that was three presidential administrations ago.

Shields doesn’t lose.

I wonder if Las Vegas even takes bets on her fights?

The only fight she may have been an underdog was against Savannah Marshall who was the last opponent to defeat her. And that was in 2012 in China. When they met as pros two years ago, Shields avenged her loss with a blistering attack.

Don’t get Shields mad.

Perhaps her toughest foe as a pro was in her pro debut when she clashed with Franchon Crews-Dezurn in Las Vegas. It was four rounds of fists and fury as the two pounded each other on the undercard of Andre Ward and Sergey Kovalev in November 2016.

That was a ferocious debut for both female pugilists.

Assisting Shields on this fight card will be several intriguing male bouts. One guy you should pay special attention is Tito Mercado (15-0, 14 KOs) a super lightweight prospect from Pomona, California.

Many excellent fighters have come out of Pomona including Sugar Shane Mosley, Shane Mosley Jr., Alberto Davila and Richie Sandoval who just passed away this week.

Sandoval was best known for his 15-round war with Philadelphia’s Jeff Chandler for the bantamweight world title in 1984. Read the story by Arne K. Lang on this link: https://tss.ib.tv/boxing/featured-boxing-articles-boxing-news-videos-rankings-and-results/81467-former-world-bantamweight-champion-richie-sandoval-passes-away-at-age-63 .

Fights to Watch

Fri. UFC Fight Pass 7 p.m. Omar Trinidad (15-0-1) vs Viktor Slavinskyi (15-2-1).

Sat. ESPN+ 12:30 p.m. Joe Joyce (16-2) vs Derek Chisora (34-13).

Sat. DAZN 3 p.m. Claressa Shields (14-0) vs Vanessa Lepage-Joanisse (7-1), Michel Rivera (25-1) vs Hugo Roldan (22-2-1); Tito Mercado (15-0) vs Hector Sarmiento (21-2).

Omar Trinidad photo by Lina Baker

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Arne’s Almanac: Jake Paul and Women’s Boxing, a Curmudgeon’s Take

Published

2 days ago

July 24, 2024

Arne K. Lang

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Jake Paul can fight more than a little. The view from here is that he would make it interesting against any fringe contender in the cruiserweight division. However, Jake’s boxing acumen pales when paired against his skill as a flim-flam artist.

Jake brought a 9-1 record into last weekend’s bout with Mike Perry. As noted by boxing writer Paul Magno, Jake’s previous opponents consisted of “a You Tuber, a retired NBA star, five retired MMA stars, a part-time boxer/reality TV star, and two undersized and inactive fall-guy boxers.”

Mike Perry, a 32-year-old Floridian, was undefeated (6-0, 3 KOs) as a bare-knuckle boxer after forging a 14-8 record in UFC bouts. In pre-fight blurbs, Perry was billed as the baddest bare knuckle boxer of all time, but against Jake Paul he proved to have very unrefined skills as a conventional boxer which Team Paul undoubtedly knew all along. Perry lasted into the eighth round in a one-sided fight that could have been stopped a lot sooner.

Jake Paul is both a boxer and a promoter. As a promoter, he handles Amanda Serrano, one of the greatest female boxers in history. That makes him the person most responsible (because the buck stops with him) for the wretched mismatch in last Saturday’s co-feature, the bout between Serrano and Stevie Morgan.

Morgan, who took up boxing two years ago at age 33, brought a 14-1 record. Nicknamed the Sledgehammer, she had won 13 of her 14 wins by knockout, eight in the opening round. However, although she resides in Florida, all but one of those 13 knockouts happened in Colombia.

“We found that in Colombia there were just more opportunities for women’s boxing than in the United States,” she told a prominent boxing writer whose name we won’t mention.

The truth is that, for some folks, Colombia is the boxing equivalent of a feeder lot for livestock, a place where a boxer can go to fatten their record. The opportunities there were no greater than in Hot Springs, Arkansas, in 1995. It was there that Peter McNeeley prepped for his match with Mike Tyson with a 6-second knockout of professional punching bag Frankie Hines. (Six seconds? So it would be written although no one seems to have been there to witness it.)

Serrano vs Morgan was understood to be a stay-busy fight for Amanda whose rematch with Katie Taylor was postponed until November. Stevie Morgan, to her credit, answered the bell for the second round whereas others in her situation would have remained on the stool and invented an injury to rationalize it. Thirty-eight seconds later it was all over and Ms. Morgan was free to go home and use her sledgehammer to do some light dusting.

The Paul-Perry and Serrano-Morgan fights played out in a sold-out arena in Tampa before an estimated 17,000. Those without a DAZN subscription paid $64.95 for the livestream. Paul’s next promotion, where he will touch gloves with 58-year-old Mike Tyson (unless Iron Mike pulls a Joe Biden and pulls out; a capital idea) with Serrano-Taylor II the semi-main, will almost certainly rake in more money than any other boxing promotion this year.

Asked his opinion of so-called crossover boxing by a reporter for a college newspaper, the venerable boxing promoter Bob Arum said, “It’s not my bag but folks who don’t like it shouldn’t get too worked up over it because no one is stealing from anybody.” True enough, but for some of us, the phenomenon is distressing.

—

The next big women’s fight happens Saturday in Detroit where Claressa Shields seeks a world title in a third weight class against WBC heavyweight belt-holder Vanessa Lepage-Joanisse.

A two-time Olympic gold medalist, undefeated in 14 fights as a pro, Shields is very good, arguably the best female boxer of her generation which makes her, arguably, the best female boxer of all time. But turning away Lepage-Joanisse (7-1, 2 KOs) won’t elevate her stature in our eyes.

Purportedly 17-4 as an amateur, the Canadian won her title in her second crack at it. Back in August of 2017, she challenged Cancun’s Alejandra Jimenez in Cancun and was stopped in the third round. Entering the bout, Lepage-Joanisse was 3-0 as a pro and had never fought a match slated for more than four rounds.

Vanessa Lepage-Joanisse

True, on the women’s side, the heavyweight bracket is a very small pod. A sanctioning body has to make concessions to harness a sanctioning fee. Nonetheless, how absurd that a woman who had answered the bell for only 11 rounds would be deemed qualified to compete for a world title. (FYI: Alejandra Jimenez was purportedly born a man. She left the sport with a 12-0-1 record after her win over Franchon Crews Dazurn was changed to a no-contest when she tested positive for the banned steroid stanozolol.)

Following her defeat to Jimenez, Vanessa Lepage-Joanisse, now 29 years old, was out of action for six-and-a-half years. When she returned, she was still a heavyweight, but a much slender heavyweight. She carried 231 pounds for Jimenez. In her most recent bout where she captured the vacant WBC title with a split decision over Argentina’s Abril Argentina Vidal, she clocked in at 173 ¼. (On the distaff side, there’s no uniformity among the various sanctioning bodies as to what constitutes a heavyweight.)

Claressa Shields doesn’t need Vanessa Lepage-Joanisse to reinforce her credentials as a future Hall of Famer. She made the cut a long time ago.

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Former World Bantamweight Champion Richie Sandoval Passes Away at Age 63

Published

4 days ago

July 22, 2024

Arne K. Lang

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Richie Sandoval, who won the WBA and lineal bantamweight title in one of the biggest upsets of the 1980s and then, not quite two years later, suffered near-fatal injuries in a title defense, has passed away at the age of 63.

News circulated fast in the Las Vegas boxing community on Monday, July 22, the grapevine actuated by a tweet from Hall of Fame matchmaker Bruce Trampler: “Boxing and the Top Rank family lost one of our own last night in the passing of former WBA bantamweight champion Richie Sandoval. It hurts personally and professionally to know that Richie is gone at age 63. RIP campeon.”

Details are vague but the cause of death was apparently a sudden heart attack that Sandoval experienced while visiting the Southern California home of his son of the same name.

Richie Sandoval put the LA County community of Pomona, California, on the boxing map before Shane Mosley came along and gave the town a more frequently-cited mention in the sports section of the papers. He came from a fighting family. An older brother, Albert “Superfly” Sandoval, became a big draw at LA’s fabled Olympic Auditorium while building a 35-2-1 record that included a failed bid to capture Lupe Pintor’s world bantamweight title.

Richie was a member of the 1980 U.S. Olympic boxing team that was stranded when U.S. President Jimmy Carter (and many other world leaders) boycotted the event as a protest against Russia’s invasion of Afghanistan.

As a pro, Sandoval’s signature win was a 15^th-round stoppage of Jeff Chandler. They fought on April 7, 1984 in Atlantic City. Chandler was making the tenth defense of his world bantamweight title.

Despite being a heavy underdog, Sandoval dominated the fight, winning almost every round until the referee stepped in and waived it off. Chandler, who was 33-1-2 heading in and had avenged his lone defeat, never fought again.

Sandoval made two successful defenses before risking his title against Gaby Canizales on the undercard of Hagler-Mugabi in the outdoor stadium at Caesars Palace. In round seven, Sandoval, who had a hellish time making the weight, was knocked down three times and suffered a seizure as he collapsed from the third knockdown. Stretchered out of the ring, he was rushed to the hospital where doctors reduced the swelling in his brain and beat the odds to save his life. This would be Richie’s lone defeat. He finished his pro career with a record of 29-1 (17 KOs).

Bob Arum cushioned some of the pain by giving Richie a $25,000 bonus and offering him a lifetime job at Top Rank which Richie accepted. And let the record show that Arum was good to his word.

A more elaborate portrait of Richie Sandoval was published in these pages in 2017. You can check it out HERE. May he rest in peace.

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