The Beast of Stillman's Gym, Part 6…TOLEDO

Published

12 years ago

January 30, 2012

beast- Middleweight Bert Lytell meets light heavyweight Archie Moore, 1950

PART 6: “THE WORLD’S MOST FEARED MIDDLEWEIGHT”

Rocky Graziano’s manager stood in a gym in a Massachusetts mill town watching Johnny Eagle train and was impressed enough to pick him to upset Bert Lytell. It was wishful thinking. Bert took a unanimous decision, snapping Eagle through the ropes along the way. There might have been a message in that. Bert had been spouting off to the press about Graziano, accusing him of “repeatedly refusing to sign for a match.” He believed he would eventually “force” the Italian bomber to reconsider. That too would prove to be wishful thinking.

In April 1947 Bert faced Sam Baroudi in New York. French superstar Marcel Cerdan was there scouting for his third match on American soil. Baroudi was a dangerous boxer-puncher coming up like a “like a house a fire” and Bert took him apart –-he took him apart while Cerdan sat ringside and thought up excuses not to fight him.

Bert’s long-awaited rematch with Jake LaMotta was set for May at Madison Square Garden with the winner to meet Tony Zale for the middleweight championship of the world. It fell through and was rescheduled for September. That date was cancelled after a physician from the New York State Athletic Commission examined LaMotta’s hands, which had been badly bruised in a bout only a few days before. Finally, a date in January 1948 was reserved, again at Madison Square Garden. It too was cancelled after LaMotta was suspended during an investigation into his suspicious loss to Billy Fox.

Cerdan, who didn’t terrorize the American field so much as tiptoe through it, got the title shot in September and defeated Zale for the middleweight crown.

His first defense would be against none other than the Bronx Bull.

LaMotta had finally caved in to Mob pressure. A man with a toothpick in his mouth approached him one day in the gym and made an offer. “Throw the fight with Fox,” he said, “and you’ll get a title shot.” LaMotta threw him out, but then got to thinking. He took a walk a few nights later, a long one, and the ruthless truth met him along the way:

You want to be “the champ” more than anything, but you’ve made all the wrong enemies. You’re too stubborn to do business with Frankie Carbo and too stupid to see what you’re up against. It’s the Mob that is the establishment here, my friend, and it’s the Mob that holds all the strings. You’ve been swapping blows with colored bombers for years and just like them you’re making chump change and going nowhere.

You and your “pride.” Your pride and a dime can get you into the subway, but it will never get you what you want most.

And that was that. LaMotta would stop Cerdan in ten rounds and got what he wanted most. “It felt like God had given me the world,” he said afterwards.

Those four kings –-LaMotta, Cerdan, Zale, and Graziano-– reigned during Bert’s rampage. Not one of them would have been any more than even money to beat him. It was a tragic irony, really. There he was fighting out of perhaps the greatest gym in boxing history with well-connected managers and a crowd-pleasing style and it didn’t matter. It just didn’t matter.

He was like bitter coffee that no one wanted to drink; too black, too strong, and as it turned out, too honest.

HAVE GUNS, WILL TRAVEL

The late Allen Rosenfeld remembered hanging around Stillman’s when a “wave of excitement” erupted around him. “Bert Lytell was in the gym,” he recalled. Rosenfeld ran upstairs and saw a “pleasant and friendly looking” boxer skipping rope and working the speed bag. He heard the regulars muttering “no one will fight him.”

Murderers’ Row seethed with top contenders that no one would fight, but Bert was off by himself even among them. He went after anyone, even other hard cases. Not many dared hunt LaMotta in the mid 1940s. Bert did. No one in their right mind went after a destroyer like Ezzard Charles. Bert did; he even offered to donate his purse to charity.

The buzz was that he was “the world’s most feared middleweight” and he’d migrate overseas to prove it. When he came back from a month-long campaign in the Caribbean, The Ring ranked him number one. He’d also migrate across weight divisions. In December 1948, he was scheduled to confront the second-ranked light heavyweight in the world, and his manager was barking even before he won. He publically offered Cerdan both purses if he agreed to meet Bert for the title: “All we want is training expenses. If we win tonight’s fight and Cerdan still ignores our challenge then we’ll go after the light heavyweight crown.”

Two kings –-Freddie Mills and Joey Maxim-– reigned during Bert’s light heavyweight rampage; neither of them would have been any more favored to beat him than their middleweight counterparts.

Despite his status as an apex contender in two divisions, he had to stay in condition like a ham-and-egger in hopes of earning enough purses to get by. He’d fight anyone, anytime, and there isn’t even a rumor that says otherwise. Managers desperate to find a last-minute substitute knew where to find him. One day a call came into Stillman’s from Ohio to offer Bert a purse of $734.86 (minus expenses) to fight a light heavyweight named Bob Amos. Bert arrived in Dayton on Sunday, trained Tuesday and Wednesday, and was ready by Thursday night. Amos’s trainer was Eddie Futch, who peered sorrowfully through the ropes while his fighter got belted around the ring for ten rounds. “Lytell crowded Amos from the outset, and seldom let up,” said the Dayton Daily News, “Bert’s style –-and it’s a varied one, because he really knows his way around that ring–- had Amos worried from the start and frequently befuddled thereafter.” Futch never wanted Lytell for his boy in the first place.

There were sightings as far off as California. A crowd gathered around the ring in Harry Fine’s gym and watched him stand up to a mountain and chop it down with both hands. The mountain was 6’4, 220 lb Leroy Evans. Bert was 5’8.

A few days later he was swarming all over the heavy-punching Oakland Billy Smith.

Smith was meat for Murderers’ Row, but that didn’t mean he went down easy. When Bert faced Smith again in Cincinnati, “Both fighters wrestled to the floor several times,” the AP reported, and “at one point, were trading punches while sitting on the canvas.” The AP failed to report that at another point Smith spit in Bert’s face. He was suspended in Cincinnati after that one, though a cursory glance at some of his other misadventures suggests that he should have been committed.

Before Bert, there was Newsboy Millich. Millich got to Smith by whispering indecent things into his ear and fouling him in close, so Smith started kicking him. After Bert, there was Jersey Joe Walcott. Walcott hired Smith as a sparring partner in the early 50s. Smith would show up to work wearing a yellow turtleneck and a harness with straps dangling around his knees. No one could say why, least of all Billy. In one session, Smith hit Walcott so hard the heavyweight champ did an “involuntary shuffle” and Walcott responded with a right hand that froze Smith in suspended animation. In another session, Smith fled the ring.

It wasn’t the first time he fled the ring. “Disappearing” Billy Smith, as he became known, gave reporters plenty of material. In the eighth round of his fourth fight against Archie Moore, Smith turned away from Moore and was heard yelling “shut up” toward his corner when Moore nailed him. Smith went down, got up at the count of five, parted the ropes, and took off toward the dressing room. The next day he appeared before the boxing commission to explain what happened. “I was hurt, but only mentally” he said to several raised eyebrows. “All through the fight [my corner] kept yelling ‘one-two’, ‘one-two’ and what happened? Archie gave me a one-two to the head,” Smith said, “Bert Lytell punished me two months ago in Texas, and I didn’t aim to go through that again. It took me more than a month to recover from that beating.”

THE ELIMINATION BOUT

Where Smith was meat for Murderers’ Row, Archie Moore was a master of it. He was also one of Bert’s early mentors at Stillman’s Gym.

Bert fought Moore on even terms for seven rounds. He shifted behind a right jab and fought a style that was, according to the Baltimore Sun, “as elusive as plans for a Stadium roof.” Moore was outworked in close during rounds four and five but landed flush rights when he could find the bobbing and weaving target. After the seventh round, Moore’s thirteen-pound weight advantage came into play and he rumbled ahead to take a decision. Bert had a victory of sorts –he never staggered and never went down against one of the most destructive punchers of the last century.

The rematch was on January 31^st 1950. It was the most important bout of Bert’s career. According to the matchmaker for Madison Square Garden, Moore-Lytell II was really an “elimination bout” that would decide the next challenger for light heavyweight champion Joey Maxim.

As a new resident of Toledo, Ohio, Moore didn’t have to travel far to the Sports Arena. He entered the ring to the cheers of a friendly crowd and sported a nine-pound weight advantage, a three-inch height advantage, and considerably more experience. Despite it all, Bert proved that he was at least the equal of Moore. The Toledo Blade reported only “a hair margin dividing any of the rounds.” Both fighters, “past masters at the art of defense had a hard time breaking through” as punches were almost invariably “caught on the gloves, arms, or shoulders.” The decision was announced for Moore and 7300 of his new neighbors erupted not in cheers but in protest. Bert stood in defiance across the ring; nose bloody, pride intact.

It did no good for either man. Bert lost –-whether or not he was robbed didn’t matter. Moore would have only one more fight in 1950 because no one wanted to risk their record. And the title shot he was promised? It was nothing more than the promise of a politician. The fine print of the agreement said that Maxim and his manager had to agree to terms –-and it took time coming to terms with losing the title.

It took three years. At Christmastime 1952, Archie Moore finally fought for the championship of the world. He was 36 years old. Fate bought him a bus ticket out of Murderers’ Row and escorted him into the company of kings.

By then, the career of Bert Lytell had tanked.

____________________________

Did Bert Lytell retire? Nope. A mysterious offer is made that he can’t refuse, and he refuses anyway –with severe consequences. Read all about it in PART 7 OF “THE BEAST OF STILLMAN’S GYM.”

The graphic is from the Toledo Blade, 1/30/50.

Irving Cohen’s bet in Berkshire Evening Eagle 10/17,18/46; 4/21/47. Dick Friendlich’s “Boxing Briefs” in San Francisco Chronicle undated. New York Herald-Tribune 4/7,8/47; The Stars and Stripes, 12/16/48. LaMotta cancellations, AP 9/9/47 and New York Times 11/22/47. Cerdan Kansas City Times 12/14/48. LaMotta makes a deal in Raging Bull pp. 159-164, 169. Passenger manifest, Pan American Airways, Inc. 11/2/1948. Allen S. Rosenfeld’s memories at Stillman’s in Charley Burley: The Life and Hard Times of an Uncrowned Champion, p. 500. Lytell-Amos in Dayton Daily News 8/19/49. LaMotta-Fox in The Berkshire Evening Eagle, 11/22/1947. Chasing Ezzard Charles in Times-Picayune 4/5/46. Sparring a heavyweight in San Francisco Examiner 1/19/48; Bert willing to fight Cerdan for free and Mills, AP, 12/15/48. Oakland Billy Smith in Berkeley Daily Gazette, 4/10/45, Red Smith’s “Views of Sports,” 9/15/52, AP 1/4, 5/51 and UP 1/4/51. Ezzard Charles at fight in AP 2/27/48; Moore-Lytell I, The Sun 7/14,15,16/47; Moore-Lytell II, Toledo Blade 1/29,31/50, 2/1/50, The Stars and Stripes, 2/5/1950.

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

Avila-Perspective-Chap-289-East-L.A.-A-Fight-Town-Claressa-Shields-and-More

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

Arne's-Almanac-Jake-Paul-and-Women's-Boxing-a-Curmudgeon's-Take

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

Former-World-Bamtamweight-Champion-Richie-Sandoval-Passes-Away-at-age-63

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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