Ray Arcel: A Boxing Biography–Book Review by Thomas Hauser

Published

12 years ago

July 31, 2012

Arcel book cover 300 The image of Ray Arcel that exists today is that of a sage old trainer who knew the science of boxing and was a gentleman. He preached patience as the foundation of training and never made himself the center of attention.

Ray Arcel: a Boxing Biography by Donald Dewey (McFarland and Company) explores Arcel’s life in detail. The author has an appreciation of boxing and boxing history. His writing is a bit ponderous at times, but the book is intelligent and insightful.

Arcel was born in Terre Haute, Indiana, in 1899. His family moved to New York when he was young so that his dying mother could be near her parents. Dewey questions the veracity of certain stories that Arcel told about himself that were repeated by others so often that they came to be accepted as true. For example, Arcel told people that he graduated from Stuyvesant High School in New York (a school for gifted students). The school records don’t support that claim.

Stephanie “Steve” Arce (Ray’s second wife, who was married to him for thirty-nine years) told Dewey that her husband “wasn’t really much of a family man.” The facts appear to support that statement. Arcel’s daughter attempted suicide at age 23 by taking an overdose of sleeping pills. He didn’t talk much about that or the death of his first wife from cancer. Indeed, Steve was married to him for more than three decades before she learned that Ray’s father had remarried after Ray’s mother died. Even then, he didn’t tell her about a half-sister and step-brother that he had.

One thing that Arcel did talk about, though, was boxing. He often emphasized the following themes:

* “A trainer can only work with the talent that’s there. He can’t give some kid a talent for boxing. What he can give him are the moves and steps that will help him give a good performance in the show when it counts.”

* “Just to train your fighters, to have them hit the bag and skip rope and develop stamina; that doesn’t mean anything. Get it out of your head that this is just some blooming gymnasium.”

* “Every young man that came to me, I made a complete study of his personal habits, his temperament. There are some people you can scold and some people you have to be careful with. No two people are alike. Unless a kid was obviously not cut out for the ring, I always took my time figuring him out.”

* “Never overestimate yourself or underestimate the other guy. See what the other guy has. See what his strengths are. See what his weaknesses are. See how you can overcome anything he has to offer.”

* “The name of the game has always been outsmarting the other fighter, not beating him to a pulp. If you can’t outsmart him, [if you] don’t use your brain, you’re going to be a loser.”

* “One thing you see far too often is a fighter coming back to his corner after a round and immediately being manhandled by everybody there. This one has this to say; that one has that to say. I always kept in my mind that the fighter came back to rest. The last thing he needed was all that screaming at him.”

During the course of Arcel’s career, he trained champions in each of boxing’s eight classic weight divisions. At various times, he worked with Benny Leonard, Jackie “Kid” Berg, Barney Ross, James Braddock, Max Baer, Tony Zale, Kid Gavilan, and Ezzard Charles. There came a time when he was in the corner for a succession of charter members of Joe Louis’s “Bum of the Month Club.” Johnny Paycheck, Al McCoy, Paulino Uzcudun, Nathan Mann, Abe Simon, Buddy Baer, and Lou Nova were all knocked out with Arcel in their corner. Before one of those bouts, when the fighters met in the center of the ring for the referee’s final pre-fight instructions, Louis looked at Arcel and blurted out, “You here again?”

Arcel was most active as a trainer during the years that organized crime was a commanding presence in boxing. Dewey acknowledges that Ray trained fighters who were controlled by mob figures like Owney Madden and Frankie Carbo. In that regard, Arcel once said of Madden, “Any other business he was involved in; that was his business, not mine.” Carbo’s fighters fell under the umbrella of, “When a manager asked me to train a fighter, the first thing I asked was to see his manager’s license. If he had a license, that meant he’d been approved by the licensing commission. If the commission didn’t have a problem with the people behind that manager and his fighter, why should I?”

That said; Arcel was aware of the moral ambiguities of his position. “All I know is the boxing business,” he offered. “There’s nothing else I can do. Nothing else I’d want to do. But sometimes . . .”

Sometime came in the 1950s. On September 14, 1953, Arcel was knocked unconscious on the streets of Boston by a man wielding a lead pipe. He was taken to Massachusetts Memorial Hospital in critical condition and remained there for nineteen days. It was widely assumed that the assault resulted from his involvement on the business end of a Saturday Night Fights series televised by ABC that threatened the TV monopoly established by James Norris and the IBC.

Thereafter, Arcel took a job in the purchasing department of Meehanite Metal (a company that blended alloys for foundry use). He returned to boxing in 1972 to work with Roberto Duran, who challenged Ken Buchanan at Madison Square Garden for the lightweight crown.

Arcel stayed with Duran through some glorious highs and one particularly heartbreaking low. The worst moment in the trainer’s career came in New Orleans on November 25, 1980, when Duran pled “no mas” is his rematch against Sugar Ray Leonard.

Dewey writes, “For all his insistence that every fighter had to be handled differently and no two boxers were the same, all [of Arcel’s] perceptions answered to very fixed laws. The first of these laws, inscribed more deeply the longer his career stretched, was that he simply didn’t want to be surprised by anything that happened. Whatever he had assured himself of with Duran over years of professional collaboration, ‘no mas’ had never been an ingredient of it.”

Longtime friend Jerry Izenberg accompanied Arcel back to his hotel after the fight and described him as “looking like a heart attack.” Later that evening, Arcel broke down in his room and cried. “The whole situation was more than I could take,” he admitted later. “It took a long time for me to get over it, if I ever did.”

Yet Arcel never asked Duran why he quit, “I didn’t think it was my business,” he said.

Nineteen months later, at age 83, Arcel notched his last victory in a fighter’s corner when Larry Holmes knocked out Gerry Cooney at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas.

Dewey’s book is filled with anecdotes. One of my favorites involves the time that Arcel was training Charlie Phil Rosenberg, who was struggling to make the 118-pound limit for a bantamweight title fight against Eddie Martin in 1925.

Arcel had some strange ideas, including the belief that a person shouldn’t drink water or anything else during meals. For a fighter struggling to make weight, water was rationed in particularly sparse quantity.

“I always had to sleep with one eye open,” Arcel said of the nights leading up to Rosenberg’s fight against Martin. “Charlie would get up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom, and I would stand there with the door open. He kept cussing me. ‘I just want to gargle,’ he’d say. And I’d tell him, ‘I’m watching your Adam’s apple, Charlie. Don’t swallow that water.’”

“After this fight is over,” Rosenberg told Arcel, “I’m going to kill you.”

Rosenberg beat Martin on a fifteen-round decision.

Arcel lived another sixty-nine years.

Thomas Hauser can be reached by email at thauser@rcn.com. His next book (And the New: An Inside Look at Another Year in Boxing) will be published later this summer by the University of Arkansas Press.

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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

3 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

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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