Battle Hymn – Part 8: Shadow and Light

Published

10 years ago

April 14, 2014

Part-8 be370 When Aaron Wade left San Francisco in 1945, he left behind a son and a pregnant wife. “He didn’t want to be a family man,” Jenny said. “He didn’t want nothing.” Right around the time he took a dive against Sugar Ray Robinson in February 1950, Alan Roy Wade turned four and had yet to meet him. By then, Jenny had given up and filed for divorce. It was finalized that year.

Wade moved in with a girlfriend in Jersey City and got a job at the Department of Sanitation. There were half-hearted attempts to reach out to his sons and every so often an envelope with a $20 money order inside would arrive at his ex-wife’s address in San Francisco. It was made out in his girlfriend’s handwriting, which speaks well of her character. In the mid-fifties, she died in a car accident and Wade went into a tailspin; he reached for the bottle with both hands and drowned his sorrows, or watched them swim.

In 1960, he made his way to Peoria to meet Alan for the first time. His mother Willie Mae and Jenny seem to have arranged the family reunion and Wade did his part; he stuck a cork in the bottle and put on a suit to make a good first impression. “He greeted me like a father,” Alan recalled, “and he looked younger than his years.” Wade tried to maintain contact by telephone—he tried to be a better father—but could not sustain it. The binging was getting worse.

He was bottoming out. Somewhere in his drunken haze the ghost of Kid Farmer was coming on, and hell followed with him.

When Kid Farmer was born over a saloon in 1884, Peoria was still called “Still City” and produced more whiskey than any other city in the nation. The saloon was only a few doors down from where the Wades would live in 1922/1923. Like Wade, Farmer became a professional fighter who never quite abstained from booze. Like Wade, he excelled in the sport anyway. Farmer was the kind of local legend carried from the ring on the shoulders of cheering fans—he reportedly had over 600 fights and 283 knockouts before he took a running leap into a bottomless vat.

It was said that Farmer was avoided by name-fighters and drank out of discouragement. It was also said Farmer never got a title shot because he was a drunk. Either way or both, he would fight half-cocked just like Wade did. “Staggering is strength,” he’d quip. “The weak fall down.” Eventually, his career became as erratic as his field of vision; he’d be in a main event one night and a curtain-raiser the next. When his career finally collapsed, he did too. Anyone looking for him was bound to find him face-down in a gutter beside an empty bottle or in a flop on skid row. One night in 1945, he got the bum’s rush out of a saloon and stumbled into the street where he was killed by a car just yards from where he was born. He’s buried in an unmarked grave in St. Mary’s cemetery, according to local historian Chuck Burroughs, “surrounded by hundreds of bodies of decent folk, who, if they knew Farmer was in their midst, would get up and walk away.”

Wade was teetering on the edge of Kid Farmer’s vat.

In May 1962, Wade was laid out on the third floor of a condemned house in Jersey City. “Paralyzed drunk,” is how he described it. He heard someone’s voice above him. “C’mon get yourself up,” it said. Wade could not. “Not a muscle in my body would move,” he said. So he murmured a prayer: “Please, Lord, let me stand on my feet.”

“The good Lord heard me,” he said. “I was able to stand, wobbly a bit, but steady enough to walk.” He made a promise then and there to stop drinking, but had another attack on the way home and was taken to the hospital. “There they told me what I always knew,” Wade said. “I was an alcoholic.”

He was likely suffering from alcoholic myopathy, the symptoms of which include sudden weakness and collapse after a drinking bout. It is invited by long-term alcohol use, as is delirium tremens (DTs), neuropathy, liver disease, and death.

—Wade had nowhere to go except up.

“I accepted Jesus Christ as my Lord and personal Saviour,” he told anyone who would listen. “Ever since that day, He has blessed me.” Wade began examining a conscience dulled for decades. What he saw were numerous tragedies that were the direct results of his “waywardness.” He had a son with a teenage sweetheart in Peoria and left them both behind when he moved west, he got mixed up with shady characters in San Francisco, got shot, almost got indicted, abandoned his wife and children when he moved east, blew a title shot after a drunken tantrum at the New York State Athletic Commission, trashed his last comeback, and became a Bowery bum shunned by his family. Wade had many regrets, though he found comfort in the sublime feeling that he was forgiven. Moved with gratitude, he began studying for the Christian ministry.

Early in 1968, Deacon Wade returned to San Francisco after a twenty-three-year absence. “I guess it was the good Lord that told me to come back to San Francisco,” he said, “where I might be able to carry on His work among people who might have remembered me when I was fighting.” He also drew nearer to his sons, now young men. “We saw him every week,” Alan told me. “Every week.”

“What was he like?” I asked Alan. “He was even-tempered, a happy man, always smiling and laughing,” he said. When either he or his brother talked back to his mother, though, the smile fell off. “He’d straighten us up,” Alan said with a chuckle, and left it at that.

He saw his father praying often and at different times during the day—head bowed, eyes closed, lips moving.

In March, the long-retired fighter stopped by the offices of the San Francisco Examiner and found the boxing writer who covered so many of his West Coast wars.

Eddie Muller glanced up from his desk as a little man with enormous shoulders pulled up a chair. Wade wore glasses by then, but Muller remembered him. “Aaron Wade was a prize fighter. A good one too,” he would write after their reunion. “Good enough to whip Archie Moore right here in San Francisco.” Wade told Muller what he had been through since his glory days, he spoke of shadows and light and how he’d “been telling others at church missions and meetings that the good Lord can do for them what He did for me.” Muller was impressed when Wade didn’t ask for a hand-out. He was even more impressed when Wade told him he received no compensation besides the “good feeling” he got helping the less fortunate.

“Even if you only help one you’ve really accomplished something,” he said.

Muller decided to help one too. He decided to help Wade. “Wade didn’t ask for this help. I am,” Muller told the Examiner’s100,000 subscribers. “The fellow can use a job.”

It was an irony that Wade probably welcomed as a test of faith when the Gallo Wine Company, then located on the south side of San Francisco, offered him a job at its warehouse. Wade accepted it and worked there for the rest of his life. Every Friday, employees would be handed a couple bottles of wine with their paychecks, but by then Wade and Kid Farmer’s ghost had gone separate ways. He gave the bottles away.

He still liked to eat. Alan fondly recalled going with him to the North Beach section of San Francisco. Wade, looking sharp in a suit, would walk into an Italian club and hobnob with guys who knew the slam-bang fighter he once was. He and his sons, who sat cowed by his warning not to say “mafia,” ate porchetta, Prosciutto di Parma, and Pork Chop Milanese free of charge. It was a sign of respect.

On March 5, 1971, Wade, now 54, was married for the second time to a short, heavyset nurse’s aide named Sallie Cousar —and life was good.

Photo by Kurt Bank found in Shaping San Francisco (digital archive).

Kid Farmer’s story found in Come Out Fighting: True Fight Tales for Fight Fans by Chuck Burroughs (1977), pp. 51-68; San Francisco Examiner 3/1/68 and 4/20/74 (Eddie Muller).

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

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Springs Toledo

A Paean to the Great Sportswriter Jimmy Cannon Who Passed Away 50 Years Ago This Week

Published

2 days ago

December 4, 2023

Arne K. Lang

A-Paean-to-the-Great-Sportswriter-Jimmy-Cannon-Who-Passed-Away-50-Years-Ago-This-Week

“Of all his assignments,” said the renowned sportswriter Dave Anderson, “[Jimmy] Cannon appeared to enjoy boxing the most.”

Cannon would have sheepishly concurred. He dated his infatuation with boxing to 1919 when he stood outside a saloon listening to a man with a megaphone relay bulletins from the Dempsey-Willard fight in faraway Toledo. His father followed boxing as did all the Irishmen in his neighborhood. For him, an interest in the sport of boxing, he once wrote, was like a family heirloom. But it became a love-hate relationship. It was Jimmy Cannon, after all, who coined the phrase “boxing is the red light district of sports.”

This week marks the 50^th anniversary of Jimmy Cannon’s death. He passed away at age 63 on Dec. 5, 1973, in his room at the residential hotel in mid-Manhattan where he made his home. In the realm of American sportswriters, there has never been a voice quite like him. He was “the hardest-boiled of the hard-drinking, hard-boiled school of sports writing,” wrote Darrell Simmons of the Atlanta Journal. One finds a glint of this in his summary of Sonny Liston’s first-round demolition of Albert Westphal in 1961: “Sonny Liston hit Albert Westphal like he was a cop.”

In his best columns, Jimmy Cannon was less a sportswriter than an urban poet. Here’s what he wrote about Archie Moore in 1955 after Moore trounced Bobo Olson to set up a match with Rocky Marciano: “Someone should write a song about Archie Moore who in the Polo Grounds knocked out Bobo Olson in three rounds…It should be a song that comes out of the backrooms of sloughed saloons on night-drowned streets in morning-worried parts of bad towns. The guy who writes this one must be a piano player who can be dignified when he picks a quarter out of the marsh of a sawdust floor.”

Prior to fighting in Madison Square Garden the previous year – his first appearance in that iconic boxing arena – Moore had roamed the globe in search of fights in a career that began in the Great Depression. Cannon was partial to boxers like Archie Moore, great ring artisans who toiled in obscurity, fighting for small purses –“moving-around money” in Cannon’s words — until the establishment could no longer ignore them.

Jimmy Cannon was born in Lower Manhattan. He left high school after one year to become a copy boy for the New York Daily News. In 1936, at age 26, the News sent him to cover the biggest news story of the day, the Lindbergh Baby kidnapping trial. While there he met Damon Runyon who would become a lifelong friend. At Runyon’s suggestion, he applied for a job as a sportswriter at the New York American, a Hearst paper, and was hired.

During World War II, he was a war correspondent in Europe embedded in Gen. George S. Patton’s Third Army. When he returned from the war, he joined the New York Post and then, in 1959, the Journal-American which made him America’s highest-paid sportswriter at a purported salary of $1000 a week. His articles were syndicated and appeared in dozens of papers.

Cannon was very close to Joe Louis. He was the only reporter that Louis allowed in his hotel room on the morning of the Brown Bomber’s rematch with Max Schmeling. Louis, he wrote, “was a credit to his race, the human race.” It was his most-frequently-quoted line.

In an early story, Cannon named Sam Langford the best pound-for-pound fighter of all time. Later he joined with his colleagues on Press Row in naming Sugar Ray Robinson the greatest of the greats. As for the fellow who anointed himself “The Greatest,” Muhammad Ali, Cannon profoundly disliked him. He persisted in calling him Cassius Clay long after Ali had adopted his Muslim name.

It troubled Cannon that Ali was afforded an opportunity to fight for the title after only 19 pro fights. Ali’s poetry, he thought, was infantile. He abhorred Ali’s political views. And, truth be told, he didn’t like Ali because certain segments of society adored him. Cannon didn’t like non-conformists – hippies and anti-war protesters and such. When queried about his boyhood in Greenwich Village, he was quick to note that he lived there “when it was a decent neighborhood, before it became freaky.”

Cannon’s animus toward Ali spilled over into his opinion of Ali’s foil, the bombastic sportscaster Howard Cosell. “If Howard Cosell were a sport,” he wrote,” it would be roller derby.”

Cannon frequently filled his column with a series of one-liners published under the heading “Nobody Asked Me, But…” His wonderfully acerbic put-down of Cosell appeared in one of these columns. But one can’t read these columns today without cringing at some of his ruminations. He once wrote, “Any man is in trouble if he falls in love with a woman he can’t knock down with one punch.” If a newspaperman wrote those words today, he would be out of a job so fast it would make his head spin.

Similarly, his famous line about Joe Louis being a credit to the human race no longer resonates in the way that it once did. There is in its benevolence an air of racial prejudice.

Jimmy Cannon was a lifelong bachelor but in his younger days before he quit drinking cold turkey in 1948, he was quite the ladies man, often seen promenading showgirls around town. Like his pal Damon Runyon, he was a night owl. As the years passed, however, he became somewhat reclusive. The world passed him by when rock n’ roll came in, pushing aside the Tin Pan Alley crooners and torch singers that had kept him company at his favorite late-night haunts.

Cannon’s end days were tough. He suffered a stroke in 1971 as he was packing to go to the Kentucky Derby and spent most of his waking hours in his last two-plus years in a wheelchair. Fortunately, he could afford to hire a full-time attendant. In 2002, he was posthumously elected to the International Boxing Hall of Fame in the Observer category.

Jimmy Cannon once said that he resented it when someone told him that his stuff was too good to be in a newspaper. It was demeaning to newspapers and he never wanted to be anything but a newspaperman. He didn’t always bring his “A” game and some of his stuff wouldn’t hold up well, but the man could write like blazes and the sportswriting profession lost a giant when he drew his last breath.

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—

Arne K. Lang is a recognized authority on the history of prizefighting and the history of American sports gambling. His latest book, titled Clash of the Little Giants: George Dixon, Terry McGovern, and the Culture of Boxing in America, 1890-1910, was released by McFarland in September, 2022.

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Ryan “KingRy” Garcia Returns With a Bang; KOs Oscar Duarte

Published

3 days ago

December 2, 2023

David A. Avila

Ryan-Kingry-Garcia-Returns-With-a-Bang-KOs-Oscar-Duarte

It was a different Ryan “KingRy” Garcia the world saw in defeating Mexico’s rugged Oscar Duarte, but it was that same deadly left hook counter that got the job done by knockout on Saturday.

Only the quick survive.

Garcia (24-1, 20 KOs) used a variety of stances before luring knockout artist Duarte (26-1-1, 21 KOs) into his favorite punch before a sold-out crowd at Toyota Arena in Houston, Texas. That punch should be patented in gold.

It was somewhat advertised as knockout artist versus matinee idol, but those who know the sport knew that Garcia was a real puncher. But could he rebound from his loss earlier this year?

The answer was yes.

Garcia used a variety of styles beginning with a jab at a prescribed distance via his new trainer Derrick James. It allowed both Garcia and Duarte to gain footing and knock the cobwebs out of their reflexes. Garcia’s jab scored most of the early points during the first three rounds. He also snapped off some left hooks and rights.

“He was a strong fighter, took a strong punch,” said Garcia. “I hit him with some hard punches and he kept coming.”

Duarte, an ultra-pale Mexican from Durango, was cautious, knowing full well how many Garcia foes had underestimated the power behind his blows.

Slowly the muscular Mexican fighter began closing in with body shots and soon both fighters were locked in an inside battle. Garcia used a tucked-in shoulder style while Duarte pounded the body, back of the head and in the back causing the referee to warn for the illegal punches twice.

Still, Duarte had finally managed to punch Garcia with multiple shots for several rounds.

Around the sixth round Garcia was advised by his new trainer to begin jabbing and moving. It forced Duarte out of his rhythm as he was unable to punch without planting his feet. Suddenly, the momentum had reversed again and Duarte looked less dangerous.

“I had to slow his momentum down. That softened him up,” said Garcia about using that change in style to change Duarte’s pressure attack. “Shout out to Derrick James.”

Boos began cascading from the crowd but Garcia was on a roll and had definitely regained the advantage. A quick five-punch combination rocked Duarte though not all landed. The danger made the Mexican pause.

In the eighth round Duarte knew he had to take back the momentum and charged even harder. In one lickety-split second a near invisible counter left hook connected on Duarte’s temple and he stumbled like a drunken soldier on liberty in Honolulu. Garcia quickly followed up with rights and uppercuts as Duarte had a look of terror as his legs failed to maintain stability. Down he went for the count.

Duarte was counted out by referee James Green at 2:51 of the eighth round as Garcia watched from the other side of the ring.

“I started opening up my legs a little bit to open up the shot,” explained Garcia. “When I hurt somebody that hard, I just keep cracking them. I hurt him with a counter left hook.”

The weapon of champions.

Garcia’s victory returns him back to the forefront as one of boxing’s biggest gate attractions. A list of potential foes is his to dissect and choose.

“I’m just ready to continue to my ascent to be a champion at 140,” Garcia said.

It was a tranquil end after such a tumultuous last three days.

Other Bouts

Floyd Schofield (16-0, 12 KOs) blitzed Mexico’s Ricardo “Not Finito” Lopez (17-8-3) with a four knockdown blowout that left fans mesmerized and pleased with the fighter from Austin, Texas.

Schofield immediately shot out quick jabs and then a lightning four-punch combination that delivered Lopez to the canvas wondering what had happened. He got up. Then Scholfield moved in with a jab and crisp left hook and down went Lopez like a dunked basketball bouncing.

At this point it seemed the fight might stop. But it proceeded and Schofield unleashed another quick combo that sent Lopez down though he did try to punch back. It was getting monotonous. Lopez got up and then was met with another rapid fire five- or six-punch combination. Lopez was down for the fourth time and the referee stopped the devastation.

“I appreciate him risking his life,” said Schofield of his victim.

In a middleweight clash Shane Mosley Jr. (21-4, 12 KOs) out-worked Joshua Conley (17-6-1, 11 KOs) for five rounds before stopping the San Bernardino fighter at 1:51 of the sixth round. It was Mosley’s second consecutive knockout and fourth straight win.

Mosley continues to improve in every fight and again moves up the middleweight rankings.

Super middleweight prospect Darius Fulghum (9-0, 9 KOs) of Houston remained undefeated and kept his knockout string intact with a second round pounding and stoppage over Pachino Hill (8-5-1) in 56 seconds of that round.

Photo credit: Golden Boy Promotions

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Jordan Gill TKOs Michael Conlan Who May Have Reached the End of the Road

Published

4 days ago

December 2, 2023

Arne K. Lang

Jordan-Gill-TKOs-Michael-Conlan-Whp-May-Have-Reached-the-End-of-the-Road

Fighting on his home turf, two-time Olympian Michael Conlan was an 8/1 favorite over Jordan Gill tonight in Belfast, Northern Ireland. Had he won, Matchroom promoter Eddie Hearn was eyeing a rematch for Conlan with Leigh Wood. Their March 2022 rumble in Nottingham was a popular pick for the Fight of the Year. But the 29-year-old Gill, a Cambridgeshire man, rendered that discussion moot with a seventh-round stoppage. It was Conlan’s third loss inside the distance in the last 18 months and he would be wise to call it a day. His punch resistance is plainly not what it once was.

It was with considerable fanfare that Conlan cast his lot with Top Rank coming out of the amateur ranks. Tonight was his first assignment for Matchroom and his first fight at 130 pounds after coming up short in two world featherweight title fights. And he almost didn’t make it past the second round. Gill had him on the canvas in the opening minute of round two compliments of a left hook and stunned him late in the round with a right hand that left him on unsteady legs.

He survived the round and for a fleeting moment in the sixth frame it appeared that he had reversed Gill’s momentum. But Gill took charge again in the next stanza, trapping Conlan in the corner and unloading a fusillade of punches that forced referee Howard Foster to waive it off, much to the great dismay of the crowd. The official time was 1:09 of round seven.

Released by Top Rank, Conlan trained for this fight in Miami, Florida, under Pedro Diaz, best known for rejuvenating the career of Miguel Cotto. But the switch in trainer and in promoter made no difference as Conlan, who won his first amateur title at age 11, was damaged goods before he entered the ring. It was a career-defining victory for Jordan Gill (28-2-1, 9 KOs) who was not known as a big puncher and was returning to the ring after being stopped by Kiko Martinez 13 months ago in his previous start.

Semi-wind-up

In the “Battle of Belfast,” undefeated welterweight Lewis Crocker seized control in the opening round and went on to win a lopsided decision over intra-city rival Tyrone McKenna (23-4-1). Two of the judges gave Crocker every round and the other had it 98-92, but yet this was entertaining fight in spurts. McKenna had more fans in the building, but Crocker, seven years younger at age 26, went to post a 7/2 favorite and youth was served.

Other Bouts of Note

Belfast super welterweight Caoimhin Agyarko, who overcame a near-fatal mugging at age 20, advanced to 14-0 (7) with a 10-round split decision over Troy Williamson (20-2-1). The judges had it 98-92 and 97-93 for Agyarko with a dissenter submitting a curious 96-94 score for the 31-year-old Williamson who wasn’t able to exploit his advantages in height and reach.

Sean McComb, a 31-year-old Belfast southpaw, scored what was arguably the best win of his career with a 10-round beat-down of longtime sparring partner Sam Maxwell. Two of the judges gave McComb every round and the other had it 99-88. McComb, who has an interesting nickname, “The Public Nuisance, successfully defended his WBO European super welterweight strap while elevating his record to 18-1 (6). The fading, 35-year-old Maxwell, a former BBBofC British title-holder, lost for third time in his last four starts after winning his first 16 pro fights.

Photo credit: Mark Robinson / Matchroom

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