MEMORIES OF ALI-FRAZIER IV

Published

11 years ago

May 16, 2014

“OK, class, the subject of today’s pop quiz is women’s boxing. Stay seated and raise your hand if you think you have the correct answer, or whatever your perception of the correct answer might be. First question: Who is the best female fighter in the world today?

“What, no responses? Not even a guess? You in the back with the perplexed look on your face, go ahead and pipe up. Start the discussion even if you’re not really certain about whom to back. You say it might be Cecilia Braekhus, the undefeated welterweight (23-0, 7 KOs) from Norway? Is that because you’ve actually seen any of her bouts on tape or YouTube? Or is it because her name is at the top of Thomas Gerbasi’s top 10 pound-for-pound list in the latest issue of The Ring?

“Let’s move on. How about identifying the person you believe to be the best female fighter of all time. That’s better. I’m seeing a few more hands go up. A couple of you are shouting out support for Lucia Rijker. She’s certainly a safe choice. Ah, I knew there’d be someone going with Christy Martin, the only woman boxer to appear on the cover of SI. Somebody else thinks it could be big-punching Ann Wolfe. That’s some scary lady. What about you with the gray hair, seated off to the side? You say you’re going very retro with the late JackieTonawanda, who was known as `Lady Ali’ during her career as one of the real pioneers? Definitely an interesting selection.

“Final question: What was the most-hyped women’s boxing match ever? Whoa! That’s a lot of raised hands. Here’s a vote for Laila Ali vs. Jacqui Frazier-Lyde. And another. Still another. One more … wait, all of you think that? Any dissenting opinions? None? Are you telling me there’s something all of you can agree upon?”

Women’s boxing has always had an image of man-bites-dog, of a fish out of water. It’s still something of an oddity, the sporting world’s ultimate example of gender role reversal. Perhaps that’s because it’s very difficult for the average guy to accept the notion of a woman, any woman, who might be able to beat him up in the ring. Even if the woman in question has regal bloodlines and a determination to uphold and the legacy of her world-renowned male forebear.

On Sunday afternoon in Philadelphia, history of sorts again will be made when the Honorable Jacqui Frazier-Lyde, 52, who sits on the Municipal Court bench in her hometown, is officially inducted into the Pennsylvania Boxing Hall of Fame. Already part of the first father-daughter combination to win professional boxing championships, Frazier-Lyde is the first woman to be so honored by the PBHOF, joining her late father, former heavyweight champ “Smokin’” Joe Frazier, and her brother, onetime heavyweight contender Marvis Frazier. Ten days earlier, “Sister Smoke” was recognized during a similar ceremony in Philly’s City Hall.

“I always expect the impossible (to happen),” the perpetually effervescent Frazier-Lyde said of the improbable fistic adventure she never expected to undertake until fate and family pride stepped in. “I’m a total optimist. To walk the path of life that I’ve been on, I’m just a very blessed person. I try to share that with everyone, everywhere.”

Frazier-Lyde retired from boxing in the fall of 2004, with a 13-1 record that included nine victories inside the distance. Along the way she captured titles from one sanctioning organization or another as a super middleweight, light heavyweight and heavyweight. But she always will be known more for the one bout she lost than for all those she won, because of who she and her younger antagonist are. Their surnames were their express tickets to fame and fortune.

It almost had to be that way, didn’t it, when one fighter’s father is Muhammad Ali and the other’s is Joe Frazier? On the date Laila and Jacqui finally squared off, June 8, 2001, at the Turning Stone Casino Resort in Verona, N.Y. – the first female bout to headline a pay-per-view card – a curious crowd of 6,500 showed up for what was billed as “Ali-Frazier IV,” the distaff extension of the epic trilogy involving their celebrated dads. Also in the house was a media throng of 300-plus from around the world.

What everyone saw is still a matter of some debate. Laila Ali, at 23, was cover-girl pretty, relatively fluid of movement and disposed to make the fight at a distance of her choosing. Frazier-Lyde, a former star basketball player at American University, was a 37-year-old mother of three who lacked Smokin’ Joe’s pulverizing left hook but relentlessly bore in on Ali as her father had in his three wars with “The Greatest,” trying and often succeeding in her attempts to turn the fight into a brawl at close quarters.

Through all eight scheduled rounds they hurled themselves at one another, and at the final bell Ali was bleeding from the nose while Frazier-Lyde had a puffy eye. Judge Tommy Hicks saw it as a 76-76 standoff, but Ali came away with a majority decision when Hicks’ cohorts, Frankie Adams and Don Ackerman, submitted scorecards favoring the younger fighter by respective margins of 79-73 and 77-75.

Veteran boxing analyst Al Bernstein, who did the postfight interviews, said Ali vs. Frazier-Lyde had not been the sideshow many had predicted it would be.

“It was fun,” Bernstein assessed afterward. “Both women showed grit and determination. They are in the embryonic stages of their boxing careers, sure, but they gave it everything they had and you can’t ask for much more than that. Are there better women boxers? Yes. Would I just as soon see Christy Martin and Lucia Rijker fight? Yes. But this was fun, and it was hardly a travesty.

“They’re obviously their fathers’ daughters.”

Others were less complimentary of what had taken place, just as the prevailing sentiment going in was that it was much ado about nothing. Jay Larkin, Showtime’s senior vice president of sports and event programming, derided the matchup as “a spectacle that has appealed to the paparazzi mentality. Women’s boxing has a hard enough time gaining credibility. This isn’t going to help.” Added longtime HBO Sports analyst Larry Merchant: “I wouldn’t spend 15 cents to see it. (The PPV subscription fee was $24.95.). To me, it’s like a stupid pet trick.”

Fightnews.com straddled the fence, on the one hand noting that that two of Ali’s defeated opponents were a steakhouse waitress and a 48-year-old former prostitute, while the seven women Frazier-Lyde had blown through on her way to Laila had all of two wins, total. But in its report on what had taken place inside the ropes, the respected web site conceded that the action was “so wild and thrilling that even the staunchest opponent of women’s boxing couldn’t possibly deny the excitement.”

Me? Writing in the Philadelphia Daily News, I allowed that although it wasn’t a reprise of the “Thrilla in Manila,” neither had it been the “Groaner in Verona.”

All that remained was for Laila and Jacqui to do it again, and maybe even a third time as their fathers had. But, alas, their rivalry proved to be a one-and-done. Laila’s then-husband and manager, Johnny “Yah-Yah” McClain, said his wife was going to “go after fresh meat” and there was no need for Laila to mix it up with Jacqui again.

Thirteen years later, Frazier-Lyde said that explanation still doesn’t wash, at least to her way of thinking.

“I broke her left clavicle. She was out of boxing for a whole year,” Frazier-Lyde said of Ali. “I went on to win a world championship and she went to the hospital, OK? While they were trying to put her back together again, I went on to win a championship. I don’t have to try to explain anything. It speaks for itself.

“If somebody had broken my left clavicle, I don’t think I’d be trying to dance with her again. That’s why she went on `Dancing With The Stars’ instead.”

For better or worse, I feel as I have some sort of proprietary attachment to Ali-Frazier IV. I was there with 25 or so other inquiring media minds at the Turning Stone when Laila, who was only eight years old when her father and the third of his four wives, Veronica, divorced, turned pro on Oct. 8, 1989. In possibly the biggest mismatch in the checkered history of women’s boxing, Ali needed just 31 seconds to take out a nervous and clearly terrified waitress named April Fowler, who never even threw a punch. As Fowler was counted out, Ali postured over her, striking the memorable pose her father had for his controversial one-round KO of Sonny Liston in their May 25, 1965, rematch in Lewistown, Maine.

Fowler, who soon after “retired” from boxing with an 0-2 record, headed home to Michigan City, Ind., to work the dinner shift at Ye Olde Benny’s Steak House. Ali dismissed any criticism leveled at her for picking such a ridiculously soft touch for her debut by haughtily saying, “It doesn’t matter who you put in the ring. I’m knocking them out.”

Ali’s mother, Veronica Ali Anderson, was at ringside for the brief, one-sided skirmish and voiced her approval to what she had just seen, which, she claimed, she had seen before from her then-husband: “It was like history repeating itself.”

A few days later, I phoned Frazier-Lyde, a practicing attorney with a law degree from Villanova University who spoke three languages (English, Spanish and French), to ask her thoughts on a daughter of Muhammad Ali getting into same profession that had made Ali’s and Jacqui’s pops such legendary figures. I figured it’d be worth a line or two in a notes column.

“I read where (Laila) said nobody could take her power, that she’d knock everybody out,” Frazier-Lyde responded. “But I don’t know about that. I can’t imagine her knocking me out.

“I love the power aspect of boxing, of sports in general. (In addition to basketball, Jacqui had at various times also competed in lacrosse, hockey and softball.) “Maybe I got that from watching my father. You know, everyone in my family said that if I had been a boy, I would have been a champion boxer. Actually, we’re all pretty athletic. I just have the biggest mouth.”

And then Frazier-Lyde uttered the words that set everything into motion, once those words appeared in print.

“If Laila Ali wants a piece of me, I’ll kick her ass.”

That very afternoon, or maybe it was the next day, the 5’9” Frazier-Lyde, then 210 pounds, began training to take off the 45 pounds or so she had gained from having her babies and living the less physically demanding lifestyle of a courtroom litigator. Her goal: an eventual showdown with Laila, which she said would be the equivalent of the 15th round that Smokin’ Joe never got to fight in his unforgettable rubber match against Muhammad Ali in Quezon City, the Philippines, on Oct. 1, 1975.

On Feb. 6, 2000, in Scranton, Pa., the slimmed-down, toned-up Frazier-Ali turned pro against Teela Reese, who had had the temerity to say this, when asked about Jaqui’s father: “The name doesn’t mean anything to me. He’s just another guy.” Frazier-Lyde then proceeded to do unto Reese, 20, what Laila had done to Fowler, winning on a first-round knockout.

It was inevitable, of course, that Ali and Frazier-Lyde would clash at some point, and that there would be verbal fireworks in the lead-up to that battle of the celebrity daughters. The surprise, at least to those who did not know Jacqui, was that it was Smokin’ Joe’s kid who would supply the juiciest comments.

At a joint press conference in Philadelphia, the surprisingly taciturn Ali said, “Anyone who’s seen me before knows that when it’s fight time, I don’t have much to say. I’m Muhammad Ali’s daughter, but my father and I are very different in that area. I don’t necessarily try to put on a show. That’s what my father’s thing was, and he was great at it. Everything I say is because I feel it. It’s not scripted.” She also admitted that Frazier-Lyde is “the first opponent that I really could not stand.”

Frazier-Lyde, standing nearby, was quick with the sort of snappy retort that her father was less adept at delivering than his wrecking-ball left hook.

“You won’t be standing,” she said. “You’re right about that, baby. You’ll be on your butt.”

Ali and Frazier-Lyde generated enough buzz that they appeared on that week’s cover of TV Guide. Ali entered the ring with a 9-0 record and eight KOs; Frazier-Lyde at 7-0 with seven stoppages. It was reported that each woman was guaranteed a minimum of $100,000, a queen’s ransom for women’s boxing then and now, with their purses escalating to as high as $250,000 if PPV projections were met, and they very well might have been.

Women’s boxing remains an afterthought in the minds of many fight fans. A proposed matchup of Rijker and Martin – promoter Bob Arum was going to pay each $250,000, with an additional $750,000 going to the winner – was scheduled to take place three weeks after the DVD release of the Academy Award-winning Million Baby Baby. But that fight never took place because Rijker tore her Achilles’ tendon and never fought again.

Ali-Frazier IV remains the most publicized, most-talked-about, biggest-money women’s fight ever. And whether they care to admit it or not, the Cecilia Braekhuses and Anne Sophie Mathises, the best of today’s female fighters, owe them a debt of gratitude for demonstrating that, as is often the case in men’s boxing, the sizzle often is as important as the steak.

Post Views: 0

Share The Sweet Science experience!

Bernard Fernandez

Avila Perspective, Chap. 326: Top Rank and San Diego Smoke

Published

21 hours ago

May 9, 2025

David A. Avila

Avila Perspective, Chap. 326: Top Rank and San Diego Smoke

Years ago, I worked at a newsstand in the Beverly Hills area. It was a 24-hour a day version and the people that dropped by were very colorful and unique.

One elderly woman Eva, who bordered on homeless but pridefully wore lipstick, would stop by the newsstand weekly to purchase a pack of menthol cigarettes. On one occasion, she asked if I had ever been to San Diego?

I answered “yes, many times.”

She countered “you need to watch out for San Diego Smoke.”

This Saturday, Top Rank brings its brand of prizefighting to San Diego or what could be called San Diego Smoke. Leading the fight card is Mexico’s Emanuel Navarrete (39-2-1, 32 KOs) defending the WBO super feather title against undefeated Filipino Charly Suarez (18-0, 10 KOs) at Pechanga Arena. ESPN will televise.

This is Navarrete’s fourth defense of the super feather title.

The last time Navarrete stepped in the boxing ring he needed six rounds to dismantle the very capable Oscar Valdez in their rematch. One thing about Mexico City’s Navarrete is he always brings “the smoke.”

Also, on the same card is Fontana, California’s Raymond Muratalla (22-0, 17 KOs) vying for the interim IBF lightweight title against Russia’s Zaur Abdullaev (20-1, 12 KOs) on the co-main event.

Abdullaev has only fought once before in the USA and was handily defeated by Devin Haney back in 2019. But that was six years ago and since then he has knocked off various contenders.

Muratalla is a slick fighting lightweight who trains at the Robert Garcia Boxing Academy now in Moreno Valley, Calif. It’s a virtual boot camp with many of the top fighters on the West Coast available to spar on a daily basis. If you need someone bigger or smaller, stronger or faster someone can match those needs.

When you have that kind of preparation available, it’s tough to beat. Still, you have to fight the fight. You never know what can happen inside the prize ring.

Another fighter to watch is Perla Bazaldua, 19, a young and very talented female fighter out of the Los Angeles area. She is trained by Manny Robles who is building a small army of top female fighters.

Bazaldua (1-0, 1 KO) meets Mona Ward (0-1) in a super flyweight match on the preliminary portion of the Top Rank card. Top Rank does not sign many female fighters so you know that they believe in her talent.

Others on the Top Rank card in San Diego include Giovani Santillan, Andres Cortes, Albert Gonzalez, Sebastian Gonzalez and others.

They all will bring a lot of smoke to San Diego.

Probox TV

A strong card led by Erickson “The Hammer” Lubin (26-2, 18 KOs) facing Ardreal Holmes Jr. (17-0, 6 KOs) in a super welterweight clash between southpaws takes place on Saturday at Silver Spurs Arena in Kissimmee, Florida. PROBOX TV will stream the fight card.

Ardreal has rocketed up the standings and now faces veteran Lubin whose only losses came against world titlists Sebastian Fundora and Jermell Charlo. It’s a great match to decide who deserves a world title fight next.

Another juicy match pits Argentina’s Nazarena Romero (14-0-2) against Mexico’s Mayelli Flores (12-1-1) in a female super bantamweight contest.

Nottingham, England

Anthony Cacace (23-1, 8 KOs) defends the IBO super featherweight title against Leigh Wood (28-3, 17 KOs) in Wood’s hometown on Saturday at Nottingham Arena in Nottingham, England. DAZN will stream the Queensberry Promotions card.

Ireland’s Cacace seems to have the odds against him. But he is no stranger to dancing in the enemy’s lair or on foreign territory. He formerly defeated Josh Warrington in London and Joe Cordina in Riyadh in IBO title defenses.

Lampley at Wild Card

Boxing telecaster Jim Lampley will be signing his new book It Happened! at the Wild Card Boxing gym in Hollywood, Calif. on Saturday, May 10, beginning at 2 p.m. Lampley has been a large part of many of the greatest boxing events in the past 40 years. He and Freddie Roach will be at the signing.

Fights to Watch (All times Pacific Time)

Sat. DAZN 11 a.m. Anthony Cacace (23-1) vs Leigh Wood (28-3).

Sat. PROBOX.tv 3 p.m. Erickson Lubin (26-2) vs Ardreal Holmes Jr. (17-0).

Sat. ESPN 7 p.m. Emanuel Navarrete (39-2-1) vs Charly Suarez (18-0); Raymond Muratalla (22-0) vs Zaur Abdullaev (20-1).

Photo credit: Mikey Williams / Top Rank

To comment on this story in the Fight Forum CLICK HERE

Post Views: 0

Share The Sweet Science experience!

“Breadman” Edwards: An Unlikely Boxing Coach with a Panoramic View of the Sport

Published

2 days ago

May 8, 2025

Arne K. Lang

Stephen-Breadman-Edwards-An-Unlikely-Boxing-Coach-with-a-Panoramic-View-of-the-Sport

Stephen “Breadman” Edwards’ first fighter won a world title. That may be some sort of record.

It’s true. Edwards had never trained a fighter, amateur or pro, before taking on professional novice Julian “J Rock” Williams. On May 11, 2019, Williams wrested the IBF 154-pound world title from Jarrett Hurd. The bout, a lusty skirmish, was in Fairfax, Virginia, near Hurd’s hometown in Maryland, and the previously undefeated Hurd had the crowd in his corner.

In boxing, Stephen Edwards wears two hats. He has a growing reputation as a boxing coach, a hat he will wear on Saturday, May 31, at Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas when the two fighters that he currently trains, super middleweight Caleb Plant and middleweight Kyrone Davis, display their wares on a show that will air on Amazon Prime Video. Plant, who needs no introduction, figures to have little trouble with his foe in a match conceived as an appetizer to a showdown with Jermall Charlo. Davis, coming off his career-best win, an upset of previously undefeated Elijah Garcia, is in tough against fast-rising Cuban prospect Yoenli Hernandez, a former world amateur champion.

Edwards’ other hat is that of a journalist. His byline appears at “Boxing Scene” in a column where he answers questions from readers.

It’s an eclectic bag of questions that Breadman addresses, ranging from his thoughts on an upcoming fight to his thoughts on one of the legendary prizefighters of olden days. Boxing fans, more so than fans of any other sport, enjoy hashing over fantasy fights between great fighters of different eras. Breadman is very good at this, which isn’t to suggest that his opinions are gospel, merely that he always has something provocative to add to the discourse. Like all good historians, he recognizes that the best history is revisionist history.

“Fighters are constantly mislabled,” he says. “Everyone talks about Joe Louis’s right hand. But if you study him you see that his left hook is every bit as good as his right hand and it’s more sneaky in terms of shock value when it lands.”

Stephen “Breadman” Edwards was born and raised in Philadelphia. His father died when he was three. His maternal grandfather, a Korean War veteran, filled the void. The man was a big boxing fan and the two would watch the fights together on the family television.

Edwards’ nickname dates to his early teen years when he was one of the best basketball players in his neighborhood. The derivation is the 1975 movie “Cornbread, Earl and Me,” starring Laurence Fishburne in his big screen debut. Future NBA All-Star Jamaal Wilkes, fresh out of UCLA, plays Cornbread, a standout high school basketball player who is mistakenly murdered by the police.

Coming out of high school, Breadman had to choose between an academic scholarship at Temple or an athletic scholarship at nearby Lincoln University. He chose the former, intending to major in criminal justice, but didn’t stay in college long. What followed were a succession of jobs including a stint as a city bus driver. To stay fit, he took to working out at the James Shuler Memorial Gym where he sparred with some of the regulars, but he never boxed competitively.

Over the years, Philadelphia has harbored some great boxing coaches. Among those of recent vintage, the names George Benton, Bouie Fisher, Nazeem Richardson, and Bozy Ennis come quickly to mind. Breadman names Richardson and West Coast trainer Virgil Hunter as the men that have influenced him the most.

We are all a product of our times, so it’s no surprise that the best decade of boxing, in Breadman’s estimation, was the 1980s. This was the era of the “Four Kings” with Sugar Ray Leonard arguably standing tallest.

Breadman was a big fan of Leonard and of Leonard’s three-time rival Roberto Duran. “I once purchased a DVD that had all of Roberto Duran’s title defenses on it,” says Edwards. “This was a back before the days of YouTube.”

But Edwards’ interest in the sport goes back much deeper than the 1980s. He recently weighed in on the “Pittsburgh Windmill” Harry Greb whose legend has grown in recent years to the point that some have come to place him above Sugar Ray Robinson on the list of the greatest of all time.

“Greb was a great fighter with a terrific resume, of that there is no doubt,” says Breadman, “but there is no video of him and no one alive ever saw him fight, so where does this train of thought come from?”

Edwards notes that in Harry Greb’s heyday, he wasn’t talked about in the papers as the best pound-for-pound fighter in the sport. The boxing writers were partial to Benny Leonard who drew comparisons to the venerated Joe Gans.

Among active fighters, Breadman reserves his highest praise for Terence Crawford. “Body punching is a lost art,” he once wrote. “[Crawford] is a great body puncher who starts his knockouts with body punches, but those punches are so subtle they are not fully appreciated.”

If the opening line holds up, Crawford will enter the ring as the underdog when he opposes Canelo Alvarez in September. Crawford, who will enter the ring a few weeks shy of his 38^th birthday, is actually the older fighter, older than Canelo by almost three full years (it doesn’t seem that way since the Mexican redhead has been in the public eye so much longer), and will theoretically be rusty as 13 months will have elapsed since his most recent fight.

Breadman discounts those variables. “Terence is older,” he says, “but has less wear and tear and never looks rusty after a long layoff.” That Crawford will win he has no doubt, an opinion he tweaked after Canelo’s performance against William Scull: “Canelo’s legs are not the same. Bud may even stop him now.”

Edwards has been with Caleb Plant for Plant’s last three fights. Their first collaboration produced a Knockout of the Year candidate. With one ferocious left hook, Plant sent Anthony Dirrell to dreamland. What followed were a 12-round setback to David Benavidez and a ninth-round stoppage of Trevor McCumby.

Breadman keeps a hectic schedule. From Monday through Friday, he’s at the DLX Gym in Las Vegas coaching Caleb Plant and Kyrone Davis. On weekends, he’s back in Philadelphia, checking in on his investment properties and, of greater importance, watching his kids play sports. His 14-year-old daughter and 12-year-old son are standout all-around athletes.

On those long flights, he has plenty of time to turn on his laptop and stream old fights or perhaps work on his next article. That’s assuming he can stay awake.

To comment on this story in the Fight Forum CLICK HERE

Post Views: 0

Share The Sweet Science experience!

Arne’s Almanac: The Good, the Bad, and the (Mostly) Ugly; a Weekend Boxing Recap and More

Published

4 days ago

May 6, 2025

Arne K. Lang

Arne's-Almanac-The-Good-the-Bad-and-the-(mostly)-Ugly-A-Weeend-Boxing-Recap-and-More

Arne’s Almanac: The Good, the Bad, and the (Mostly) Ugly; a Weekend Boxing Recap and More

It’s old news now, but on back-to-back nights on the first weekend of May, there were three fights that finished in the top six snoozefests ever as measured by punch activity. That’s according to CompuBox which has been around for 40 years.

In Times Square, the boxing match between Devin Haney and Jose Carlos Ramirez had the fifth-fewest number of punches thrown, but the main event, Ryan Garcia vs. Rolly Romero, was even more of a snoozefest, landing in third place on this ignoble list.

Those standings would be revised the next night – knocked down a peg when Canelo Alvarez and William Scull combined to throw a historically low 445 punches in their match in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, 152 by the victorious Canelo who at least pressed the action, unlike Scull (pictured) whose effort reminded this reporter of “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” – no, not the movie starring Paul Newman, just the title.

CompuBox numbers, it says here, are best understood as approximations, but no amount of rejiggering can alter the fact that these three fights were stinkers. Making matters worse, these were pay-per-views. If one had bundled the two events, rather than buying each separately, one would have been out $90 bucks.

****

Thankfully, the Sunday card on ESPN from Las Vegas was redemptive. It was just what the sport needed at this moment – entertaining fights to expunge some of the bad odor. In the main go, Naoya Inoue showed why he trails only Shohei Ohtani as the most revered athlete in Japan.

Throughout history, the baby-faced assassin has been a boxing promoter’s dream. It’s no coincidence that down through the ages the most common nickname for a fighter – and by an overwhelming margin — is “Kid.”

And that partly explains Naoya Inoue’s charisma. The guy is 32 years old, but here in America he could pass for 17.

Joey Archer

Joey Archer, who passed away last week at age 87 in Rensselaer, New York, was one of the last links to an era of boxing identified with the nationally televised Friday Night Fights at Madison Square Garden.

Joey Archer

Archer made his debut as an MSG headliner on Feb. 4, 1961, and had 12 more fights at the iconic mid-Manhattan sock palace over the next six years. The final two were world title fights with defending middleweight champion Emile Griffith.

Archer etched his name in the history books in November of 1965 in Pittsburgh where he won a comfortable 10-round decision over Sugar Ray Robinson, sending the greatest fighter of all time into retirement. (At age 45, Robinson was then far past his peak.)

Born and raised in the Bronx, Joey Archer was a cutie; a clever counter-puncher recognized for his defense and ultimately for his granite chin. His style was embedded in his DNA and reinforced by his mentors.

Early in his career, Archer was domiciled in Houston where he was handled by veteran trainer Bill Gore who was then working with world lightweight champion Joe Brown. Gore would ride into the Hall of Fame on the coattails of his most famous fighter, “Will-o’-the Wisp” Willie Pep. If Joey Archer had any thoughts of becoming a banger, Bill Gore would have disabused him of that notion.

In all honesty, Archer’s style would have been box office poison if he had been black. It helped immensely that he was a native New Yorker of Irish stock, albeit the Irish angle didn’t have as much pull as it had several decades earlier. But that observation may not be fair to Archer who was bypassed twice for world title fights after upsetting Hurricane Carter and Dick Tiger.

When he finally caught up with Emile Griffith, the former hat maker wasn’t quite the fighter he had been a few years earlier but Griffith, a two-time Fighter of the Year by The Ring magazine and the BWAA and a future first ballot Hall of Famer, was still a hard nut to crack.

Archer went 30 rounds with Griffith, losing two relatively tight decisions and then, although not quite 30 years old, called it quits. He finished 45-4 with 8 KOs and was reportedly never knocked down, yet alone stopped, while answering the bell for 365 rounds. In retirement, he ran two popular taverns with his older brother Jimmy Archer, a former boxer who was Joey’s trainer and manager late in Joey’s career.

May he rest in peace.

To comment on this story in the Fight Forum CLICK HERE

Post Views: 0

Share The Sweet Science experience!