Springs Toledo’s “The Ringside Belle,” Part 1

Published

10 years ago

February 6, 2015

Mae West Weakens Legs

Mae West burst onto the Hollywood screen like it was hers the whole time. She was fashionably late— Night After Night (1932) was half-over when she appeared outside a speakeasy surrounded by leering men. Audiences heard her before they saw her; they heard Brooklyn, with a purring lilt all her own: “Aww why don’t you boys be good and go home to ya wives.”

Behind her a peek-hole opened, then a voice. “Who is it?”

“It’s the fairy godmother ya mug!”

West received fourth billing for her film debut but was happy to work alongside George Raft, an old Gotham beau. Raft, an ex-fighter with underworld ties, starred as an ex-fighter with underworld ties. It was he who insisted that she join the cast. “Mae,” he said, “stole everything but the cameras.”

The moment she walked into the club, the white-bread background music switched to raunchy jazz—the music of Harlem. And she didn’t walk in so much as bump-and-grind past the doorman for the benefit of him and the rest of what was, but had yet to be recognized as, the weaker sex. “Don’t let those guys in,” she said with a toss of her head. “They’ll wreck the joint.”

West wrote her own lines and they sizzled like a New York sirloin. Sometimes they sizzled like forbidden love. Spotting someone in the distance, she put the brakes on her strut and a hand on her hip.

“Hey ga-rilla!” she called out. “C’mere—”

Foreplay
Mae West sprang from the loins of a cigar-chomping, bareknuckle brawler from Brooklyn called “Battlin’ Jack.” In her autobiography, she described her father as something of a free spirit with a penchant for “banging physical action” (not unlike how many described her). “My earliest memory,” she told a reporter, “was of dad coming home from making a couple of bucks —with a battered physog— and of mother flying around the kitchen with towels, hot water, and funny-smelling lotions.” Battlin’ Jack taught her how to box and before he knew it his daughter had, pardon me, fully developed. When asked whether his being a prizefighter influenced her career, she said, “Yes. It made me. You see, dad was always shadow boxing in front of the mirror at home. He wanted to be a crowd pleaser. Well, I got to using that mirror myself… I wanted to be a crowd pleaser too.”

When his prizefighting days were behind him, Battlin’ Jack drifted into other rackets. Biographers usually say he became a private detective, but it would be more apt to call him what he was—a leg-breaker in the New York underworld. West recalled his reputation for cruelty and how frequently those he confronted ended up in the hospital. “All his fighting was done doing other people’s fighting for them,” she hinted. At once attracted to and repelled by violence, her taste in men never went far from the familiar. Her second boyfriend was a young boxer with the same penchant for solving social disputes with a punch on the sniffer as her father. When a rival made a pass at her during a date, a gang fight ensued, and Battlin’ Jack appeared, escorted her out of harm’s way, and dove into the melee. “I watched it from a porch,” she said, “politely—not cheering.”

She was still close to the action after she became a Hollywood star. On Friday nights, she was found ringside at Olympic Stadium, sitting politely, not cheering. She was at Madison Square Garden when a teenage Sugar Ray Robinson won the Golden Gloves just before turning professional. She saw Henry Armstrong fighting as an amateur bantamweight in San Francisco. He saw her too. “She was there with her manager in all that beautiful white like she used to wear, stunning as ever,” he recalled. “She was sitting right in my corner.”

Gossip columnists said she was close enough to the action to touch it, and often did.

Her bedroom eyes were looking for “a guy with a nice build,” one of those guys said. “He didn’t have to be too handsome. And this is something very few people know—what excited her was a fellow with a busted nose or a cauliflower ear. She liked to fondle it, nuzzle it, kiss it.”

Mae West has been linked with more fighters than Al Haymon.

“Gentleman Jim” Corbett once left his overcoat and derby hat in her dressing room. She gave Jack Dempsey a lesson or two in the fine art of embracing like you mean it. When she quipped “C’m up an’ see me sometime” in 1933, a Hall of Fame ensemble thought she was talking to them. Jack Johnson came up to see her, she said, “several times.” Max Baer was reportedly invited to her bedroom and, well, afterward, went to the window and waved. He admitted that it was a signal to a friend that he had won their bet. West laughed. The parade continued. Jim Braddock took one look at Cinderella pure-as-New York-snow and moved faster than he ever did in the ring. (She recalled a conversation with him about, pardon me, “uppercuts and grips.”) In his autobiography, Joe Louis told a curious story about “a real good-looking white woman with blonde hair” who bought him a brand new Buick he was admiring in a showroom in Detroit and who would buy him one every Christmas between 1935 and 1940. The generous “lady” was never named, though he let on that she was a movie star with whom he had several one-night stands.

With neither altars nor apple-eyed apron-clingers slowing her momentum, success came early and through unexpected channels. A child-prodigy, ragtime singer, and queen of vaudeville, she was playing the Chicago circuit in 1917 when the first waves of African-American migrants arrived up from the South. They brought jazz and the blues with them and West became a fan enthralled. It was at a café in the South Side that she first saw the shimmy-shawobble. “They got out to the dance floor, and stood in one spot with hardly any movement of the feet,” she recalled, “and just shook their shoulders, torsos, breasts and pelvises.” West introduced the risqué dance to white audiences and had her first swig of infamy.

Much of what she saw and experienced found its way into the plays and novels she wrote. Her first play was called “SEX.” It went to stage in April 1926. She went to jail over it in April 1927, serving ten days at Roosevelt Island for obscenity (minus one or two days for good behavior) and charming the warden into letting her wear silk panties instead of state-rationed burlap. She didn’t learn her lesson. In 1930, she published a steamy novel called Babe Gordon that flaunted her preference for prizefighters and shined a spotlight on taboo topics such as black/white love affairs and nymphomania. “Babe was the type that thrived on men,” West wrote like one who knows. “She needed them. She enjoyed them and she had to have them.”

In the early Thirties, she and her black chauffer were spied climbing out of a limousine and walking arm-in-arm across Central Avenue in Los Angeles. They went to an after-hours joint near the Dunbar Hotel where they were seen all tangled up at a table. A gumshoe took notes. Around the same time pulp writer Raymond Chandler was writing “Nevada Gas,” which featured a rich and “sex-hungry looker” who got a new chauffeur every three months. Chandler was then living on Hartzell Street, a half-hour from West’s Ravenswood apartment on Rossmore Avenue.

The Hollywood social scene knew the score but kept it on the hush; after all, they all had secrets.

—West had more than most.

THE TRUTH ABOUT THE MYSTERIOUS DEATH OF FEATHERWEIGHT LEGEND CHALKY WRIGHT IS REVEALED IN “THE RINGSIDE BELLE” …PART 2.

CHECK BACK IN A FEW DAYS!

Springs Toledo is the author of The Gods of War: Boxing Essays (Tora, 2014, $25).He can be reached at scalinatella@hotmail.com

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Springs Toledo

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

Published

6 hours ago

May 8, 2025

Arne K. Lang

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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.

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

Published

2 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.

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Bombs Away in Las Vegas where Inoue and Espinoza Scored Smashing Triumphs

Published

4 days ago

May 4, 2025

David A. Avila

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Japan’s Naoya “Monster” Inoue banged it out with Mexico’s Ramon Cardenas, survived an early knockdown and pounded out a stoppage win to retain the undisputed super bantamweight world championship on Sunday.

Japan and Mexico delivered for boxing fans again after American stars failed in back-to-back days.

“By watching tonight’s fight, everyone is well aware that I like to brawl,” Inoue said.

Inoue (30-0, 27 KOs), and Cardenas (26-2, 14 KOs) and his wicked left hook, showed the world and 8,474 fans at T-Mobile Arena in Las Vegas that prizefighting is about punching, not running.

After massive exposure for three days of fights that began in New York City, then moved to Riyadh, Saudi Arabia and then to Nevada, it was the casino capital of the world that delivered what most boxing fans appreciate- pure unadulterated action fights.

Monster Inoue immediately went to work as soon as the opening bell rang with a consistent attack on Cardenas, who very few people knew anything about.

One thing promised by Cardenas’ trainer Joel Diaz was that his fighter “can crack.”

Cardenas proved his trainer’s words truthful when he caught Inoue after a short violent exchange with a short left hook and down went the Japanese champion on his back. The crowd was shocked to its toes.

“I was very surprised,” said Inoue about getting dropped. ““In the first round, I felt I had good distance. It got loose in the second round. From then on, I made sure to not take that punch again.”

Inoue had no trouble getting up, but he did have trouble avoiding some of Cardenas massive blows delivered with evil intentions. Though Inoue did not go down again, a look of total astonishment blanketed his face.

A real fight was happening.

Cardenas, who resembles actor Andy Garcia, was never overly aggressive but kept that left hook of his cocked and ready to launch whenever he saw the moment. There were many moments against the hyper-aggressive Inoue.

Both fighters pack power and both looked to find the right moment. But after Inoue was knocked down by the left hook counter, he discovered a way to eliminate that weapon from Cardenas. Still, the Texas-based fighter had a strong right too.

In the sixth round Inoue opened up with one of his lightning combinations responsible for 10 consecutive knockout wins. Cardenas backed against the ropes and Inoue blasted away with blow after blow. Then suddenly, Cardenas turned Inoue around and had him on the ropes as the Mexican fighter unloaded nasty combinations to the body and head. Fans roared their approval.

“I dreamed about fighting in front of thousands of people in Las Vegas,” said Cardenas. “So, I came to give everything.”

Inoue looked a little surprised and had a slight Mona Lisa grin across his face. In the seventh round, the Japanese four-division world champion seemed ready to attack again full force and launched into the round guns blazing. Cardenas tried to catch Inoue again with counter left hooks but Inoue’s combos rained like deadly hail. Four consecutive rights by Inoue blasted Cardenas almost through the ropes. The referee Tom Taylor ruled it a knockdown. Cardenas beat the count and survived the round.

In the eighth round Inoue looked eager to attack and at the bell launched across the ring and unloaded more blows on Cardenas. A barrage of 14 unanswered blows forced the referee to stop the fight at 45 seconds of round eight for a technical knockout win.

“I knew he was tough,” said Inoue. “Boxing is not that easy.”

Espinoza Wins

WBO featherweight titlist Rafael Espinosa (27-0, 23 KOs) uppercut his way to a knockout win over Edward Vazquez (17-3, 4 KOs) in the seventh round.

“I wanted to fight a game fighter to show what I am capable,” said Espinoza.

Espinosa used the leverage of his six-foot, one-inch height to slice uppercuts under the guard of Vazquez. And when the tall Mexican from Guadalajara targeted the body, it was then that the Texas fighter began to wilt. But he never surrendered.

Though he connected against Espinoza in every round, he was not able to slow down the taller fighter and that allowed the Mexican fighter to unleash a 10-punch barrage including four consecutive uppercuts. The referee stopped the fight at 1:47 of the seventh round.

It was Espinoza’s third title defense.

Photo credit: Mikey Williams / Top Rank

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