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Springs Toledo’s “The Ringside Belle,” Part 2

“Is That a Pistol in Your Pocket?”
Rubbing shoulders and who knows what else with Mae West at ringside was a rogues gallery of gangsters; many of whom branched out from Brooklyn like she did or left on the lam. There was Mickey Cohen in Los Angeles, Al Capone in Chicago, and Owney Madden. She was closest to Madden, a gangland murderer and bootlegger who became the underworld king of New York in the late 1920s. He was chief proprietor of the Cotton Club in Harlem and had interests in boxing —and Mae West. He bankrolled her career and was, for a time, her lover.
She wasn’t shy about asking for favors. When she heard that a Joe Louis-Maxie Rosenbloom bout was being negotiated for the Hollywood Legion in 1937, she called Madden and persuaded him to get Louis a title shot instead. That June, Louis knocked the crown off the head of Jim Braddock and became the first black heavyweight king since Jack Johnson. West was there, ringside.
She said that the guys who talked out of the sides of their mouths were perfect gentleman, but learned the hard way that they weren’t exactly pals. Three of them, one an ex-member of the Capone gang who used to work for her, held her up while she sat in her limousine in 1933. “Throw out your poke and let’s have the rocks,” she was told, and off into the night went $17,000 in diamonds and cash. She testified at the trial, despite receiving phone calls of the “or else” type. She knew where to turn for protection. Prospective chauffeurs were asked about their ability to bust heads, not brake safely. A parade of professional boxers were hired, among them a future world champion named Albert “Chalky” Wright. Chalky was a frustrated featherweight who needed a weekly paycheck to keep what little he had. West reportedly did better than that; handing him the down payment for a house he wanted to buy for his mother and paying for his divorce. He would drive her to the fights at the Olympic Auditorium on Tuesday and Friday nights in a chocolate-colored Rolls Royce; she would slip him a C-note and away he went.
Chalky, no stranger to vice, preferred bourbon to horses and horses to home life. If the word of a private investigator is to be believed, he preferred Miss West to everything else. “I am not the chauffer,” Chalky supposedly told an acquaintance when asked why he didn’t always wear a uniform, “—I am The Man.” Moreover, he admitted he was in love with her.
She loved him right back. When she heard that his boxing career had stalled out because of mismanagement, she sponsored his comeback and applied pressure behind the scenes to get him a title shot. She even hired his brother to take his place as her driver, to “keep it in the family.” When Lee Wright, a welterweight, got himself arrested for shooting light heavyweight Cannonball Green while Green was in a phone booth on Sunset Boulevard, she pulled strings and he walked. After all, said an eye-rolling reporter, it was “an accident.”
It wasn’t the last time she helped a fighter beat the rap. Filipino bantamweight Speedy Dado followed the Wrights into West’s front seat and was arrested for waving a gun at three motorists in a traffic incident. The hot-headed Dado might have been better off cooling his heels in the clink because he was losing more fights than he won.
Perhaps (pardon me) his legs were weak.
In the early Fifties, Chalky was retired and greasing pans in a bakery for a living. Mae West was, well, back on top in Vegas with a bevy of beefcakes on stage at the Sahara. In 1955, her private life was thrust into public view. Investigators for what she called an “under-the-rock” magazine were making the rounds at boxing arenas in California where, they said, “the name Mae West is as well-known as Spalding.” The name Chalky Wright kept coming up. They tracked him to a bar. Chalky, thinking they were producers interested in making a movie about West, took $200 to talk about his months in her employment. “Mae West’s Open-Door Policy” appeared in the November 1955 edition of Confidential Magazine. It became part of a lawsuit filed by Hollywood against the magazine, though there wasn’t much more than a tickle or two among mundane facts about West’s cleanliness and generosity.
Her lawyer drew up an affidavit denying any hanky-panky and the ex-featherweight champ signed it, or so the lawyer said. In 1957, Chalky was subpoenaed to court, but he never showed up. He died thirteen days before the court date.
It was an odd death. Recently separated from his second wife, he had moved in with his mother on South Main Street in Los Angeles. On August 12, she returned home from shopping and heard water running in the bathroom. She called Chalky’s name and when he didn’t answer she unlocked the door to find his body slumped in the bathtub. His head was under the water and the tap was running. At first, police suspected foul play —a towel rack had been torn from the wall, which suggested a struggle, and they thought they saw a contusion on Chalky’s head.
Whatever the cause, the caseagainst Confidential Magazine went forward and Chalky’s ex-wife’s subpoena was in the mail practically before the mourners had left Lincoln Memorial Park. It was still on her kitchen table when the phone rang. “You’d better clam up,” she was warned, “if you know what’s good for you.” She made it clear to the Baltimore Afro-American that the caller did not represent the magazine. She said “[t]hose people have too much money and too much power” but would not say who “those people” were and that invites speculation that West’s underworld friends were behind it. On the other hand, another witness was told to slant testimony in favor of the magazine, and a third, scheduled to testify against the magazine, died from a drug overdose that was no less suspicious than Chalky’s death.
Chalky was no stranger to vice lords. Word on the street was that gangster Frankie Carbo owned him during the latter days of his career, and no one doubted that he had a story to tell. It turns out that he told it, three years before his death, to a young black pulp writer by the name of Jay Thomas Caldwell. Me an’ You was published by Lion Books in 1954 and was dedicated to “Chalky, the gentle Hedonist.” Names were changed to protect the not-so innocent: “Turkey Jones,” the main character, is Chalky. “One Gun Laws” is “One Shot” Wirt Ross, Chalky’s manager early in his career, and “Al Smith” is Eddie Mead, his last manager.
The story unloads like a death-bed confession. Laws/Wirt, said the Chalky Wright character, routinely “invented fiction for the newspapers,” including one that said the fighter was born in Mexico. Chalky had a good laugh at that one: “Ain’t that a pip?” his character says.
There are more serious revelations that, if true, cast a shadow on his career. For example, the record tells us Eddie Shea knocked out Chalky Wright in the first round in 1933. In the book, a fight manager (who happens to share a first name with notorious West Coast gangster Mickey Cohen) meets Turkey Jones at the Main Street Gym in Los Angeles and hands him $300 to take a dive against “Bobby Shay” in the first round. “That bum didn’t knock me out,” Chalky’s character says afterward. “I dumped.” It wasn’t the only time he did.
The character of “Tommy White,” a short, God-fearing whirlwind from St. Louis who became a double champion, is Henry Armstrong. Chalky’s character is offered a fight against the Armstrong character to set up the book’s most startling mea culpa. It’s found in a scene on page 55:
“Only one thing,” his manager told him. “We gotta do a little business.”
“Whatever’s best,” the fighter replied.
“Okay. They want a good guy, somebody with a reputation and you’re the only one who fills the bill. But they know they can’t take any chances with you. You might beat him.”
The record tells us Chalky Wright was knocked out by Henry Armstrong in three rounds in 1938. It is no longer certain that he did. Armstrong’s manager, Eddie Mead, is fingered in the book as the man behind the fix. Three pages later we read that the manager was satisfied enough with the performance to invite the main character to New York. It’s a matter of record that Eddie Mead became Chalky’s manager after Armstrong-Wright and that Wright’s next fight was his first at Madison Square Garden, where the spotlight was brighter and the purses were bigger.
It’s also a matter of record that Mead was all tangled up with gangsters on both coasts. One afternoon in 1942, he dropped dead in front of the Park Central Hotel. According to gangster Mickey Cohen, Meade was fencing diamonds back east and they were stashed in his coat. Cohen couldn’t believe it. He died “with all the f*ckin’ stuff on him!” (The police report left that out.) “Boxing and the racket world were almost one and the same,” opined Cohen as if we didn’t know. “Most boxers were owned by racket people and at one time, six of the boxing titles belonged to guys in the so-called racket world.”
Chalky’s affinity for white women is also dramatized in the pages of Me an’ You, including his marriages to two of them, but it stops there. His affair with Mae West is conspicuously absent. There is only a hint, at once suggestive and poignant, that appears near the end of the book as the main character walks toward the ring at Yankee Stadium: “He smelled a woman’s perfume from among ringsiders. It was a white woman’s perfume and no matter what he ever did he would never know what to do about it.”
In the end, Chalky’s death mirrored his affair with West. Despite the controversy swirling around it, his death was natural as his love. His autopsy report, dated September 3, 1957 ends the mystery. The Los Angeles County Coroner examined the body and found nothing that would make a mob hit likely. “No evidences of bony injury, either old or recent are demonstrated,” it reads. “The scalp is free of any evidences of injury.” Nor was he drowned. Tests conducted on his lungs, liver, and heart could not support that diagnosis. The coroner’s conclusion was as anticlimactic as a marriage: “aortic stenosis due to old rheumatic valvulitis, inactive.” It was heart failure that did Chalky in.
Mae West was present at his funeral.
According to at least one family member, she paid for it as well.
THEY SAY MAE WEST HAD A SOFT SPOT FOR GORILLA JONES —THEY DON’T KNOW THE HALF OF IT. DON’T MISS THE VALENTINE-WORTHY CONCLUSION TO “THE RINGSIDE BELLE” ….
TELL YOUR SWEETHEART! READ IT BEFORE BED!
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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More ‘Dances’ in Store for Derek Chisora after out-working Otto Wallin in Manchester

Tonight’s fight at Co-op Live Arena in Manchester between Derek Chisora and Otto Wallin bore the tagline “Last Dance.” The reference was to Chisora who at age 41 was on the cusp of his last hurrah. However, when the IBF went and certified the match as an eliminator, that changed the equation and, truth be told, Chisora would have likely soldiered on regardless of the outcome.
The UK boxing fans have embraced Chisora, an honest workman, never an elite fighter, but always a tough out. They certainly hope to see him in action again and they will get their wish. Tonight, he made more fans with a hard-earned, unanimous decision over 34-year-old Swedish southpaw Otto Wallin who went to post a small favorite.
Chisora came out fast, pressuring the Swede while keeping his hands busy. He was comfortably ahead after five rounds, but was seemingly ripe for a comedown after cuts developed above and below his right eye. Fortunately for him, he had the prominent Canadian cutman Russ Amber in his corner.
Chisora scored two knockdowns before the fight was finished. The first came in round nine when Chisora caught Wallin with a punch that landed high on his temple. In a delayed reaction, Wallin went flying backward, landing on his butt. Wallin recovered nicely and had his best round in the next frame.
Wallin appeared to be winning the final round when Chisora put the explanation point on his performance just as the final bell was about to ring, catching the Swede off-balance with a cuffing right hand that sent him to the floor once again. If not for that knockdown, there would have been some controversy when the scores were read. The tallies were 117-109, 116-110, and 114-112, the latter of which was too generous to Wallin (27-3).
“I love the sport and I love the fans,” said Derek Chisora (36-13, 23 KOs), addressing the audience in his post-fight interview. His next bout will likely come against the winner of the match between Daniel Dubois and Joseph Parker happening later this month in Saudi Arabia.
Semi-wind-up
Stoke-on-Kent middleweight Nathan Heaney disappointed his large contingent of rooters when he was upset by French invader Sofiane Khati. The 35-year-old Heaney, who was 18-1-1 heading in, started well and was slightly ahead after six frames when things turned sour.
Both landed hard punches simultaneously in round seven, but the Frenchman’s punch was more damaging, knocking out Heaney’s mouthpiece and putting him on the canvas. When he arose, Khati, a 6/1 underdog, charged after him and forced the referee to intrude, saving Heaney from more punishment. The official time was 1:08 of round seven. It was the sixth win in the last seven tries for Khati (18-5, 7 KOs) who, akin to Chisora, is enjoying a late-career resurgence.
Other Bouts of Note
Lancashire junior welterweight Jack Rafferty was an 18/1 favorite over Morecambe ditch digger Reece MacMillan and won as expected. MacMillan’s corner tossed in the towel at the 1:08 mark of round seven. Rafferty’s record now stands at 25-0 (16 KOs), giving him the longest current unbeaten run of any British boxer. It was the second loss in 19 starts for MacMillan.
In a lackluster performance, Zach Parker, now competing as a light heavyweight, improved his record to 26-1 (19) with a 10-round decision over France’s Mickael Diallo (21-2-2) who took the bout on five days’ notice after Parker’s original opponent Willy Hutchinson suffered a bad shoulder injury in sparring and had to withdraw. The scores were 98-92, 98-93, and 97-94.
Parker’s lone defeat came in a domestic showdown with John Ryder, a match in which he could not continue after four rounds because of a broken hand. The prize for Ryder was a date with Canelo Alvarez. Mickael Diallo has another fight booked in four weeks in Long Beach, California.
Also
Featherweight Zak Miller scored the biggest win of his career, capturing a pair of regional trinkets with a 12-round majority decision over Masood Abdulah. The judges had it 115-113, 115-114, and 114-114.
Heading in, Miller was 15-1 but had defeated only one opponent with a winning record. It was the first pro loss for Abdulah (11-1), an Afghanistan-born Londoner.
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Avila Perspective, Chap. 313: The Misadventures of Canelo and Jake Paul (and More)

Avila Perspective, Chap. 313: The Misadventures of Canelo and Jake Paul (and More)
Boxing news has taken a weird arc.
For the past 20 years or so, social media has replaced newspapers, radio and television as a source for boxing news.
And one thing is certain:
You cannot truly rely on many social media accounts to be accurate. Unless they are connected to actual reputable journalists. There are not that many.
Claims of Saul “Canelo” Alvarez and Jake Paul reaching an agreement to fight each other this year were rampant on social media sites. No contracts had been signed between the two parties, but several social media accounts claimed the fight was happening. One claimed: “it was official.”
It is not happening as of Friday Feb. 7. 10 a.m. Pacific Time.
A statement by Most Valuable Promotions was sent Friday Feb. 7, to various boxing publications that emphasized the Canelo-Paul fight is not official.
“MVP was deep in negotiations for a blockbuster fight between Jake Paul and Canelo Alvarez on Cinco de Mayo weekend in Las Vegas…This situation is a reminder not to believe everything you read.”
The past few days numerous social media accounts were posting erroneously that Paul and Canelo Alvarez were fighting on a certain date and place. It was jumped on by other social media accounts like Piranhas and gobbled up and spit out as actual verified news.
Fake news is happening more and more. I hate that term but it’s becoming more common.
Many accounts on social media sites are not trained journalists. They don’t understand that being the first to spit out news is not as important as being accurate.
Also, there is no such thing as using the term “according to sources” without naming the source. Who made the claim?
Third, verification of a fight comes from the promoters. They are the most reliable methods of verifying a pending fight. It’s their job. Don’t rely on a fighter, a trainer or somebody’s friend. Call the promoter involved and they will verify.
Otherwise, it’s just rumor and exaggeration.
There are social media accounts with trained journalists. Find out which social media accounts are connected to actual news media sources and established by trained journalists. A real journalist verifies a story before it is published.
R.I.P. Michael Katz
Recently, a highly respected journalist, Michael Katz, passed away. He wrote for various newspapers including the New York Times and for various boxing web sites such as Maxboxing.com and a few others.
Katz covered prize fights beginning in 1968 with the heavyweight fight between Floyd Patterson and Jimmy Ellis. Read the full story in www.TheSweetscience.com by Arne Lang.
I first came across Katz probably in 1994 when I began covering boxing events as a writer for the L.A .Times. During media press conferences Katz was one of the more prominent writers and very outspoken.
The New York-bred Katz could tell you stories about certain eras in boxing. I happened to overhear one or two while sitting around a dinner buffet in the media rooms in Las Vegas. He always had interesting things to say.
Boxing writers come in waves during each era. Today this new era of boxing writers has dwindled to almost nothing. Writing has been overtaken by boxing videographers. The problem is during an actual fight, videographers cannot record the fight itself. The media companies sponsoring the fight cards don’t allow it. So, after a fight is completed, very few descriptions of a fight exist. Only interviews.
Written journalism is shrinking due to the lack of newspapers, magazines and periodicals. The only sure way to know what happened is by seeing the fight on tape. You won’t see many stories on a bulletin board at a boxing gym because there are fewer boxing writers today. The written history of a championship fight has shrunk to almost nothing.
Katz was one of the superb writers from the 1960s to the 2000s. It’s a shrinking base that gets smaller every day. It’s a dying breed but there are still some remaining.
Fights in SoCal
All Star Boxing returns with two female fights on the card on Saturday Feb. 8, at Commerce Casino in Commerce, Calif.
Stephanie Simon (1-0) and Archana Sharma (3-2) are scheduled to headline the boxing card in a super lightweight main event. Others on the boxing event include Ricardo De La Torre, Bryan Albarran and Jose Mancilla to name a few.
Doors open at 6 p.m. No one under 14 will be admitted. For more information call (323) 816-6200.
Fights to Watch
Sat. DAZN 10:30 a.m. Derek Chisora (35-13) vs Otto Wallin (27-2).
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Biyarslanov TKOed Mimoune at Montreal; Jalolov Conspicuous by his Absence

It was a cold and snowy night in Montreal, depressing the turnout at the Montreal Casino where Camille Estephan’s Eye of the Tiger Promotions presented a six-fight card that aired in the U.S. on ESPN+.
The match-up that had the most intrigue, although not the main event and not expected to be remotely competitive, centered around heavyweight Bakhodir Jalolov who would be returning to the professional ranks after an absence of almost 14 months during which he fattened his extraordinary amateur profile. But the Montreal Commission nixed the match, ostensibly because Jalolov took sick after the weigh-in.
Main Event
The main event was a 10-round junior welterweight contest between well-acquainted southpaws Arthur Biyarslanov (pictured) and Mohamed Mimoune. The Toronto-based, Russian-born Biyarslanov, nicknamed the Chechen Wolf, had no trouble with his 37-year-old French opponent, taking Mimoune out in the second round.
Mimoune did not appear to be badly hurt after Biyarslanov knocked him to the canvas, but he had no antidote when Biyarslanov swarmed after him. With nothing come back Biyarslanov’s way, the referee sensibly waived it off. The official time was 2:16 of round two.
Biyarslanov (18-0, 15 KOs) looks like he can make some noise in the talent-rich 140-pound division. Mimoune, who had been stopped five times previously, declined to 24-7.
Co-Feature
Albert Ramirez, a 32-year-old Venezuelan, ranked in the Top Five by all four relevant sanctioning bodies, moved a step closer to a title fight with a third-round stoppage of Marco Calic.
As an amateur, Ramirez, who improved to 20-0 (17 KOs), defeated Cuban stalwarts Erislandy Savon and Julio Cesar La Cruz in 5-round fights. Tonight, he put his opponent away with a fusillade of punches. After rising from a knockdown, Calic got a brief respite when Ramirez was warned for an illegal punch behind the head, but Cacic’s body language informed us that the end was near.
The official time was 2:10 of round three. A 37-year-old Croatian making his North American debut, Calic lost for the second time in 17 starts.
More
In a match-up between former Olympians contested at the catch-weight of 178 pounds, Montreal-based Mehmet Unal, who represented Turkey in the 2016 Games, scored a third-round stoppage of Ezequiel Maderna. The final punch was a looping right hand that knocked Maderna off his pins, leading to what some would argue was a quick stoppage. The official time was 1:41 of round three.
It was the second knockdown scored by Unal, the first coming in the previous round, a knockdown that was more of a push. But Maderna was holding his own in what was an entertaining fight for as long as it lasted. Unal, although rough-around-the-edges, is undefeated (12-0, 10 KOs) as a pro. Maderna, a 38-year-old Argentine, saw his ledger dip to 31-14.
Fast rising welterweight Christopher Guerrero scored the best win of his career with a fourth-round stoppage of Swiss journeyman Dennis Dauti. A two-time Canadian amateur champion, born in Mexico, Guerrero channeled Julio Cesar Chavez and ended the bout with a left hook to the body. Dauti made it to his feet although he was in obvious pain. Guerreo then tossed him to the canvas (officially a slip) and the referee waived it off before Guerrero (13-0, 8 KOs) had the opportunity to land another punch. The 31-year-old Dauti (25-6-2) hadn’t previously been stopped.
Super middleweight Moreno Fendero who has drawn comparisons with stablemate Christian Mbilli, had an easy workout with Edison Demaj, stopping the German-Albanian trial horse in the third round.
The 25-year-old Moreno, a former member of the French Army, scored three knockdowns before the match was halted at the 1:36 mark of the third round. The final knockdown was a looping right hand that landed high on Demaj’s temple. He beat the count, but the referee waived the match off with the approval of Demaj’s corner. Fendero improved to 9-0 (7 KOs). The overmatched Demaj falls to 13-4-1.
In the TV opener, lightweight Avery Martin-Duval, a local product, advanced to 13-0-1 (7) with an 8-round unanimous decision over French import Keshan Koaly (6-1-2) The scores were 77-74 and 77-73 twice
From Nice with roots in the French territory of Guadalupe, Koaly knocked Martin-Duval to his knees in the second frame with a jab to the midsection. Two rounds later, the local lad landed the best punch of the fight, staggering Koaly with a counter right hand that immediately caused a purplish welt to develop under his right eye. From that point on, Martin-Duval controlled the action.
Upsets are extremely rare on Eye of the Tiger events. Tonight was no exception.
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