Rest in Peace, Harold “Hercules” Johnson

Published

10 years ago

February 24, 2015

“I didn’t want that fight. I didn’t want to fight Harold Johnson. They had to pay me a lot of money to fight that animal.” – Willie Pastrano

Harold Johnson was a licensed union drummer and as his astonishing fight career wound down he could be found in clubs with his band “Harold Johnson and the Contenders.” The story goes that when Johnson ran out of money, he would pawn his drums and then take a fight, explaining that spate of ten round decisions over the likes of John Alford (23-15-3) and Eddie Jones (7-5) in the late sixties. When he was paid, he would rescue his drums and return to the jazz circuit and bang out his second love on stage. Having never heard him play I’ll make a guess that he married a sizzling left to steady right.

I don’t know what he made of Johnson the musician but Philadelphia boxing scribe Jack McKinney compared the fighter to Bach. He was on to something, I think. French composer Charles Gounod regarded Mozart as the most beautiful composer and Bach as the “most comprehensive”, damning him, it might seem, with faint praise – but completeness is in many ways the highest praise a great artist can pay a peer. What Gounod is saying is that Bach does more perfectly than his fellow genius, for all that he is not quite so dazzling. Something similar can be said about Johnson.

Johnson’s Mozart was Archie Moore. It is hard, really, to exaggerate the atrocious luck he experienced in sharing an era with arguably the greatest light-heavyweight in history but nor can Johnson’s bravery in setting out to master this man be overstated. He first met Moore in April of 1949, two months after his impressive defeat of Chilean heavyweight Arturo Godoy. Godoy was almost a decade removed from his outstanding performance against the immortal Joe Louis but he still held a twenty-pound weight advantage over the smaller Johnson. The great Tommy Loughran was working closely with him at that time, and it showed. Harold reportedly boxed his way calmly and clearly to a unanimous decision. Unbeaten at 24-0 he was still an underdog against the vastly more experienced Moore in a fight that was laughably listed as an eliminator for the light-heavyweight title then held by Freddie Mills.

Moore would have to wait four years for his shot but he looked like a champion against Johnson that April evening in 1949. Johnson was never in the fight. Moore was aggressive from the first while Johnson banked upon his jab to keep Moore off. It didn’t work, and by the sixth he was bleeding from the nose and by the seventh he was hauling himself off the canvas.

“I knew I’d win,” Moore told the press. “But the tough ones are still ahead.”

Johnson took his defeat quietly, in keeping with his character. He had won no more than three rounds in the ten round contest and had been bullied and outclassed, but there is something dismissive in that line that bothers me a little – “the tough ones are still ahead” – and I suspect it bothered Johnson too. Moore was among the cleverest and most deadly of punchers in history but for whatever reason his name was never far from Johnson’s mouth. It is hard to think of a more difficult way to make a living in the 1950s than fighting Archie Moore, but that became Johnson’s job – he met him four times in that decade.

By the end of their first rematch Johnson was bleeding from his “nose, mouth and left eye” but on one card he won five of the ten rounds. He was gathering experience, closing in. Three months later in December of 1951, Harold Johnson defeated Archie Moore by unanimous decision 5-4, 5-4, 6-4. A low blow landed by Moore in the tied fifth round cost him a draw, but the most significant factor was Johnson’s left. It had developed into perhaps the most cultured appendage in the history of the glittering light-heavyweight division.

Precious footage of their fifth and final contest fought in August of 1954 for the world’s light-heavyweight championship survives until this day, and in it we see just what a punch Johnson’s left jab had become. Within seconds of the bell for the first round he threw a swift jab to Moore’s body while leaning away, a stiff jab to the head thrown from behind his high left-shoulder as Moore ducked and moved in, and three short-arm hooks, arm punches thrown as a reaction to the champion’s sudden presence within his sphere of action. Two different kind of attacking jabs and three different kinds of defensive hooks, Johnson shows a whole offence without once chancing the right hand. Often outreached even in the light-heavyweight division, Johnson developed a beautiful, baiting footwork mode, moving away from an opponent in tiny increments, moving even the genius Moore out of a crouch and slightly towards him – simply by moving his head backwards in a deep stance he puts Archie on the end of his jab. He was conservative with his balance and this sometimes cost him punching opportunities and led the ignorant to name him boring, but it bought him control of the range against a man who thought he had mastered that forever. By the fifth Moore is clearly playing Johnson’s game and losing.

In the tenth, Johnson dropped his man with a sneaky right behind the ear. If the fight had ended with that round like their previous contests, Johnson would have been victorious; if it had been fought over twelve, he would have been victorious – but it was a championship fight decided over fifteen rounds, a distance Johnson had never boxed before. By the thirteenth he was hanging on and in the fourteenth, still ahead on two of the cards, he was cruelly stopped by a resurgent Moore.

I think Johnson’s problem with his nemesis was a stylistic one. If he was classical, Moore was the jazz Johnson so loved, technically proficient but free-wheeling, as capable of the unexpected as the true. In the end, when Moore had to abandon himself to win, he knew where to find Johnson in a way that Johnson could never replicate with Moore. Willie Pastrano called him “a fighter’s fighter, a perfectionist” but his commitment to what was correct described his limitations, too.

Those limitations did not prevent him adding a second layer of astonishing success at heavyweight. Johnson is perhaps the most underrated heavyweight in history and few light-heavyweights come close to matching his overall resume in the unlimited class. In 1961 he put on a left-handed clinic against master-technician Eddie Machen, out-jabbing the man who was supposed to carry the best left in the division. Even more impressive was his narrow defeat of former heavyweight champion Ezzard Charles. A victory that came almost a decade before his defeat of Machen it means that Johnson proved himself the heavyweight division’s definitive technician in fights eight years apart against world-class opposition. Jimmy Bivins, Nino Valdes and Clarence Henry were the other major heavyweight scalps he carried, the last in particular regarded as an enormous shock against an overwhelming favourite.

Indeed, his only losses at heavyweight came in strange circumstances. In a 1950 fight with Jersey Joe Walcott he withdrew in the third with an injured lower back. He was also “stopped” without having been hit against Julio Mederos in the second, an apparent victim of a drugging by a “stranger” who presented him with a “bitter orange.” It should be enough to say that an African-American that turned professional in the 1940s walked a strange and difficult path.

Despite his glowing success above, light-heavy was where Johnson walked his true path. It had its valleys, not least his two rounds stoppage at the hands of puncher Billy Smith but eventually he took the long walk to a ring containing Doug Jones, the winner to be named the undisputed champion of the world. Jones, ten short months from extending a prospect soon to be known as Muhammad Ali, was embarrassed in a one-sided masterclass that to this day remains among the benchmarks for technical excellence in the field of boxing. Johnson looks old; he is balding, the severe crew-cut he wore from his navy days becoming redundant. But the younger Jones just isn’t allowed to hit him without suffering. He is smooth and Jones is fast, and this is not a contest.

Johnson, by his stage had mastered the control of his opponents trailing hand, with jab, with movement, with vision. Glimmers of what we see against Moore are concrete lightning now, he often ditches the Jones jab before he has really thrown it, a twitch of his head and then, boom, across comes the right hand, an uppercut, a straight, a feint and a jab. I managed to score the seventh and fourteenth for Jones; sympathy may have played a part.

In the aftermath, Johnson once again demanded Archie Moore, for what would have been a sixth time, but had to settle for Gustav Scholz in Berlin in front of forty-thousand Germans. He took the decision in what some regard as his finest hour. When he returned to America he was matched with defensive specialist Willie Pastrano after Henry Hank withdrew from a proposed title fight with a facial injury. Such was Pastrano’s respect for Johnson that they had to make him three different offers before they could come up with a payday he could not refuse. What appears on film to be another one-sided schooling followed, although Johnson’s rhythm was destroyed by Pastrano’s jittery up-jab and mobility. Somehow the decision went against Johnson and his short title run was over.

“Man, I just got lucky, that’s all,” Pastrano would say years later. “After each round I’d say ‘Well, I’m still here. Thank God.’”

Johnson was never particularly well managed. When he won the title he received a bonus of just $250. His fifth fight with Moore was the first time he received a purse larger than $6,000. He once claimed career earnings of just under $200,000 but spread over a twenty-three year career that represents just over $8,000 per annum. Soon, he was pawning that drum-kit. Then he made a desperate and failed comeback attempt. Finally he sold the trophies of his fistic greatness, transforming them from riches to memorabilia with each swift, sad transaction. Questioned about his excellent physical condition in later life he would say with a serious smile that he could not afford to gain weight because he could not afford to buy new clothes.

In the end he seems to have found a modicum of peace, living his last years “in quiet retirement in northeast Philadelphia” according to phillyboxinghistory.com. But no more writers will seek him out there to hear about those glory days that spanned four decades and two weight divisions. No young fighters will approach him, as Bernard Hopkins once did, and beg his wisdom or pay their respects. He died this week at the age of eighty-six. Watching him box in that timeless style in stark black and white all day today has made that fact unreal.

The great matchmaker Teddy Brenner once called Johnson the perfect fighter but added that “there is no room in boxing for perfection.”

And you know what he means.

But I’m not sure that Archie Moore would agree with him. Nor would Ezzard Charles. Or Jimmy Bivins. Or Arturo Godoy, or Bert Lytell, or Clarence Henry, Bob Satterfield, Nino Valdes, Eddie Machen, Eddie Cotton, Doug Jones, Gustav Sholz, Willie Pastrano, Henry Hank…

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Matt McGrain

History has Shortchanged Freddie Dawson, One of the Best Boxers of his Era

Published

20 hours ago

April 2, 2025

Arne K. Lang

History has Shortchanged Freddie Dawson, One of the Best Boxers of his Era

This reporter was rummaging around the internet last week when he stumbled on a story in the May 1950 issue of Ebony under the byline of Mike Jacobs. Boxing was then in the doldrums (isn’t it always?) and Jacobs, the most powerful promoter in boxing during the era of Joe Louis, was lassoed by the editors of the magazine to address the question of whether the over-representation of black boxers was killing the sport at the box office.

This hoary premise had been kicking around even before the heyday of Jack Johnson, bubbling forth whenever an important black-on-black fight played to a sea of empty seats as had happened the previous year when Chicago’s Comiskey Park hosted the world heavyweight title fight between Ezzard Charles and Jersey Joe Walcott.

Jacobs ridiculed the hypothesis – as one could have expected considering the publication in which the story ran – and singled out three “colored” boxers as the best of the current crop of active pugilists: Sugar Ray Robinson, Ike Williams, and Freddie Dawson.

Sugar Ray Robinson? A no-brainer. Skill-wise the greatest of the great. Even those that didn’t follow boxing, would have recognized his name. Ike Williams? Nowhere near as well-known as Robinson, but he was then the reigning lightweight champion, a man destined to go into the International Boxing Hall of Fame with the inaugural class of 1990.

And Freddie Dawson? If the name doesn’t ring a bell, dear reader, you are not alone. I confess that I too drew a blank. And that triggered a search to learn more about him.

Freddie Dawson had four fights with Ike Williams. All four were staged on Ike’s turf in Philadelphia. Were this not the case, the history books would likely show the series knotted 2-2. Late in his career, Dawson became greatly admired in Australia. But we are jumping ahead of ourselves.

Dawson was born in 1924 in Thomasville, Arkansas, an unincorporated town in the Arkansas Delta. Likely a descendent of slaves who worked in the cotton plantations, he grew up in the so-called Bronzeville neighborhood of Chicago, the heart of Chicago’s Black Belt.

The first mention of him in the newspapers came in 1941 when he won Chicago’s Catholic Youth Organization (CYO) featherweight title. In those days, amateur boxing was big in the Windy City, the birthplace of the Golden Gloves. The Catholic Archdiocese, which ran gyms in every parish, and the Chicago Parks Department, were the major incubators.

In his amateur days, he was known as simply Fred Dawson. As a pro, his name often appeared as Freddy Dawson, although Freddie gradually became the more common spelling.

Dawson, who stood five-foot-six and was often described as stocky, made his pro debut on Feb. 1, 1943, at Marigold Gardens. Before the year was out, he had 16 fights under his belt, all in Chicago and all but two at Marigold. (Currently the site of an interdenominational Christian church, Marigold Gardens, on the city’s north side, was Chicago’s most active boxing and wrestling arena from the mid-1930s through the early-1950s. Joe Louis had three of his early fights there and Tony Zale was a fixture there as he climbed the ladder to the world middleweight title.)

The last of these 16 fights was fatal for Dawson’s opponent who collapsed heading back to his corner after the fight was stopped in the 10^th round and died that night at a local hospital from the effects of a brain injury.

Dawson left town after this incident and spent most of the next year in New Orleans where energetic promoter Louis Messina ran twice-weekly shows (Mondays for whites and Fridays for blacks) at the Coliseum, a major stop on boxing’s so-called Chitlin’ Circuit.

That same year, on Sept. 19, 1944, Dawson had his first encounter with Ike Williams. He was winning the fight when Ike knocked him out with a body punch in the fourth round.

The first and last meetings between Dawson and Ike Williams were spaced five years apart. In the interim, Freddie scored his two best wins, stopping Vic Patrick in the twelfth round at Sydney, NSW, and Bernard Docusen in the sixth round in Chicago.

The long-reigning lightweight champion of Australia, Patrick (49-3, 43 KOs) gave the crowd a thrill when he knocked Dawson down for a count of “six” in the penultimate 11^th round, but Dawson returned the favor twice in the final stanza, ending the contest with a punch so harsh that the poor Aussie needed five minutes before he was fit to leave the ring and would spend the night in the hospital as a precaution.

Dawson fought Bernard Docusen before 10,000-plus at Chicago Stadium on Feb. 4, 1949. An 8/5 favorite, Docusen lacked a hard punch, but the New Orleans cutie had suffered only three losses in 66 fights, had never been stopped, and had extended Sugar Ray Robinson the 15-round distance the previous year.

Dawson dismantled him. Docusen managed to get back on his feet after Dawson knocked him down in the sixth, but he was in no condition to continue and the referee waived the fight off. Dawson was then vacillating between the lightweight and welterweight divisions and reporters wondered whether it would be Robinson or Ike Williams when Dawson finally got his well-earned title shot.

Sugar Ray wasn’t in his future. Here are the results of his other matches with Ike Williams:

Dawson-Williams II (Jan. 28, 1946) – The consensus on press row was 7-2-1 or 7-3 for Dawson, but the match was ruled a draw. “[The judges and referee] evidently saw [Williams] land punches that nobody else did,” said the ringside reporter for the Philadelphia Inquirer.

Dawson-Williams III (Jan. 26, 1948) – Dawson lost a majority decision. The scores were 6-4, 5-4-1, and 4-4-2. The decision was booed. Ike Williams then held the lightweight title, but this was a non-title fight. (It was tough for an outsider to get a fair shake in Philadelphia, home to Ike Williams’ co-manager Frank “Blinky” Palermo who would go to prison for his duplicitous dealings as a fight facilitator.)

Dawson-Williams IV (Dec. 5, 1949) – This would be Freddie Dawson’s only crack at a world title and he came up short. Ike Williams retained the belt, winning a unanimous decision. The fight was close – 8-7, 8-7, 9-6 – but there was no controversy.

Dawson made three more trips to Australia before his career was finished. On the first of these trips, he knocked out Jack Hassen, successor to Vic Patrick as the lightweight champion of Australia. A 1953 article in the Sydney Sunday Herald bore witness to the esteem in which Dawson was held by boxing fans in Australia: “None of our boxers could withstand his devastating attacks which not only knocked them out but also knocked years off their careers,” said the author. “It is doubtful whether any Australian boxer in any division could have beaten Dawson.”

Dawson had his final fights in the Land Down Under, finishing his career with a record of 103-14-4 while answering the bell for 962 rounds. Following what became his final fight, he had an eye operation in Sydney that was reportedly so intricate that it required a two-week hospital stay. He injured the eye again in Manila while sparring in preparation for a match with the welterweight champion of the Philippines, a match that had to be aborted because of the injury. Dawson then disappeared, by which we mean that he disappeared from the pages of the newspaper archives that allow us to construct these kinds of stories.

What about Freddie Dawson the man? A 1944 story about him said he was an outstanding all-around athlete, “a champion in all athletic undertakings – basketball, baseball, track and even jitterbugging.” A story in a Sydney paper as he was preparing to meet Vic Patrick informs us that he had two young children, ages 2 and 1, owned his own home in Chicago, and drove a two-year-old Cadillac. But beyond these flimsy snippets, Dawson the man remains elusive.

What we learned, however, is that he was one of the most underrated boxers to come down the pike in any era, a borderline Hall of Famer who ought not have fallen through the cracks. Inside the ring, this guy was one tough hombre.

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Ringside at the Fontainebleau where Mikaela Mayer Won her Rematch with Sandy Ryan

Published

5 days ago

March 30, 2025

Arne K. Lang

Ringside-at-the-Fontainebleau-where-Mikaela-Mayer-won-her-Rematch-with-Sandy-Ryan

LAS VEGAS, NV — The first meeting between Mikaela Mayer and Sandy Ryan last September at Madison Square Garden was punctuated with drama before the first punch was thrown. When the smoke cleared, Mayer had become a world-title-holder in a second weight class, taking away Ryan’s WBO welterweight belt via a majority decision in a fan-friendly fight.

The rematch tonight at the Fontainebleau in Las Vegas was another fan-friendly fight. There were furious exchanges in several rounds and the crowd awarded both gladiators a standing ovation at the finish.

Mayer dominated the first half of the fight and held on to win by a unanimous decision. But Sandy Ryan came on strong beginning in round seven, and although Mayer was the deserving winner, the scores favoring her (98-92 and 97-93 twice) fail to reflect the competitiveness of the match-up. This is the best rivalry in women’s boxing aside from Taylor-Serrano.

Mayer, 34, improved to 21-2 (5). Up next, she hopes, in a unification fight with Lauren Price who outclassed Natasha Jonas earlier this month and currently holds the other meaningful pieces of the 147-pound puzzle. Sandy Ryan, 31, the pride of Derby, England, falls to 7-3-1.

Co-Feature

In his first defense of his WBO world welterweight title (acquired with a brutal knockout of Giovani Santillan after the title was vacated by Terence Crawford), Atlanta’s Brian Norman Jr knocked out Puerto Rico’s Derrieck Cuevas in the third round. A three-punch combination climaxed by a short left hook sent Cuevas staggering into a corner post. He got to his feet before referee Thomas Taylor started the count, but Taylor looked in Cuevas’s eyes and didn’t like what he saw and brought the bout to a halt.

The stoppage, which struck some as premature, came with one second remaining in the third stanza.

A second-generation prizefighter (his father was a fringe contender at super middleweight), the 24-year-old Norman (27-0, 21 KOs) is currently boxing’s youngest male title-holder. It was only the second pro loss for Cuevas (27-2-1) whose lone previous defeat had come early in his career in a 6-rounder he lost by split decision.

Other Bouts

In a career-best performance, 27-year-old Brooklyn featherweight Bruce “Shu Shu” Carrington (15-0, 9 KOs) blasted out Jose Enrique Vivas (23-4) in the third round.

Carrington, who was named the Most Outstanding Boxer at the 2019 U.S. Olympic Trials despite being the lowest-seeded boxer in his weight class, decked Vivas with a right-left combination near the end of the second round. Vivas barely survived the round and was on a short leash when the third stanza began. After 53 seconds of round three, referee Raul Caiz Jr had seen enough and waived it off. Vivas hadn’t previously been stopped.

Cleveland welterweight Tiger Johnson, a Tokyo Olympian, scored a fifth-round stoppage over San Antonio’s Kendo Castaneda. Johnson assumed control in the fourth round and sent Castaneda to his knees twice with body punches in the next frame. The second knockdown terminated the match. The official time was 2:00 of round five.

Johnson advanced to 15-0 (7 KOs). Castenada declined to 21-9.

Las Vegas junior welterweight Emiliano Vargas (13-0, 11 KOs) blasted out Stockton, California’s Giovanni Gonzalez in the second round. Vargas brought the bout to a sudden conclusion with a sweeping left hook that knocked Gonzalez out cold. The end came at the 2:00 minute mark of round two.

Gonzalez brought a 20-7-2 record which was misleading as 18 of his fights were in Tijuana where fights are frequently prearranged. However, he wasn’t afraid to trade with Vargas and paid the price.

Emiliano Vargas, with his matinee idol good looks and his boxing pedigree – he is the son of former U.S. Olympian and two-weight world title-holder “Ferocious” Fernando Vargas – is highly marketable and has the potential to be a cross-over star.

Eighteen-year-old Newark bantamweight Emmanuel “Manny” Chance, one of Top Rank’s newest signees, won his pro debut with a four-round decision over So Cal’s Miguel Guzman. Chance won all four rounds on all three cards, but this was no runaway. He left a lot of room for improvement.

There was a long intermission before the co-main and again before the main event, but the tedium was assuaged by a moving video tribute to George Foreman.

Photos credit: Al Applerose

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William Zepeda Edges Past Tevin Farmer in Cancun; Improves to 34-0

Published

5 days ago

March 29, 2025

David A. Avila

William Zepeda Edges Past Tevin Farmer in Cancun; Improves to 34-0

No surprise, once again William Zepeda eked out a win over the clever and resilient Tevin Farmer to remain undefeated and retain a regional lightweight title on Saturday.

There were no knockdowns in this rematch.

The Mexican punching machine Zepeda (33-0, 17 KOs) once more sought to overwhelm Farmer (33-8-1, 9 KOs) with a deluge of blows. This rematch by Golden Boy Promotions took place in the famous beach resort area of Cancun, Mexico.

It was a mere four months ago that both first clashed in Saudi Arabia with their vastly difference styles. This time the tropical setting served as the background which suited Zepeda and his lawnmower assaults. The Mexican fans were pleased.

Nothing changed in their second meeting.

Zepeda revved up the body assault and Farmer moved around casually to his right while fending off the Mexican fighter’s attacks. By the fourth round Zepeda was able to cut off Farmer’s escape routes and targeted the body with punishing shots.

The blows came in bunches.

In the fifth round Zepeda blasted away at Farmer who looked frantic for an escape. The body assault continued with the Mexican fighter pouring it on and Farmer seeming to look ready to quit. When the round ended, he waved off his corner’s appeals to stop.

Zepeda continued to dominate the next few rounds and then Farmer began rallying. At first, he cleverly smothered Zepeda’s body attacks and then began moving and hitting sporadically. It forced the Mexican fighter to pause and figure out the strategy.

Farmer, a Philadelphia fighter, showed resiliency especially when it was revealed he had suffered a hand injury.

During the last three rounds Farmer dug down deep and found ways to score and not get hit. It was Boxing 101 and the Philly fighter made it work.

But too many rounds had been put in the bank by Zepeda. Despite the late rally by Farmer one judge saw it 114-114, but two others scored it 116-112 and 115-113 for Zepeda who retains his interim lightweight title and place at the top of the WBC rankings.

“I knew he was a difficult fighter. This time he was even more difficult,” said Zepeda.

Farmer was downtrodden about another loss but realistic about the outcome and starting slow.

“But I dominated the last rounds,” said Farmer.

Zepeda shrugged at the similar outcome as their first encounter.

“I’m glad we both put on a great show,” said Zepeda.

Female Flyweight Battle

Costa Rica’s Yokasta Valle edged past Texas fighter Marlen Esparza to win their showdown at flyweight by split decision after 10 rounds.

Valle moved up two weight divisions to meet Esparza who was slightly above the weight limit. Both showed off their contrasting styles and world class talent.

Esparza, a former unified flyweight world titlist, stayed in the pocket and was largely successful with well-placed jabs and left hooks. She repeatedly caught Valle in-between her flurries.

The current minimumweight world titlist changed tactics and found more success in the second half of the fight. She forced Esparza to make the first moves and that forced changes that benefited her style.

Neither fighter could take over the fight.

After 10 rounds one judge saw Esparza the winner 96-94, but two others saw Valle the winner 97-93 twice.

Will Valle move up and challenge the current undisputed flyweight world champion Gabriela Fundora? That’s the question.

Valle currently holds the WBC minimumweight world title.

Puerto Rico vs Mexico

Oscar Collazo (12-0, 9 KOs), the WBO, WBA minimumweight titlist, knocked out Mexico’s Edwin Cano (13-3-1, 4 KOs) with a flurry of body shots at 1:12 of the fifth round.

Collazo dominated with a relentless body attack the Mexican fighter could not defend. It was the Puerto Rican fighter’s fifth consecutive title defense.

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