DiSanto Making Sure Boxing Heroes Are Remembered From Cradle to Grave

Published

9 years ago

March 25, 2015

A potter’s field, pauper’s grave or common grave is a term for a place for the burial of unknown or indigent people.

–From Wikipedia

There was an outpouring of emotion from boxing fans the world over, and deservedly so, when Matthew Saad Muhammad, arguably the greatest action fighter of all time, succumbed to the debilitating effects of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, more commonly known as Lou Gehrig’s disease, on May 25, 2014.

Saad Muhammad, 59 at the time of his passing, was hardly unknown; he was a former WBC light heavyweight champion who defended that title eight times, and a first-ballot inductee into the International Boxing Hall of Fame in 1998. But Saad Muhammad was not someone whose legacy could be defined solely by numbers in the record book; he was “Miracle Matthew,” a warrior imbued with such a remarkable heart and resilience that he came back from the brink of defeat time and again, winning bouts that were so exhilarating that the tapes should be preserved in a time capsule for future generations to unearth and marvel at.

“To me, Saad Muhammad is the most exciting fighter who ever lived,” says John DiSanto, who in 2004 founded PhillyBoxingHistory.com, a web site dedicated to the preservation of the memory of the local fighters who became his heroes. “His fights were unbelievable. I would say they were like `Rocky’ movies, but they can’t even make boxing movies that are that exciting.”

Saad Muhammad, however, died broke, the $4 million he earned during his 18-year professional career having long since vanished to imprudent spending and a leeching entourage. At one point he was unemployed and owed $250,000 in back taxes. When a proposed story of his life failed to find a buyer in Hollywood, Saad was reduced to working as an itinerant roofer, a sometimes trainer of fighters, and ultimately to life on the streets as a homeless person. It is a common tale, one repeated too often in a cutthroat sport that tends to chew up even its finest practitioners and spit them out once they’ve given their last full measure of devotion.

But the death of Saad Muhammad, sad though it might be, is only the beginning of another story, a more hopeful one that was repeated several times beforehand and is likely to be repeated again in the future. DiSanto, and others like him, are determined that fighters who made such an indelible mark on boxing, and on the memories of those who watched them bleed for our entertainment, should not fade away when the last spadeful of dirt is shoveled onto an unmarked grave.

Which is why DiSanto, 52, who a decade ago quit good-paying jobs in finance and marketing to devote all his attention to his avocation, again is asking the public to come forward with enough modest contributions so that Saad Muhammad’s final resting place be commemorated with a $5,000 gravestone where none now stands.

“Years from now, maybe someone will be doing research on Saad Muhammad, go to the cemetery and instead of seeing a bare patch of grass, he’ll see a big, beautiful gravestone,” DiSanto said.

A bare patch of grass in another cemetery is what prompted DiSanto to inaugurate the Philly Boxing History Gravestone Program, the first placement of which, in December 2005, commemorated the too-short life of super featherweight contender Tyrone Everett, who was only 24 when he was shot and killed by a jealous girlfriend on May 26, 1977. Everett is most remembered in Philadelphia and elsewhere as having been on the wrong end of one of the most egregious decisions ever, a 15-round split nod that enabled WBC 130-pound champion Alfredo Escalera of Puerto Rico to retain his title – in a bout staged in Philly, of all places.

“When I did it for Tyrone Everett, it sort of happened by accident,” DiSanto recalled. “I went out to Tyrone’s grave just to pay my respects. I had read about his viewing and how so many of his fans had shown up, the line going around the block. But when I got to the cemetery, I learned he didn’t have a gravestone. My first thought was, `This is something I can do. Tyrone Everett can’t be the only one.’”

DiSanto more or less paid the full price for Everett’s granite marker, but his next such project, a gravestone for welterweight contender “Gypsy” Joe Harris in 2006, saw him reach out to like-minded individuals who chafed at the notion of another great Philadelphia fighter bereft of proper identification. Harris was just 22 when his boxing license was revoked in October 1968 when an examination revealed that he was blind in his right eye. It was not a recent development; Harris was blinded in that eye as a child and had been fighting and winning with the equivalent of a pirate’s patch blocking half his field of vision.

“It was with the Gypsy Joe gravestone that it occurred to me that this might be something that could be ongoing,” DiSanto said.

And so it has been, with similar gravestones placed in 2008 for Garnet “Sugar” Hart and in 2011 for Eddie Cool, with Saad Muhammad up next. But while Saad may be the latest, he likely won’t be the last.

“When I do something like this, I announce it,” DiSanto said. “People can go online and donate $20 or whatever they can to make it happen. The thing is, some people complain that while this is a good thing to do, somebody else should be doing it. I keep hearing how there’s going to be this $300 million fight in May (Floyd Mayweather Jr.-Manny Pacquiao), and why doesn’t somebody involved with that just step up and pay for Saad Muhammad’s gravestone? But that hardly ever happens, so it’s up to us to do it.

“The way I look at it, fans of the fighters we remember and respect need to continue being fans. If I can get 100 of them to contribute 50 bucks, or 200 to contribute 25 bucks, we’re there. It’s simple math.”

But the gravestone program isn’t all that DiSanto does to keep alive the memory of the best fighters in one of America’s boxing hotbeds. Since 2008 he has annually presented the Briscoe Awards, in honor of the late, great middleweight contender “Bad” Bennie Briscoe, to contemporary Philadelphia fighters, and on May 17, 2011, he was present for the dedication of his most ambitious undertaking, a nearly seven-foot statue of former middleweight champion Joey Giardello in South Philly.

“The fighters who are fighting now, they’re history in the making,” DiSanto said. “Sometimes we don’t fully grasp that; time has to pass. The Briscoe Awards is a way to acknowledge what’s going on in the present, but it also is a way to fuse that with the memory of Bennie Briscoe, who deserves to be remembered forever. Those of us who saw him fight will never forget him.”

The Giardello statue, designed and crafted by noted sculptor Carl LeVotch, cost $100,000-plus and was the inspiration for numerous beef-and-beer dinners and other fundraisers over an extended period.

“That statue belongs to the people,” DiSanto said. “The people paid for it. Now, there were a couple of big donors, which made it a lot easier than it otherwise could have been. But there were also a lot of $10 donations that went into making the finished product a reality.

“To me, the Giardello statue is attributed to the artist that did it, and he did a beautiful job. It’s attributed to Joey’s family and to his legacy. But when I drive by Passyunk Avenue and I see it, I can say, `That’s mine, too.’”

So how long does DiSanto see himself throwing body, mind and spirit, into these myriad labors of love?

“At first I thought, `Boy, wouldn’t it be great to do this for a living?’” he said. “But in the 10 years since I’ve had the web site there is no living to be made. It’s a black hole as far as money is concerned. I’m just fortunate to have people who sponsor the Briscoe Awards and donate for the gravestones.

“Look, I know I’m going to have to go back to the kind of work I used to do, eventually. I miss my regular paycheck. But for now, this is what I do, and I believe in what I’m doing.

“When I get into something, I take it to ridiculous extremes and that’s what I’ve done with boxing. The sickness goes pretty far, and I tend to push it. But I’m happier doing this. I could go back to something in finance or marketing, working 12 hours a day, and be miserable. I’m not ready to do that yet.”

TSS readers interested in the Matthew Saad Muhammad gravestone a reality can make a donation by check or money order to “Philly Boxing History Gravestone Fund,” P.O. Box 428, Sewell, New Jersey 08080. Online payments via credit card can also be made by going to the PhillyBoxingHistory.com web site.

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Bernard Fernandez

Avila Perspective, Chap. 289: East LA, Claressa Shields and More

Published

1 day ago

July 25, 2024

David A. Avila

Avila-Perspective-Chap-289-East-L.A.-A-Fight-Town-Claressa-Shields-and-More

Avila Perspective, Chap. 289: East LA, Claressa Shields and More

East Los Angeles has long been a haven for some of the best fighters around if you can keep them out of trouble. For every Oscar De La Hoya or Seniesa Estrada there are thousands derailed by crime, drugs or drinking.

Boxing has always been a favorite sport of East L.A. Every family has an uncle or two who boxes.

On Friday, 360 Promotions’ Omar Trinidad (15-0-1) fights Viktor Slavinskyi (15-2-1) in the main event at Commerce Casino, in Commerce, CA. UFC Fight Pass will stream the fight card.

The City of Commerce used to be part of East L.A. until 1960 when it incorporated. It’s still considered to be part of East Los Angeles, but informally.

Plenty of fighters come out of East L.A. but few make it all the way like De La Hoya and Estrada. Will Trinidad be the one?

The first world champion from East L.A. or “East Los” as some call it, was Solly Garcia Smith back in the late 1800s. Others were Richie Lemos, Art Frias and Joey Olivo. There is also 1984 Olympic gold medalist Paul Gonzalez.

Once again 360 Promotions brings its popular brand of fights to the area. On this fight card includes two female bouts. One features Roxy Verduzco (1-0) the former amateur star fighting Colleen Davis (3-1-1) in a featherweight fight.

All that action takes place on Friday.

Elite Boxing

The next day, also in East L.A., Elite Boxing stages another boxing card at Salesian High School located at 960 S. Soto Street in the Boyle Heights area of East Los Angeles.

Elite Boxing has promoted several successful boxing cards at the Catholic high school grounds. The area is saturated by many of the best eateries in Los Angeles. Don’t take my word for it. Check it out yourself and grab some of that delicious food.

Boxing has long been a favorite sport of anyone who lives in East L.A. It’s a fight town equal to Philadelphia, Brooklyn or Detroit. There’s something different about the area. For more than 100 years some of the best fighters continue to come out of its boxing gyms. Some will be performing on these club shows.

For tickets or information go to www.eliteboxingusa.com

Claressa Shields in Detroit

Speaking of fight towns, pound-for-pound best Claressa Shields who won two Olympic Gold Medals in boxing, moves up another weight division to tackle the WBC heavyweight world champion Vanessa Lepage-Joanisse on Saturday, July 27, at Little Caesars Arena in Detroit, Michigan.

DAZN will stream the heavy-duty fight card.

Shields (14-0) cleaned out the super welterweight, middleweight and super middleweight divisions and now wants to add the big girls to her conquests. She will be facing Canada’s Lepage-Joanisse (7-1) who holds the WBC belt.

The last time Shields gloved up was more than a year ago when she fought Maricela Cornejo. Don’t blame Shields. She loves to fight. She loves to win. The last time Shields lost a fight was in the amateurs and that was three presidential administrations ago.

Shields doesn’t lose.

I wonder if Las Vegas even takes bets on her fights?

The only fight she may have been an underdog was against Savannah Marshall who was the last opponent to defeat her. And that was in 2012 in China. When they met as pros two years ago, Shields avenged her loss with a blistering attack.

Don’t get Shields mad.

Perhaps her toughest foe as a pro was in her pro debut when she clashed with Franchon Crews-Dezurn in Las Vegas. It was four rounds of fists and fury as the two pounded each other on the undercard of Andre Ward and Sergey Kovalev in November 2016.

That was a ferocious debut for both female pugilists.

Assisting Shields on this fight card will be several intriguing male bouts. One guy you should pay special attention is Tito Mercado (15-0, 14 KOs) a super lightweight prospect from Pomona, California.

Many excellent fighters have come out of Pomona including Sugar Shane Mosley, Shane Mosley Jr., Alberto Davila and Richie Sandoval who just passed away this week.

Sandoval was best known for his 15-round war with Philadelphia’s Jeff Chandler for the bantamweight world title in 1984. Read the story by Arne K. Lang on this link: https://tss.ib.tv/boxing/featured-boxing-articles-boxing-news-videos-rankings-and-results/81467-former-world-bantamweight-champion-richie-sandoval-passes-away-at-age-63 .

Fights to Watch

Fri. UFC Fight Pass 7 p.m. Omar Trinidad (15-0-1) vs Viktor Slavinskyi (15-2-1).

Sat. ESPN+ 12:30 p.m. Joe Joyce (16-2) vs Derek Chisora (34-13).

Sat. DAZN 3 p.m. Claressa Shields (14-0) vs Vanessa Lepage-Joanisse (7-1), Michel Rivera (25-1) vs Hugo Roldan (22-2-1); Tito Mercado (15-0) vs Hector Sarmiento (21-2).

Omar Trinidad photo by Lina Baker

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Arne’s Almanac: Jake Paul and Women’s Boxing, a Curmudgeon’s Take

Published

2 days ago

July 24, 2024

Arne K. Lang

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Jake Paul can fight more than a little. The view from here is that he would make it interesting against any fringe contender in the cruiserweight division. However, Jake’s boxing acumen pales when paired against his skill as a flim-flam artist.

Jake brought a 9-1 record into last weekend’s bout with Mike Perry. As noted by boxing writer Paul Magno, Jake’s previous opponents consisted of “a You Tuber, a retired NBA star, five retired MMA stars, a part-time boxer/reality TV star, and two undersized and inactive fall-guy boxers.”

Mike Perry, a 32-year-old Floridian, was undefeated (6-0, 3 KOs) as a bare-knuckle boxer after forging a 14-8 record in UFC bouts. In pre-fight blurbs, Perry was billed as the baddest bare knuckle boxer of all time, but against Jake Paul he proved to have very unrefined skills as a conventional boxer which Team Paul undoubtedly knew all along. Perry lasted into the eighth round in a one-sided fight that could have been stopped a lot sooner.

Jake Paul is both a boxer and a promoter. As a promoter, he handles Amanda Serrano, one of the greatest female boxers in history. That makes him the person most responsible (because the buck stops with him) for the wretched mismatch in last Saturday’s co-feature, the bout between Serrano and Stevie Morgan.

Morgan, who took up boxing two years ago at age 33, brought a 14-1 record. Nicknamed the Sledgehammer, she had won 13 of her 14 wins by knockout, eight in the opening round. However, although she resides in Florida, all but one of those 13 knockouts happened in Colombia.

“We found that in Colombia there were just more opportunities for women’s boxing than in the United States,” she told a prominent boxing writer whose name we won’t mention.

The truth is that, for some folks, Colombia is the boxing equivalent of a feeder lot for livestock, a place where a boxer can go to fatten their record. The opportunities there were no greater than in Hot Springs, Arkansas, in 1995. It was there that Peter McNeeley prepped for his match with Mike Tyson with a 6-second knockout of professional punching bag Frankie Hines. (Six seconds? So it would be written although no one seems to have been there to witness it.)

Serrano vs Morgan was understood to be a stay-busy fight for Amanda whose rematch with Katie Taylor was postponed until November. Stevie Morgan, to her credit, answered the bell for the second round whereas others in her situation would have remained on the stool and invented an injury to rationalize it. Thirty-eight seconds later it was all over and Ms. Morgan was free to go home and use her sledgehammer to do some light dusting.

The Paul-Perry and Serrano-Morgan fights played out in a sold-out arena in Tampa before an estimated 17,000. Those without a DAZN subscription paid $64.95 for the livestream. Paul’s next promotion, where he will touch gloves with 58-year-old Mike Tyson (unless Iron Mike pulls a Joe Biden and pulls out; a capital idea) with Serrano-Taylor II the semi-main, will almost certainly rake in more money than any other boxing promotion this year.

Asked his opinion of so-called crossover boxing by a reporter for a college newspaper, the venerable boxing promoter Bob Arum said, “It’s not my bag but folks who don’t like it shouldn’t get too worked up over it because no one is stealing from anybody.” True enough, but for some of us, the phenomenon is distressing.

—

The next big women’s fight happens Saturday in Detroit where Claressa Shields seeks a world title in a third weight class against WBC heavyweight belt-holder Vanessa Lepage-Joanisse.

A two-time Olympic gold medalist, undefeated in 14 fights as a pro, Shields is very good, arguably the best female boxer of her generation which makes her, arguably, the best female boxer of all time. But turning away Lepage-Joanisse (7-1, 2 KOs) won’t elevate her stature in our eyes.

Purportedly 17-4 as an amateur, the Canadian won her title in her second crack at it. Back in August of 2017, she challenged Cancun’s Alejandra Jimenez in Cancun and was stopped in the third round. Entering the bout, Lepage-Joanisse was 3-0 as a pro and had never fought a match slated for more than four rounds.

Vanessa Lepage-Joanisse

True, on the women’s side, the heavyweight bracket is a very small pod. A sanctioning body has to make concessions to harness a sanctioning fee. Nonetheless, how absurd that a woman who had answered the bell for only 11 rounds would be deemed qualified to compete for a world title. (FYI: Alejandra Jimenez was purportedly born a man. She left the sport with a 12-0-1 record after her win over Franchon Crews Dazurn was changed to a no-contest when she tested positive for the banned steroid stanozolol.)

Following her defeat to Jimenez, Vanessa Lepage-Joanisse, now 29 years old, was out of action for six-and-a-half years. When she returned, she was still a heavyweight, but a much slender heavyweight. She carried 231 pounds for Jimenez. In her most recent bout where she captured the vacant WBC title with a split decision over Argentina’s Abril Argentina Vidal, she clocked in at 173 ¼. (On the distaff side, there’s no uniformity among the various sanctioning bodies as to what constitutes a heavyweight.)

Claressa Shields doesn’t need Vanessa Lepage-Joanisse to reinforce her credentials as a future Hall of Famer. She made the cut a long time ago.

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Former World Bantamweight Champion Richie Sandoval Passes Away at Age 63

Published

4 days ago

July 22, 2024

Arne K. Lang

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Richie Sandoval, who won the WBA and lineal bantamweight title in one of the biggest upsets of the 1980s and then, not quite two years later, suffered near-fatal injuries in a title defense, has passed away at the age of 63.

News circulated fast in the Las Vegas boxing community on Monday, July 22, the grapevine actuated by a tweet from Hall of Fame matchmaker Bruce Trampler: “Boxing and the Top Rank family lost one of our own last night in the passing of former WBA bantamweight champion Richie Sandoval. It hurts personally and professionally to know that Richie is gone at age 63. RIP campeon.”

Details are vague but the cause of death was apparently a sudden heart attack that Sandoval experienced while visiting the Southern California home of his son of the same name.

Richie Sandoval put the LA County community of Pomona, California, on the boxing map before Shane Mosley came along and gave the town a more frequently-cited mention in the sports section of the papers. He came from a fighting family. An older brother, Albert “Superfly” Sandoval, became a big draw at LA’s fabled Olympic Auditorium while building a 35-2-1 record that included a failed bid to capture Lupe Pintor’s world bantamweight title.

Richie was a member of the 1980 U.S. Olympic boxing team that was stranded when U.S. President Jimmy Carter (and many other world leaders) boycotted the event as a protest against Russia’s invasion of Afghanistan.

As a pro, Sandoval’s signature win was a 15^th-round stoppage of Jeff Chandler. They fought on April 7, 1984 in Atlantic City. Chandler was making the tenth defense of his world bantamweight title.

Despite being a heavy underdog, Sandoval dominated the fight, winning almost every round until the referee stepped in and waived it off. Chandler, who was 33-1-2 heading in and had avenged his lone defeat, never fought again.

Sandoval made two successful defenses before risking his title against Gaby Canizales on the undercard of Hagler-Mugabi in the outdoor stadium at Caesars Palace. In round seven, Sandoval, who had a hellish time making the weight, was knocked down three times and suffered a seizure as he collapsed from the third knockdown. Stretchered out of the ring, he was rushed to the hospital where doctors reduced the swelling in his brain and beat the odds to save his life. This would be Richie’s lone defeat. He finished his pro career with a record of 29-1 (17 KOs).

Bob Arum cushioned some of the pain by giving Richie a $25,000 bonus and offering him a lifetime job at Top Rank which Richie accepted. And let the record show that Arum was good to his word.

A more elaborate portrait of Richie Sandoval was published in these pages in 2017. You can check it out HERE. May he rest in peace.

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