`NO MAS’ FIGHT SHOWED EVERY FIGHTER HARBORS A FEAR OF SOMETHING

Published

9 years ago

November 24, 2015

So many fighters say the same thing. “I’m ready to die if necessary,” they publicly pronounce, and some might even believe it. But while bravery is as much of a staple of winning boxing as talent, answering the bell against even the most fearsome puncher is not the same as a soldier charging a machine-gun nest or engaging in hand-to-hand combat with an enemy who is actually trying to end his life, not just knock him out. A fighter’s fortitude and strength of character certainly are tested in the ring, but all the convenient comparisons to war go way too far. Boxing is a sport, and not one for the faint of heart, but it is never a matter of kill-or-be-killed. At least it shouldn’t be.

The truth is every fighter – probably every human being, for that matter – is afraid of something. The seemingly meekest individual is capable of extraordinary heroism, given the proper circumstances, and the most blustery bully can be exposed as a paper tiger if confronted by someone made of sterner stuff. The only thing that holds true in either case is the observers who stand off to the side critiquing the actions of the actually involved as being courageous or cowardly. And once the more odious label is applied, it can be extremely difficult to scrape off.

There might never have been a boxing match to fuel as much armchair psychoanalysis as the second of the three bouts that pitted Panamanian tough guy Roberto Duran against flashy American Sugar Ray Leonard. Nov. 25 marks the 35th anniversary of that curious bout in the Louisiana Superdome, in which Duran, who had been widely perceived as the fight game’s most implacable and relentless destroyer, abruptly threw up his hands late in the eighth round, muttered something to Mexican referee Octavio Meyran and began to walk away. It was a blatant act of surrender by the one man from whom no one would ever have expected it.

The bout soon came to be known, rather notoriously, as the “No Mas Fight,” a reference to the words in Spanish Duran supposedly had said to Meyran, which meant “No more,” although Duran to this day steadfastly insists he never said any such thing.

A disgraced Duran went home to find his palatial home vandalized, his most ardent fans holding him in contempt and the Panamanian government, which had assured him he would get to keep all $8 million of his purse because of his status as a “national hero,” now disposed to nullify that exemption and take $2 million off the top in taxes.

Fortunately, for the “Hands of Stone,” his legacy has been largely restored. He went on to fight 21 more years after “No Mas,” winning another two world championships along the way, and, who knows, he might still be fighting today, at 64, had he not been forced to retire after being in a bad car accident in October 2001, when he was 50. Several historians today rate him higher on various all-time pound-for-pound lists than Leonard, who lost their first fight (which was terrific) on a close but unanimous decision before Sugar Ray won parts two and three of the trilogy.

“In New Orleans, Duran became the story,” Leonard said of the “No Mas” fight that, even in victory, didn’t turn out the way he had anticipated. “All everyone talked about was him quitting. He got more attention for quitting than I did for winning the fight.”

There have been, of course, other fights – major ones, too – in which one of the principals quit, if only in a manner of speaking, rather than allowing himself to be knocked out or his humiliation to be extended to the final bell. But it is “No Mas” that has become a case study of the swirling emotions that can engulf even a great fighter when he finds himself in a place where bravado cannot rescue him from a dark place he never expected to be thrust into.

At the press conference to officially announce Duran-Leonard II, Duran dismissed Leonard and brashly predicted he would beat him much worse than he had in their first bout, which took place in Montreal five months earlier.

“I don’t like to see clowns in the ring,” he sneered with undisguised contempt. “I like to see boxers. To fight and beat me, you have to come into the ring and fight me, hard. (Leonard) goes into the ring and tries to imitate (Muhammad) Ali, but an imitator is a loser.”

Leonard imitated Ali all right, and pretty damn effectively, the most obvious example coming in the seventh round, when Sugar Ray wound up his right hand in windmill fashion, as if he was going to throw a bolo punch, before delivering a stinging left jab to Duran’s nose, causing the WBC welterweight champion’s eyes to water.

William Nack, writing in Sports Illustrated, described that moment as “the most painful blow of Duran’s life. It drew hooting laughter from the crowd and made Duran a public spectacle – a laughingstock.”

Perhaps ironically, Duran – who was not in the same tip-top shape he had been for the first fight with Leonard, having had to take off anywhere from 40 to 70 pounds in a relatively short time, depending on which version of the tale you choose to believe – believed that by simply walking away he was putting himself in a better light than if he had continued to be the target of Sugar Ray’s largely successful attempts to embarrass him.

“In Duran’s mind I think he expected that the crowd would condemn Leonard for having made a mockery of the fight, rather than him for quitting,” said veteran trainer Emanuel Steward, who was in the Superdome with his fighter, WBA welterweight titlist Thomas Hearns, to agitate for a unification showdown with the winner.

It was an egregious miscalculation.

“He quit out of humiliation and frustration,” Leonard told the late George Kimball, author of “Four Kings: Leonard, Hagler, Hearns, Duran and the Last Great Era of Boxing.” “It’s one of those things that happens to bullies. Duran threw his hands up without realizing the repercussions it would have on his legacy.”

Not surprisingly, Duran’s people quickly put up a smokescreen in which they blamed their guy’s disappointing performance, and eventual surrender, on stomach cramps and an injured right shoulder more than on Leonard’s superior foot and hand speed.

“If Duran had stomach cramps,” wrote Al Goldstein, the boxing writer for the Baltimore Sun, “it must have been his guts shrinking.”

Ed Schuyler Jr. of The Associated Press, cracking wise to his colleagues in the press room, said, “They’re checking Duran’s birth certificate back in Panama. They think now he may be a Guatemalan.”

To appreciate and understand the furor attendant to “No Mas,” it is necessary to go back to their first encounter, on June 20, 1980, at Montreal’s Stade Olympique, in the same city in which Leonard was the breakout, gold-medal-winning star of the Olympic boxing competition.

Perhaps Duran’s resentment of Leonard went from slow boil to volcanic eruption when it became apparent that he and his team had been snookered at the negotiating table by the Sugar man and his savvy attorney/adviser, Mike Trainer. Trainer had arranged for Leonard to receive the entire site fee and 80 percent of the closed-circuit and foreign TV sales, which wound up being nearly $10 million, by far eclipsing the previous high payday for a fighter, which was the $6.5 million Ali got for his third bout with Ken Norton. Duran, meanwhile, had signed quickly for $1.65 million, which was his biggest purse to that point but so much less than he might have received had he sought a more equitable division of the financial pie.

In any case, this was a fight in which it was virtually impossible to sit on the fence.

“The casting is perfect,” said Angelo Dundee, Leonard’s chief second. “You have Sugar Ray, the kid next door, the guy in the white hat, against Duran, the killer, the guy with the gunfighter’s eyes. It’s the kind of fight where you can’t be neutral.”

Duran played his part to the hilt, except that he wasn’t playing. He insulted Leonard from the get-go, and his constant disparagement of the Olympic poster boy had Leonard convinced that his best course of action would be to beat the mouthy Panamanian at his own game.

“He had that bully’s mentality,” Leonard said after he was handed his first loss as a pro. “He always tries to intimidate opponents. He challenged my manhood, and I wasn’t mature enough to know how to respond. All I could think about was retaliating.”

Despite facing Duran on the Panamanian’s terms, Leonard met fire with fire. He barely lost on points, coming up short by margins of 146-144, 148-147 and 145-144 on the judges’ scorecards. And it wasn’t long before he concluded that he would fare much better with a revised fight plan, particularly in light of the nonstop celebrating engaged in by Duran, who now saw himself as invincible, or at least something close to it. So Leonard and Trainer pressed for a quick rematch, offering Duran that $8 million, but only if he agreed to the November date.

“I knew Duran was overweight and partying big time,” Leonard said. “I’ve done some partying myself, but I knew when to cut it out. I said to Mike, `Let’s do it now, as soon as possible.’ In retrospect, it was pretty clever of me.’”

So, how does “No Mas” look now, 35 years down the road? Should Duran have insisted on more time to get his body back in peak condition, and if so, would the outcome have been different? Might it have been preferable to chase after Leonard, slowly being beaten down and then stopped?

Duran, in an interview with Nack three years after “No Mas,” continued to give Leonard something less than full credit for winning while absolving himself of at least some of the blame.

“Leonard knew I had nothing,” Duran said. “He was running and clowning because he knew I couldn’t do anything. I wasn’t going to let myself get knocked out and look ridiculous in the ring.”

It is a mindset that is hardly unique to Duran. A two-time former heavyweight champion who had won a silver medal at the 1992 Barcelona Olympics as a 165-pounder, Chris Byrd made a career of flummoxing larger heavyweights who would have preferred being pounded into submission by someone more like them than to be shown up by the flitting Byrd.

“It’s called `getting clowned,’” Byrd said before his Dec. 14, 2002, bout with Evander Holyfield for the vacant IBF heavyweight title, which Byrd won by unanimous decision. “Nobody wants to get clowned. They’d rather get knocked out than to get frustrated and embarrassed at the same time. But I’ve been doing that to people for a long time … since I was a kid. I pride myself on that. I kind of make guys look foolish, particularly heavyweights since they’re a lot slower.”

Which brings us back to the subject of fear in the ring, in all its various forms. There is the most obvious application, which is the fear of being beaten bloody, the kind that virtually paralyzed some of the opponents faced by such devastating punchers as Sonny Liston, George Foreman and Mike Tyson. And there is the more subtle form of apprehension and dismay, the kind perhaps displayed by Tyson – a fighter who, by the way, has always looked upon Duran as a role model – when he got himself disqualified in his rematch with Holyfield, by twice chomping on Evander’s ears, a form of submission as much as Duran turning his back on Leonard, at least in the opinion of noted boxing commentator and former Tyson trainer Teddy Atlas.

One of the more gentlemanly fighters ever to have achieved significant success, the late two-time former heavyweight champion Floyd Patterson, was as far removed from Duran, both stylistically and personally, as anyone could be. But Patterson gave one of the most honest and insightful interviews ever to author Gay Talese in the March 1964 edition of Esquire magazine, in which Patterson spoke of the near-terror that gripped him before both of his clashes with Liston, who won each by first-round knockout.

“Oh, I would give up anything to just be able to work with Liston, to box with him somewhere where nobody would see us, and to see if I could get past three minutes with him,” Patterson told Talese. “I know I can do better. I’m not talking about a rematch. Who would pay a nickel for another Patterson-Liston fight? I know I wouldn’t. But all I want to do is get past the first round.

“It’s not a bad feeling when you’re knocked out,” Patterson said a bit further down in the article. “It’s a good feeling, actually. It’s not painful, just a sharp grogginess; you’re on a pleasant cloud. But then this good feeling leaves you. And what follows is a hurt, a confused hurt – not a physical hurt. It’s a hurt combined with anger; it’s a what-will-people-think hurt. All you want then is a hatch door in the middle of the ring, a hatch door that will open and let you fall through and land in your dressing room.”

For his first fight with Liston, Patterson – who had a sinking sensation he would lose in pretty much the manner that he did – brought a false beard, false mustache, hat and glasses to his dressing room so that he could slip away as quietly and anonymously as possible.

“You must wonder what makes a man do things like this,” Patterson told Talese. “Well, I wonder, too. And the answer is, I don’t know. But I think within me, within every human being, there is a certain weakness. It is a weakness that expresses itself more when you’re alone. And I have figured out that part of the reason I do the things I do is because … I am a coward. You see it when a fighter loses.”

So, Patterson was asked, could the menacing Liston be a coward as well?

“That remains to be seen,” he replied. “We’ll find out what he’s like after somebody beats him, how he takes it. It’s easy to do anything in victory. It’s in defeat that a man reveals himself.”

On Feb. 25, 1964, the big, ugly bear, Liston, got clowned big-time in his first meeting with Cassius Clay and quit on his stool after the sixth round, citing an injured shoulder which in retrospect appears as dubious an excuse as was to Roberto Duran’s stomach cramps.

The fights go on, and sometimes the hardest struggle is the one that a fighter wages within himself to tame the beast that gnaws at his insides when things aren’t going his way and the prospect for a turnaround are dimming fast. It calls to mind something written by Ernest Hemingway, not necessarily about boxing, although it very well might have been.

“The world breaks everyone, and afterward, some are strong at the broken places,” surmised Hemingway, who also noted that, “Man is not made for defeat. A man can be destroyed but not defeated.” It is a point of view that would seem to be the basis of extensive debate.

“Papa” did not weigh in on the conundrum of a fighter being clowned. You’d have to think it would have been the basis for a terrific novel, though.

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Bernard Fernandez

Avila Perspective, Chap. 309: 360 Promotions Opens with Trinidad, Mizuki and More

Published

1 day ago

January 16, 2025

David A. Avila

Avila Perspective, Chap. 309: 360 Promotions Opens with Trinidad, Mizuki and More

Best wishes to the survivors of the Los Angeles wildfires that took place last week and are still ongoing in small locales.

Most of the heavy damage took place in the western part of L.A. near the ocean due to Santa Ana winds. Another very hot spot was in Altadena just north of the Rose Bowl. It was a horrific tragedy.

Hopefully the worst is over.

Pro boxing returns with 360 Boxing Promotions spotlighting East L.A.’s Omar Trinidad (17-0-1, 13 KOs) defending a regional featherweight title against Mike Plania (31-4, 18 KOs) on Friday, Jan. 17, at the Commerce Casino in Commerce, Calif.

“I’m the king of L.A. boxing and I’ll be ready to put on a show headlining again in the main event. This is my year, I’m ready to challenge and defeat any of the featherweight world champions,” said Trinidad.

UFC Fight Pass will stream the Hollywood Night fight card that includes a female world championship fight and other intriguing match-ups.

Tom Loeffler heads 360 Promotions and once again comes full force with a hot prospect in Trinidad. If you’re not familiar with Loeffler’s history of success, he introduced America to Oleksandr Usyk, Gennady “GGG” Golovkin and the brothers Wladimir and Vitaly Kltischko.

“We’ve got a wealth of international talent and local favorites to kick off our 2025 in grand style,” said Loeffler.

He knows talent.

Trinidad hails from the Boyle Heights area of East L.A. near the Los Angeles riverbed. Several fighters from the past came from that exact area including the first Golden Boy, Art Aragon.

Aragon was a huge gate attraction during the late 1940s until 1960. He was known as a lady’s man and dated several Hollywood starlets in his time. Though he never won a world title he did fight world champions Carmen Basilio, Jimmy Carter and Lauro Salas. He was more or less the king of the Olympic Auditorium and Los Angeles boxing during his career.

Other famous boxers from the Boyle Heights area were notorious gangster Mickey Cohen and former world champion Joey Olivo.

Can Trinidad reach world title status?

Facing Trinidad will be Filipino fighter Plania who’s knocked off a couple of prospects during his career including Joshua “Don’t Blink” Greer and Giovanni Gutierrez. The fighter from General Santos in the Philippines can crack and hold his own in the boxing ring.

It’s a very strong fight card and includes WBO world titlist Mizuki Hiruta of Japan who defends the super flyweight title against Mexican veteran Maribel Ramirez. It’s a tough matchup for Hiruta who makes her American debut. You can’t miss her with that pink hair and she has all the physical tools to make a splash in this country.

Mizukii Hiruta

Two other female bouts are also planned, including light flyweight banger L.A.’s Gloria Munguilla (6-1) against Coachella’s Brook Sibrian (5-1) in a match set for six rounds. Both are talented fighters. Another female fight includes super featherweights Iyana “Right Hook Roxy” Verduzco (2-0) versus Lindsey Ellis (2-1) in another six-rounder. Ellis can crack with all her wins coming via knockout. Verduzco is a multi-national titlist as an amateur.

Others scheduled to perform are Ali Akhmedov, Joshua Anton, Adan Palma and more.

Doors open at 4:30 p.m.

Boxing and the Media

The sport of professional boxing is currently in flux. It’s always in flux but no matter what people may say or write, boxing will survive.

Whether you like Jake Paul or not, he proved boxing has worldwide appeal with monstrous success in his last show. He has media companies looking at the numbers and imagining what they can do with the sport.

Sure, UFC is negotiating a massive billion dollar deal with media companies, as is WWE, both are very similar in that they provide combat entertainment. You don’t need to know the champions because they really don’t matter. Its about the attractions.

Boxing is different. The good champions last and build a following that endures even beyond their careers a la Mike Tyson.

MMA can’t provide that longevity, but it does provide entertainment.

Currently, there is talk of establishing a boxing league again. It’s been done over and over but we shall see if it sticks this time.

Pro boxing is the true warrior’s path and that means a solo adventure. It’s a one-on-one sport and that appeals to people everywhere. It’s the oldest sport that can be traced to prehistoric times. You don’t need classes in Brazilian Jiujitsu, judo, kick boxing or wrestling. Just show up in a boxing gym and they can put you to work.

It’s a poor person’s path that can lead to better things and most importantly discipline.

Photos credit: Lina Baker

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Boxing Trainer Bob Santos Paid his Dues and is Reaping the Rewards

Published

2 days ago

January 15, 2025

Arne K. Lang

Boxing-Trainer-Bob-Santos-Paid-his-Dues-and-is-Reaping the Rewards

Bob Santos, the 2022 Sports Illustrated and The Ring magazine Trainer of the Year, is a busy fellow. On Feb. 1, fighters under his tutelage will open and close the show on the four-bout main portion of the Prime Video PPV event at the T-Mobile Arena in Las Vegas. Jeison Rosario continues his comeback in the lid-lifter, opposing Jesus Ramos. In the finale, former Cuban amateur standout David Morrell will attempt to saddle David Benavidez with his first defeat. Both combatants in the main event have been chasing 168-pound kingpin Canelo Alvarez, but this bout will be contested for a piece of the light heavyweight title.

When the show is over, Santos will barely have time to exhale. Before the month is over, one will likely find him working the corner of Dainier Pero, Brian Mendoza, Elijah Garcia, and perhaps others.

Benavidez (29-0, 24 KOs) turned 28 last month. He is in the prime of his career. However, a lot of folk rate Morrell (11-0, 9 KOs) a very live dog. At last look, Benavidez was a consensus 7/4 (minus-175) favorite, a price that betokens a very competitive fight.

Bob Santos, needless to say, is confident that his guy can upset the odds. “I have worked with both,” he says. “It’s a tough fight for David Morrell, but he has more ways to victory because he’s less one-dimensional. He can go forward or fight going back and his foot speed is superior.”

Benavidez’s big edge, in the eyes of many, is his greater experience. He captured the vacant WBC 168-pound title at age 20, becoming the youngest super middleweight champion in history. As a pro, Benavidez has answered the bell for 148 rounds compared with only 54 for Morrell, but Bob Santos thinks this angle is largely irrelevant.

“Sure, I’d rather have pro experience than amateur experience,” he says, “but if you look at Benavidez’s record, he fought a lot of soft opponents when he was climbing the ladder.”

True. Benavidez, who turned pro at age 16, had his first seven fights in Mexico against a motley assortment of opponents. His first bout on U.S. soil occurred in his native Pheonix against an opponent with a 1-6-2 record.

While it’s certainly true that Morrell, 26, has yet to fight an opponent the caliber of Caleb Plant, he took up boxing at roughly the same tender age as Benavidez and earned his spurs in the vaunted Cuban amateur system, eventually defeating elite amateurs in international tournaments.

“If you look at his [pro] record, you will notice that [Morrell] has hardly lost a round,” says Santos of the fighter who captured an interim title in only his third professional bout with a 12-round decision over Guyanese veteran Lennox Allen.

Bob Santos is something of a late bloomer. He was around boxing for a long time, assisting such notables as Joe Goossen, Emanuel Steward, and Ronnie Shields before becoming recognized as one of the sport’s top trainers.

A native of San Jose, he grew up in a Hispanic neighborhood but not in a household where Spanish was spoken. “I know enough now to get by,” he says modestly. He attended James Lick High School whose most famous alumnus is Heisman winning and Super Bowl winning quarterback Jim Plunkett. “We worked in the same apricot orchard when we were kids,” says Santos. “Not at the same time, but in the same field.”

After graduation, he followed his father’s footsteps into construction work, but boxing was always beckoning. A cousin, the late Luis Molina, represented the U.S. as a lightweight in the 1956 Melbourne Summer Olympics, and was good enough as a pro to appear in a main event at Madison Square Garden where he lost a narrow decision to the notorious Puerto Rican hothead Frankie Narvaez, a future world title challenger.

Santos’ cousin was a big draw in San Jose in an era when the San Jose / Sacramento territory was the bailiwick of Don Chargin. “Don was a beautiful man and his wife Lorraine was even nicer,” says Santos of the husband/wife promotion team who are enshrined in the International Boxing Hall of Fame. Don Chargin was inducted in 2001 and Lorraine posthumously in 2018.

Chargin promoted Fresno-based featherweight Hector Lizarraga who captured the IBF title in 1997. Lizarraga turned his career around after a 5-7-3 start when he hooked up with San Jose gym operator Miguel Jara. It was one of the most successful reclamation projects in boxing history and Bob Santos played a part in it.

Bob hopes to accomplish the same turnaround with Jeison Rosario whose career was on the skids when Santos got involved. In his most recent start, Rosario held heavily favored Jarrett Hurd to a draw in a battle between former IBF 154-pound champions on a ProBox card in Florida.

“I consider that one of my greatest achievements,” says Santos, noting that Rosario was stopped four times and effectively out of action for two years before resuming his career and is now on the cusp of earning another title shot.

The boxer with whom Santos is most closely identified is former four-division world title-holder Robert “The Ghost” Guerrero. The slick southpaw, the pride of Gilroy, California, the self-proclaimed “Garlic Capital of the World,” retired following a bad loss to Omar Figueroa Jr, but had second thoughts and is currently riding a six-fight winning streak. “I’ve known him since he was 15 years old,” notes Santos.

Years from now, Santos may be more closely identified with the Pero brothers, Dainier and Lenier, who aspire to be the Cuban-American version of the Klitschko brothers.

Santos describes Dainier, one of the youngest members of Cuba’s Olympic Team in Tokyo, as a bigger version of Oleksandr Usyk. That may be stretching it, but Dainier (10-0, 8 KOs as a pro), certainly hits harder.

Dainier Pero

This reporter was a fly on the wall as Santos put Dainier Pero through his paces on Tuesday (Jan. 14) at Bones Adams gym in Las Vegas. Santos held tight to a punch shield, in the boxing vernacular a donut, as the Cuban practiced his punches. On several occasions the trainer was knocked off-balance and the expression on his face as his body absorbed some of the after-shocks, plainly said, “My goodness, what the hell am I doing here? There has to be an easier way to make a living.” It was an assignment that Santos would have undoubtedly preferred handing off to his young assistant, his son Joe Santos, but Joe was preoccupied coordinating David Morrell’s camp.

Dainer’s brother Lenier is also an ex-Olympian, and like Dainier was a super heavyweight by trade as an amateur. With an 11-0 (8 KOs) record, Lenier Pero’s pro career was on a parallel path until stalled by a managerial dispute. Lenier last fought in March of last year and Santos says he will soon join his brother in Las Vegas.

There’s little to choose between the Pero brothers, but Dainier is considered to have the bigger upside because at age 25 he is the younger sibling by seven years.

Bob Santos was in the running again this year for The Ring magazine’s Trainer of the Year, one of six nominees for the honor that was bestowed upon his good friend Robert Garcia. Considering the way that Santos’ career is going, it’s a safe bet that he will be showered with many more accolades in the years to come.

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Bygone Days: The Largest Crowd Ever at Madison Square Garden Sees Zivic TKO Armstrong

Published

1 week ago

January 10, 2025

Arne K. Lang

Bygone Days: The Largest Crowd Ever at Madison Square Garden Sees Zivic TKO Armstrong

There’s not much happening on the boxing front this month. That’s consistent with the historical pattern.

Fight promoters of yesteryear tended to pull back after the Christmas and New Year holidays on the assumption that fight fans had less discretionary income at their disposal. Weather was a contributing factor. In olden days, more boxing cards were staged outdoors and the most attractive match-ups tended to be summertime events.

There were exceptions, of course. On Jan. 17, 1941, an SRO crowd of 23,180 filled Madison Square Garden to the rafters to witness the welterweight title fight between Fritzie Zivic and Henry Armstrong. (This was the third Madison Square Garden, situated at 50^th Street and Eighth Avenue, roughly 17 blocks north of the current Garden which sits atop Pennsylvania Station. The first two arenas to take this name were situated farther south adjacent to Madison Square Park).

This was a rematch. They had fought here in October of the previous year. In a shocker, Zivic won a 15-round decision. The fight was close on the scorecards. Referee Arthur Donovan and one of the judges had it even after 14 rounds, but Zivic had won his rounds more decisively and he punctuated his well-earned triumph by knocking Armstrong face-first to the canvas as the final bell sounded.

This was a huge upset.

Armstrong had a rocky beginning to his pro career, but he came on like gangbusters after trainer/manager Eddie Mead acquired his contract with backing from Broadway and Hollywood star Al Jolson. Heading into his first match with Zivic – the nineteenth defense of the title he won from Barney Ross – Hammerin’ Henry had suffered only one defeat in his previous 60 fights, that coming in his second meeting with Lou Ambers, a controversial decision.

Shirley Povich, the nationally-known sports columnist for the Washington Post, conducted an informal survey of boxing insiders and found only person who gave Zivic a chance. The dissident was Chris Dundee (then far more well-known than his younger brother Angelo). “Zivic knows all the tricks,” said Dundee. “He’ll butt Armstrong with his head, gouge him with his thumbs and hit him just as low as Armstrong [who had five points deducted for low blows in his bout with Ambers].”

Indeed, Pittsburgh’s Ferdinand “Fritzie” Zivic, the youngest and best of five fighting sons of a Croatian immigrant steelworker (Fritzie’s two oldest brothers represented the U.S. at the 1920 Antwerp Olympics) would attract a cult following because of his facility for bending the rules. It would be said that no one was more adept at using his thumbs to blind an opponent or using the laces of his gloves as an anti-coagulant, undoing the work of a fighter’s cut man.

Although it was generally understood that at age 28 his best days were behind him, Henry Armstrong was chalked the favorite in the rematch (albeit a very short favorite) a tribute to his body of work. Although he had mastered Armstrong in their first encounter, most boxing insiders considered Fritzie little more than a high-class journeyman and he hadn’t looked sharp in his most recent fight, a 10-round non-title affair with lightweight champion Lew Jenkins who had the best of it in the eyes of most observers although the match was declared a draw.

The Jan. 17 rematch was a one-sided affair. Veteran New York Times scribe James P. Dawson gave Armstrong only two rounds before referee Donovan pulled the plug at the 52-second mark of the twelfth round. Armstrong, boxing’s great perpetual motion machine, a world title-holder in three weight classes, repaired to his dressing room bleeding from his nose and his mouth and with both eyes swollen nearly shut. But his effort could not have been more courageous.

At the conclusion of the 10^th frame, Donovan went to Armstrong’s corner and said something to the effect, “you will have to show me something, Henry, or I will have to stop it.” What followed was Armstrong’s best round.

“[Armstrong] pulled the crowd to its feet in as glorious a rally as this observer has seen in twenty-five years of attendance at these ring battles,” wrote Dawson. But Armstrong, who had been stopped only once previously, that coming in his pro debut, had punched himself out and had nothing left.

Armstrong retired after this fight, siting his worsening eyesight, but he returned in the summer of the following year, soldiering on for 46 more fights, winning 37 to finish 149-21-10. During this run, he was reacquainted with Fritzie Zivic. Their third encounter was fought in San Francisco before a near-capacity crowd of 8,000 at the Civic Auditorium and Armstrong got his revenge, setting the pace and working the body effectively to win a 10-round decision. By then the welterweight title had passed into the hands of Freddie Cochran.

Hammerin’ Henry (aka Homicide Hank) Armstrong was named to the International Boxing Hall of Fame with the inaugural class of 1990. Fritzie Zivic followed him into the Hall three years later.

Active from 1931 to 1949, Zivic lost 65 of his 231 fights – the most of anyone in the Hall of Fame, a dubious distinction – but there was yet little controversy when he was named to the Canastota shrine because one would be hard-pressed to find anyone who had fought a tougher schedule. Aside from Armstrong and Jenkins, he had four fights with Jake LaMotta, four with Kid Azteca, three with Charley Burley, two with Sugar Ray Robinson, two with Beau Jack, and singles with the likes of Billy Conn, Lou Ambers, and Bob Montgomery. Of the aforementioned, only Azteca, in their final meeting in Mexico City, and Sugar Ray, in their second encounter, were able to win inside the distance.

By the way, it has been written that no event of any kind at any of the four Madison Square Gardens ever drew a larger crowd than the crowd that turned out on Jan. 17, 1941, to see the rematch between Fritzie Zivic and Henry Armstrong. Needless to say, prizefighting was big in those days.

A recognized authority on the history of prizefighting and the history of American sports gambling, TSS editor-in-chief Arne K. Lang is the author of five books including “Prizefighting: An American History,” released by McFarland in 2008 and re-released in a paperback edition in 2020.

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