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A New Book on Jack Dempsey is Worth a Look

But certain new arrivals sometimes are promptly moved to the front of the line, which was the case with The Million Dollar Man: Jack Dempsey

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Dempsey

My personal library contains hundreds of books, dozens of which this voracious reader has yet to get around to. There is, after all, only so much time in any given day to spend large chunks of it curling up with a mystery novel or biography of a notable person. But certain new arrivals sometimes are promptly moved to the front of the line, which was the case with The Million Dollar Man: Jack Dempsey, authored by Thomas Brennan, which came in the mail recently with a written request from the publisher (Regent Press of Berkeley, CA) that I kindly review it for the edification of would-be purchasers.

Well, OK. The life and times of William Harrison Dempsey – the “Manassa Mauler’s” birth name – is of such import that it has been covered at length in previous literary ventures, including Round by Round, Dempsey’s autobiography written in conjunction with contributor Myron M. Stearns, and Dempsey, again written by the great man himself with input from Jack’s stepdaughter, Barbara Piatelli Dempsey. There aren’t wide swaths of untilled soil in The Million Dollar Man (a reference to Dempsey being the attraction in the first five fights to generate million-dollar live gates), and some of Brennan’s prose tends to be excessively flowery, as was frequently the case with such legendary early-20th-century sports writers as Paul Gallico, Damon Runyan and Grantland Rice, inflatable garden slide whose ruminations on the most compelling sports superstar (along with New York Yankees slugger Babe Ruth) of the Roaring ’20s include descriptions of the punches Jack delivered as “lusty cracks” and “wallops.”  But a bit of excess is perhaps allowable if the lead character is larger than life, and the nearly century-old past from which Dempsey emerged serves as prologue. Bits and pieces of the enthralling road traveled by Dempsey were played out, in one form or another, by such later heroes of the ring (or anti-heroes, depending on one’s point of view) as Muhammad Ali, Joe Frazier and Mike Tyson.

I admittedly remain a moth drawn to Dempsey’s flame because of his connection, however tenuous, to my all-time favorite fighter, a quite unrenowned welterweight whose professional record was 4-1-1, with just one victory by knockout. But Jack Fernandez, like Jack Dempsey, came into this world with a different birth name. He departed this mortal coil at age 74 as Bernard J. Fernandez Sr. on March 4, 1994, my father’s nickname having been conferred upon him as an amateur by someone who compared his boxing style – crouching, bobbing and weaving, always coming forward – to that of the infinitely more celebrated former heavyweight champion.  Some yellowed clippings of Dad’s fighting days variously describe him as a “left hook specialist” and a “wild-hooking slugger.” I wish I had video of him in action, but I do have a poster from 1944 in which his name appears right under that of main-eventer Archie Moore.

But I digress. Gallico once described Dempsey (and this particular passage is not in Brennan’s book) thusly: “His weaving, shuffling style of approach suggested the stalking of a jungle animal. He had a smoldering truculence on his face and hatred in his eyes.” Brennan supports the notion of Dempsey as predator, claiming that he “singlehandedly brought shock and awe to the sport of boxing like no one before or since … The Manassa Mauler backed down to no man in the ring. He stalked his opponents much the same way a tiger stalks his prey.”

Many of the better fighters from every era arise from abject poverty, and Dempsey was no exception. He was the ninth of Hyrum and Celia Dempsey’s 13 children, and perhaps the only one predestined to follow a particular career path. Before Jack was born, his mother had read and re-read a book given to her by an old peddler, Life of a 19th Century Gladiator, supposedly authored by John L. Sullivan but no doubt assisted in no small part by a ghost writer. Celia told Jack years later that, before he was born, she wanted her next male child to be the next John L. Sullivan.

In truth, Harry – which is what the rest of the family, which relocated often in search of better financial opportunities, called him – was preceded as a boxer by older brother Bernie, who for reasons unstated billed himself as Jack Dempsey. But Bernie had a liability, a glass jaw that precluded him from ever making it big as a fighter. In the hope of avoiding the pugilistic fate that had befallen Bernie, Harry – then going by the nom de guerre of “Kid Blackie” in mostly unsanctioned (and unrecorded for historical purposes) bouts – chewed rosin gum to strengthen his jaw muscles and soaked his face in beef brine to toughen his skin and make it less susceptible to cuts.

“Who knows how many fights I had between 1911 and 1916?” the former Kid Blackie said years later, after he had officially switched his ring (and legal) name to Jack Dempsey in tribute to the retired Bernie. “The record books don’t contain them, and I couldn’t name the number or identify all the faces today if my life depended on it. I’d guess a hundred. But that’s still a guess. Whatever the number was, it wasn’t enough to support me. To fill the gaps and my belly, I was a dishwasher, a miner or anything else you could dig up in Nevada, Utah, Colorado and Idaho – I dug potatoes and beets, punched cattle, shined shoes and was a porter in the Hotel Utah in Salt Lake City.”

In search of more and better-paying fights, and to capture the attention of nationally influential sports writers, Dempsey relocated to New York City. He did have some spot success – Damon Runyon was the first columnist to refer to him as the “Manassa Mauler,” a reference to the Colorado mining town in which he was born, and a sobriquet which eventually took root with the public – but the constant struggle for recognition wore on him and he moved back to his comfort zone out west.

Except that Dempsey’s comfort zone wasn’t any more comforting than New York. He was still scuffling along, considering quitting the ring, when a fortuitous turn of events – a barroom brawl – essentially turned his life around. He was having a drink in a saloon in Oakland, Calif., when he noticed several men attacking another bar patron, who was by far getting the worst of it. Jack went to the aid of the customer being pummeled, driving off the assailants. The guy he saved from taking a more severe thrashing was Jack “Doc” Kearns, a boxing manager, who figured anyone that handy with his fists had to have boxing potential. He immediately offered to take his accidental savior under his wing.

Kearns might have been many things, not all of them good – Dempsey later claimed Kearns had shortchanged him on several purses, and the two had a bitter falling-out that led to Kearns filing a lawsuit against his onetime meal ticket – but their association soon began to pay major dividends, with Jack rising to the position of the top-ranked heavyweight contender to champion Jess Willard after he starched the previous No. 1, Fred Fulton, in a mere 18 seconds on July 27, 1918.

But Willard, nicknamed “The Pottawatomie Giant” (for his hometown of Pottawatomie, Kan.) at 6-6½ and 245 pounds, dismissed Dempsey as too small to pose much of a threat. Kearns and Dempsey were obliged to embark on a nationwide tour in which Dempsey registered five consecutive first-round knockouts in early 1919 while constantly chirping for Willard to come out of hiding and face him. Given the immense size difference – the 6-foot-1 Dempsey was scarcely 180 pounds then – there was some concern that Willard might lethally dispose of the mouthy challenger, as he had six years earlier when another opponent, John “Bull” Young, died of a brain hemorrhage a day after he was knocked unconscious. Willard even asked Kearns to provide written assurance that no attempt would be made to file charges if he did unto Dempsey what he had done to Young.

America was still not that far from its frontier days when the Willard-Dempsey fight finally took place on July 4, 1919, in Toledo, Ohio. Legendary Old West lawmen Bat Masterson and Wyatt Earp, serving as human metal detectors, were charged with the responsibility of collecting guns and knives from armed fans before they could enter the outrageously hot stadium.

Willard was correct, in a sense; a slaughter did indeed take place. But it was not Dempsey’s health and well-being that were in jeopardy, it was Willard’s after the ferocious aspirant to the title – perhaps spurred on by the knowledge that Kearns had bet $10,000 of their money (at 10-to-1 odds) on him to win by first-round knockout – beat the champion bloody in the process of flooring him seven times in that opening stanza. Willard was counted out by referee Ollie Pecord after the last of those knockdowns, but the bell sounded just prior to the toll of 10, obliging the battered Willard to submit himself to more punishment while Kearns and Dempsey missed out by a couple of ticks on $100,000 additional income on the wager. Willard did not come out for the fourth round, having gone down twice more in round three.

Handsome in a rugged, outdoors kind of way with his chiseled physique, jet-black hair, bushy eyebrows, piercing eyes and mesmerizing air of malevolence, Dempsey, already on the way there, was instantly confirmed as the USA’s new king of the ring following his beatdown of the favored Willard. Damon Runyon, ever the wordsmith, wrote that Willard’s submission came “just as the bell was about to toss him into the fourth round of a mangling at the paws of Jack Dempsey, the young mountain lion in human form, from the Sangre de Cristo Hills of Colorado.”

But those placed upon a pedestal learn fast that the fall from grace can be swift and damaging. Dempsey was soon thereafter denounced as a “slacker” after reporters learned he had not served in the U.S. military during World War I, prompting Grantland Rice of the New York Tribune to temper his praise of the new titlist’s ferociousness inside the ropes with his presumed lack of patriotism outside of them.

“Let us have no illusions about our new heavyweight champion,” Rice wrote. “He is a marvel in the ring, the greatest hitting machine even the old-timers have ever seen. But he isn’t the world’s champion fighter. Not by a margin of 50,000 men who either stood or were even ready to stand the test of cold steel and exploding shell for anything from six cents to a dollar a day.”

By and by, Dempsey’s undeniable charisma and crowd-pleasing savagery in plying his trade won over that portion of a nation, and the world, that would have preferred him to have included a Sergeant York chapter in his thickening book of pugilistic accomplishments. During a trip to Europe he literally had to fight off female admirers, and his popularity soared to a point that an envious Babe Ruth reportedly considered taking up boxing before coming to his senses and sticking with baseball.

A four-round destruction of France’s Georges Carpentier was the first of five fights involving Dempsey to have generated million-dollar live gates, to be followed by those against Luis Angel Firpo, Jack Sharkey and the two losing matchups with Gene Tunney, his stylistic opposite.

Where Dempsey had always fought to win as quickly and emphatically as possible, a boiling pot of explosive energy always on the verge of eruption, Tunney, a former Marine, was a scholarly type who, despite a decent KO percentage, considered boxing to be something of a sweaty but nonetheless intellectual pursuit.

“I am here to train for a boxing contest, not a fight,” Tunney said before the rematch with Dempsey on Sept. 22, 1927, the notorious “Long Count” bout. “I don’t like fighting. Never did. But I’m free to admit that I like boxing.”

Such comments by Tunney did not set well with fans that preferred Dempsey’s familiar go-for-the-jugular aggression. Gallico claimed that Tunney’s image was that of a “priggish, snobbish, bookish fellow, too proud to associate with common prizefighters.”

By the time an aging Dempsey, by now accustomed to taking long breaks between fights, entered into his fire-and-ice meetings with Tunney, however, his internal blaze was already set to low flame. Even a jungle cat might be capable of fighting mad only so long. Even before his epic slugfest with the much larger Firpo, in which the Argentine went down nine times and Dempsey twice in two rounds, the champion spoke wistfully of the changes brought about when the desperation of poverty is replaced by the comfort of wealth and privilege.

“Maybe I can’t take as much now as I took then,” Dempsey said. “It’s much easier you know and more fun fighting your way to the top and defending it. Being champion isn’t as great as it seemed before I was champion. I have more money and softer living, but there are more worries and troubles and cares than I ever dreamed of before. The glory and even the money don’t mean as much as they did in the days when you belonged only to yourself – not the public.”

Now, regarding those parallels between Dempsey and those who would later fill his role and his shoes as elite heavyweight champions. That crouching, swarming, no-reverse-gear, left-hook-heavy attack? “Smokin” Joe Frazier fits the bill.

What about the controversy and loss of fan support that arose from Dempsey’s lack of military service during wartime? Sounds a lot like Muhammad Ali staying on the sidelines during Vietnam, doesn’t it?

Dempsey’s bitter split with his longtime manager, Kearns? How about the unpleasant professional separation of Mike Tyson from his disliked co-manager Bill Cayton after the two father figures in Iron Mike’s life, Cus D’Amato and Jimmy Jacobs, passed away?

Nor were Dempsey’s marital difficulties lastingly unique. His first wife, Maxine, was a prostitute 16 years his senior. His second wife, Estelle Taylor, was a stunningly beautiful model and actress who detested her husband’s boxing friends and considered them to be low-class and beneath her station. Tyson’s first wife, Robin Givens, apparently didn’t much care for anything about him except for the lavish lifestyle he was able to provide her.

Fortunately for Dempsey, his post-boxing life was as rich and fulfilling, in its own way, as had been his ring career. Not only did he enjoy a long and successful run as a New York restaurateur, but he served in the Coast Guard during World War II and was part of the American assault on Okinawa in 1945, when he was 49. Doing so mollified whatever holdovers were still resentful about his non-participation in the so-called war to end all wars.

If there is a lingering knock on Dempsey, it is the lack of black opponents on his otherwise sterling resume. He never did swap punches with such highly capable men of color as Sam Langford and Harry Wills, a taint that still clings in part to his legacy and is a shameful reminder of the bigotry prevalent in America in the early 20th century. It should be noted, however, that Dempsey urged promoter Tex Rickard to arrange a fight with Wills, but Rickard either was unwilling or unable to do so because of the tense racial politics of that time. Too many managers and promoters remembered the race riots that erupted throughout the country after Jack Johnson, a black man with swagger, conquered James J. Jeffries in 1910.

Dempsey was 87 when he died on May 31, 1983, but he remains a pivotal figure in the first golden age of American sports in the 1920s, a heyday also marked by Ruth, football’s Red Grange, golf’s Bobby Jones and tennis’ Bill Tilden. If you think Tom Brady and LeBron James are big deals today, beamed into your living room or den in high-definition color with regularity by the miracle of satellite communications, imagine yourself and a dozen friends hunched around an upright radio, listening to an excited announcer describe the majesty of a Ruth home run or a Dempsey knockout.

The very inaccessibility of such athletes in the 1920s stamped them as wondrous, almost mystical individuals. Were they mortal men, hewn of flesh and bone? Or did some elixir of the gods course through their veins, enabling them to extend the boundaries of athletic capability to limits once thought unimaginable?

The Million Dollar Man might not be a long (262 pages) or classic read, but its subject matter will grab anyone who wants to know more about one of the fight game’s most enduring and cherished legends. It might make a nice Christmas present for any fight fan willing to open an important portal to boxing’s past.

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With Valentine’s Day on the Horizon, let’s Exhume ex-Boxer ‘Machine Gun’ McGurn

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Feb. 14, which this year falls on a Friday, is Valentine’s Day, more formally St. Valentine’s Day. It’s a day identified with romance, but for students of organized crime, it summons up an image of a different sort. On Valentine’s Day in 1929, at a warehouse in the Lincoln Park district of Chicago, seven men were lined up against a wall and murdered in cold blood by four intruders with machine guns and shotguns. The infamous St. Valentine’s Day Massacre was the most sensational news story during the Prohibition Era when many of America’s cities, most notably Chicago, were roiled by deadly turf wars between rival bootlegging factions.

It shouldn’t surprise us that a former boxer was one of the alleged perpetrators. During the Prohibition years, bootleggers were well-represented among the ranks of boxing promoters and managers. Philadelphia’s Max “Boo Boo” Hoff reportedly had the largest boxing stable in the country. In New York, Owney Madden was purportedly the brains behind the consortium that controlled future heavyweight champion Primo Carnera.

That brings us to Jack McGurn, but first a little context. Prohibition was the law of the land from 1920, when the Volstead Act took effect, until 1933 when the ill-conceived law was repealed. Prohibition did not fetter America’s thirst for alcoholic beverages but arguably encouraged it. Confirmed beer drinkers didn’t stop drinking beer because it was illegal. Restaurateurs at high-end establishments didn’t stop selling cognac and brandy; they just did it more discreetly. Speakeasies became fashionable.

Big money awaited entrepreneurs willing to risk arrest by flouting the law, either by opening distilleries and breweries or importing alcohol with Canada the leading supplier.

In Chicago and environs, circa 1929, two of the kingpins of the bootlegging trade were “Scarface” Al Capone and George “Bugs” Moran. They were bitter rivals. The warehouse at which the seven men were assassinated housed some of Moran’s delivery trucks. The victims were members of his gang.

Al Capone wasn’t directly involved. On Feb. 14, he was in Florida where, among other things, he was finalizing arrangements to host a bevy of A-list sportswriters at his lavish Miami Beach estate; the scribes were coming to town to cover the heavyweight title eliminator between Jack Sharkey and Young Stribling. But the hired guns, who stormed into Moran’s warehouse at 10:30 on a snowy Valentine’s Day morning, were presumed to be working for Capone and the one henchman whose name stood out among the usual suspects was Jack McGurn. He had purportedly saved Capone’s life on two occasions by intercepting would-be assassins out to kill his boss and shooting them dead. Of all his underlings, Capone was said to be especially fond of McGurn.

Maching Gun McGurn

Machine Gun Jack McGurn

It had long been the custom of Jewish and Italian boxers to adopt Irish-sounding ring names. McGurn was born Vincenzo Gibaldi in 1902 in the Sicilian seaside city of Licata and lived in Brooklyn before moving with his widowed mother to Chicago. He had his first documented prizefight in 1921. The bout was held on a naval training ship, the U.S.S. Commodore. Prizefighting was then illegal in the Windy City, a residue of the malodorous 1900 fight between Terry McGovern and Joe Gans, but the ship was docked outside the Chicago city limits.

McGurn would have five more documented fights, the last against Bud Christiano on a strong card in Aurora, Illinois. Their six-round bout was the semi-windup. The main go was a 10-round contest between bantamweights Bud Taylor, the Terre Haute Terror, and Memphis Pal Moore, both of whom are enshrined in the International Boxing Hall of Fame.

By law, these were no-decision fights with wagers resting on the opinion of one or more ringside reporters. McGurn really had no business in the same ring with Christiano, an 84-fight veteran who had won two of three from future world lightweight title-holder Jimmy Goodrich. He took the worst of it, but was still standing at the final bell. And that was that. After only six pro fights, he hung up his gloves to pursue other endeavors and, in time, when his name appeared in the newspapers, it invariably appeared as Machine Gun Jack McGurn, the reference to the newfangled Thompson Machine Gun, colloquially the Tommy Gun, a tool with which McGurn was said to be very proficient.

The police found McGurn holed up in a Chicago hotel where he was staying with his girlfriend, Louise Rolfe, a 22-year-old “professional model and cabaret entertainer” with a 5-year-old daughter from a previous relationship being raised by her mother.

Louise testified that on the day of the massacre, they were in bed until noon. She said that she and McGurn had seldom left the room during their 13-day stay, having their food brought up from the hotel’s kitchen.

Louise held tight to her story and the police never did have sufficient evidence to charge the ex-boxer in connection with the crime. However, whenever the authorities were frustrated in sending a perp to prison, they had other weapons at their disposal to get their pound of flesh.

In the case of Scarface Al Capone, it was the 1913 law that authorized a federal income tax. The feds had enough circumstantial evidence to show that Al hadn’t been paying his fair share of taxes and succeeded in removing him from society. (After serving almost eight years in federal prisons, mostly Alcatraz, Capone returned to civilian life a sick man and passed away in Florida at age 48.)

In the case of Machine Gun Jack McGurn and his paramour, later his wife, the wedge was the Mann Act of 1910.

The Mann Act, most famously used to waylay heavyweight champion Jack Johnson, was aimed at brothel-keepers and immigrant flesh peddlers but was worded in such a way that it could be applied when there was no commerce involved. It prohibited the interstate transportation of “any woman or girl for the purpose of prostitution or debauchery, or for any other immoral purpose.” (The law remains on the books but has been watered-down to decriminalize sexual activity between consenting adults.)

The feds spent thousands of hours digging up evidence to show that the couple had violated the Mann Act. They eventually got hotel receipts showing that they had registered as Mr. and Mrs. under assumed names at hotels in Florida and Mississippi during a motor trip down south. Jack was sentenced to two years in Leavenworth and Louise to four months in the county jail, but their convictions were later overturned by the Illinois Supreme Court.

What comes around, goes around, goes the saying, and it figured that Machine Gun Jack McGurn would die a violent death. The ex-boxer met his maker at 1 a.m. on Feb. 15, 1936, at a second-floor bowling alley in Chicago where he was fatally shot by two gunmen who opened fire as his back was turned. There were at least 20 people present said the story in the Chicago Tribune, but “the wall of silence, traditional among the gangsters and the people who know them, was erected high and tight.”

Was McGurn’s murder retaliation for the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre? The answer appears to be a resounding “yes.” Had the deed happened before the stroke of midnight, it would have happened on a St. Valentine’s Day, the seventh anniversary of the infamous event.

The police found a crumpled comic Valentine’s card next to McGurn’s body. On the front of the card were the figures of a man and a woman in their underwear. The verse inside read:

You’ve lost your job, You’ve lost your dough;

Your jewels and cars and handsome houses;

But things could still be worse you know

At least you haven’t lost your trousers.

Was this card intentionally left there by the assassins? We don’t know, but the view from here (pardon the wisecrack) is that if one were to receive a card on Valentine’s Day bearing this poem, perhaps it would be best not to leave the house.

Postscript #1: Jack McGurn’s wife, the former Louise Rolfe, routinely referenced in the press as his blonde alibi, continued to have her name pop up in the news after he died. In February of 1940, police found a gun used in a burglary in a drawer in her apartment. In 1943, she was arrested on a charge of disorderly conduct after police found her in the company of a 25-year-old Army deserter.

Postscript #2:

Al Capone refused to pose for photographs, but made an exception for his friend Jack Sharkey, the future heavyweight champion. Sharkey is pictured on the right next to Capone in this 1929 photo.

****

The Mob Museum, officially the National Museum of Organized Crime and Law Enforcement, opened 13 years ago on Feb. 14, 2012 in an old three-story building in downtown Las Vegas that was originally a federal courthouse. So, each Valentine’s Day is a special occasion at the Mob Museum, an anniversary celebrated with special events, free admission for Nevada residents, and steep discounts for tourists. (On other days of the year, a single admission during peak hours is $34.95, but there are always discounts available on-line.)

A permanent display is a reconstructed portion of the wall where the seven victims were murdered.  The garage where the killings happened was demolished in 1967, but before it was torn down a collector rescued many of the bricks, some with blood-stained bullet holes, which the Mob Museum acquired. Other artifacts on display this Friday will be the two Tommy Guns used in the assault, a one-day loan from the Berrian County Sheriff’s Department in Michigan which recovered the weapons from the home of a bank robber.

For the record, there is also a mob museum, called the Gangster Museum of America, in Hot Springs, Arkansas.

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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More ‘Dances’ in Store for Derek Chisora after out-working Otto Wallin in Manchester

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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)

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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).

To comment on this story in the Fight Forum CLICK HERE

 

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