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Three Sons of Pro Fighters Poised to Pursue Their NFL Dreams

Maybe, if former heavyweight David Long Sr. and former middleweight Sanderline Williams had become highly paid and celebrated world champions, their sons would have chosen to follow in their fighting fathers’ footsteps. Then again, perhaps not. Look at what the great Evander Holyfield accomplished in boxing, but still his athletically gifted son preferred to make his mark in another sport that also requires its participants to hit and be hit.
The NFL draft is a frenzied, three-day meat market in which 32 league-member teams, after analyzing the strengths and weaknesses of hundreds of draft-eligible college players, make their selections in rounds one through seven, hoping that at least a couple of their rookie additions improve their rosters and thus their chances at going to the Super Bowl. And if the 254 drafted players aren’t enough to provide just the right youthful infusion of talent, there’s also a glut of undrafted free agents to be signed, with the same goal in mind.
No less impressive than the painstakingly thorough work of NFL scouts and front offices is that of ESPN and the NFL Network, which every year somehow manage to put together video highlights of every drafted player, even those who played at small colleges and whose games never make it onto anyone’s television screen. In showing those clips, the TV talking heads at the draft, which this year was staged in Nashville, Tenn., also have anecdotes and informational tidbits to pass along to viewers.
Thus were NFL draft junkies – of which I confess to be one – alerted to the sizes, statistics and stories of Dre’Mont Jones and David Long Jr., draftees who might or might not go on to pro football stardom with their new teams. And you can bet a lot more attention would have been devoted to Elijah Holyfield, a potential draftee who wasn’t one of the chosen 254 but shortly thereafter signed a free-agent contract. Elijah’s lineage is certain to be a hot topic when he reports to training camp with the Carolina Panthers this summer.
Given his higher draft position and the elite status of the college program for which he played – the Ohio State defensive end was taken in the third round, No. 71 overall, by the Denver Broncos – Jones likely will get a longer look in camp than either Long, a linebacker for the West Virginia Mountaineers who went to the Tennessee Titans in the sixth round, No. 188 overall, or Holyfield, the former Georgia running back whose legendary father won’t be of much assistance if his kid doesn’t show enough in camp to convince his coaches he’s NFL material.
Stats? Here they are for Jones, a 6-foot-3, 281-pounder who put together some commendable numbers during his junior season with the Buckeyes: in 14 games, he totaled 8½ sacks, 13 tackles for loss, three fumble recoveries, one forced fumble, one defensive touchdown scored and one interception. His pre-draft analysis describes him as “an undersized defensive tackle with above-average length and a quick first step. He’s a disruptive one-gap run-defender. He has heavy hands and flashes some violence with his initial punch rushing the passer.”
That “violence with his initial punch” bit might come from his father, Sanderline Williams, who was a pretty good middleweight from Cleveland until he began mixing it up with the division’s top performers. Williams, now 61, posted a 24-15-1 record with 14 knockouts, but at one point he was 22-4 with those 14 wins inside the distance. It’s hard to fault someone, though, for failing to maintain career momentum when you consider that he twice fought James Toney (earning a draw in their first matchup) as well as single bouts with Gerald McClellan, Reggie Johnson, Nigel Benn and Iran Barkley, all of whom at one point were, like Toney, world champions. Oh, one more thing to be considered: despite sharing the ring with a Murderer’s Row of opponents, Williams was stopped just once, by Lindell Holmes, in the ninth round of a scheduled 10-rounder on June 29, 1985.
It stands to reason that his pop taught Dre’Mont some boxing moves, if only to better protect himself on the street as the occasion warranted. But even if pro football doesn’t work out for the first-team All-Big Ten player and he eventually tries his hand at boxing, it almost certainly won’t be at Williams’ old weight class. Jones would have to shed 121 pounds to get down to middleweight, a slimming-down which, if nothing else, might net him a commercial for Nutrisystem.
David Long Jr., at 5-11¼ and 227 pounds, is already a virtual clone of his heavyweight father, but a bit on the smallish side for an NFL linebacker. His pre-draft analysis lists him as “an undersized linebacker with below-average length and top-end speed. He’s an instinctive run defender who fills gaps and sifts through traffic between the tackles. He masks below-average speed by reading the play quickly and chasing with great effort.”
The elder Long, now 47, never went as far in the fight game as did Sanderline Williams, but he did post a 12-5-2 record with eight KOs as a pro. The Cincinnati native also has the distinction of sharing the ring with future WBC heavyweight champion Deontay Wilder, who starched him in one round on Nov. 26, 2011. But at first glance that bout did not appear to be the total mismatch that the outcome suggested. Although Wilder came in at 19-0, all of the wins in abbreviated fashion, Long Sr., who weighed 228 pounds to Wilder’s 215½, was a respectable 11-1-2 (7) at the time.
It was a given that Elijah Holyfield would be picked in the later rounds of the draft, if at all, after he ran the 40-yard dash in an abysmal (for a running back) 4.78 seconds at the NFL combine. But the 5-10, 217-pounder had a very productive junior season in the ultracompetitive Southeastern Conference, rushing for 1,018 yards and scoring seven touchdowns for Georgia despite splitting time with second-team All-SEC choice D’Andre Swift, a sophomore who rushed for 1,049 yards and scored 10 TDs. The pre-draft analysis on Elijah Holyfield notes that he “possesses good size and strength, but did not perform well at the combine except for the bench press (26 reps of 225 pounds). He’s a patient runner with strong leg drive, runs behind his pads and almost always falls forward at the end of runs. He lacks elite, make-you-miss suddenness, but shows good stop-start ability and has enough lateral ability to weave in and out of creases. He is more quick than fast and lacks a second gear when he hits daylight.”
Given the fact that Elijah Holyfield boxed until he was 13 and showed some promise, it wouldn’t be a shocker if he ever got around to trying his hand at the sport that made his dad rich and famous. But, ironically, it is the son who lived the dream that his father first had as a young boy growing up in Atlanta as a huge fan of the Georgia Bulldogs and the NFL Atlanta Falcons.
“Wasn’t nothing I wanted more than to play for that team (Georgia),” Evander hold me in August 2015, for a story I did on the highly recruited Elijah, the eighth of Evander’s 11 children by several women. “Herschel Walker had won the Heisman Trophy for Georgia (in 1982). It was my dream to be another Herschel Walker, and then to play for the Falcons and be another Dave Hampton.”
But while it isn’t easy to be successful in pro football, there is at least one voice from beyond the grave that says that making it at the highest levels of boxing is even more difficult.
“Athletically, boxing is the toughest profession in the world,” the late, great trainer Angelo Dundee once told me. “Just because you’re big and strong and great in football has nothing to do with it. I’ve seen it many times over the years, football players walking into gyms, asking me to train them into boxers. It never works. The qualities that a boxer has to have to be really good are different than in any other sport.”
Bernard Fernandez is the retired boxing writer for the Philadelphia Daily News. He is a five-term former president of the Boxing Writers Association of America, an inductee into the Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Atlantic City Boxing Halls of Fame and the recipient of the Nat Fleischer Award for Excellence in Boxing Journalism and the Barney Nagler Award for Long and Meritorious Service to Boxing.
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With Valentine’s Day on the Horizon, let’s Exhume ex-Boxer ‘Machine Gun’ McGurn

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.

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

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

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