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Boxing Referees Were Tough in Bygone Days and Jere Dunn Was Toughest of Them All

Jere Dunn was a referee of some importance during the late nineteenth century, a period when professional boxing was in flux as the modern Queensberry rules of combat hadn’t yet taken a firm hold. Some fights still had no ceiling on the number of rounds, but these “fights-to-a-finish” were now almost always contested with gloves.
BoxRec lists only 12 assignments for Dunn which occurred between 1885 and 1891, but there were likely dozens more. We can infer that he was a ref of some importance because of the boxers with whom he shared the ring. He refereed fights involving five men who would be enshrined in the International Boxing Hall of Fame: Nonpareil Jack Dempsey, Jake Kilrain, George Godfrey, Jack McAuliffe, and George Dixon.
Referees had to be tough in Dunn’s days when there were no judges. If a match had a specified number of rounds and went the full distance, the referee was the sole arbiter. Betting on fights was more common – at big fights, bookmakers circulated among the crowd before the opening bell and there was considerable action among ringsiders while a fight was in progress – and if it was hard to separate the fighters at the end of a bout, the ref’s verdict was bound to cause ill feelings; potentially a riot.
Often refs were freed from this obligation by contractual arrangements that specified that a fight had to be called a draw if both men were standing at the final gong. However, the high frequency of draws back in Dunn’s day – many fighters finished their career with more draws than wins and losses combined – was also due to squeamish referees who took the safest road and called a fight a draw if neither man was clearly dominant.
Jere Dunn was born in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. At age 15, he ran away to New York City. He served as a cavalryman on the Union side in the Civil War.
Dunn stood about five-feet-ten inches in height and had broad shoulders. In 1885, when he was promoting some boxing and wrestling shows in New Orleans, a writer for the Times-Picayune made this observation: “(Dunn) is a man of invincible courage and gamblers and fighters of every degree are in absolute fear of him…He has a square face, a well-trimmed dark beard, parted in the middle, and he always wears a perfectly fitting frock and high hat.”
By then, Dunn had shot and killed three men; an Army deserter with a bounty on his head, an alleged bank burglar, and a prizefighter of considerable repute. Dunn would allege that he shot each of them after a fierce struggle in which he had no recourse but to use his pistol.
The prizefighter was Jimmy Elliott who once had a tenuous hold on the world heavyweight title. Elliott was now in his forties and well past his prime – he had recently been badly punished by John L. Sullivan who knocked him out in the third round of their match in Brooklyn – but he was still a handy man with his fists.
Dunn and Elliott had their little set-to on March 1, 1883, in Chicago at the Tivoli, a restaurant, concert hall, and saloon on South Dearborn Street in the city’s notorious Levee district. There was bad blood between them. Dunn had arranged a rematch for Elliott with Sullivan and was out a considerable sum of money when Elliott backed out citing an injury. In a newspaper story, Dunn was quoted as saying that Elliott pulled out because he was yellow, or words to that effect.
In the Tivoli, the argument between Dunn and Elliott escalated into a gun battle. Needless to say, there are different versions of what took place. Most versions concur that Dunn opened fire first, striking Elliott in the arm or the chest. Regardless, the bullet only wounded him and a scuffle ensued that lasted for half an hour. At one point, said Dunn, Elliott held a cocked pistol against his chest, but the gun failed to discharge. The fray ended as Elliott was poised to smash Dunn over the head with the back of a chair. The chair became entangled in a chandelier, giving Dunn the split-second he needed to grab hold of his six-shooter and terminate the battle.

Jimmy Elliott
At his murder trial, Dunn’s attorney convinced the jury that his client did not instigate the fatal brawl and Dunn was acquitted on grounds of self-defense. It undoubtedly helped his cause that Jimmy Elliott was a notorious hot-head who had twice been sent to prison for various offenses, the second time resulting in a nine-year stay behind bars at a prison in Philadelphia following his conviction for assaulting and robbing a well-known black minstrel singer. Elliott, however, had many friends who would always believe that he had been murdered, shot dead in cold blood, and Jere Dunn would live out his days with a bullseye on his back.
Dunn would have been wise to keep a low profile, but that wasn’t his nature. In addition to refereeing big fights, he got involved in thoroughbred racing and became a conspicuous figure on the turf.
Dunn was in San Francisco with his wife on the morning of April 18, 1906, when the city was roiled by the devastating earthquake. He was a sick man at this time, wasting away from esophageal cancer, but it would be written that he got out of bed and went out in the street to comfort people who were frantic with worry.
Dunn died on June 27, 1906. He was 67 years old at the time of his death said one paper; 71 said another. Neither figure jibes with the story that he was 16 years old when the Civil War broke out, but whatever. Boxing referees were a lot tougher in Jere Dunn’s day and he was the toughest of them all.
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Avila Perspective, Chap. 326: San Diego Smoke

Years ago, I worked at a newsstand in the Beverly Hills area. It was a 24-hour a day version and the people that dropped by were very colorful and unique.
One elderly woman Eva, who bordered on homeless but pridefully wore lipstick, would stop by the newsstand weekly to purchase a pack of menthol cigarettes. On one occasion, she asked if I had ever been to San Diego?
I answered “yes, many times.”
She countered “you need to watch out for San Diego Smoke.”
This Saturday, Top Rank brings its brand of prizefighting to San Diego or what could be called San Diego Smoke. Leading the fight card is Mexico’s Emanuel Navarrete (39-2-1, 32 KOs) defending the WBO super feather title against undefeated Filipino Charly Suarez (18-0, 10 KOs) at Pechanga Arena. ESPN will televise.
This is Navarrete’s fourth defense of the super feather title.
The last time Navarrete stepped in the boxing ring he needed six rounds to dismantle the very capable Oscar Valdez in their rematch. One thing about Mexico City’s Navarrete is he always brings “the smoke.”
Also, on the same card is Fontana, California’s Raymond Muratalla (22-0, 17 KOs) vying for the interim IBF lightweight title against Russia’s Zaur Abdullaev (20-1, 12 KOs) on the co-main event.
Abdullaev has only fought once before in the USA and was handily defeated by Devin Haney back in 2019. But that was six years ago and since then he has knocked off various contenders.
Muratalla is a slick fighting lightweight who trains at the Robert Garcia Boxing Academy now in Moreno Valley, Calif. It’s a virtual boot camp with many of the top fighters on the West Coast available to spar on a daily basis. If you need someone bigger or smaller, stronger or faster someone can match those needs.
When you have that kind of preparation available, it’s tough to beat. Still, you have to fight the fight. You never know what can happen inside the prize ring.
Another fighter to watch is Perla Bazaldua, 19, a young and very talented female fighter out of the Los Angeles area. She is trained by Manny Robles who is building a small army of top female fighters.
Bazaldua (1-0, 1 KO) meets Mona Ward (0-1) in a super flyweight match on the preliminary portion of the Top Rank card. Top Rank does not sign many female fighters so you know that they believe in her talent.
Others on the San Diego fight card include Giovani Santillan, Andres Cortes, Albert Gonzalez, Sebastian Gonzalez and others.
They all will bring a lot of smoke to San Diego.
Probox TV
A strong card led by Erickson “The Hammer” Lubin (26-2, 18 KOs) facing Ardreal Holmes Jr. (17-0, 6 KOs) in a super welterweight clash between southpaws takes place on Saturday at Silver Spurs Arena in Kissimmee, Florida. PROBOX TV will stream the fight card.
Ardreal has rocketed up the standings and now faces veteran Lubin whose only losses came against world titlists Sebastian Fundora and Jermell Charlo. It’s a great match to decide who deserves a world title fight next.
Another juicy match pits Argentina’s Nazarena Romero (14-0-2) against Mexico’s Mayelli Flores (12-1-1) in a female super bantamweight contest.
Nottingham, England
Anthony Cacace (23-1, 8 KOs) defends the IBO super featherweight title against Leigh Wood (28-3, 17 KOs) in Wood’s hometown on Saturday at Nottingham Arena in Nottingham, England. DAZN will stream the Queensberry Promotions card.
Ireland’s Cacace seems to have the odds against him. But he is no stranger to dancing in the enemy’s lair or on foreign territory. He formerly defeated Josh Warrington in London and Joe Cordina in Riyadh in IBO title defenses.
Lampley at Wild Card
Boxing telecaster Jim Lampley will be signing his new book It Happened! at the Wild Card Boxing gym in Hollywood, Calif. on Saturday, May 10, beginning at 2 p.m. Lampley has been a large part of many of the greatest boxing events in the past 40 years. He and Freddie Roach will be at the signing.
Fights to Watch (All times Pacific Time)
Sat. DAZN 11 a.m. Anthony Cacace (23-1) vs Leigh Wood (28-3).
Sat. PROBOX.tv 3 p.m. Erickson Lubin (26-2) vs Ardreal Holmes Jr. (17-0).
Sat. ESPN 7 p.m. Emanuel Navarrete (39-2-1) vs Charly Suarez (18-0); Raymond Muratalla (22-0) vs Zaur Abdullaev (20-1).
Photo credit: Mikey Williams / Top Rank
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“Breadman” Edwards: An Unlikely Boxing Coach with a Panoramic View of the Sport

Stephen “Breadman” Edwards’ first fighter won a world title. That may be some sort of record.
It’s true. Edwards had never trained a fighter, amateur or pro, before taking on professional novice Julian “J Rock” Williams. On May 11, 2019, Williams wrested the IBF 154-pound world title from Jarrett Hurd. The bout, a lusty skirmish, was in Fairfax, Virginia, near Hurd’s hometown in Maryland, and the previously undefeated Hurd had the crowd in his corner.
In boxing, Stephen Edwards wears two hats. He has a growing reputation as a boxing coach, a hat he will wear on Saturday, May 31, at Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas when the two fighters that he currently trains, super middleweight Caleb Plant and middleweight Kyrone Davis, display their wares on a show that will air on Amazon Prime Video. Plant, who needs no introduction, figures to have little trouble with his foe in a match conceived as an appetizer to a showdown with Jermall Charlo. Davis, coming off his career-best win, an upset of previously undefeated Elijah Garcia, is in tough against fast-rising Cuban prospect Yoenli Hernandez, a former world amateur champion.
Edwards’ other hat is that of a journalist. His byline appears at “Boxing Scene” in a column where he answers questions from readers.
It’s an eclectic bag of questions that Breadman addresses, ranging from his thoughts on an upcoming fight to his thoughts on one of the legendary prizefighters of olden days. Boxing fans, more so than fans of any other sport, enjoy hashing over fantasy fights between great fighters of different eras. Breadman is very good at this, which isn’t to suggest that his opinions are gospel, merely that he always has something provocative to add to the discourse. Like all good historians, he recognizes that the best history is revisionist history.
“Fighters are constantly mislabled,” he says. “Everyone talks about Joe Louis’s right hand. But if you study him you see that his left hook is every bit as good as his right hand and it’s more sneaky in terms of shock value when it lands.”
Stephen “Breadman” Edwards was born and raised in Philadelphia. His father died when he was three. His maternal grandfather, a Korean War veteran, filled the void. The man was a big boxing fan and the two would watch the fights together on the family television.
Edwards’ nickname dates to his early teen years when he was one of the best basketball players in his neighborhood. The derivation is the 1975 movie “Cornbread, Earl and Me,” starring Laurence Fishburne in his big screen debut. Future NBA All-Star Jamaal Wilkes, fresh out of UCLA, plays Cornbread, a standout high school basketball player who is mistakenly murdered by the police.
Coming out of high school, Breadman had to choose between an academic scholarship at Temple or an athletic scholarship at nearby Lincoln University. He chose the former, intending to major in criminal justice, but didn’t stay in college long. What followed were a succession of jobs including a stint as a city bus driver. To stay fit, he took to working out at the James Shuler Memorial Gym where he sparred with some of the regulars, but he never boxed competitively.
Over the years, Philadelphia has harbored some great boxing coaches. Among those of recent vintage, the names George Benton, Bouie Fisher, Nazeem Richardson, and Bozy Ennis come quickly to mind. Breadman names Richardson and West Coast trainer Virgil Hunter as the men that have influenced him the most.
We are all a product of our times, so it’s no surprise that the best decade of boxing, in Breadman’s estimation, was the 1980s. This was the era of the “Four Kings” with Sugar Ray Leonard arguably standing tallest.
Breadman was a big fan of Leonard and of Leonard’s three-time rival Roberto Duran. “I once purchased a DVD that had all of Roberto Duran’s title defenses on it,” says Edwards. “This was a back before the days of YouTube.”
But Edwards’ interest in the sport goes back much deeper than the 1980s. He recently weighed in on the “Pittsburgh Windmill” Harry Greb whose legend has grown in recent years to the point that some have come to place him above Sugar Ray Robinson on the list of the greatest of all time.
“Greb was a great fighter with a terrific resume, of that there is no doubt,” says Breadman, “but there is no video of him and no one alive ever saw him fight, so where does this train of thought come from?”
Edwards notes that in Harry Greb’s heyday, he wasn’t talked about in the papers as the best pound-for-pound fighter in the sport. The boxing writers were partial to Benny Leonard who drew comparisons to the venerated Joe Gans.
Among active fighters, Breadman reserves his highest praise for Terence Crawford. “Body punching is a lost art,” he once wrote. “[Crawford] is a great body puncher who starts his knockouts with body punches, but those punches are so subtle they are not fully appreciated.”
If the opening line holds up, Crawford will enter the ring as the underdog when he opposes Canelo Alvarez in September. Crawford, who will enter the ring a few weeks shy of his 38th birthday, is actually the older fighter, older than Canelo by almost three full years (it doesn’t seem that way since the Mexican redhead has been in the public eye so much longer), and will theoretically be rusty as 13 months will have elapsed since his most recent fight.
Breadman discounts those variables. “Terence is older,” he says, “but has less wear and tear and never looks rusty after a long layoff.” That Crawford will win he has no doubt, an opinion he tweaked after Canelo’s performance against William Scull: “Canelo’s legs are not the same. Bud may even stop him now.”
Edwards has been with Caleb Plant for Plant’s last three fights. Their first collaboration produced a Knockout of the Year candidate. With one ferocious left hook, Plant sent Anthony Dirrell to dreamland. What followed were a 12-round setback to David Benavidez and a ninth-round stoppage of Trevor McCumby.
Breadman keeps a hectic schedule. From Monday through Friday, he’s at the DLX Gym in Las Vegas coaching Caleb Plant and Kyrone Davis. On weekends, he’s back in Philadelphia, checking in on his investment properties and, of greater importance, watching his kids play sports. His 14-year-old daughter and 12-year-old son are standout all-around athletes.
On those long flights, he has plenty of time to turn on his laptop and stream old fights or perhaps work on his next article. That’s assuming he can stay awake.
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Arne’s Almanac: The Good, the Bad, and the (Mostly) Ugly; a Weekend Boxing Recap and More

Arne’s Almanac: The Good, the Bad, and the (Mostly) Ugly; a Weekend Boxing Recap and More
It’s old news now, but on back-to-back nights on the first weekend of May, there were three fights that finished in the top six snoozefests ever as measured by punch activity. That’s according to CompuBox which has been around for 40 years.
In Times Square, the boxing match between Devin Haney and Jose Carlos Ramirez had the fifth-fewest number of punches thrown, but the main event, Ryan Garcia vs. Rolly Romero, was even more of a snoozefest, landing in third place on this ignoble list.
Those standings would be revised the next night – knocked down a peg when Canelo Alvarez and William Scull combined to throw a historically low 445 punches in their match in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, 152 by the victorious Canelo who at least pressed the action, unlike Scull (pictured) whose effort reminded this reporter of “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” – no, not the movie starring Paul Newman, just the title.
CompuBox numbers, it says here, are best understood as approximations, but no amount of rejiggering can alter the fact that these three fights were stinkers. Making matters worse, these were pay-per-views. If one had bundled the two events, rather than buying each separately, one would have been out $90 bucks.
****
Thankfully, the Sunday card on ESPN from Las Vegas was redemptive. It was just what the sport needed at this moment – entertaining fights to expunge some of the bad odor. In the main go, Naoya Inoue showed why he trails only Shohei Ohtani as the most revered athlete in Japan.
Throughout history, the baby-faced assassin has been a boxing promoter’s dream. It’s no coincidence that down through the ages the most common nickname for a fighter – and by an overwhelming margin — is “Kid.”
And that partly explains Naoya Inoue’s charisma. The guy is 32 years old, but here in America he could pass for 17.
Joey Archer
Joey Archer, who passed away last week at age 87 in Rensselaer, New York, was one of the last links to an era of boxing identified with the nationally televised Friday Night Fights at Madison Square Garden.

Joey Archer
Archer made his debut as an MSG headliner on Feb. 4, 1961, and had 12 more fights at the iconic mid-Manhattan sock palace over the next six years. The final two were world title fights with defending middleweight champion Emile Griffith.
Archer etched his name in the history books in November of 1965 in Pittsburgh where he won a comfortable 10-round decision over Sugar Ray Robinson, sending the greatest fighter of all time into retirement. (At age 45, Robinson was then far past his peak.)
Born and raised in the Bronx, Joey Archer was a cutie; a clever counter-puncher recognized for his defense and ultimately for his granite chin. His style was embedded in his DNA and reinforced by his mentors.
Early in his career, Archer was domiciled in Houston where he was handled by veteran trainer Bill Gore who was then working with world lightweight champion Joe Brown. Gore would ride into the Hall of Fame on the coattails of his most famous fighter, “Will-o’-the Wisp” Willie Pep. If Joey Archer had any thoughts of becoming a banger, Bill Gore would have disabused him of that notion.
In all honesty, Archer’s style would have been box office poison if he had been black. It helped immensely that he was a native New Yorker of Irish stock, albeit the Irish angle didn’t have as much pull as it had several decades earlier. But that observation may not be fair to Archer who was bypassed twice for world title fights after upsetting Hurricane Carter and Dick Tiger.
When he finally caught up with Emile Griffith, the former hat maker wasn’t quite the fighter he had been a few years earlier but Griffith, a two-time Fighter of the Year by The Ring magazine and the BWAA and a future first ballot Hall of Famer, was still a hard nut to crack.
Archer went 30 rounds with Griffith, losing two relatively tight decisions and then, although not quite 30 years old, called it quits. He finished 45-4 with 8 KOs and was reportedly never knocked down, yet alone stopped, while answering the bell for 365 rounds. In retirement, he ran two popular taverns with his older brother Jimmy Archer, a former boxer who was Joey’s trainer and manager late in Joey’s career.
May he rest in peace.
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