Remembering the late Craig ‘Gator’ Bodzianowski, Boxing’s One-Legged Wonder

Published

3 years ago

July 16, 2021

Remembering the late Craig ‘Gator’ Bodzianowski, Boxing’s One-Legged Wonder

It is a really old joke, so much so that you’d have to figure that Henny Youngman and Jack Benny were telling it when they were young comedians on the burlesque circuit nearly a century ago. But there is always an exception to every rule or punchline, the foremost for the purposes of boxing history being its sole contrarian to the oft-repeated proposition that an inept person is “as useless as a one-legged man in an ass-kicking contest.”

The late cruiserweight contender, Craig “Gator” Bodzianowski, who was a one-legged man, didn’t mind poking a bit of self-deprecating humor at his disability as the occasion warranted. When Bodzianowski was asked why he did not seek financial damages through legal means from the driver of the automobile that slammed into his motorcycle, resulting in the amputation of his mangled lower right leg, the impish former Chicago Golden Gloves champion would wink and say, “I can’t go to court. I wouldn’t have a leg to stand on.”

Bada-bing.

Monday, July 19, marks the 21^st anniversary of Bodzianowski’s unsuccessful yet indisputably heroic bid to make the seemingly impossible possible. Perhaps he wouldn’t have defeated WBA cruiserweight titlist Robert Daniels had he the benefit of two fully functional legs, but his longshot quest in Seattle’s Kingdome was made more difficult when a Daniels powershot re-fractured a previously broken rib in the second round, hampering Bodzianowski until the final bell. Although it became increasingly evident that Bodzianowski had no chance to win on the scorecards (Daniels was a wide winner on points, by margins of 119-110 and 118-109 (twice), the battered challenger, his left eye completely swollen shut, refused to yield and finished on his feet.

Bodzianowski – his nickname owed in part to his family’s limited finances during his adolescence and in part to his apparent failure to distinguish between large reptiles of similar appearance — was not disposed to crack wise about what he still was able to accomplish in the ring, before, during and after he made what was arguably his sport’s most remarkable comeback while fitted with a prosthesis where a significant portion of the extremity he had been born with had been surgically removed.

The Bodzianowski family, its suburban Chicago-area home notwithstanding, had a backyard that housed a menagerie of baboons, pigeons, chickens, snakes and even an alligator. Craig soon took to calling himself “Gator” not because of that particular reptilian pet, but because of the Lacoste polo shirts so in favor at the time, with the little alligator (actually a crocodile) embroidered on the left side of the chest. Those shirts were too pricey for parents Pat and Gloria Bodzianowski to purchase in multiple colors for their four sons, so Pat, a tattoo artist, inked the iconic symbol on Craig’s chest and Gloria cut out little rectangles of cheaper Ban-Lon shirts, exposing the tat.

That homemade tattoo served as Craig’s most singular mark of identification, at least until he was fitted with his prosthesis.

“I never, ever say, `Darn, if I had my real (leg), I could have been on top a long time ago,” Bodzianowski said of any might-have-beens that less-determined individuals would have considered had they found themselves in his situation. “I may have. But I don’t look back on that, ever. Not one time. Because I kick ass the way I am now.”

Given his steadfast refusal to give up on life or his dream of becoming a world champion, the most shocking part of Craig Bodzianowski’s inspirational journey is that the body part that ultimately failed him was the organ that kept him going when nearly everyone had told him he would never box again, or should not even make the attempt. He was just 52 when, the night of July 28, 2013, he suffered a heart attack and died in his sleep.

Hollywood loves tales of underdogs who beat the odds, but the fight flick that could have been made about Bodzianowski’s one-of-a-kind comeback never gained traction in La-La Land, if indeed such a pitch ever was made. Perhaps some studio bigwig would have green-lighted a script had the scrappy amputee furnished the requisite exclamation-point finish against Daniels, but he didn’t, and so what if Bodzianowski rebounded from that disappointment to win his last seven bouts to retire with a commendable 31-4-1 record with 23 wins inside the distance?

It says much about the impermanence of fringe-level celebrity that ESPN boxing writer/commentator Mark Kriegel, in his blurb review for my 2020 anthology, Championship Rounds, mentions Bodzianowski in passing as a fighter most readers have never heard of, although they would do well to try to find out about him.

Bodzianowski was building a reputation in the Chicago area as a fighter worth following, winning his first 13 professional bouts, 11 by knockout, when, on May 29, 1984, while driving his Kawasaki 440 at a mere 15 mph, the driver of a parked car suddenly pulled ahead of him, attempted a U-turn and smashed into his bike.

In an instant, the 23-year-old of Polish extraction discovered the hard way why bikers are 25 times more likely to suffer death or serious injury than those involved in car crashes. The list of fighters whose lives or careers were ended by motorcycle mishaps is long, both predating and postdating Bodzianowsk: 1996 IBHOF inductee Young Stribling was 28 when he died from injuries he incurred on Oct. 3, 1933; middleweight contender James Shuler, 26, he perished on March 20, 1986, after is cycle collided with a tractor-trailer; former IBF super featherweight and WBC lightweight champ Diego Corrales, 29, took the eternal 10-count when his bike, traveling at an estimated 100 mph, crashed on May 7, 2009, and two-division world champ Paul “The Punisher” Williams, 26, was paralyzed from the waist down when his bike crashed on May 27, 2012.

“If I could change time, I would,” Williams told Joseph Santoliquito for a 2015 story. “But I can’t, so I have to deal with it. If I wasn’t able to deal with it, I probably would have committed suicide by now or would be angry and depressed all the time. I do feel there are two sides of me: who I was and who I am.”

Somewhat amazingly, Bodzianowski was determined never to look back in regret or self-pity. What happened, happened, and there was no changing it. He would live in the present and look to the future, whatever that might hold. And he was determined it was a future that still included boxing, all predictions to the contrary notwithstanding.

Told that his choices were to have his right leg amputated several inches above his ankle or undergo the possibility of as many as 12 operations over two years, after which he likely would forever walk with a cane and have no more than 70 percent use of the leg, Bodzianowski immediately informed the doctors attending him, “Adios, cut it off.”

That could have and probably should have been the end of Craig Bodzianowski the boxer. But, after a nine-hour surgery and with the benefit of an advancement in prosthesis technology known as the “Seattle Foot,” Bodzianowski showed that his physical limitations were not necessarily as limiting as was widely believed.

“Look, I could have been hurt a lot worse,” Bodzianowski said in 1985. “I could have lost an arm, both legs. I consider myself very, very lucky.”

He slowly began to build upon that semi-good fortune by beginning with a regimen of standing on his artificial leg for hours each day. Once he felt comfortable with that, he’d jog a few steps. Over time, he bumped the distance up to three miles every other day, with a mile run in between.

The next hurdle to be cleared was convincing different groups of physicians that he was, indeed, fit enough to resume his boxing career. There were skeptics, to be sure; Dr. Ferdie Pacheco, Muhammad Ali’s longtime personal physician who later served as a boxing analyst for NBC and Univision, said that, while he admired the “courage and determination of this young man to continue in a dangerous sport, I question and I’m amazed by the lack of judgment and common sense of the boxing commissions and licensors. If this young man should be seriously injured in this sport, where would the commission go hide to avoid the rain of censure falling on its head. The hue and cry, `Ban boxing,’ would be heard throughout the land and I might be the guy to lead it.”

By and by, however, Bodzianowski demonstrated to various state commission-appointed doctors that he was indeed fit enough and mobile enough to be afforded the opportunity to succeed or fail inside the ropes, where it mattered. In his first comeback fight, he knocked out Francis Sargent in two rounds on Dec. 14, 1985. That would be the same opponent he faced in his last pre-accident bout, which he won via 10-round unanimous decision. It was admittedly a tiny sample size, but at first glance it appeared as if the Gator had not only come back, but possibly even a bit better.

“Hey, I was never that graceful when I had two good legs,” Bodzianowski reasoned. “I sort of shuffled side to side.”

In addition to Daniels, Bodzianowski’s other losses came against former WBC cruiserweight champion Alfonzo Ratliff (twice, both by majority decision) and future IBF cruiser ruler James Warring. Given his handicap, the fact that his only four defeats, all on points, came against current, former and future world titlists makes his saga all the more compelling.

“Only in America can a one-legged man fight for the world title!,” mega-promoter Don King harrumphed before Bodzianowski challenged Daniels, the chief undercard bout of a show headlined by two-time former heavyweight champion Tim Witherspoon’s 10-round majority decision over Jose Ribalta.

Ratliff, winner of both of his matchups with Bodzianowski, also came away impressed. “I’ll say one thing about knocking Craig down, he always gets back up,” Ratliff said. “I think the guy’s crazy! He’s such a sneaky fighter that it looks like he’s not throwing hard punches, but the punches are short and they got all his weight in them. He can hurt you. All his punches hurt you. I’ll tell you, that’s the hardest work I’ve had in my life. Craig Bodzianowski, all he knows is to keep coming forward.”

After stepping away as an active fighter, Bodzianowski trained fighters for a while and worked in construction. Always handy in the kitchen, he went on to graduate from Chicago’s Le Cordon Bleu College of Culinary Arts in 2012.

Enduring fame, however, can be fleeting. The novelty of the one-legged fighter who rose near the top of his profession but didn’t quite reach the pinnacle faded. Guest spots with David Letterman, NBC Sports and Inside Edition, as well as an 18-minute documentary of his life and career, Against the Ropes, came and went. More recent fighters with fresh stories emerged. The news cycle always replenishes, unless you are a Muhammad Ali (who attended the Daniels-Bodzianowski fight), Mike Tyson or someone of that stripe.

But Craig Bodzianowski deserves to be remembered, if simply for the bottomless depth of his resolve if not his skill-set, and for the magical, mystery quality of the human spirit he so exemplified.

—

A New Orleans native, Bernard Fernandez retired in 2012 after a 43-year career as a newspaper sports writer, the last 28 years with the Philadelphia Daily News. A former five-term president of the Boxing Writers Association of America, Fernandez won the BWAA’s Nat Fleischer Award for Excellence in Boxing Journalism in 1998 and the Barney Nagler Award for Long and Meritorious Service in 2015. In December of 2019, Fernandez was accorded the highest honor for a boxing writer when he was named to the International Boxing Hall of Fame with the Class of 2020. Last year, Fernandez’s anthology, “Championship Rounds,” was released by RKMA Publishing.

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

Published

1 day ago

July 25, 2024

David A. Avila

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

All that action takes place on Friday.

Elite Boxing

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

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

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

For tickets or information go to www.eliteboxingusa.com

Claressa Shields in Detroit

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

DAZN will stream the heavy-duty fight card.

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

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

Shields doesn’t lose.

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

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

Don’t get Shields mad.

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

That was a ferocious debut for both female pugilists.

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

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

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

Fights to Watch

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

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

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

Omar Trinidad photo by Lina Baker

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

Published

3 days ago

July 24, 2024

Arne K. Lang

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

—

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

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

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

Vanessa Lepage-Joanisse

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

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

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

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Former World Bantamweight Champion Richie Sandoval Passes Away at Age 63

Published

4 days ago

July 22, 2024

Arne K. Lang

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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