Joe Cortez Mourns the Loss of Gaspar Ortega, His Friend of 60-plus Years

Published

2 years ago

December 21, 2021

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“Gaspar Ortega has fought everybody who was anybody in the welterweight division since he turned professional in 1953. He’s been on television more times than Ben Casey and he’s had more fights than most pugs have had workouts. What he doesn’t know about boxing hasn’t been invented.”

So wrote Ron Amos in the May 14, 1964 issue of the Las Vegas Review Journal in reference to Ortega’s forthcoming fight at the Castaways, a little hotel-casino that sat next to a gas station in the center of the Las Vegas Strip. This would be Ortega’s only appearance in Nevada, but the vagabond prizefighter, a self-described boxing gypsy, sure did get around. He fought all over the U.S. and made three trips overseas during a career in which he had 176 documented fights and likely a few dozen more that weren’t recorded. His record, per boxrec.com, was 131-39-6 with 69 KOs.

Ortega passed away at age 86 on Dec. 13 in Naples, Florida, where he had had gone to live with a daughter following the death of his wife Iraida who passed away in November of last year. Gaspar and Iraida, a native New Yorker, were married for 64 years.

Born in Mexicali, Gaspar Ortega spent his formative years in Tijuana where lore has it that the home he shared with his parents and 11 siblings had no electricity and a dirt floor. He had his first twenty-three documented fights in northern Mexico and his twenty-fourth at Madison Square Garden where he gradually built himself into a headliner.

Ortega developed rivalries with most of the top welterweights of his day including the tough Cubans Isaac Logart and Florentino Fernandez. He won two out of three from future Hall of Famer Tony DeMarco, a trilogy shoe-horned into only 68 days. “After a fight,” Ortega recalled, “my manager would say, ‘Stay in shape. We might need you to fight again tomorrow.’ I would say, ‘I’m ready.’”

Ortega’s father was of Spanish descent and his mother was a Zapotec Indian. The elaborate Indian headdress that he wore into the ring was ostensibly meant to honor her although one suspects that the idea of it may have been conceived by a wily press agent. It made him one of the most well-known ring personalities in a day when there were two and sometimes three nationally televised fights every week. Indeed, he may have been the most well-known boxer of his era that never held a world title.

Ortega had one crack at it. On June 3, 1961, in his eighty-second documented bout, he challenged Emile Griffith at LA’s fabled Olympic Auditorium. They had met once before with Griffith winning a split decision, but on this particular night Griffith had all the best of it until the referee called it off in the 12^th round.

Incredibly, Ortega wouldn’t be stopped again until very late in his career when he was stopped by junior middleweight champion Sandro Mazzinghi in a non-title bout in Rome. Ortega’s corner pulled him out at the conclusion of the sixth round. And that may be the most remarkable fact about Gaspar Ortega’s boxing career – that not once in 176 documented fights was “El Indio” ever knocked down for the count.

When Ortega moved to New York, he took up residence in an apartment building in a complex of six-story buildings on East 99^th Street which was a few subway stops away from Stillman’s Gym where he trained under the watchful eye of the noted trainer and cut man Freddie Brown. Joe Cortez and his brother Mike lived with their divorced mother and two siblings in the building right next door.

Mike, a year older than Joe, was thirteen years old when Ortega became his neighbor. According to an article in the New York Daily News, Mike took to following Ortega around when the boxer did his roadwork and mimicked Ortega’s shadow boxing. That served him well when he took up the sport at the boys’ club on 111^th Street.

Joe followed his brother into the squared circle and both became stars on the regional amateur circuit. The Cortez brothers won back-to-back New York Golden Gloves titles in 1960 and 1961, Mike at 126 and then 135 pounds, Joe at 112 and 118. (The 1961 finals at Madison Square Garden attracted a crowd of 16,119, indicative of the role that amateur boxing played back then in the sporting life of the city.)

Joe (l) and Mike

As a pro, Mike Cortez never went far, finishing 16-10-2. Joe fared better, 18-1 (13-1 documented), but never advanced beyond the preliminary stage. His final fight was at the La Concha Resort in San Juan, not far from Fajardo, Puerto Rico, where Joe worked as an assistant manager at the Conquistador Hotel after starting as a front desk clerk.

Although they weren’t that far apart in age, Ortega was something of a surrogate father to the Cortez brothers. He mentored them and Joe returned the favor, mentoring Gaspar’s son Mike Ortega who, like Joe, would go on to become a world class referee. Joe Cortez is Mike Ortega’s godfather. (Although he grew up in New Haven, Connecticut, where his parents eventually settled, Mike Ortega was actually born at a hospital in Hollywood, California. Papa wasn’t there. Gaspar was at work at LA’s Pacific Coast League baseball park, Wrigley Field, carving out a split decision over Kid Gavilan.)

“I talked with [Gaspar] every month on the phone for the last 50 years,” Cortez told this reporter. “He was like family. I got him hired as an extra in the Rocky Balboa film and he stayed in our house during the six days they were filming here in Las Vegas.” In the 2006 movie, Cortez is the third man in the ring for the climactic fight scenes. Ortega is seen seated at a ringside table portraying a boxing commissioner.

Gaspar Ortega kept mentoring novice boxers almost to the end of his days. In Connecticut, he worked as a counselor for a nonprofit agency for troubled teenagers and volunteered his time as a boxing instructor at a community center. He didn’t leave the sport with a lot of money, but with enough to live comfortably. It was his habit to return to Tijuana for one or two weeks every year where, according to Iraida, he was welcomed like visiting royalty.

In documented fights, Ortega answered the bell for 1293 rounds. A boxer with this many rounds on his dossier figures to be walking on his heels with marbles in his mouth before he is old enough to draw social security, but “El Indio” was one of the lucky ones, blessed with a cast-iron constitution. More amazing, for many years he was a pack-a-day cigarette smoker.

Joe Cortez, who was enshrined in the International Boxing Hall of Fame in 2011, has had some tough times in recent years. In 2009, he was diagnosed with prostate cancer (it’s in remission). His wife Sylvia is a two-time breast cancer survivor. Their daughter Cindy has been in a wheelchair since 1996, the result of a rollover accident caused by a defective tire that left her a qudriplegic. And in November of last year Joe came down with Covid which resulted in a five-month hospital stay during which he wasn’t allowed to have any visitors.

“I weathered the storms,” says Cortez, 77, proudly. But the hits keep coming, even if they don’t directly impact his immediate family. For Joe Cortez, losing Gaspar Ortega was like losing a brother.

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Arne K. Lang

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A Paean to the Great Sportswriter Jimmy Cannon Who Passed Away 50 Years Ago This Week

Published

1 day ago

December 4, 2023

Arne K. Lang

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“Of all his assignments,” said the renowned sportswriter Dave Anderson, “[Jimmy] Cannon appeared to enjoy boxing the most.”

Cannon would have sheepishly concurred. He dated his infatuation with boxing to 1919 when he stood outside a saloon listening to a man with a megaphone relay bulletins from the Dempsey-Willard fight in faraway Toledo. His father followed boxing as did all the Irishmen in his neighborhood. For him, an interest in the sport of boxing, he once wrote, was like a family heirloom. But it became a love-hate relationship. It was Jimmy Cannon, after all, who coined the phrase “boxing is the red light district of sports.”

This week marks the 50^th anniversary of Jimmy Cannon’s death. He passed away at age 63 on Dec. 5, 1973, in his room at the residential hotel in mid-Manhattan where he made his home. In the realm of American sportswriters, there has never been a voice quite like him. He was “the hardest-boiled of the hard-drinking, hard-boiled school of sports writing,” wrote Darrell Simmons of the Atlanta Journal. One finds a glint of this in his summary of Sonny Liston’s first-round demolition of Albert Westphal in 1961: “Sonny Liston hit Albert Westphal like he was a cop.”

In his best columns, Jimmy Cannon was less a sportswriter than an urban poet. Here’s what he wrote about Archie Moore in 1955 after Moore trounced Bobo Olson to set up a match with Rocky Marciano: “Someone should write a song about Archie Moore who in the Polo Grounds knocked out Bobo Olson in three rounds…It should be a song that comes out of the backrooms of sloughed saloons on night-drowned streets in morning-worried parts of bad towns. The guy who writes this one must be a piano player who can be dignified when he picks a quarter out of the marsh of a sawdust floor.”

Prior to fighting in Madison Square Garden the previous year – his first appearance in that iconic boxing arena – Moore had roamed the globe in search of fights in a career that began in the Great Depression. Cannon was partial to boxers like Archie Moore, great ring artisans who toiled in obscurity, fighting for small purses –“moving-around money” in Cannon’s words — until the establishment could no longer ignore them.

Jimmy Cannon was born in Lower Manhattan. He left high school after one year to become a copy boy for the New York Daily News. In 1936, at age 26, the News sent him to cover the biggest news story of the day, the Lindbergh Baby kidnapping trial. While there he met Damon Runyon who would become a lifelong friend. At Runyon’s suggestion, he applied for a job as a sportswriter at the New York American, a Hearst paper, and was hired.

During World War II, he was a war correspondent in Europe embedded in Gen. George S. Patton’s Third Army. When he returned from the war, he joined the New York Post and then, in 1959, the Journal-American which made him America’s highest-paid sportswriter at a purported salary of $1000 a week. His articles were syndicated and appeared in dozens of papers.

Cannon was very close to Joe Louis. He was the only reporter that Louis allowed in his hotel room on the morning of the Brown Bomber’s rematch with Max Schmeling. Louis, he wrote, “was a credit to his race, the human race.” It was his most-frequently-quoted line.

In an early story, Cannon named Sam Langford the best pound-for-pound fighter of all time. Later he joined with his colleagues on Press Row in naming Sugar Ray Robinson the greatest of the greats. As for the fellow who anointed himself “The Greatest,” Muhammad Ali, Cannon profoundly disliked him. He persisted in calling him Cassius Clay long after Ali had adopted his Muslim name.

It troubled Cannon that Ali was afforded an opportunity to fight for the title after only 19 pro fights. Ali’s poetry, he thought, was infantile. He abhorred Ali’s political views. And, truth be told, he didn’t like Ali because certain segments of society adored him. Cannon didn’t like non-conformists – hippies and anti-war protesters and such. When queried about his boyhood in Greenwich Village, he was quick to note that he lived there “when it was a decent neighborhood, before it became freaky.”

Cannon’s animus toward Ali spilled over into his opinion of Ali’s foil, the bombastic sportscaster Howard Cosell. “If Howard Cosell were a sport,” he wrote,” it would be roller derby.”

Cannon frequently filled his column with a series of one-liners published under the heading “Nobody Asked Me, But…” His wonderfully acerbic put-down of Cosell appeared in one of these columns. But one can’t read these columns today without cringing at some of his ruminations. He once wrote, “Any man is in trouble if he falls in love with a woman he can’t knock down with one punch.” If a newspaperman wrote those words today, he would be out of a job so fast it would make his head spin.

Similarly, his famous line about Joe Louis being a credit to the human race no longer resonates in the way that it once did. There is in its benevolence an air of racial prejudice.

Jimmy Cannon was a lifelong bachelor but in his younger days before he quit drinking cold turkey in 1948, he was quite the ladies man, often seen promenading showgirls around town. Like his pal Damon Runyon, he was a night owl. As the years passed, however, he became somewhat reclusive. The world passed him by when rock n’ roll came in, pushing aside the Tin Pan Alley crooners and torch singers that had kept him company at his favorite late-night haunts.

Cannon’s end days were tough. He suffered a stroke in 1971 as he was packing to go to the Kentucky Derby and spent most of his waking hours in his last two-plus years in a wheelchair. Fortunately, he could afford to hire a full-time attendant. In 2002, he was posthumously elected to the International Boxing Hall of Fame in the Observer category.

Jimmy Cannon once said that he resented it when someone told him that his stuff was too good to be in a newspaper. It was demeaning to newspapers and he never wanted to be anything but a newspaperman. He didn’t always bring his “A” game and some of his stuff wouldn’t hold up well, but the man could write like blazes and the sportswriting profession lost a giant when he drew his last breath.

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Arne K. Lang is a recognized authority on the history of prizefighting and the history of American sports gambling. His latest book, titled Clash of the Little Giants: George Dixon, Terry McGovern, and the Culture of Boxing in America, 1890-1910, was released by McFarland in September, 2022.

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Ryan “KingRy” Garcia Returns With a Bang; KOs Oscar Duarte

Published

3 days ago

December 2, 2023

David A. Avila

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It was a different Ryan “KingRy” Garcia the world saw in defeating Mexico’s rugged Oscar Duarte, but it was that same deadly left hook counter that got the job done by knockout on Saturday.

Only the quick survive.

Garcia (24-1, 20 KOs) used a variety of stances before luring knockout artist Duarte (26-1-1, 21 KOs) into his favorite punch before a sold-out crowd at Toyota Arena in Houston, Texas. That punch should be patented in gold.

It was somewhat advertised as knockout artist versus matinee idol, but those who know the sport knew that Garcia was a real puncher. But could he rebound from his loss earlier this year?

The answer was yes.

Garcia used a variety of styles beginning with a jab at a prescribed distance via his new trainer Derrick James. It allowed both Garcia and Duarte to gain footing and knock the cobwebs out of their reflexes. Garcia’s jab scored most of the early points during the first three rounds. He also snapped off some left hooks and rights.

“He was a strong fighter, took a strong punch,” said Garcia. “I hit him with some hard punches and he kept coming.”

Duarte, an ultra-pale Mexican from Durango, was cautious, knowing full well how many Garcia foes had underestimated the power behind his blows.

Slowly the muscular Mexican fighter began closing in with body shots and soon both fighters were locked in an inside battle. Garcia used a tucked-in shoulder style while Duarte pounded the body, back of the head and in the back causing the referee to warn for the illegal punches twice.

Still, Duarte had finally managed to punch Garcia with multiple shots for several rounds.

Around the sixth round Garcia was advised by his new trainer to begin jabbing and moving. It forced Duarte out of his rhythm as he was unable to punch without planting his feet. Suddenly, the momentum had reversed again and Duarte looked less dangerous.

“I had to slow his momentum down. That softened him up,” said Garcia about using that change in style to change Duarte’s pressure attack. “Shout out to Derrick James.”

Boos began cascading from the crowd but Garcia was on a roll and had definitely regained the advantage. A quick five-punch combination rocked Duarte though not all landed. The danger made the Mexican pause.

In the eighth round Duarte knew he had to take back the momentum and charged even harder. In one lickety-split second a near invisible counter left hook connected on Duarte’s temple and he stumbled like a drunken soldier on liberty in Honolulu. Garcia quickly followed up with rights and uppercuts as Duarte had a look of terror as his legs failed to maintain stability. Down he went for the count.

Duarte was counted out by referee James Green at 2:51 of the eighth round as Garcia watched from the other side of the ring.

“I started opening up my legs a little bit to open up the shot,” explained Garcia. “When I hurt somebody that hard, I just keep cracking them. I hurt him with a counter left hook.”

The weapon of champions.

Garcia’s victory returns him back to the forefront as one of boxing’s biggest gate attractions. A list of potential foes is his to dissect and choose.

“I’m just ready to continue to my ascent to be a champion at 140,” Garcia said.

It was a tranquil end after such a tumultuous last three days.

Other Bouts

Floyd Schofield (16-0, 12 KOs) blitzed Mexico’s Ricardo “Not Finito” Lopez (17-8-3) with a four knockdown blowout that left fans mesmerized and pleased with the fighter from Austin, Texas.

Schofield immediately shot out quick jabs and then a lightning four-punch combination that delivered Lopez to the canvas wondering what had happened. He got up. Then Scholfield moved in with a jab and crisp left hook and down went Lopez like a dunked basketball bouncing.

At this point it seemed the fight might stop. But it proceeded and Schofield unleashed another quick combo that sent Lopez down though he did try to punch back. It was getting monotonous. Lopez got up and then was met with another rapid fire five- or six-punch combination. Lopez was down for the fourth time and the referee stopped the devastation.

“I appreciate him risking his life,” said Schofield of his victim.

In a middleweight clash Shane Mosley Jr. (21-4, 12 KOs) out-worked Joshua Conley (17-6-1, 11 KOs) for five rounds before stopping the San Bernardino fighter at 1:51 of the sixth round. It was Mosley’s second consecutive knockout and fourth straight win.

Mosley continues to improve in every fight and again moves up the middleweight rankings.

Super middleweight prospect Darius Fulghum (9-0, 9 KOs) of Houston remained undefeated and kept his knockout string intact with a second round pounding and stoppage over Pachino Hill (8-5-1) in 56 seconds of that round.

Photo credit: Golden Boy Promotions

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Jordan Gill TKOs Michael Conlan Who May Have Reached the End of the Road

Published

3 days ago

December 2, 2023

Arne K. Lang

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Fighting on his home turf, two-time Olympian Michael Conlan was an 8/1 favorite over Jordan Gill tonight in Belfast, Northern Ireland. Had he won, Matchroom promoter Eddie Hearn was eyeing a rematch for Conlan with Leigh Wood. Their March 2022 rumble in Nottingham was a popular pick for the Fight of the Year. But the 29-year-old Gill, a Cambridgeshire man, rendered that discussion moot with a seventh-round stoppage. It was Conlan’s third loss inside the distance in the last 18 months and he would be wise to call it a day. His punch resistance is plainly not what it once was.

It was with considerable fanfare that Conlan cast his lot with Top Rank coming out of the amateur ranks. Tonight was his first assignment for Matchroom and his first fight at 130 pounds after coming up short in two world featherweight title fights. And he almost didn’t make it past the second round. Gill had him on the canvas in the opening minute of round two compliments of a left hook and stunned him late in the round with a right hand that left him on unsteady legs.

He survived the round and for a fleeting moment in the sixth frame it appeared that he had reversed Gill’s momentum. But Gill took charge again in the next stanza, trapping Conlan in the corner and unloading a fusillade of punches that forced referee Howard Foster to waive it off, much to the great dismay of the crowd. The official time was 1:09 of round seven.

Released by Top Rank, Conlan trained for this fight in Miami, Florida, under Pedro Diaz, best known for rejuvenating the career of Miguel Cotto. But the switch in trainer and in promoter made no difference as Conlan, who won his first amateur title at age 11, was damaged goods before he entered the ring. It was a career-defining victory for Jordan Gill (28-2-1, 9 KOs) who was not known as a big puncher and was returning to the ring after being stopped by Kiko Martinez 13 months ago in his previous start.

Semi-wind-up

In the “Battle of Belfast,” undefeated welterweight Lewis Crocker seized control in the opening round and went on to win a lopsided decision over intra-city rival Tyrone McKenna (23-4-1). Two of the judges gave Crocker every round and the other had it 98-92, but yet this was entertaining fight in spurts. McKenna had more fans in the building, but Crocker, seven years younger at age 26, went to post a 7/2 favorite and youth was served.

Other Bouts of Note

Belfast super welterweight Caoimhin Agyarko, who overcame a near-fatal mugging at age 20, advanced to 14-0 (7) with a 10-round split decision over Troy Williamson (20-2-1). The judges had it 98-92 and 97-93 for Agyarko with a dissenter submitting a curious 96-94 score for the 31-year-old Williamson who wasn’t able to exploit his advantages in height and reach.

Sean McComb, a 31-year-old Belfast southpaw, scored what was arguably the best win of his career with a 10-round beat-down of longtime sparring partner Sam Maxwell. Two of the judges gave McComb every round and the other had it 99-88. McComb, who has an interesting nickname, “The Public Nuisance, successfully defended his WBO European super welterweight strap while elevating his record to 18-1 (6). The fading, 35-year-old Maxwell, a former BBBofC British title-holder, lost for third time in his last four starts after winning his first 16 pro fights.

Photo credit: Mark Robinson / Matchroom

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