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Thomas Hauser’s Literary Notes: Reading Old Books

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Old books can be enlightening and a pleasure to read. I’m not talking now about classics. Just good old books that have been largely forgotten.

A well-written old book offers a window onto the distant past. The facts and scenes might be replicated in works written today. But there’s a different feel to the way that authors of old books presented and interpreted their subject matter within the context of their time.

This article is about non-fiction books written about boxing in the 1920s and earlier. Some notable writers authored novels about the sweet science during that time. Jack London wrote The Game in 1905 and The Abysmal Brute in 1913. George Bernard Shaw penned Cashel Byron’s Profession in 1882. Historian Randy Roberts reminds us that “a novel can sometimes get at deeper truths in a way that a legitimate historian can’t.”

Be that as it may; this inquiry is limited to non-fiction. In that regard, Roberts cautions, “These old books are historical sources. And you have to weigh them like any other historical source in terms of accuracy. What can you confirm? What biases did the writer have? How much attention did the writer pay to detail? If the writer saw a fight himself, it might add credibility to his narrative. But I rarely use these books as the gospel truth.”

Adam Pollack has written a series of exhaustively researched biographies about boxing’s early gloved champions.

“I like accuracy, detail, and truth,” Pollack says. “And the books you’re talking about have very little verification of facts and almost no citation of sources. The authors might have done the best job they could, given the limited resources they had to tap into. But these old books are filled with errors. Writing today, I have the advantage of modern research tools and can access primary sources like old newspaper accounts online.”

And what about the autobiographies by John L. Sullivan, James J. Corbett, Jack Johnson, and their brethren?

“For the fighters’ own personal feelings and certain insights into how they thought about things, those books are okay,” Pollack answers. “But if you’re looking for accuracy, forget it.  Most of the old autobiographies are self-serving and wildly inaccurate. And most of the time, these guys were talking years later off the top of their head. And they were hit in the head a lot.”

Historian Clay Moyle echoes Pollack’s thoughts, saying, “People who were writing a hundred years ago couldn’t go to BoxRec.com to check on the details of a fight. Writing today, I can go into newspaper archives online, read twenty different articles written about the same fight, and piece the jigsaw puzzle together. Today’s research tools are simply better than what writers had to work with a century ago.”

With these caveats in mind, I decided to read an old boxing book. I chose Ten and Out: The Complete Story of the Prize Ring in America by Alexander Johnston.

“Complete” is a relative term. The book was published in 1927 shortly after Gene Tunney defeated Jack Dempsey in their “long count” rematch to solidify his claim to the heavyweight championship of the world. Joe Louis had yet to reign. Rocky Marciano was four years old. Muhammad Ali and Mike Tyson were unimaginable.

Johnston did his best to be an accurate historian. Indeed, he referenced some of the same issues that Roberts, Pollack, and Moyle flagged a century later, acknowledging, “In digging back into the pugilistic records of this country, the chronicler is confronted by many difficulties. In the early days, records were carelessly kept or altogether neglected. For many of the records, we have to depend on the shifting minds of managers or even the fighters themselves, obviously not the most unbiased testimony that could be obtained. We must rely on the stories of eye-witnesses. And spectators at prize fights are not the most reliable recorders.”

Ten and Out begins with a look at prize fighting in England and then, as its title suggests, moves to America. Johnston called boxing “the most exciting form of sport in which man has ever engaged,” and added, “Fighting with the fists is not a gentle sport. Blood will be shed, eyes will be blackened, and there may be accidents of a more serious nature.” He chronicled what he called boxing’s “thuggish past” and its evolution to “a more respectable present,” writing, “The bare knuckle days of the prize ring in America were distinctly a bad time. Anyone who talks of ‘the good old days of real fighting’ is absolutely wrong. They were the bad old days, and the great sport of boxing lived through them because it had inherent rough virtues of its own.”

Johnston’s work focused in large measure on heavyweights. In his hands, major championship fights were well told, particularly those that involved the violent transfer of power from one champion to another.

Writing about James Corbett’s 1892 conquest of John L. Sullivan at the Olympic Club in New Orleans, Johnston recounted, “Sullivan’s strength, speed, hitting power, fighting instinct, and ring ferocity would have made him a great fighter in any generation. [But] in Corbett, he met the first exponent of a new boxing generation which was to carry ring skill far beyond anything that Sullivan’s era had known. The old boxing could not meet the new skill on even terms. Sullivan relied on paralyzing punching but you can’t paralyze a man who refuses to be hit. Corbett was the first real student of boxing. He was always trying new blows and perfecting his delivery of the old ones. He studied defense. Even in the ring, he was perpetually studying the man opposite him.”

Then, in 1897, Corbett fell prey to Bob Fitzsimmons.

“They had broken from a clinch near the center of the ring,” Johnston wrote. “Jim feinted as if to start one of his left hooks for Bob’s jaw when suddenly Fitz straightened up a bit, shot out a long left to the champion’s chin, and then, shifting his feet, drove home his right with all the force of his gigantic shoulders behind it to a place just to the right of the heart where the diaphragm begins. Corbett started to fall forward, and Fitz cracked the jaw again with his left but the last blow was unnecessary. The ‘solar plexus’ blow had done the trick. Gentleman Jim lay and listened to the fateful count. He says that he was conscious when the fatal ‘ten’ was being counted but that he was absolutely paralyzed. So the first champion of the new dispensation in the boxing game had gone and a new king reigned in his stead, even as he had replaced the mighty Sullivan on the throne.”

Fitzsimmons was followed by James Jeffries, who was regaled as a “giant” of a man (which he was for his time). The “giant” stood a shade over 6-feet-1-inch tall and weighed 220 pounds. Johnston believed that, at his peak, “Jeffries could have hammered into submission any pugilist that ever took the ring.”

Then Jeffries retired and, after Marvin Hart and Tommy Burns, Jack Johnson ascended to the throne.

Johnston called the search for a great white hope to beat Johnson “one of the saddest chapters in the history of the heavyweight prize ring in America,” adding, “Whatever may have been Jack Johnson’s failings in personal behavior, he was a fighter. Some competent critics consider him the greatest fighter that ever lived. He was a master boxer with an almost perfect defense and also a smashing wallop. Johnson had learned in his hundreds of ring battles the art of using only as much energy as was needed to carry out any given maneuver of offense or defense. He never allowed himself to be hurried. He conserved his resources of strength and stamina. And when the time came, he was ready for the finisher.”

Johnson was succeeded by Jess Willard. Then, in 1919, Jack Dempsey became king.

“Dempsey,” Johnston wrote, “believed thoroughly that the best defense is a good offense. From the moment the first gong rang, he was at his man. He seemed to burn in the ring with a cold white fighting rage that made it impossible to call on finesse. His one idea was to get at his man and knock him horizontal. He plunged in almost wide open, leaving innumerable chances for a skilled opponent to hurt him. He had, though, excellent recuperative powers and he was a vicious hitter. His most outstanding quality as a fighter was his fighting spirit. He carried more than his share of the ‘killer instinct.’ Given his terrific lust for battle with a killing punch in either hand and a physique able to stand up under punishment, we have a very formidable fistic gladiator.”

Recreating the moment in Willard’s corner after the third round of the carnage inflicted on him by Dempsey’s fists, Johnston wrote, “The champion’s seconds worked over him. Walter Monahan, who had charge of his corner, said, ‘Jess, do you think you can go on?'”

“‘I guess I’m beaten,’ Willard answered. “I can’t go on any longer.'”

“Monahan at once threw a towel into the center of the ring.”

“Willard did not quit,” Johnston wrote. “He was smashed to a bruised and broken object of pity. As they took him from the ring, his jaw drooped foolishly like a gate that had lost one hinge. If he had gone up for another round, there might have been a fatality.”

Johnston had a way with words.

Regarding Jack Johnson’s demolition of James Jeffries when the latter attempted an ill-advised comeback at age 35 (six years after he’d retired from the ring), Johnston turned the race issue upside down, writing of Johnson, “In the middle of the third round, it seems to have dawned on him that he was this man’s master.”

Later, setting the scene for the 1921 bout between Dempsey and George Carpentier (boxing’s first million-dollar gate), Johnston observed, “Following his usual custom, Dempsey went into the ring with several day’s growth of beard on his face. As he sat glowering across at the clean-shaven Carpentier, he looked like a ferocious tramp about to assault a Greek god.”

There’s also an occasional nod to humor.

Prior to challenging Corbett for the heavyweight crown, Fitzsimmons and an acquaintance named Robert H. Davis listened as Mrs. Fitzsimmons prayed to God for her husband’s victory and safety. Davis suggested to the fighter that he do the same, and Fitzsimmons shook his head, saying, “If He won’t do it for her, He won’t do it for me.”

There were parts of Ten and Out that I skimmed when reading through it. I didn’t feel an obligation to Johnston to read his description of every fight and the events surrounding it. But there’s something satisfying in good writing about boxing’s early heavyweight champions as written in their time. It draws a reader closer to these remarkable men and the era in which they lived.

A book that was good when it was written will always have something to offer despite the passage of time.

*         *         *

Allow me, if you will, this non-boxing literary note. . .

Recently, I was going through a cabinet and came across a letter that was written to me in 1958 when I was twelve years old. The correspondent was Howard Pease.

For the uninitiated (which includes almost everyone reading this column), Pease was born in Stockton, California in 1894 and lived in San Francisco for most of his life. He served in the United States Army during World War I and shipped out on several occasions afterward as a crew member on freighters to gather material for books that he was writing.

Pease crafted adventure stories aimed primarily at boys age twelve and older. Many of his books were set on tramp steamers. His first published novel – The Tattooed Man (1926) – introduced the character of Tod Moran, a young merchant mariner who, during the course of thirteen books, works his way up from boiler-room wiper to first mate. Pease also wrote seven non-Tod-Moran novels and two children’s stories. To make ends meet, he taught high school English and, later, was an elementary school principal. He died in 1974.

Pease wanted to show his young readers what the real world was like. His books touched on themes like racism, drug addiction, and struggles between labor and management. In 1939, speaking at a gathering of four hundred librarians, he decried the children’s literature then being published and declared, “We attempt to draw over their heads a beautiful curtain of silk. Let’s catch up with our children, catch up with this world around us. Let’s be leaders, not followers, and let’s be leaders with courage.”

Writers as diverse as E.L. Doctorow and Philip Roth cited Pease’s books as influencing their childhood. Robert Lipsyte (a much-honored sports journalist who has written several award-winning novels for young adults) said recently, “I loved Howard Pease. His books took you somewhere. You could travel with his characters. They were long books, but I tore through them. Reading them was a formative experience for me. When you write for young adults, you’re also functioning as a teacher. And Pease did that. I wish we had more books like that now.”

By age twelve, I’d read all of Pease’s books with the exception of Mystery on Telegraph Hill (which wasn’t published until 1961) and The Gypsy Caravan (which had been written in the early-1920s, published in 1930, and wasn’t available in any of the local libraries where I foraged for books). This was before the Internet and sites like AbeBooks.com. So, I wrote to Pease in care of his publisher, asking where I could get a copy of The Gypsy Caravan. Several weeks later, an envelope addressed to me arrived in the mail with a return address that read, “Howard Pease, 1860 Ora Avenue, Livermore, California.”

Inside, a neatly-typed letter dated October 12, 1958, began, “Dear Tom Hauser, It was a pleasure indeed to get your letter. The Gypsy Caravan was my first book and is now out of print. I’m afraid you will not be able to find a copy anywhere. I’ve looked for some without any success. However, that book was aimed at younger readers than you.”

Pease then recounted that Thunderbolt House was his favorite of the books he’d written, followed by The Dark Adventure, Heart of Danger, and The Tattooed Man. “My most successful book in sales,” he added, “has been The Jinx Ship, a book I do not care for much.” He closed with “Cordially yours” followed by “P.S. In 1946, I spent the summer not too far from your home on Bell Island near Rowayton, Connecticut. Enjoyed it a lot, too.”

In today’s world, I can go to AbeBooks.com and, with a few clicks, order a copy of The Gypsy Caravan.

Pease’s books are more expensive now than most young adult literature from his era. He still has a following among older readers who fondly remember his tales from when they were young.

I have two books by Pease in my home library – The Jinx Ship (published in 1927) and Shipwrecked (1957). Last week, I decided to spend a night reading The Jinx Ship. My copy has “Discard Mt. Pleasant Library” stamped on the front and back end pages. My best guess is that I picked it up at a book sale decades ago.

Stylistically, Pease wrote in a way that was fit for grown-ups but also accessible to young adults. The Jinx Ship is 313 pages long and gives readers a feel for what it was like to be a crewman on a tramp streamer almost a century ago. The plot holds together reasonably well with twists that include gun-running, murder, and a voodoo ceremony on a Caribbean island. On the downside, there are demeaning racial stereotypes typical of the 1920s and the culture that Pease was writing about. The “N-word” appears frequently in dialogue.

After I finished reading The Jinx Ship, I reread Pease’s letter. The paper has aged; the letter was written 63 years ago. But it’s still in good condition.

“My most successful book in sales,” Pease wrote, “has been The Jinx Ship, a book I do not care for much.”

Why didn’t he care for his most commercially-successful novel? The romantic in me would like to think that, as an author who confronted racism in his later work, Pease came to have misgivings about that component of his earlier writing. I’ll never know. I do know that getting his letter meant a lot to me when I was twelve years old. It still does.

Thomas Hauser’s email address is thomashauserwriter@gmail.com. His most recent book – Broken Dreams: Another Year Inside Boxing – was published by the University of Arkansas Press this autumn. In 2004, the Boxing Writers Association of America honored Hauser with the Nat Fleischer Award for career excellence in boxing journalism. In 2019, Hauser was selected for boxing’s highest honor – induction into the International Boxing Hall of Fame.

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Thomas Hauser is the author of 52 books. In 2005, he was honored by the Boxing Writers Association of America, which bestowed the Nat Fleischer Award for career excellence in boxing journalism upon him. He was the first Internet writer ever to receive that award. In 2019, Hauser was chosen for boxing's highest honor: induction into the International Boxing Hall of Fame. Lennox Lewis has observed, “A hundred years from now, if people want to learn about boxing in this era, they’ll read Thomas Hauser.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Maching Gun McGurn

Machine Gun Jack McGurn

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Your jewels and cars and handsome houses;

But things could still be worse you know

At least you haven’t lost your trousers.

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

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

Postscript #2:

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

****

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

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

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

A recognized authority on the history of prizefighting and the history of American sports gambling, TSS editor-in-chief Arne K. Lang is the author of five books including “Prizefighting: An American History,” released by McFarland in 2008 and re-released in a paperback edition in 2020.

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

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Tonight’s fight at Co-op Live Arena in Manchester between Derek Chisora and Otto Wallin bore the tagline “Last Dance.” The reference was to Chisora who at age 41 was on the cusp of his last hurrah. However, when the IBF went and certified the match as an eliminator, that changed the equation and, truth be told, Chisora would have likely soldiered on regardless of the outcome.

The UK boxing fans have embraced Chisora, an honest workman, never an elite fighter, but always a tough out. They certainly hope to see him in action again and they will get their wish. Tonight, he made more fans with a hard-earned, unanimous decision over 34-year-old Swedish southpaw Otto Wallin who went to post a small favorite.

Chisora came out fast, pressuring the Swede while keeping his hands busy. He was comfortably ahead after five rounds, but was seemingly ripe for a comedown after cuts developed above and below his right eye. Fortunately for him, he had the prominent Canadian cutman Russ Amber in his corner.

Chisora scored two knockdowns before the fight was finished. The first came in round nine when Chisora caught Wallin with a punch that landed high on his temple. In a delayed reaction, Wallin went flying backward, landing on his butt. Wallin recovered nicely and had his best round in the next frame.

Wallin appeared to be winning the final round when Chisora put the explanation point on his performance just as the final bell was about to ring, catching the Swede off-balance with a cuffing right hand that sent him to the floor once again. If not for that knockdown, there would have been some controversy when the scores were read. The tallies were 117-109, 116-110, and 114-112, the latter of which was too generous to Wallin (27-3).

“I love the sport and I love the fans,” said Derek Chisora (36-13, 23 KOs), addressing the audience in his post-fight interview. His next bout will likely come against the winner of the match between Daniel Dubois and Joseph Parker happening later this month in Saudi Arabia.

Semi-wind-up

Stoke-on-Kent middleweight Nathan Heaney disappointed his large contingent of rooters when he was upset by French invader Sofiane Khati. The 35-year-old Heaney, who was 18-1-1 heading in, started well and was slightly ahead after six frames when things turned sour.

Both landed hard punches simultaneously in round seven, but the Frenchman’s punch was more damaging, knocking out Heaney’s mouthpiece and putting him on the canvas. When he arose, Khati, a 6/1 underdog, charged after him and forced the referee to intrude, saving Heaney from more punishment. The official time was 1:08 of round seven. It was the sixth win in the last seven tries for Khati (18-5, 7 KOs) who, akin to Chisora, is enjoying a late-career resurgence.

Other Bouts of Note

Lancashire junior welterweight Jack Rafferty was an 18/1 favorite over Morecambe ditch digger Reece MacMillan and won as expected. MacMillan’s corner tossed in the towel at the 1:08 mark of round seven. Rafferty’s record now stands at 25-0 (16 KOs), giving him the longest current unbeaten run of any British boxer. It was the second loss in 19 starts for MacMillan.

In a lackluster performance, Zach Parker, now competing as a light heavyweight, improved his record to 26-1 (19) with a 10-round decision over France’s Mickael Diallo (21-2-2) who took the bout on five days’ notice after Parker’s original opponent Willy Hutchinson suffered a bad shoulder injury in sparring and had to withdraw. The scores were 98-92, 98-93, and 97-94.

Parker’s lone defeat came in a domestic showdown with John Ryder, a match in which he could not continue after four rounds because of a broken hand. The prize for Ryder was a date with Canelo Alvarez. Mickael Diallo has another fight booked in four weeks in Long Beach, California.

Also

Featherweight Zak Miller scored the biggest win of his career, capturing a pair of regional trinkets with a 12-round majority decision over Masood Abdulah. The judges had it 115-113, 115-114, and 114-114.

Heading in, Miller was 15-1 but had defeated only one opponent with a winning record. It was the first pro loss for Abdulah (11-1), an Afghanistan-born Londoner.

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Avila Perspective, Chap. 313: The Misadventures of Canelo and Jake Paul (and More)

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Avila Perspective, Chap. 313: The Misadventures of Canelo and Jake Paul (and More)

Boxing news has taken a weird arc.

For the past 20 years or so, social media has replaced newspapers, radio and television as a source for boxing news.

And one thing is certain:

You cannot truly rely on many social media accounts to be accurate. Unless they are connected to actual reputable journalists. There are not that many.

Claims of Saul “Canelo” Alvarez and Jake Paul reaching an agreement to fight each other this year were rampant on social media sites. No contracts had been signed between the two parties, but several social media accounts claimed the fight was happening. One claimed: “it was official.”

It is not happening as of Friday Feb. 7. 10 a.m. Pacific Time.

A statement by Most Valuable Promotions was sent Friday Feb. 7, to various boxing publications that emphasized the Canelo-Paul fight is not official.

“MVP was deep in negotiations for a blockbuster fight between Jake Paul and Canelo Alvarez on Cinco de Mayo weekend in Las Vegas…This situation is a reminder not to believe everything you read.”

The past few days numerous social media accounts were posting erroneously that Paul and Canelo Alvarez were fighting on a certain date and place. It was jumped on by other social media accounts like Piranhas and gobbled up and spit out as actual verified news.

Fake news is happening more and more. I hate that term but it’s becoming more common.

Many accounts on social media sites are not trained journalists. They don’t understand that being the first to spit out news is not as important as being accurate.

Also, there is no such thing as using the term “according to sources” without naming the source. Who made the claim?

Third, verification of a fight comes from the promoters. They are the most reliable methods of verifying a pending fight. It’s their job. Don’t rely on a fighter, a trainer or somebody’s friend. Call the promoter involved and they will verify.

Otherwise, it’s just rumor and exaggeration.

There are social media accounts with trained journalists. Find out which social media accounts are connected to actual news media sources and established by trained journalists. A real journalist verifies a story before it is published.

R.I.P. Michael Katz

Recently, a highly respected journalist, Michael Katz, passed away. He wrote for various newspapers including the New York Times and for various boxing web sites such as Maxboxing.com and a few others.

Katz covered prize fights beginning in 1968 with the heavyweight fight between Floyd Patterson and Jimmy Ellis. Read the full story in www.TheSweetscience.com by Arne Lang.

I first came across Katz probably in 1994 when I began covering boxing events as a writer for the L.A .Times. During media press conferences Katz was one of the more prominent writers and very outspoken.

The New York-bred Katz could tell you stories about certain eras in boxing. I happened to overhear one or two while sitting around a dinner buffet in the media rooms in Las Vegas. He always had interesting things to say.

Boxing writers come in waves during each era. Today this new era of boxing writers has dwindled to almost nothing. Writing has been overtaken by boxing videographers. The problem is during an actual fight, videographers cannot record the fight itself. The media companies sponsoring the fight cards don’t allow it. So, after a fight is completed, very few descriptions of a fight exist. Only interviews.

Written journalism is shrinking due to the lack of newspapers, magazines and periodicals. The only sure way to know what happened is by seeing the fight on tape. You won’t see many stories on a bulletin board at a boxing gym because there are fewer boxing writers today. The written history of a championship fight has shrunk to almost nothing.

Katz was one of the superb writers from the 1960s to the 2000s. It’s a shrinking base that gets smaller every day. It’s a dying breed but there are still some remaining.

Fights in SoCal

All Star Boxing returns with two female fights on the card on Saturday Feb. 8, at Commerce Casino in Commerce, Calif.

Stephanie Simon (1-0) and Archana Sharma (3-2) are scheduled to headline the boxing card in a super lightweight main event. Others on the boxing event include Ricardo De La Torre, Bryan Albarran and Jose Mancilla to name a few.

Doors open at 6 p.m. No one under 14 will be admitted. For more information call (323) 816-6200.

Fights to Watch

Sat. DAZN 10:30 a.m. Derek Chisora (35-13) vs Otto Wallin (27-2).

To comment on this story in the Fight Forum CLICK HERE

 

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