Leach Cross vs. Mexican Joe: A Great Boxing Rivalry Buried in the Sands of Time

Published

1 year ago

June 14, 2023

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The Jan. 14, 1913 fight between Leach Cross and Mexican Joe Rivers was a humdinger, but for some fight-goers it was a night to forget. The event was oversold. The aisles were jammed with standees and ticket-holders arriving late were left out in the cold when the fire marshal ordered the doors to be shut. Some of those that made it inside discovered that their wallet was missing. In the lobby of the arena and outside on the street, pickpockets worked the crowd to great effect. Such were the hazards of attending a major boxing show in New York during the early years of the twentieth century.

Cross vs. Rivers – the first salvo of a great rivalry – was staged at the Manhattan Casino which was situated on the corner of 155^th Street and Eighth Avenue in the upper reach of Harlem. This warrants a clarification.

The word “casino” has come to be associated with gambling. Back in those days, it carried no such inference. The most salient image was that of a place where couples came to dance to a live orchestra. Harlem hadn’t yet become a signpost of Black America. In 1913, it had a burgeoning population of upwardly mobile Jews who had escaped the tenements of the Lower East Side. And Leach Cross, born Louis Wallach to immigrants from Austria, was one of them, a landsmen.

Cross (pictured) and Mexican Joe were lightweights. No title was at stake when they locked horns that night in Harlem or in any of their subsequent meetings. Indeed, both were considered a notch below the topmost fighters in their weight class. However, it was a very sexy division which owed to two factors. The heavyweight class was bereft of charismatic fighters other than Jack Johnson whose career was in limbo because of legal problems. And in no other division was the talent pool as deep. “In those days,” reminisced the colorful fight manager Dumb Dan Morgan, “there was a good lightweight on every streetcorner.”

The principals: Leach Cross and Mexican Joe Rivers

Leach Cross didn’t look like a fighter. “He had the lean, cadaverous appearance of the professional distance runner who has overtrained,” wrote one reporter. But his appearance was deceiving. Prior to meeting Rivers, he had knocked out Young Otto and One Round Hogan, reputable opponents, and had feathered his cap with a clear 10-round decision over Battling Nelson. True, the Durable Dane was then past his prime, but in his heyday the former two-time lightweight champion was the most talked-about non-heavyweight on the planet.

By and large, young Jewish men were avid fight fans and from a ticket-selling standpoint it mattered greatly that “Leachie” was a member of the tribe. He had another distinction that made him stand out. He was a dentist with a flourishing practice in the Bowery.

Unlike Leach Cross, Mexican Joe Rivers, who turned pro in 1908 at age 16, looked very much like a boxer. Three inches shorter than Cross at five-foot-four, he had a well-defined physique. “Physically,” said a reporter for the Los Angeles Times, “Joe is one of the grandest pieces of furniture ever seen in a ring. His body is the body of a sculptor’s dream.”

Mexican

Mexican Joe had far less experience than Leach Cross but had fought stiffer competition. He had split two fights with future Hall of Famer Johnny Kilbane and with Joe Mandot, the Pride of New Orleans, and had TKOed Frankie Conley, an outstanding fighter from Wisconsin, after their first encounter ended in a draw. His most famous fight had come the previous year against world lightweight champion Ad Wolgast. In the thirteenth round of a 20-round fight, Rivers and Wolgast landed simultaneous knockout punches. Rivers hit the canvas first, Wolgast landing on top of him, whereupon referee Jack Welsh helped the semi-conscious Wolgast to his feet and named him the winner. The queer ending provoked a long-running debate.

Prior to meeting up with Leach Cross, Mexican Joe had fought exclusively in California. The West Coast vs. East Coast angle imbued their fights with a bit more cachet in a day when the country wasn’t as homogenized.

Cross-Rivers I (Jan. 14, 1913)

Those that navigated their way to their assigned seat without incident were treated to a riveting fight. “The bout never lagged,” said a reporter. “Action was rife from start to finish.”

Cross put Rivers on the canvas in the second round, but Rivers — “the hot tamale from out West” in the words of a Connecticut scribe — was never deterred from pressing the action and at the final bell of the 10-rounder, Cross returned to his stool “very distressed.”

This was the no-decision era of boxing in New York. Prizefights were ostensibly sparring exhibitions (wink, wink) and referees were prohibited from naming a winner. Bets were decided based on the verdict of a designated ringside reporter or by the consensus of a panel of reporters whose judgments were culled from the next day’s newspapers. Chalk this one up to Joe Rivers, but softly, as few would have complained if the verdict was returned as a draw.

Cross-Rivers II (April 8, 1913)

Not quite 11 weeks later, Leach Cross and Mexican Joe Rivers had a do-over. The venue was St. Nicholas Arena on 66^th Street, a former indoor ice skating rink. There was no repetition of the hooliganism that had scarred the first meeting. The promoters, the McMahon brothers, Eddie and Jess (the latter was the grandfather of WWE impresario Vince McMahon) were on a short leash and extra security was hired to keep order outside the arena and turn away would-be gate crashers.

Cross and Rivers delivered another crowd-pleaser. The 10-rounder was a “whirlwind battle” wrote the stringer for the Chicago Inter-Ocean.

Many of the rounds were undoubtedly tough to score as one finds a great deal of variation in round-by-round reports. What everyone seemed to agree on, however, is that Cross showed more stamina than in the first meeting, dominating the ninth round and having a shade the best of it in the final stanza. But, in the eyes of New York’s foremost boxing writer Robert Edgren, his rally came too late.

“Rivers won easily” wrote Edgren, the sports editor of the New York Evening World. Rube Goldberg, who would achieve fame as a cartoonist but was then covering fights for the New York Evening Mail, thought otherwise: “It would be unjust to either man to call the fight anything but a draw,” he wrote.

A survey of 11 ringside reporters by the Brooklyn Daily Eagle found that six favored the Mexican, two gave it to Cross and the others had it a draw.

“It seems that only a longer battle will satisfy to determine which is the better man,” said a correspondent for a Buffalo paper. And before the year was out, he got his wish. The Cross-Rivers rivalry went west to Vernon, California, an industrial suburb of Los Angeles, where fights were allowed up to 20 rounds.

Cross-Rivers III (Nov. 27, 1913)

The third meeting between Rivers and Cross created a lot of buzz in the City of Angels. Three days before the Thanksgiving Day battle, on Nov. 24, a joint workout in Vernon attracted a reported crowd of 4,000.

Vernon was Mexico Joe’s turf. He was the “house fighter” at promoter Tom McCarey’s wooden pavilion. Ten of his previous 13 fights took place in this very ring.

Cross-Rivers III started at 3:30 in the afternoon and concluded after sundown with the ring illuminated by lights that were turned on as the fight was in progress.

Rivers knocked Cross to the canvas with a right-left combination in round four and again in round 12, but on each occasion Cross fought back feverishly. In round 19, with Rivers plainly ahead, there was high drama as the match turned sharply in favor of the New Yorker; Cross battered Rivers from pillar to post. But Rivers weathered the storm and, as it turned out, Cross had exhausted all of his bullets. He had no argument when the referee awarded the fight to Mexican Joe.

“It was the greatest battle ever fought in a southern [California] ring,” gushed Harry A. Williams of the LA Times.

Rivers-Wolgast IV (Aug. 11, 1914)

Prizefighters invariably have an alibi to explain why they lost, and Leach Cross had a good one. Seventeen days before the bout, he had fought lightweight champion Willie Ritchie in a non-title 10-rounder at Madison Square Garden and he was still feeling the effects of that hard tussle. “With proper rest,” said Cross, “I would have beaten this guy.”

That was sufficient inducement for promoter McCarey to summon up yet another sequel.

The fourth and final installment of the rivalry was redemption for Leach Cross who was deemed the winner in a bout so absorbing that one of the spectators passed out from all the excitement.

Mexican Joe piled up points in the early rounds, but he lost some of the steam on his punches after suffering a bad cut on his lower lip in round five. Rivers landed the best punch of the fight in round 18, a left hook to the jaw, but he got discouraged when Cross stayed upright and failed to press his advantage. Had he done so, he would have likely pulled the fight out of the fire as the match very close.

How close was it? “Cross won by a shade as fine as that cast by a single strand of a spider’s web on a foggish day,” said the ringside reporter for the Los Angeles Evening Express.

And that was that; 60 rounds of boxing spread across 20 months with interruptions for a slew of intervening fights and when it was all over, one couldn’t say that one man was plainly superior. As rivalries go, Cross vs. Rivers will never rank with boxing’s most storied multi-fight rivalries, but it was chock full of pregnant moments.

Postscripts

Leach Cross was a wealthy man when he retired from boxing in 1916. With his ring earnings he purchased an 80-unit apartment building in Hollywood. He disposed of his California real estate holdings following the stock market crash of 1929, resumed his dental practice in New York, and kept his hand in the fight game as a referee and a judge. He was well-off financially when he passed away in 1957.

Mexican Joe Rivers had his last fight in 1924 in the Los Angeles County community of San Fernando. It was a 4-rounder which was all that the law allowed after voters in the Golden State had approved a constitutional amendment to abolish prizefighting in the November elections of 1914. When things were going good, Joe lived high. He owned a big touring car, expensive jewelry, and dozens of custom-made suits. In 1955, when he was 63 years old, a reporter for the Los Angeles Times found him living alone in a windowless room in a flophouse hotel, his only possession a 200-year-old violin passed down from his father. The reporter discovered that Mexican Joe wasn’t actually a Mexican. A fourth-generation Californian, born Jose Ybarra, Joe was of Spanish and Mission Indian stock.

Arne K. Lang’s third boxing book, titled “George Dixon, Terry McGovern and the Culture of Boxing in America, 1890-1910,” rolled off the press in September of last year. Published by McFarland, the book can be ordered directly from the publisher or via Amazon.

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Arne K. Lang

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Fast-Rising Omar Trinidad KOs Slavinskyi at the Commerce Casino

Published

5 hours ago

July 26, 2024

David A. Avila

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East L.A.’s Omar Trinidad knocked out Ukraine’s Viktor Slavinskyi to retain the WBC Continental America’s featherweight title on Friday in a strategic but entertaining contest.

Fighting in front of frenzied crowd of supporters Trinidad (16-0-1, 13 KOs) defeated southpaw Slavinskyi (15-3-1, 7 KOs) with a measured and careful attack at the Commerce Casino in Commerce, Calif.

Fans familiar with Trinidad (pictured over the right shoulder of promoter Tom Loeffler) are familiar with his aggressive pressure fighting style, but the Boyle Heights pugilist took a careful approach against Slavinskyi. Instead of a pounding assault Trinidad kept the fight at a distance and used his reach advantage to perfection.

It was reminiscent of long-armed fighters of the past like the late great Mando Ramos of the late 1960s who could punch or box. Pick your poison.

Trinidad employed a constant jab and well-placed counter shots. The right hand, in particular, was especially effective.

“I couldn’t miss with the right,” said Trinidad

For seven rounds Trinidad dominated with counter-punching. Then, Slavinskyi increased the pressure and forced the East L.A. fighter to come along. He did.

“If I could get a knockout I’d put him in the blender,” Trinidad said.

From the eighth round until the end Trinidad engaged in his usual fast and furious style and was especially effective with uppercuts in ninth round. Slavinskyi walked into a right uppercut that sent him across the ring and into the ropes. Referee Ray Corona ruled it a knockdown.

In the final round Trinidad wasted no time in looking to unload with an uppercut and Slavinskyi walked into a right hand version. There was no escape as he was ruled unable to continue by Corona at 2:31 of the 10^th and final round.

Trinidad keeps the title.

“The left hook and right uppercut was the money shot,” said Trinidad. “It was well-timed and it was a money shot.”

Welterweights

A fight between buddies from the same Armenian amateur team saw Aram Amirkhanyun (16-0-1, 4 KOs) defeat Gor Yeritsyan (18-1, 14 KOs) by split decision after 10 hard-fought rounds in a welterweight fight for a regional title.

The judges scored it 96-94 Yeritsyan and 96-94 twice for Amirkhanyun. No knockdowns were scored.

Iyana “Right Hook Roxy” Verduzco (2-0) proved that adapting into a pro style was not a problem in soundly defeating Pittsburgh’s Colleen Davis (3-2-1) after six featherweight rounds. Her best weapon was accuracy.

Verduzco, who is trained by her mother Gloria Alvarado, had been one of the most decorated amateur boxers for many years. In just her second pro fight the tell-tale signs of the amateur style were gone.

While the taller Davis circled rapidly to the left, Verduzco calmly waited for the openings and blasted away with pinpoint shots to the body and head. Her right hook was deadly accurate and the left found openings whenever they appeared.

Davis was able to land rights but just not enough to offset the incoming fire from the Southern California fighter. After six rounds all three judges scored it 60-54 for Verduzco.

In a firefight, Abel Mejia (5-0, 4 KOs) barely survived a second round knockdown against Tijuana’s rugged Jose Correa (6-10, 4 KOs) and rallied to remain relevant in the super featherweight match. In the fourth and final round Mejia beat Correa to the punch with a left hook that knocked out the tough Mexican challenger at 55 seconds as referee Ray Corona stopped the fight.

A super featherweight fight saw Hawaii’s Jaybrio Pe Benito (5-0, 4 KOs) power past Texan Michael Land (1-5-1) for a knockout win at 1:30 of the second round. Benito was too powerful and busy for Land who tried but was unable to slow down the assault.

Photo credit: Lina Baker

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

Published

2 days 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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