R.I.P ex-Boxer, Fight Manager and Author Ron Ross, a Covid-19 Victim

Tributes are pouring in for Ron Ross who succumbed to the coronavirus yesterday at a hospital in Boca Raton, Florida. A longtime member of the Boxing Writers Association of America, Ross would have turned 88 this summer.

Born and raised in the East Flatbush section of Brooklyn, Ross (pictured with Micky Ward) had several pro fights as a teenager in Coney Island and boxed in the Army. He also worked as a boxing manager and promoter, all the while managing his real estate business in Oceanside, Long Island. He sold the business in 1992 which allowed him to spend more time at his second home in Boca Raton and devote more time to writing, his lifelong passion.

Ross’s first book was a work of fiction. He also authored two children’s books that sat on the shelf for many years before he submitted them to a publisher, and a book of short stories, “Tales from the Sidewalks of New York.” But it was his biographies of Bummy Davis and Emile Griffith that cemented his reputation as a writer and boxing historian.

“Bummy Davis vs. Murder Incorporated: The Rise and Fall of an Ill-Fated Prizefighter” (first published in hardcover by St. Martin’s Press in 2003), is as much about the gritty Brownsville neighborhood in which Davis was raised as about the boxer, a welterweight with a fierce left hook and little defense who fought the likes of Tony Canzoneri, Lou Ambers, Fritzie Zivic, Bob Montgomery, Beau Jack, Henry Armstrong, and Rocky Graziano.

Saddled with a name like “Bummy” (and with a well-earned reputation as a dirty fighter), it was inevitable that many would say “good riddance” when the fighter born Albert Abraham Davidoff was murdered at age 25 during the course of an armed robbery, but Ross presents a more nuanced picture of Davis and he comes off as more hero than villain. No less a luminary than Budd Schulberg was impressed. “Ross,” said Schulberg, “tells an intense personal story with a powerful sense of social history that makes this labor of love one of the most gripping reads in years.”

Ron Ross was a friend of Emile Griffith going back to Griffith’s fighting days. His 2008 biography “Nine..Ten…and Out!: The Two Worlds of Emile Griffith” was likewise well-received.

Ross was encouraged to write the story of the bi-sexual boxer by Gil Glancy, Griffith’s former manager. “Everybody who wanted to write the book wanted to get into the bedroom parts, and Clancy did not want that; he wanted some sensitivity,” Ross told Howard Schwach, a reporter for the Long Island Herald.

In 2012, Ross was inducted into the Florida Boxing Hall of Fame along with Roberto Duran, Danny Nardico, Aaron Pryor, Chico Vejar and former referee and boxing judge Mark Conn. Steve Canton, the President of the Florida Boxing Hall of Fame, notes that Ron Ross’s wife Sue remains in intensive care and requests prayers for her and all others battling this terrible scourge.

Amen to that.

(The author thanks Henry Hascup for his assistance in preparing this all-too-brief story.)

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