Requiem for a Heavyweight Gatekeeper: A Contrite Farewell to Leroy Caldwell

Leroy Caldwell passed away during the second week of February at a hospital in Las Vegas. He was 77 years old.

The local papers and TV outlets made no mention of it. Neither did the leading boxing journals. Like many journeymen boxers before him, Caldwell died in obscurity. But as journeyman go, Caldwell had quite a resume. He fought five men who held a world heavyweight title – George Foreman, Gerrie Coetzee, Pinklon Thomas, Trevor Berbick, and John Tate — and six others who were world title challengers: Earnie Shavers, Cleveland Williams, Oscar Bonavena, Ron Lyle, Joe Bugner, and David Bey.

No, Caldwell didn’t win any of these fights – and, truth be told, his efforts against Bonavena and Bugner were desultory — but his setbacks, in the aggregate, were the product of extenuating circumstances.

As the “B side,” Caldwell was constantly fighting in his opponent’s backyard where the deck was stacked against him. He out-boxed European heavyweight champion Jose Manuel Urtain on Urtaini’s turf in Bilbao, Spain but received only a draw. The same thing happened when he fought the tough Canadian Trevor Berbick in Winnipeg; another draw.

It didn’t help that Leroy, although well-muscled, was on the small side for a heavyweight. More often than not, he carried less than 205 pounds on his six-foot-one frame. Cleveland “Big Cat” Williams out-weighed him by 30 pounds, George Foreman by 32 pounds, Big John Tate by 40 pounds.

Also, since Caldwell was constantly taking fights on short notice, he rarely the luxury of training for a specific opponent. He stayed in shape, by and large, by working as a sparring partner.

He sparred with many of the men that he eventually fought and also touched gloves with Tim Witherspoon, Tony Tucker, Michael Dokes, Frank Bruno, and Bonecrusher Smith. Over the course of a career that spanned 22 years, he likely earned more money as a sparring partner than he did in his actual fights. His largest purse, by his recollection, was the $19,000 he received when he opposed Gerrie Coetzee in Johannesburg.

Caldwell spent his boyhood in New Orleans. His parents, he said, had 23 children between them. Needless to say, times were tough. On occasion as many as 15 people resided under the same roof with him.

Caldwell had no amateur bouts. His first pro fights were on the Gulf Coast club circuit. For a time he fought out of Chris Dundee’s fabled 5^th Street Gym in Miami Beach. Bruce Trampler, the future Hall of Fame matchmaker, fresh out of college, was also there, serving as an intern under Chris’s brother Angelo, the famous trainer. In 1972, Trampler accompanied Leroy to Madrid and to London for bouts with Gregory Peralta and Joe Bugner, matches spaced seven-and-a-half weeks apart. (Trivia time: Later that same year, when Caldwell fought Earnie Shavers at Newton Falls, Ohio, Bruce Trampler was the referee!)

In 1974 or 1975, while living in Milwaukee, Caldwell got into an altercation with a policeman who came to arrest him for stealing a package of lunch meat from a grocery store. The gap in his boxing timeline – he missed all of 1975 and 1976 – was a residue of this incident; he was incarcerated.

News of Caldwell’s passing brought back memories to this grizzled reporter.

Late in his career, Caldwell fought Jeff Shelburg at Las Vegas’ long-gone Hacienda Hotel. I was there with several of my friends.

A stocky, short-armed heavyweight from Salt Lake City who had knocked out 19 opponents while building a 22-3 record, Shelburg had been the subject of a recent feature story in a local weekly rag called SportsBook. The story said that someone had invented a contraption for measuring the force of a punch and that of the dozens of boxers that had been tested, Shelburg had the best score.

Armed with this information, I was prepared to chunk it in on Jeff Shelburg if I could find a willing taker. Inside the arena, someone overheard me extolling Shelburg’s credentials and a bet was consummated at even-money. Back in those days, a $40 wager was a big bet for me and, as I recall, I wagered $50. I was showing off. I didn’t want my friends to think I was a piker.

Ignoring the Lopez brothers, Ernie and Danny, who were raised on the Ute Indian Reservation, only two top-shelf boxers ever came out of Utah: Jack Dempsey and Gene Fullmer. Dempsey grew up in Colorado and West Virginia, but he represented Salt Lake City as he was climbing the ladder and met his first wife in a Salt Lake City whorehouse. Fullmer had two left feet but was tough as nails. Sugar Ray Robinson knocked him out cold in their second of four meetings, but Fullmer won the series 2-1-1.

Of course, I didn’t know all this at that time; I was a greenhorn; a foolish greenhorn. Jeff Shelburg may have packed a hard punch, but as I learned to my dismay, he was a typical Utah fighter. “Shelburg could never get untracked against the veteran Caldwell, who jabbed and moved and used his superior boxing ability to rack up a one-sided win,” wrote Review-Journal boxing writer Royce Feour.

I ran into Leroy about 12 years later and, ironically, we were in Utah. This was the first and last time that I ever spoke with him. More precisely, he spoke to me.

I was in Utah to perform the duties of a ring announcer at a kickboxing show at the basketball arena of Dixie State College in St. George, a town about 100 miles northeast of Las Vegas. The promoter was pals with a number of individuals in the Las Vegas boxing community and two carloads of boxers – some active, some retired – made the trip to St. George.

There were a number of “notables” in their ranks – I don’t remember them all, but Roger Mayweather comes quickly to mind – and I had them stand up and take a bow during the course of the festivities.

Leroy Caldwell was there too and he let me know about it at the conclusion of the show. “I was on TV more than all those other guys put together. Why didn’t you acknowledge me too?’, he said to me, his carriage less indignant than disconsolate.

An oversight on my part? Not exactly. I knew that he was there. He had been retired for some time now and I just didn’t consider him noteworthy. And that was my bad; shame on me. I hurt his feelings and in the ensuing years, whenever I saw him, I remembered that one-sided conversation in Utah and rued that I had been so inconsiderate.

Caldwell stayed involved in boxing after he retired. He made himself useful in the gyms around town and picked up odd jobs as a cornerman. He was a trainer, yes, and arguably a very good one, but he was never the primary voice in the comer of a big-name boxer. And the money that dribbled in was barely enough to keep his head above water.

In August of last year, a longtime friend of Caldwell, a former club fighter named Johnny Jackson, started a GoFundMe page for Leroy. Caldwell, he said, had major medical bills and although Leroy’s wife had a job, they were facing eviction. Caldwell staved off homelessness, but the fund fell far short of its $10,000 goal.

When Caldwell was last seen at the Mayweather Boxing Club, he was in a wheelchair. However, it was plain that he still had all of his faculties. “He was one of my favorite people to talk to,” said former WBC super featherweight champion Cornelius Boza-Edwards who helps run the place.

“When I heard that Leroy was in the hospital, I went over to see him, just to chat with him for a little while,” said Boza-Edwards. “But his wife, who I never met, had put a no-visitors rule in place and I wasn’t allowed up to his room. That was the first time that it dawned on me that Leroy might be seriously ill.”

“Leroy was a good guy,” said everyone I talked to about him since I learned of his passing. “He was in my corner helping [trainer-manager] Luis [Tapia] when I won my first title [against Sandra Yard at Colorado’s Sky Ute Casino in 2000], recalled Layla McCarter. “I will never forget how happy he was for me. Looking back that made it even more special.”

In researching this story, I stumbled on this item in the Oct. 4, 1979 edition of the Los Angeles Times:

“Heavyweight Mircea Simon of Torrance, silver medalist at the 1976 Olympics while representing his native Romania, was announced to have fought journeyman Leroy Caldwell of Las Vegas to a draw in Thursday night’s featured bout at the Olympic Auditorium.

However, in reviewing the fight, the California State Athletic Commission discovered an error in the tabulations. Recalculated, the scoring shows Caldwell the winner of a split decision.”

This story ran seven days after the fight. The correction never went into the record books. At boxrec, Leroy Caldwell’s final record is listed at 27-31-6. It should be 28-31-5.

We called it to boxrec’s attention and hopefully they will fix it. True, it wouldn’t bump Leroy’s record above .500, but here was a journeyman who was used and spit out by the boxing establishment (and disrespected by one unnoteworthy ring announcer) and it seems only proper to set the record straight.

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

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