Ryan O’Neal Loved Boxing So Much he let Joe Frazier Punch Him in the Face

Ryan O’Neal passed away last week at a hospital in Santa Monica, California, at age 82. During the 1970s, O’Neal was one of the most well-known and highest-paid actors in the world. The propellant was the 1970 blockbuster “Love Story” for which O’Neal received an Oscar nomination for Best Actor.

O’Neal played a boxer in the 1979 comedy “The Main Event.” He was penciled-in to star as the broken-down prizefighter in the remake of the 1931 classic “The Champ,” but dropped out when the director Franco Zeffirelli reneged on his promise to cast Ryan’s son Griffin O’Neal in a secondary role and was replaced by Jon Voight.

O’Neal’s involvement in boxing wasn’t limited to the big screen. Born in Los Angeles, the son of a TV screenwriter and Hollywood actress, he fought as amateur, was a regular on fight nights at the Olympic Auditorium when he wasn’t off somewhere on a movie shoot, was involved in the management of several fighters, one of whom won a version of the world welterweight title, and once actually swapped punches with Joe Frazier!

He shared the ring with Frazier in 1967 when he was co-hosting Mike Douglas’s TV talk show. At the time, O’Neal was starring in the hit ABC nighttime soap opera “Peyton Place,” and Frazier was a fast-rising contender with 17 pro fights under his belt.

They fought a two-round exhibition with headgear in a ring pitched in the middle of the street outside the Philadelphia TV studio where Douglas’s show was taped. The referee was Floyd Patterson and Muhammad Ali played the role of a ringside TV commentator. The episode aired in most markets on Sept. 29, 1967.

This came about when Douglas’s producer learned that O’Neal had an amateur boxing background. Had he known more about that background, he would have undoubtedly shelved the idea.

“I fought as an amateur back in 1959 and 1960 in Santa Monica,” O’Neal told Los Angeles Times staff writer Dwight Chapin for a story that ran two years after the Frazier exhibition. “Middleweight division. I wasn’t worth a damn. My brother Kevin was a bantamweight and he wasn’t any better; we took some terrible beatings.”

Recollecting his misadventure in Philadelphia with Smokin’ Joe, O’Neal said, “Everything was OK until Frazier hit me. I still wake up screaming.” He later said that he had to visit a chiropractor to have his neck straightened.

O’Neal’s amateur background was useful in one respect. “I learned enough so that I could recognize somebody else with talent,” he said.

On Dec. 1, 1966, a young fighter from Detroit, Hedgemon Lewis, made his West Coast debut on the undercard of a show at the Olympic Auditorium where he was matched against a local tough named Phil Garcia with whom O’Neal was familiar from his amateur days. Lewis knocked Garcia out in the third round and O’Neal, watching on the TV, was mesmerized.

O’Neal wasn’t the only one who saw great potential in Hedgemon Lewis. When a man named Dell Jackson, a hair stylist in an exclusive Hollywood boutique, set about forming a syndicate to back the young prospect, he had no trouble finding investors. Ryan O’Neal jumped on board, as did Bill Cosby and recording artist and Broadway star Robert Goulet.

Lewis failed in three cracks at the world welterweight title, losing twice to the great Jose Napoles and to John H. Stracey in what would be his farewell fight, but he captured the New York version of the title when he out-pointed Carmen Basilio’s nephew Billy Backus in 1972 on Backus’s turf in Syracuse. (They fought again six months later at the same venue with the same result; Lewis won a 15-round decision.)

No member of the syndicate was more hands-on than O’Neal.

Lewis trained at LA’s Hoover Street Gym under the watchful eyes of the renowned trainer Eddie Futch and his protégé Thell Torrence. Whenever he could fit it into his busy schedule, O’Neal turned up there to keep tabs on his fighter. He eventually took a financial interest in several others that trained there, including another Hedgemon, Hedgemon Robertson, whose signature win was a first-round stoppage of Andy “The Hawk” Price at the LA Forum.

In popular fiction, boxing managers are commonly portrayed as venal, as people that extract as much mileage as they can from a prizefighter before casting him aside with only his memories to console him as he grows older. Ryan O’Neal didn’t fit the stereotype. He took an interest in Hedgemon Lewis the man, not merely in Hedgemon the boxer. With O’Neal’s encouragement, Lewis — who had taken some college courses before leaving Detroit — got his real estate license and invested his purses wisely. Ryan and Hedgemon remained close long after Lewis retired and returned to the Motor City to care for his ailing mother,

“The Main Event” reunited Ryan O’Neal with Barbra Streisand, his co-star in the screwball comedy “What’s Up Doc?” Streisand was notoriously hard to work with, but she and Ryan had great chemistry.

In their second collaboration, Streisand plays a perfume company tycoon who loses her fortune and her assets, save for a washed-up boxer who runs a driving school that is a subsidiary of her perfume company. She induces him to return to the ring and maneuvers him into a title fight. Yes, it’s a hokey movie, but an enjoyable romp with a surprise ending (sorry; no spoiler alert here).

As O’Neal’s popularity began to fade, he continued to make headlines in the tabloids because of his bumpy, albeit long-standing, relationship with actress and swimsuit model Farrah Fawcett who bore him a son. An intrepid reporter once asked Fawcett what she saw in O’Neal. “He’s real” was her terse reply.

Thell Torrence, who still keeps his hand, or at least a couple of fingers, in the boxing game at age 87, would concur. Torrence was also close with O’Neal. He was there in 2017 when the actor was awarded the Tom Kelly Lifetime Achievement Award for his contribution to boxing at the annual banquet of the West Coast Boxing Hall of Fame. “I can’t say enough good things about Ryan,” he said when we talked with him yesterday.

Ryan O’Neal, who had leukemia, died peacefully with family members at his side. We here at TSS send our condolences to all of his loved ones.

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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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