The written history of Muhammad Ali is on ongoing construction. Sting Like a Bee by Leigh Montville (Doubleday) is the latest building block in that process.
Sting Like a Bee focuses on the five years from February 17, 1966, when Ali was reclassified 1-A (eligible for military service) by his draft board in Louisville, through June 28, 1971, when the United States Supreme Court unanimously reversed his conviction for refusing induction into the United States Army.
These years included the pre-exile period when Ali was at the peak of his powers as a fighter and fought seven times in less than twelve months through his March 8, 1971, loss to Joe Frazier.
“For a stretch of time,” Montville writes, “1966 through 1971, the most turbulent divided stretch of the nation’s history outside of the Civil War, Muhammad Ali was discussed as much as anyone on the planet.”
That might seem like an outlandish statement. But those who lived through the era can attest to its truth.
Montville paints a portrait of Ali as a gifted, charismatic, talented, determined, sometimes confused young man, often courageous, occasionally fearful, intellectually limited in some ways, insightful in others.
“Pretty much illiterate,” Montville recounts, “he was supremely good-looking and supremely verbal at a time when television invaded everywhere and these qualities became more important. He was part boob, part rube, part precocious genius, somewhat honorable, and could be really funny. He stumbled into his situation, said he didn’t want to go to war because of his religion, put one foot in front of the other, and came out the other end a hero.”
Readers of Montville’s earlier work, such as his biographies of Ted Williams and Babe Ruth, are familiar with his writing style. There are few flourishes. That said, Sting Like a Bee has several particularly well-crafted passages, such as the one in which Montville describes Ernie Terrell on the eve of the fight in which Ali savaged him to shouts of “What’s my name!”
Ali made it sound like he was the first black man who ever lived, the first to fight through injustice. Uncle Tom? Terrell said he would compare hard roads to the Astrodome with this guy any day of the publicity week. He grew up in Inverness, Mississippi, one of ten children. His parents were sharecroppers. His father got a factory job in Chicago when Terrell was in his teens, so everyone headed to the cold north. He was a professional boxer two years before he graduated from Farragut High School. There were no press conferences when the first contract was signed. He never had the carefully planned list of opponents. His style was bang and hold, bang and hold, hit with the left and grind around the ring. He was a defensive fighter, a neutralizer. He had no dazzling speed, no shuffle. He was a survivor. His record was an honest 39–4, and he hadn’t been beaten in five years.
Montville also gives readers an intriguing portrait of Hayden Covington, the larger-than-life attorney who oversaw much of the early draft-related legal work on Ali’s behalf (and later resigned over unpaid legal fees).
Similarly, Lawrence Grauman, the hearing examiner whose recommendation to the Kentucky Appeals Board that Ali be granted conscientious objector status was ignored, is well portrayed.
And thank you to Montville for debunking the oft-repeated notion that it was Ali who originated the phrase “No Viet Cong ever called me nigger.” The credit for that properly goes to Stokely Carmichael.
Montville has conducted serious research into the legal maneuvering and legal issues surrounding Muhammad Ali and the draft and brought the source material together in a way that makes it more easily accessed and more fully understood. That’s a valuable service.
Max Baer reigned as heavyweight champion for one day shy of a year during the seven-year interregnum between Gene Tunney and Joe Louis. John Jarrett tells his story in Max Baer: Clown Prince of Boxing (Pitch Publishing). The book isn’t up to the standard that Jarrett set two years ago with Dempsey and the Wild Bull. But it does have some entertaining moments.
Baer fashioned a 66–13 (51 KOs, 3 KOs by) career ledger. He was a showman and a womanizer, kind-hearted and erratic, with a potent right hand. “I don’t like to fight,” he once said. “I never did, except when I’m hurt. Then I want to get in there and hurt back.”
Baer’s career was defined by four consecutive fights contested within the span of twenty-seven months.
On June 8, 1933, he knocked out former heavyweight champion Max Schmeling in the tenth round of a brutal back-and-forth encounter. After the bout, Baer observed, “I was pretty rough in there. But say, a fight’s a fight, isn’t it?”
After beating Schmeling, Baer took advantage of his good looks and outgoing personality to land a starring role in the Hollywood film The Prizefighter and The Lady. It was soon apparent that he preferred vaudeville, acting in motion pictures, and womanizing to fighting. But on June 14, 1934, he returned to the ring to challenge Primo Carnera, who had knocked out Jack Sharkey to claim the heavyweight crown.
Baer had the good fortune to challenge the mob-controlled Carnera in an honest fight. Before the bout, the challenger promised. “That’s one that will be so good, I wish I was out in the audience watching myself.” In a sloppy, free-swinging affair, he knocked the Italian giant down an implausible twelve times en route to an eleventh-round stoppage.
“Carnera didn’t look bad,” sportswriter Joe Williams declared afterward. “He looked terrible.”
Baer looked just as terrible 364 days later when he made his first and only title defense, coming in undermotivated and out of shape to lose a decision to James Braddock in one of the worst heavyweight championship fights ever.
Interviewed after his defeat, Baer told Tommy Manning of NBC radio, “I’m glad and really happy to see Jimmy happy. He’ll appreciate it more than I did. After all, he’s got a family and he’s married. Of course, I might have a family around the country too, but I don’t know it.”
Baer chose unwisely for his comeback fight after losing to Braddock. Three months later, on September 24, 1935, he stepped into the ring before an estimated 95,000 fans at Yankee Stadium to face an undefeated young heavyweight named Joe Louis.
Louis knocked him out in four rounds. Baer could have gotten up after his final trip to the canvas but didn’t.
“Sure I quit,” he acknowledged afterward. “He hit me eighteen times while I was going down the last time. If anybody wants to see the execution of Max Baer, he’s got to pay more than twenty-five bucks for a ringside seat.”
Baer died of a heart attack in 1959 at age fifty. Damon Runyon summed up nicely when he wrote, “There have been many greater fighters than Max Baer, but never a greater showman.”
For more than a century, the heavyweight champion of the world was sports royalty. But unlike many kings, whose authority is bestowed as an accident of birth, these men derived their authority first through conquest and then from the consent of the governed.
The Boxing Kings: When American Heavyweights Ruled the World by Paul Beston (Rowman & Littlefield) is a history of the heavyweight championship in America from the 1880s through the end of the twentieth century.
The heavyweight title, Beston writes, was once “a defining property in sports” and American champions were “symbols of national might.” But “boxing lost its narrative in America. The rise of competitive sports as a commercial industry, a story in which boxing was integral, eventually left the sport trailing badly behind.”
Beston places special emphasis on seven champions who held what he calls “a defining place in our culture”: John L. Sullivan, Jack Johnson, Jack Dempsey, Joe Louis, Rocky Marciano, Muhammad Ali, and Mike Tyson. He then examines these seven and their brethren in the context of their times and with appreciation for boxing’s “capacity to absorb such varieties of human character.”
The lineage begins with John L. Sullivan.
“Sullivan,” Beston writes, “came along with no precedents for the role he was about to play, which was to become the George Washington of boxing and America’s first sports superstar. In 1882, the
year Sullivan won the heavyweight championship, the idea of professional sports was in its infancy. Professional baseball was just coming into existence. The National League had been founded six years earlier. American football was barely a flicker in the eye of Yale’s Walter Camp. Basketball had not yet been invented.”
Thereafter, Beston continues, “The evolution of the heavyweight championship from an underground quasi-mythical title to a commercial property was part of a social revolution, one in which working-class passions would create a new popular culture in America.”
No sporting event in history has matched the social significance of Jack Johnson vs. James Jeffries, the second encounter between Joe Louis and Max Schmeling, and the first Ali–Frazier fight.
Beston acknowledges Johnson’s greatness as a fighter, his prominence in American social history, and the oppressive racial climate in which he lived. But citing Papa Jack’s personal flaws, he posits that “the long cycle of redefinition has produced a heroic image that is almost as misleading as the original racist caricature.”
Of Jack Dempsey, Beston observes, “So many people wanted to see his fights that special arenas were built to accommodate them.”
Then, after Gene Tunney (Dempsey’s conqueror) retired, Max Schmeling, Jack Sharkey, Primo Carnera, Max Baer, and James Braddock, arrived sequentially on the scene. That paved the way for Joe Louis. In Beston’s words, “Five uninspiring heavyweight champions plus Depression economics made the public more receptive to breaking the color line.”
Ultimately, Rocky Marciano filled the void in the public imagination left when Louis retired.
Muhammad Ali was the next man to be enshrined in heavyweight boxing’s pantheon of gods.
“Ali, Frazier, and Foreman made an unequaled heavyweight trio,” Beston declares. “It was as if Jack Dempsey, Joe Louis, and Rocky Marciano had all competed during the same era.” But Beston goes on to write, “Before Ali, the title had made smaller men into bigger men. After him, the title seemed somehow smaller.”
That trend continued with Mike Tyson, who Beston calls “the final towering figure” in the American heavyweight lineage. Writing of the years after Tyson was deposed, Beston states, “For most of the public, the term ‘heavyweight champion’ still signified one man: Tyson. As with Ali, his non-possession of the title seemed incidental, a nettlesome technicality. Tyson’s global fame made his possession, or non-possession, of the official title virtually irrelevant.”
Beston writes well. There’s a nice flow to the book. He has done a lot of research, and it shows. The major fights are nicely recounted.
He also does a pretty good job of separating allegorical anecdotes from reality. For example, there’s a tale that many writers (including yours truly) have told of Franklin Roosevelt inviting Joe Louis to the White House in 1938, squeezing Louis’s biceps, and saying, “Joe, we need muscles like yours to beat Germany.”
“The 1938 meeting,” Beston writes, “never happened. Louis did have a friendly visit with FDR a few years earlier.”
But there are places where Beston falls short. Some of his errors are niggling misstatements of fact. He writes that the three Patterson-Johansson fights represented the first time that “two men fought three times for the heavyweight title.” Ezzard Charles vs. Jersey Joe Walcott counters that notion. Similarly, Beston states that Axel Schulz (who challenged George Foreman in 1995) was “the first German to fight for the crown since Max Schmeling.” People who remember Muhammad Ali vs. Karl Mildenberger would dispute that claim.
More seriously, there are instances where Beston seems to have relied on promotional hype rather than accurate reports. For example, he writes that Larry Holmes and Gerry Cooney had a “50–50 money split” with each fighter being promised $10 million for their 1982 encounter. In reality, Cooney’s purse was $8.5 million, and Holmes received significantly less.
There are also unsourced statements of questionable veracity, such as the claim that “eight doctors confirmed a torn tendon” in Sonny Liston’s shoulder after his loss to Cassius Clay.
That said, The Boxing Kings is a good book. Beston condenses a great deal of history into 313 pages and does it well.
There was a time when boxing fans relied on newspapers for the timeliest recounting of big fights. That changed in the 1920s with the mass commercialization of radio. Then, in the 1940s, television began the process of supplanting radio.
Frederick V. Romano tells the tale in The Golden Age of Boxing on Radio and Television (Carrel Books).
The first boxing match transmitted by radio was an experimental broadcast of the April 11, 1921, encounter between Johnny Dundee and Johnny Ray. Twelve weeks later, Jack Dempsey’s July 2, 1921, championship defense against Georges Carpentier was heard by an estimated three hundred thousand listeners.
By the mid-1920s, radio had advanced from being a curiosity to a fixture in American homes. Fifteen million people heard Graham McNamee’s call when Gene Tunney dethroned Jack Dempsey on September 23, 1926, to seize the heavyweight crown.
The preeminent blow-by-blow commentators of the radio era were McNamee, Ted Husing, Clem McCarthy, Sam Taub, and Don Dunphy.
Nat Fleisher, the founding editor of The Ring, took a turn behind the microphone for a May 7, 1926, bout between Sammy Baker and Larry Estridge at Madison Square Garden. But the broadcast did not go well. Stuart Hawkins, a boxing columnist for the New York Herald, described Fleischer’s effort as “the most woefully inadequate, utterly colorless, and consistently exasperating broadcast that has ever disappointed eastern listeners.”
The high point of the marriage between boxing and radio was Joe Louis’s first-round knockout of Max Schmeling on June 22, 1938. NBC carried the bout on 146 stations throughout the United States, and it was transmitted in multiple languages around the world. Clem McCarthy called the blow-by-blow in what was arguably the most important sports broadcast of all time.
The golden age of boxing on radio, by Romano’s reckoning, lasted into the twilight of Joe Louis’s heavyweight reign. By then, it was clear that television was the wave of the future.
Early boxing telecasts were primitive compared to what fans see today. Benny Leonard had boxed an exhibition on television in 1931. But as noted in the New York Herald Tribune, the picture quality was such that the fighters “seemed to be struggling through a severe blizzard.”
The first major televised boxing match was a June 1, 1939, encounter at Yankee Stadium between Max Baer and Lou Nova. Here too, the grainy black-and-white images were far from satisfying.
The first heavyweight championship fight seen live on home television was the June 19, 1946, rematch between Joe Louis and Billy Conn. Romano calls that “the start of the modern era of boxing and commercial TV,” but adds, “At this juncture, the live gate was still overwhelmingly the most important source of revenue.”
The numbers support this contention. The live gate for fights at Madison Square Garden in 1947 was $2.2 million. By comparison, the radio and television revenue streams for those fights were $220,000 and $100,000 respectively.
By the early 1950s, boxing was ubiquitous on television. Not only was it a national sport, it was the perfect sport for the tiny black-and-white TV screens of that era. The action was contested in a small, enclosed area with only two competitors for the camera to follow and no hard-to-see balls flying through the air.
The Gillette Safety Razor Company took the lead in sponsoring boxing on television with weekly telecasts under the banner of The Gillette Cavalcade of Sports.
Don Dunphy transitioned successfully from radio to television, where he was joined by Chris Schenkel as the two preeminent TV blow-by-blow commentators of that era.
But the seeds of destruction were being sown. Other sports rose in popularity. TV technology advanced to accommodate them. United States Senate hearings chaired by Estes Kefauver lay bare the influence of organized crime on boxing. Then, on March 24, 1962, Benny Paret was beaten to death by Emile Griffith.
&
nbsp; Boxing and tragedy walk hand in hand. In 1947, a national radio audience had listened as Sugar Ray Robinson bludgeoned Jimmy Doyle into unconsciousness. Doyle, age twenty-two, was taken from the ring on a stretcher and died one day later. There had been similar tragedies in minor televised bouts. But Griffith–Paret was a major championship fight witnessed by millions on national television.
Sponsors grew wary of the sweet science. In 1964, regularly scheduled national telecasts ended, marking the end of what Romano calls “boxing’s golden age of television.”
Romano deserves credit for having undertaken an enormous amount of research. His book contains an extensive recounting of the not-so-behind-the-scenes machinations of James Norris, the International Boxing Club, the mob-linked Managers Guild, Franky Carbo, Blinky Palermo, and their brethren. There’s also a recounting of the technology behind radio and television boxing broadcasts and an exploration of radio and television contractual arrangements.
On the downside, there are places where Romano’s recounting goes on for too long, as if he’s determined to include everything he learned rather than edit down. And the writing is a bit dry. Historic milestones like the Dempsey–Tunney and Louis–Schmeling fights are treated with little drama.
That said, The Golden Age of Boxing on Radio and Television is a valuable resource for those interested in the subject.
On March 5, 2016, unbeaten Australian heavyweight Lucas Browne journeyed to Grozny (the capital of the Chechen Republic) to fight Ruslan Chagaev. Chagaev was the WBA “regular” world heavyweight champion and a favorite of Chechen strongman, President Ramzan Kadyrov, who attended the fight. Trailing badly on the judges’ scorecards, Browne knocked Chagaev out in the tenth round. The World Champion That Never Was: The Story of Lucas Browne by Graham Clark (Hardie Grant Books) is the story of that fight.
Protect Yourself at All Times Page 36