My View from the Corner

by Angelo Dundee

  For 175 was 175 was 175 was 175 ...

  And so it was that after being frustrated for years in his quest for fame and fortune, Willie finally got his shot at a title, the 175-pound light-heavyweight title then owned by Harold Johnson. Now Willie wasn't the originally scheduled opponent but instead a substitute for a substitute. The original opponent, Mauro Mina, had pulled out because of a detached retina, and his replacement, Italian champion Giulio Rinaldi, had likewise excused himself because of a twisted ankle. Higher-ranked Henry Hank had taken a pass because of a torn shoulder, and others ahead of Willie in the rankings, such as Eddie Cotton, Doug Jones, and Gustav Scholz, had already fought and lost to Johnson. But because champions set the calendar and the fight was slated for June 1963 at the Las Vegas Convention Center, the date had to be kept, and an opponent, any opponent, had to be produced. As luck would have it, after all the dominoes had fallen, that opponent was Willie.

  (Here it must be noted that this was how Jimmy Braddock got his chance against Max Baer for the heavyweight title. Baer, who had a contract with Madison Square Garden for a certain date, threatened to pull out of the contract if the Garden couldn't produce an opponent for the contracted date. And the Garden, after sifting through the then-threadbare list of potential challengers, came up with the only fighter deemed worthy and available: James J. Braddock. And, if you saw the movie Cinderella Man, you know the rest of the story.)

  It made no difference how Willie got there, he was there, fighting for the light-heavyweight championship of the world. And although a five-to-one underdog, Willie, never believing it was a mismatch, disposed of the supposed unfair disadvantage by stutter-stepping, deking, and going left-hand crazy, jabbing the bejabbers out of Johnson, keeping him off balance, and tying him into knots. Before the fifteenth and final round, with the fight sill in doubt, I made one final impassioned "Win one for the Gipper" speech. Expressing the urgency of the situation, I cried, "Willie, you win this one and you're the champ.... These are the three most important minutes of you life, Willie.... Don't blow it, son." And with that, Willie went out and, with a high purpose, closed the show, winning the round and a close split decision. Afterward, many, including Philadelphia promoter Russell Peltz, told me that Willie had "stolen" the fight. But to me, it was a case of who you were going to believe, the storytellers or your own eyes. I mean, they raised Willie's hand at the end, so he won the fight and the title.

  And, bless his heart, afterward Willie said, "When Angie talked to me in the corner, I listened.... I can't tell you how many times he talked me into winning fights I did not think I could win."

  Two months earlier Ralph Dupas had won the vacant junior-middleweight title after spending most of his career in two lower weight divisions. So finally, after eleven years of hard labor, Whitey's two boys had made good on his prophecy that they were "something special."

  I have always loved Louisville, Kentucky—friendly people, great fight fans, wonderful hotels, and excellent Italian restaurants. Who could ask for anything more?

  One of the first times I visited Louisville, I had come with Willie for a fight against Johnny Holman, the same Johnny Holman I used to train. Figuring Johnny couldn't catch Willie with a taxicab, we decided to take it easy the afternoon before the fight. At lunchtime, Willie went back to the room at the Sheraton Hotel to watch an interview he had taped the day before on local TV, and I went off to lunch. My lunch was one of my favorites: cheese and celery, tagliatelle alla crema, veal pizziola, along with Frascati wine and grappa. Willie's was a light lunch, in keeping with his diet. And please, I had pleaded with him, no milk.

  After my sumptuous lunch—which I didn't dare mention to Willie—I returned to our room at the Sheraton. "Our room" I say because I shared the room with Willie to make sure he didn't sneak out for any pleasurable purpose. I had no intentions of losing him to some outside temptation so close to a fight.

  It was about 2:00 or 2:30 in the afternoon when the phone rang. Willie was caught up in whatever it was that was on TV and ignored the ringing, so it fell to me to pick up the phone. "Hello, this is Angelo Dundee," I said. And what to my wondering ear should I hear from the earpiece but a rush of words that went something like: "Hello, my name is Cassius Marcellus Clay.... I'm the Golden Gloves champion of Louisville. I won the Atlanta Golden Gloves.... I'm gonna be the Olympic champion and the champion of the whole world...." and on and on, the number and the names of titles he had and would win flying by so fast I could barely keep track. Then he said, "I'm downstairs and want to come up and talk to you and Mr. Pastrano...." I was, if that's possible, stunned and at a loss for words. Seeing me standing there holding the phone at arm's length and staring blankly, Willie looked up from the TV set and said, "Who is it?" All I could think of saying was, "Some nut ... he wants to come up and meet us.... He sounds like a nice kid. Want to talk to him?" Or somesuch. Willie, by this time bored with whatever it was he was watching, nodded and said, "Sure, send the sucker up. It'll break the monotony. TV's lousy anyway."

  "Well, Mr...." and here I paused, hoping he'd help me out with his name. He did, filling in the blank with "Mr. Cassius Marcellus Clay," then politely added, "Mr. Dundee." "Well, Mr. Clay," I said, "I can give you about five minutes or so. Willie has to take a nap." "Thank you, sir," came back the voice. Then a pause and, "Is it OK if I bring my brother up, too?" Again I turned to Willie for his approval. "He has his brother with him," I said. Willie, game for anything, said, "What the hell, send 'em both up."

  Within seconds, Mr. Cassius Marcellus Clay and his brother were knocking on the door. I opened it, and almost before I had said "Hello," the young Cassius had entered and introduced himself and his brother, whose name I found out was Rudy. Politely he said, "I've seen you on TV, Mr. Dundee.... I saw you with Carmen Basilio," even telling me I had the nickname of being a "Mr. Cutman" because of my work with Carmen. Then he went on without taking a breath to tell me he had seen the Holman-Charles fight and several others and on and on and on, almost as if my face was as known to him as one you'd see in the mirror in the morning, made so by television.

  Then he turned to Willie. "And the fight I really enjoyed most was when Mr. Pastrano beat Al Andrews in Chicago.... You sure do have one sweet left hand, Mr. Pastrano." Appearing to look modest, Willie smiled, eating it up.

  But that merely served as the prologue. For young Cassius continued to ask rapid-fire questions like "How many miles do your fighters run?" "Why do they run?" "What do they eat?" "Do they eat once a day, twice a day, three times a day?" "What do they do prior to a fight?" "How long do they stay away from their wives?" etc. And always, after asking the questions, he would stand there, politely listening to the answers, taking it all in while his brother Rudy just stood there, over on the side, holding a bust made of clay—although I wasn't sure of what. The discussion ranged far and wide and well past the five allotted minutes, lasting almost three and one-half hours.

  But while the youngster may have left the room filled with answers to his questions, he had left me with an appreciation of his thirst for information. See, he was a student of boxing, someone who had studied the sport. And somehow I knew, just knew, that our paths would cross again. I didn't know when or where, but I just knew.

  But I'm getting ahead of my story....

  TWO

  My Apprenticeship with Brother Chris

  Copyright © 2008 by Angelo Dundee and Bert Randolph Sugar Click here for terms of use.

  The road to becoming a trainer is not a straight line but a winding one that takes many different turns, many different routes. In my case, it was a particularly roundabout path. Following the bread crumbs back to the beginning, I was born Angelo Mirena in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in 1923, the eighth of nine children born to Angelo and Philomena Mirena. Really, it was South Philly, sort of a city within a city filled with Old World Italians, many of whom, hardworking first-generation Italians with a working unfamiliarity with English, spoke only their native tongue.

 
But whether I call it Philadelphia or South Philly, the so-called City of Brotherly Love was a city of brotherly, sisterly, motherly, and fatherly love for me growing up. For the Mirena family was a caring, warm, loving family, numbering, by the time I and my younger sister came along, just nine—Pop, who worked for the railroad, Mom, the homemaker, and seven Mirena bambinos and bambinas, two having perished in the diphtheria epidemic of 1917. The remaining members of la familia were, in order: Joe, the oldest, followed by Chris, Mary, Frankie, Jimmy, myself, and Josephine.

  And with Joe and Chris having left the roost to make their way in the world, there were just seven of us clustered around the dinner table at 829 Morris Street every night for Mom's delicious Italian meals—Mondays, meat and potatoes served in a big pot; Tuesdays, spaghetti and meatballs; Wednesdays, greens; Thursdays, pasta; Fridays, fish; Saturdays, grab bags featuring sandwiches; and Sundays, ah Sundays, a large traditional Italian meal that defied you to finish even the third course. All served with vino made by Pop. And woe to any of us who showed up late for dinner, Pop always warning us, "When food is on the table, show your mother the respect to be there to eat it." In other words, mange. And mange we did; families coming from Calabria could eat anything.

  And here, just for purposes of accuracy, I must tell you that though our name was Mirena, somewhere along the way it had been Mirenda, with a d, but the d had somehow disappeared. And because Pop never mastered the English language, he sometimes would write our name with a large, looping a at the end, which came out looking like an o. So some of us were Mirena, with an a, while others were Mireno, with an o. And I'm sure I had relatives back in the old country whose name was Mirenda with a d.

  But Mirena or Mireno or even Mirenda, how did I come by the name Dundee? Well, my oldest brother, Joe, who was twenty-one years older than yours truly, harbored dreams of boxing professionally. But like a lot of fighters who didn't want their parents to know, Joe took another name to keep his little secret from Pop. The name he selected was Dundee, a name worn by two fighting brothers out of Baltimore, Joe and Vince, both of whom became champions. Only it wasn't their given name; their real name was Lazzaro.

  The original was a great featherweight champion out of New York way back in the first two decades of the twentieth century: Johnny Dundee. But that wasn't his real name either. His name was Guiseppe Carrora. But Carrora wasn't hiding behind his boxing name, Dundee, to keep his boxing activities from his parents. Instead, it was his manager, Scotty Monteith, who changed it, saying the name Carrora sounded like "carrots" and that if Carrora continued to use his real name "people will start throwing vegetables at you." And so it was that Monteith suggested that Carrora change his name, taking, as Monteith advised him, "the name of my hometown in Scotland, Dundee." And so Johnny Dundee it became, a thrilling fighter who fought some 335 pro bouts, exciting his fans by bouncing off the ropes and throwing punches with both hands. One of those who saw Johnny Dundee in action was young Joe Mirena, who decided then and there to adopt his name in tribute to the all-time great known in those days before political correctness as "the Scotch Wop."

  And although my brother Joe's career lasted only about nine fights, the name he wore in the ring became the name of a line of another Dundee fighting clan, this one from Philadelphia—my brother Chris first and then yours truly adopting this fitting fighting name.

  But, as a kid, I really didn't care what my name was—Mirena, Mireno, Mirenda, or Dundee—I just merrily went on my way, doing things any kid does. There were football games to be played, movies to go to, visits to make to the local firehouse where the firemen called me "Tootsie" for some strange reason, and even, with the Mason Hall AC Gym over on Seventh and Morris, a chance to watch boxing. The only thing I didn't do was run errands, my mother realizing early on in my errand-running days that I would stop and talk to anyone and everyone and never come back. So she assigned that all-important task to my brother Jimmy.

  To help make ends meet all the kids pitched in, taking part-time jobs. I had a variety of jobs; my résumé, which read like the Philadelphia Yellow Pages, included blocking hats, shining shoes, making sandwiches at Pat's King of Steaks, and working behind the counter at Bruno's on the corner—where I was fired for giving some customer a dozen and a half eggs instead of the dozen she asked for. In the meantime, in between time, I attended Southern High, the same school heavyweight champion Tim Witherspoon went to, where I took commercial courses, learning such things as typing, a skill that would come in handy later on. (I even took Italian, a language I spoke every day, and wouldn't you know it, I failed!)

  After graduation I had no idea what I wanted to do. So, looking for something, anything, that would give me a steady job with long-term possibilities, I applied for a job at the Philadelphia courthouse as a typing assistant to the court reporter. But I stayed there only a short time before taking a job with a naval aircraft factory in Philadelphia as a clerk typist. However, the factory relocated to Johnstown, a sixty-minute drive away—that is, if you drove, which I didn't. So I had to hitch a ride every day with my coworkers to and from the plant. Guess my work was satisfactory because, in a very short time, I was promoted to the position of inspector, a position I knew would serve me well after the outbreak of World War II.

  I won't bore you with details of World War II or my career in the Air Corps. I'm sure you've read about the war; it was in all the newspapers of the time. We won, but not because of anything I did. I had had dreams of servicing B-17s, the airplanes that were bombing the bejabbers out of the enemy. But no, those bureaucratic geniuses who could screw up a two-car parade decided to assign me to organizational duties and even tried to make me a spy behind enemy lines in Italy. Great, a spy. Hell, I failed Italian in high school. What was I going to do behind enemy lines? Order pasta in pidgin Italian?

  The only thing I got out of the war was the experience, if you could call it that, of working corners in some of the service boxing tournaments. As luck would have it, I met up with my brother Jimmy over in England, and the two of us, known as "Chris Dundee's kid brothers"—Chris was by this time known as the manager of former middleweight champion Ken Over-lin—were thought of as "experienced" fight men. Hell, what we knew about boxing could be written on the back of a picture postcard with more than enough room left over for a stamp and a beautiful picture of the English countryside. Nevertheless, after studying a few books on the functions of cornermen, or "seconds" as they were called over there, the two of us worked the corners of several tourney boxers, nearly drowning the poor guys we were supposed to be spritzing with water as we overenthusiastically sponged them down. And God forbid a fighter ever needed our help over and above a sponge bath. We were totally at sea. Equally at sea as a boxer was Angelo Mirena, who won a few fights but not sure how.

  Working corners, no matter how ineptly, brought me into contact with several important figures in the world of boxing, including heavyweight champ Joe Louis, then over in England touring the bases for the USO and giving exhibitions, and Marcel Cerdan, the great French middleweight, also entertaining the troops. But the most important chance meeting I had during my tour of duty was with a Canadian boxing writer named Eddie Borden. I didn't know it at the time, but it would turn out to be one of the most important run-intos of my life.

  The war was finally over. And like a lot of returning veterans I had absolutely no idea what I was going to do with the rest of my life. I had no great ambitions, no fantasies; I was just, like any twenty-five-year-old kid, trying to figure out what I was going to do with my life. The job at the naval aircraft factory was still open, so I went back to being an aircraft maintenance inspector. However, a funny thing had happened to the industry during my absence: the technology had advanced radically, and no longer was I working on prop-engine planes as I had before the war; rather, I was working on jets. I was completely lost, my skills now obsolete.

  But stuff happens, doors open, and you fall into something. It was at this point in time that Lady Luc
k, in the form of Eddie Borden, stepped in. For Eddie, the same Eddie Borden I had first met in England, was now an editor for Boxing and Wrestling News. And he had suggested to my brother Chris that maybe, just maybe, Chris could use me in his New York office where he was managing fourteen fighters. As I was to hear afterward, Eddie had said something to Chris along the lines of, "You couldn't do better than use your own flesh and blood. Angie is a nice kid; give him a chance; he'll do OK." And even though I was to learn later that Chris had really wanted my older brother Jimmy instead of me but that Jimmy couldn't take the job because he had married and settled down in Philly, I was flattered and excited to get the call from Chris.

  Sure, I could have stayed in South Philly like so many of my paisanos. But I decided to roll the dice. If it didn't work out, I could always go back.

  Romantic writers of the time were calling the postwar years the "boom years." But you couldn't prove it by me. Hell, my brother was going to pay me only seventy-five dollars a week. But I also got my own adobe hacienda—a room to sleep in and a closet to hang my clothes in at his offices in the Capitol Hotel in exchange for my serving as his gofer—as in go-fer coffee, go-fer errands, and go-fer whatever it is I need you fer. I jumped at the chance. It was my escape into the world of boxing.

  Chris's office was Room 711 of the Capitol Hotel, kitty-corner from Madison Square Garden. The narrow room was so small that, to steal a line from Milton Berle, you couldn't get in unless you were born there. It had a cot at one end and two desks at the other—the cot I slept in and one of the desks I worked at, typing up press releases and the names and records of fighters on the backs of their publicity photos and taking phone calls and messages for Chris.

  I really didn't know Chris from the man in the moon. You see, I was the last of five brothers, and Chris was fifteen years older than me and had left home when I was just a toddler. Going out into the world to make it on his own, he had hustled any way he could—shining shoes, selling newspapers, and hawking candy and gum on trains—going anywhere and everywhere chasing the buck.