Then came Cinderella Man, the title coming from the nickname given to James J. Braddock by writer Damon Runyon. Here was a guy going nowhere, fighting for food on the table. He was on welfare and working on the docks—that kind of guy. Then, against all odds, he won the heavyweight championship of the world, beating Max Baer in one of the biggest upsets in boxing history. I was fortunate to work in the picture training one of the nicest guys and best actors I've ever met, Russell Crowe, who played the title role. Russell was a great athlete who was easy to train, and by the time our training sessions were over, he not only looked and moved like Braddock, but in the film he was Braddock.
Besides serving as a Boxing Consultant or Technical Advisor (or some other lofty-sounding "Wizard of Oz'–like title), director Ron Howard gave me a small part in the movie. So small in fact that I had more lines in my face than I had in the picture. However, that didn't stop me from inadvertently enlarging my part. I would get carried away, the "reel" action looking so real that several times during the filming I'd forget myself and start screaming instructions up at Russell from the corner for him to do something or other. And every time I did, Ron Howard would come over to calm me down, telling me, "Angie, that's not in the script." At the end of the film after Russell, as Braddock, defeated Baer, Russell leaned over and planted a big kiss on my bald head as a gesture of "thanks." That wasn't in the script either.
Cinderella Man was a stirring, uplifting, feel-good movie, one that won critical acclaim across the board. And yet I have one small quibble with it. I have nothing but the utmost admiration for director Ron Howard and the job he did—especially keeping in the shot of Russell kissing me on the forehead—but I also have respect for historical accuracy. And I felt that the writers didn't have to "Hollywoodize" Max Baer, making him a villain. For Max Baer was anything but a villain. In fact, if anything was a villain it was the Great Depression. Alternately known as "Madcap Maxie" and "The Magnificent Screwball," Baer was a happy-go-lucky guy who once said he "just wanted to have a barrel of fun." Here was a guy who dedicated himself to a life of wine, women, and song, with emphasis on the latter, a hint of which you saw in the movie and which he gave voice to after losing to Braddock, saying, "I'm happy for Braddock ... he has three kids. I don't know how many I have."
One story told around the trainers' table at The Neutral early on in my New York days had it that one of those connected with the Braddock camp, "Dumb" Dan Morgan, who was anything but dumb, put a beautiful bleach-blonde Venus in a ringside seat before the Braddock-Baer fight. Her "job," if it can be called that, was to raise her skirt, spread her legs, and wave at Maxie all fight long. And as she kept at it, Maxie responded in kind instead of paying attention to Braddock's left.
Nah, that was no villain.
Quibbling aside, I've got to tell you I've never had as much fun and still remained conscious as I had on the set of Cinderella Man, thanks to Russell and Ron.
But a Robert De Niro I'll never be.
I know I've been on longer than Oscar Award winners, giving thanks to all those whose paths I've had the pleasure of crossing during my fistic travels of the last half-century, but wait!, as they say in those Ginzu knife commercials, there's more. There's my brother Chris, Gene Kilroy, Michael Mann, and Bert Sugar, who gave me a better view from my corner. And so many others I owe a debt of gratitude to I'll have to write another book to include them all. But the ones I owe my most heartfelt thanks to are the family Dundee, to my bride of more than fifty years, the lovely Helen, who claims we've only been married for twenty-five or so of those years since I've been gone over half the time pursuing my dream, and to my kids, Jimmy and Terri, for their understanding of the time I took away from them to spend it with my "other" family, my colleagues and boxers in my boxing family.
Regrets? I have a few. My biggest heartbreak came back in 1963—a double heartbreak, really. Luis Rodriguez, my fighter, had been promised a big story in Sports Illustrated after his victory over Emile Griffith for the welterweight title. But Luis had fought in the cofeature that night at Dodger Stadium on the same card headed up by Davey Moore, who was defending his featherweight title against another of my fighters, Sugar Ramos. In a rock-'em-sock-'em fight, with each fighter giving as much as he got, Ramos knocked out Moore in the tenth round, Moore's head whiplashing off the bottom rope and then bouncing on the floor. After a few frightening moments, Moore finally regained consciousness, slowly opening his eyes and talking to those around him. Thinking everything was okay, I went back to visit Moore in his dressing room. We talked for a couple of minutes, he asking for "a return bout" and me saying "sure." Then he said, "I'm tired. I'm gonna lie down." He never woke up, dying two days later. Because of the tragedy, Sports Illustrated ditched the story on Rodriguez. My heart went out to Moore and his family, but I also felt a little for Luis who never got the recognition he deserved for being a great fighter.
I also regret not being there for José Napoles when he lost his welter-weight title to Billy Backus. You see, as a trainer with more than one fighter in his so-called stable, you're always juggling assignments. And because I couldn't be in two places at one time—Napoles's defense in Syracuse being just four days before Muhammad Ali was to fight Oscar Bonavena in New York City—I had to make a choice and the choice was Muhammad in his second comeback fight after his three-and-a-half-year layoff. If I had been there for Napoles, I would have been able to save his title. Instead, after he was cut along the right eye by a head butt in the second round and along his left eye by a Backus hook in the third, the replacement cutman couldn't stop the flow of blood. At one minute of the fourth round, the referee called in the doctor who took one look and waved it off, Napoles losing. Six months later Napoles regained his crown from Backus, with yours truly, the man a younger Cassius Clay had called "Mr. Cutman," there to take care of Napoles's brittle scar tissue.
But my biggest regret is the state of boxing today. It's hurting. Once one of the three major sports—along with baseball and horse racing—commanding headlines not only on the sports pages but the front pages as well, today it's charitably number 11 on the list of Top Ten sports, tucked somewhere under the shipping news.
How did boxing ever lose its place in the pecking order of sports? Part of the reason is that the sports world has changed. Today fans are given more choices, a greater variety of sports, and there's been a seismic shift in the sports fans' preference, with better-marketed sports taking away our fans. Look at ESPN and you'll find so-called "sports," such as Texas Hold-'Em, being televised and watched by millions of eyeballs.
And then there's a new entry on the list of sports offered to sports fans, what the Washington Post calls "that gruesome junk," ultimate fighting. Some call it "human cockfighting," others "bar fights without the beer bottles." But whatever you call it, this new phenomenon has captured the imagination of young fans who have exchanged the cartoon violence of pro wrestling for the real violence of this so-called sport.
Now they're even planning to televise the "Rock-Paper-Scissors" championship! I can't wait until they begin to televise topless volleyball, maybe then I'll be interested. But put them together and you begin to see boxing's problem. It has trouble shoehorning its way onto television and into the consciousness of fans, thereby preventing it from recapturing the glory of yesteryear.
The biggest reason for the sport's decline in interest, however, can be found by looking in the mirror, for the biggest enemy is ourselves. When I first entered the sport—granted, that was just after the Great Flood—there were eight divisions and eight world champions. And you could name every one of them, from the heavyweight champion all the way down to the flyweight champion. Today we have seventeen—count 'em, seventeen—divisions and the four alphabet-soup sanctioning bodies (a four-ring circus made up of the WBC, the WBA, the IBF, and the WBO) can't even get those straight, one group calling those halfway houses between the eight traditional divisions, like welterweight or middleweight, "junior" something or other and o
ther groups "super" something or other. And I never could figure out what a "cruiserweight" was. I know it's bigger than a breadbox and smaller than a battleship, but what's the weight limit? Again, the sanctioning bodies disagree. And with the four major sanctioning bodies each crowning their own divisional champions, today we have as many as sixty-eight champions in all. (And that's not even counting their made-up boutique-y titles, such as "interim," "super," "continental," "whatevers." That's still more champions—and more sanctioning fees.) No wonder the hard-core boxing fan has trouble naming as many as half of them. So why should the peripheral fan be interested? Hell, it's easier to ace a college entrance exam than name them all!
As my old friend Pat Putnam once wrote: "It's a good thing we only have twenty-six letters in the alphabet or we'd have more of these clowns." And more champions! And what are these clueless sanctioning bodies, who probably would only be charged half-price by a mind reader, doing for the sport? They charge outrageous sanctioning fees for championship bouts, some even taking money for ranking fighters. (Dare I call them "bribes'?) And then they give their champions belts that look like they were made out of broken beer bottles found on the San Diego freeway.
And now the head of one of those sanctioning bodies is running around peddling an idea called "Open Scoring," an idea whose time should never come. The idea is to let fans and fighters alike know the round-by-round scoring during a fight. But Open Scoring is a concept that cheats the fans. I know, having "worked" an angle on Open Scoring myself. During the Muhammad Ali–Earnie Shavers fight, knowing we were ahead by four rounds with but three left to go by virtue of NBC posting the round-by-round scores, I told Muhammad the only way he could lose was by getting knocked out. So I instructed him to go into a safety-first shell rather than risk being knocked out, which he did, winning the fight. But even though that worked for me, it didn't for the fans at Madison Square Garden that night who got less than they paid for. And what about the most dramatic phrase in all of sports: "and the winner is ...'? That, too, would be lost with Open Scoring, since we'd probably already know who "the winner is." No, little would be gained by going to an Open Scoring system, except maybe having riots at the end of every round instead of just one at the end of the fight.
These alphabet soup groups probably think their purpose in life is to lose fans, not gain them. Why not just have the fans vote for the winner of every round, à la "American Idol"? That way the sanctioning bodies could sell that on pay-per-view and even charge a sanctioning fee.
But it's not just the sanctioning bodies that are responsible for boxing's current state. It's also the promoters. They're constantly bashing and slashing and trashing one another. Some aren't above spreading rumors about a competitor's promotion or telling fans not to watch another's fights. And sometimes they even schedule their own cards against another's on the same night.
It would be too easy to say that what the sport needs is another charismatic fighter like a Muhammad Ali or a Sugar Ray Leonard. No, what boxing needs is some organization for a totally dysfunctional sport—like one alphabet soup organization; one champion in each division; or one central office to market the sport like other sports. Only then can our once-great sport rightfully take its place back amongst the top sports. Otherwise, those who call themselves boxing's caretakers might well turn out to be its undertakers.
Back in the late 1950s, just after the mob scandals first came to light, I remember Dan Parker of the New York Mirror writing: "I've been at its bedside for forty years waiting for boxing to die." Well, here it is a half century later and the patient is still there. Hanging on assuredly, but still there. And just as boxing survived the mob scandals, it will continue to survive. It's too great a sport not to.
Time, like taffy, tends to stretch out, leaving me time to count my blessings as well as my memories. Looking back, I'm grateful to those many organizations that have recognized my work. The Boxing Writers named me Manager of the Year twice and even honored me with an award for "Long and Meritorious Service." I've been inducted—or is that indicted?—into the International Boxing Hall of Fame, the World Boxing Hall of Fame, the National Italian-American Sports Hall of Fame, the Florida Sports Hall of Fame, the Pennsylvania Sports Hall of Fame, and the UNICO National Hall of Fame. The Touchdown Club of Washington, D.C., presented me with their prestigious Timmie Award, and a permanent plaque bearing my name was placed on South Beach to commemorate the 5th Street Gym. The boxing club of Florida State even named their team the Angelo Dundee Boxing Club in my honor. Not bad for a little kid from South Philly who got into boxing almost by default.
But recently, when I was given a Lifetime Achievement Award by a local organization, I told them my lifetime was far from over, that I still had several miles left on my odometer. For far from retiring, I am still involved in boxing, working with fighters like Tommy Zbikowski, the Notre Dame safety whom I've known since he was about ten or eleven years old; Jimmy Lange, a local fighter in Virginia, who is a great local attraction; and several kids from Nassau, like Jermaine Mackey.
I remember once when Muhammad Ali was in a small town outside of Louisville he met a man who asked, "Are you Muhammad Ali?" After he answered yes, the man asked, "Do you know the Dundees?" And Muhammad answered, "Yes, Chris and Angelo." The old guy said, "Good hustlers." And for years afterward, whenever Muhammad would see me he would always say, "Still hustling."
Well, I'm still hustling. I have so many wonderful memories from the past sixty years—people I've known, places I've been to, breathtaking moments I've experienced. But there's still room for more ... much more.
Index
Copyright © 2008 by Angelo Dundee and Bert Randolph Sugar Click here for terms of use.
ABC
Abrams, Georgie
Africa
Agosto, Pedro
Ahearn, Goldie
Albertaini, Francis
Ali(film)
Ali, Belinda
Ali, John
Ali, Muhammad
Africa visited by
"Anchor Punch"
Banks vs.
Berbick vs.
Besmanoff vs.
boasting of
Bonavena vs.
Bugner vs.
bus of ("Big Red")
celebrity status of
Chuvalo vs.
college lectures of
conviction for induction refusal
Cooper (Henry) vs.
Coopman vs.
draft conviction overturned
draft deferment
draft induction date
draft induction refused by
Dundee takes over training
Dundee's appreciation of
Dundee's introduction to
Duran compared with
earning power of
Ellis (Jimmy) vs.
Ellis-Frazier competition and
European tour
Evangelista vs.
exile of
fascination with celebrities
fear of flying
fighting style
fining of
first pro fight of
Folley vs.
Foreman congratulated by
Foreman on comeback attempts
Foreman vs. (see Ali-Foreman competition)
Frazier vs. (see Ali-Frazier competition)
Fuller vs.
as a gym fighter
hand problems
heavyweight title stripped from
heavyweight title won by (first time)
heavyweight title won by (second, time)
heavyweight title won by (third time)
hernia operation
Holmes vs.
hospitalizations of
Hunsaker vs.
Islam and
Johnson (Alonzo) vs.
Jones (Doug) vs.
Leonard's admiration for
Liston vs. (see Ali-Liston competition)
London vs.
Lyle vs.
&nbs
p; Marciano vs. (computerized fight)
Mildenberger vs.
Miteff vs.
Moore (Archie) vs.
movies and
NABF heavyweight championship win
name change
nicknames for rivals
nicknames of
Norton vs.
number of fights in career
Olympics and
Patterson (Floyd) vs.
as "The People's Champion"
Playboy interviews
Powell vs.
practical jokes played by
predictions of
prefight nerves
presidential campaign suggestion
Quarry vs.
race issues and
retirement announcements
retirement of
rhymes of
roadwork of
Sabedong vs.
Shavers vs.
Siler vs.
South American tour
Spinks vs.
Terrell vs.
thyroid medication taken by
torn glove
"Viet Cong" remark
weight problems
Wepner vs.
Williams (Cleveland) vs.
womanizing of
wrestling match (Inoki vs.)
Young (Jimmy) vs.
"Ali Shuffle"
Ali-Foreman competition
Ali's taunts
analysis of Foreman's style
fee for
the fight
Foreman haunted by outcome
Foreman's training for
negotiation difficulties
as "The Rumble in the Jungle"
Ali-Frazier competition
Ali's reaction to loss
fee for
the fights (first)
the fights (second)
the fights (third)
Frazier's rejection of return bout
"The Thrilla in Manila"
ticket price for
Ali-Liston competition
Ali's challenges in
Ali's "surround the jab" move
the fights (first)
the fights (second)
odds in
theories on Liston's loss
weigh-in
Almeida, Manny
My View from the Corner Page 38