One morning, not long after that day in the park, I walked across Dundas Street, right in the heart of the Junction, and wandered into Morgan’s cigar store to buy some candy. On my way to the counter I happened to stop and look at the big rack of magazines—all those colorful covers and exotic titles. As I took in the whole display, my eye was drawn to a copy of The Ring (“The Bible of Boxing”), which was just about at eye level for a little guy.
I was instantly mesmerized. I took the magazine off the rack and carefully opened it up. Inside were pictures of big, muscular guys punching each other. It was a whole different world from anything I’d ever seen. After browsing for a couple of minutes, I carefully put the magazine back on the rack. I didn’t even buy any candy, because I couldn’t wait to run home and tell my parents I wanted to be a fighter.
As it happened, around that time we had a little Italian woman and her son and daughter subletting the upstairs of our house, and the kid was an amateur boxer. His name was Rollie Mignacca, and he looked like Gabe from the old Dead End Kids movie serials: tall and lanky, maybe 16 or 17 years old.
Rollie went out one night to fight a guy named Gus Rubicini. I don’t know why I didn’t ask to go to the fight, or if kids were even allowed to go to the fights; it seemed so very adult to me. But I stayed up until he came home, and I could hear his mother asking him about the fight, which he lost. I can still hear that woman’s voice: “Rollie, how coulda you loosa da fight? How coulda you loosa, after I’m a feeda you da porka chops?”
Poor Mrs. Mignacca was crestfallen. She just couldn’t fathom how her boy could lose a fight after she fed him meat. By the way, Gus Rubicini, the guy who beat Rollie that night, went on to have a very respectable professional career, highlighted by a win over Joey Giardello in 1951. A few months later, Giardello became middleweight champion of the world.
I took Rollie’s loss almost as hard as his mother did. He was a big kid I looked up to. In fact, all the big kids in our neighborhood—who were mostly the older brothers of my buddies—were sort of role models for the rest of us. Most of them belonged to what was known as the Junction Gang, which was the toughest group in the city’s west end. They used to have street rumbles with the Beanery Gang, who ruled the east end. Zip guns, bicycle chains, baseball bats … name any weapon, and they used it.
Most of them were real tough kids, but the leader of the Junction Gang, who lived on our street, was a little twerp named Johnny O’Hearn. He was five foot nothing, but like all the rest of the gang members, he used to wear what was called a zoot suit, with shoulder pads to make him look bigger. Another integral part of the uniform, if you wanted to look really cool, was a vest chain hanging from your waistband to about halfway down your thigh, which the guys used to twirl when they were walking down the street. After I got my first pair of dress pants at age nine or 10, the first thing I did was run out and buy a chain to twirl like the big guys. Very cool!
It was right around that time that I got my first set of boxing gloves, too. After weeks of listening to me beg, my mother finally purchased them at Eaton’s department store. There were four gloves in the set, and five minutes after she brought them home, I ran across the street to round up some pals to break them in. We went to what we called the macaroni field, which was an unpaved parking lot—just a beat-up patch of grass, really—at the pasta plant down the street. We took turns punching each other, and it became our daily ritual.
I’d already learned a couple of tricks from studying those Kellogg’s trading cards, including how to get a guy out of position by feinting a left to the body and then shooting a left hook to the head, just like Joe Louis (or so I thought). Even something as simple as that can really boost the confidence of a 10-year-old kid, and I quickly found out that nobody in our little group could lay a glove on me. This went on for a few weeks until one day an older guy on the street—he was probably 18 or 19—stopped to watch. After we finished, he came up to me and said, “Hey George, you’re pretty good with your dukes. Why don’t you go to the gym?”
When I asked him where that might be, he said it was about a mile away, at St. Mary’s Roman Catholic Church, where there was boxing training Monday to Friday evenings and weekend afternoons, and dances for teenagers on Saturday night. That’s all I needed to hear.
I showed up at the church the next day. In the basement they had a heavy bag, a floor-to-ceiling punching ball, a couple of medicine balls and an exercise table. There was an old guy who kind of kept an eye on things. He had fought pro and also shared the same name, Mickey McDonald, with a bank robber operating and still at large. But for the most part the kids just fooled around with the bags and then paired off for sparring.
I was one of the smaller ones there, so it took a while before I really got involved. I spent most of my time doing push-ups and sit-ups, learning how to hold my hands up and twist my body when I threw a punch. I watched all the bigger kids and tried to emulate anything that looked useful.
I had my first real fight at the age of 10 at Stanley Barracks, which was part of the armed forces complex down by the Canadian National Exhibition grounds. I was 85 pounds and pretty edgy. I was in awe of the crowd and of the way the whole room was dark except for the lights illuminating the ring. My mother and father were there, along with my sister, my aunt Sofie and my uncle Sam.
My enduring memory of that night is of my trainer, Mickey McDonald, greasing my face with Vaseline in the corner. It was the first time that boxing seemed so serious, but it made me feel like a real fighter. I can’t remember the name of the east-end kid I fought in an exhibition, but when it was over they called it a draw.
A couple of years (and four fights) later, the St. Mary’s boxing program came to an abrupt end with the arrival of a new priest, Father Paderski, from Winnipeg, who immediately decreed that “Catholics don’t box and Catholics don’t dance.” That was a particularly perplexing turn of events, because my family had just moved into a house right next door to the church.
In order to continue my training, I joined the Diamond Boxing Club, which was a couple of miles away. It was run by Vic and Joey Bagnato, two of the seven brothers who to this day are revered as Toronto’s all-time best boxing benefactors. Originally there were 24 Bagnato kids, but only 12 survived. Mrs. Bagnato received an award and some cash from the federal government for having given birth to so many children. There were seven boys, and all but one were fighters. The best of the brood was Joey, a former Canadian lightweight champ who floored world featherweight champion Willie Pep before losing to him in 1942. The only Bagnato brother who didn’t fight was Vince; he became a successful promoter and pioneered the concept of “So You Think You’re Tough” tournaments back in the early ‘70s. Vince also played a fight manager opposite Tony Curtis in the 1979 movie Title Shot and contributed some of the film’s cheesy dialog, including such nuggets as “You’re a piece of garbage wrapped up in a $300 suit!” and “The first time he gets hit on the button, you’ll hear crystal cracking all over town.”
If St. Mary’s got me smitten with the sport, the Diamond Boxing Club made me fall head-over-heels in love with it. Walking in there the first time as a skinny 12-year-old, I couldn’t believe what I saw. The rows of heavy bags and speed bags, the noise … even the smell. It was intoxicating.
For me, the most impressive thing was the regulation-sized ring, right in the middle of the gym. I spent hours watching every guy that climbed through the ropes of that ring, whether he was a flyweight or a heavyweight. One of the “old” fighters who caught my eye during those sparring sessions was a 20-year-old banger named James J. Parker—the guy I would knock out in one round to win the Canadian heavyweight championship just nine years later.
One spring morning in 1950 I walked into the gym and saw Vic Bagnato talking to a fighter named Les Irwin, a future mobster who got shot to death in Vancouver several years later. I asked Vic if he could spare a ticket to the upcoming fight between Li’l Arthur King, Toronto’s world-ranked lightweight
contender, and Johnny Rowe, a tough customer from Rochester, New York. Vic was a little reluctant about handing out a free ducat, but then Les started ragging on him—“Come on, give the kid a ticket, you cheap bastard”—and it worked.
I rode the streetcar to the fight at the CNE Coliseum all by myself, and it was a huge thrill—the first pro card I ever attended. I watched Les lose his prelim to a guy named Eddie Zastre, but then King knocked out Rowe in the third round, so it was a memorable night. The ring introductions and the noisy crowd made it all seem so big-time through the eyes of a 12-year-old. I’ve never forgotten what it felt like to be there that night, or that it was a future mobster who helped a wide-eyed kid get a ticket to soak it all up. I was always thankful to Les, and I was very sorry when he got shot, but I guess he must’ve done some pretty bad stuff to end up like that.
By the way, the first “big-time” heavyweight fight I saw in person was in 1954, when world-ranked Canadian champion Earl ‘The Hooded Terror” Walls fought Tommy Harrison at Maple Leaf Gardens. Little did I realize that I would become Walls’s successor just a few years later.
By age 14 I’d moved over to the Earlscourt Boxing Club, which was part of a recreational complex in the park at St. Clair and Lansdowne avenues. They had tennis courts, and later they added a skating rink. I was fighting regularly and earning a bit of a reputation as a kid who was pretty good with his mitts.
I also started building up my body. One day in Latin class I happened to swing my arm over the back of a chair to talk to the kid behind me, and he made a comment about how skinny my bicep was. When I got back to the gym, I started lifting weights, a passion that’s still with me today. Over the next year I put on 75 pounds of solid muscle—and I’ve never heard a crack about my biceps since.
When I was 12 years old, I also used to do push-ups on chairs. I’d place three chairs in a triangular position, put my feet on the back one and dip my body between the other two just ahead of me. When I started, I could only do four push-ups on the floor. Nine months later, I could do 400 on the chairs. Of course, I made all kinds of noises while doing this, grunting and groaning. Hey, it was a tough workout! My old man would be trying to sleep because he had to get up at 4:30 a.m. to go to Canada Packers, and I’d be up in my room in the dead of night, doing all these push-ups. He didn’t take too kindly to it. My mother would get upset and holler, “George, what are you doing up there?” And I would yell back, “I’m trying to get somewhere!”
In 1952, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation began televising the weekly amateur boxing program from the East York Arena, and later from the Palace Pier. The bouts were shown live in the Toronto market, and the following week a film of the show would air on a dozen CBC affiliate stations across the country. I thought it was pretty cool to see myself on TV, and the shows were run very professionally. A sportscaster by the name of Steve Douglas did the blow-by-blow commentary and conducted post-fight interviews with the winners, which really made us feel important.
By age 15, I was a full-fledged 198-pound heavyweight, and thanks to a dismissive comment from my father—and a sneaky jab from a guy named Glen Mowat—I made the conscious decision to become a professional fighter.
The comment from my dad came one day when we were walking to the pool hall on St. Clair Avenue, where he used to meet his pals to shoot a few games. I can’t even remember what we were talking about, except that it had nothing to do with boxing. Then, out of the blue, he blurted out in his thick Croatian accent, “When your nose start bleeding, you quit!”
I couldn’t figure out what he was getting at. But today, 60 years later, I think I know. I mentioned earlier that Papa Steve took care of business when I misbehaved. He was most definitely old school, from the old country. Whenever I received the all-too-familiar pussy-willow lashing (my father’s favorite form of corporal punishment) on my fingertips, knuckles, or bare buttocks, I would yelp and howl like a natural-born sissy. My baby sister, on the other hand, would simply grit her teeth and let out nary a whimper. She was tougher than I was.
It was plain to see that my dad figured my kid sister was more resilient than I was in the take-a-beating department. How the heck could I ever make it in the fight game? Still, I was shocked and hurt, because I’d already had a few amateur fights and would never quit. Of course, I would never disrespect my father by talking back to him or challenging anything he said, but that comment really stung me. I was hurt, and I got mad. I said to myself, “All right, old man. I’ll show you!”
Before I could show my dad just how tough I was, however, I was expected to at least finish my education. But when it came to choosing between boxing and school, there really was no choice.
In 1950, I enrolled in Grade 9 at the brand new St. Michael’s College high school, but by that time I was so passionate about pursuing a career in the ring that I didn’t really care if I attended classes or not.
St. Mike’s had great sports programs, and I had a lot of fun there. I played fullback on a house league football team and for a while I was a sprinter on the track team, but neither of those things came close to giving me the rush that I felt in the ring.
In Grades 10 and 11, my classmates included future National Hockey League stars Dick Duff and Charlie Burns, and a kid named Tony Roman, who went on to play for the Ottawa Rough Riders in the Canadian Football League. Duff, who won six Stanley Cups with the Toronto Maple Leafs and Montreal Canadiens, was voted into the Hockey Hall of Fame in 2006. During his induction speech, when he said that he taught me how to fight, I blurted out, “Yeah, and I taught you how to skate!”
By Grade 11, I’d had enough. I quit St. Mike’s in early 1953, and when I wasn’t training I worked in construction and other odd jobs, including a stint at Canada Packers. In the fall I decided to give school another shot, so I enrolled at Central Tech with the idea of studying electronics. That lasted all of three weeks, because I didn’t have the prerequisite courses. I moved on to Humberside Collegiate but got the boot for cutting too many classes. Just before I was expelled, my English teacher, Mr. Green, told me, “George, you’ll never amount to anything more than a pick-and-shovel guy.”
For the next few months, it looked like Mr. Green was right. I went back to construction work and then took a job moving furniture for 90 cents an hour. After one particularly brutal stint of hauling pianos and sofas for 36 straight hours, the thought of doing any more of that kind of labor was all the incentive I needed to start seriously planning to become a professional boxer.
It was also around this time that I gave up smoking, a bad habit I’d picked up a few months earlier. I don’t even know why I started—except that I thought it looked very adult. The first cigarette I ever smoked was at Burt’s Turkey Palace, a big park on the outskirts of Toronto where the Croatian community used to have picnics. One day my buddy Johnny Milkovich asked if I wanted to smoke a Black Cat cigarette. I had no idea at the time how harmful tobacco was, and it didn’t take long before I was hooked, even though I knew it was no good for my wind. I’ve got to be honest, though; I really liked the taste of tobacco, and I developed a neat little trick where I could exhale the smoke three or four inches in front of my face and then suck it back in. I thought it was pretty cool.
As much as I enjoyed smoking, I quit cold turkey on August 11, 1954, the same night Archie Moore retained his light heavyweight championship by knocking out Harold Johnson in New York. I really admired Archie as a fighter, so I quit as kind of a tribute to him. And I’ve never smoked since.
A few weeks later I packed it in as a furniture mover, and thanks to a sparring session with Glen Mowat, I knew I’d chosen the right career path. Mowat was 24 and the Ontario amateur heavyweight champion. We hooked up in the gym on a Wednesday afternoon because he was fighting the following Monday on the TV card and wanted some last-minute work.
Halfway through the first round, he caught me with a good left hand and busted my nose. I knew it was broken right away, because there was blood all over the
place, and when I went back to the corner my trainer could kind of slide my nose from side to side—not the greatest feeling in the world. Anyway, I finished the session and went home. My mother nearly fainted when she saw my face, but I didn’t think it was such a big deal—certainly not worth a trip to the doctor’s office.
The next day I showed up at the gym as usual, and my trainer, Sonny Thomson, told me I had to spar some more because Glen Mowat had a fight coming up the next week and needed the work to get sharp. Sure, why not? Well, Mowat started whacking me on my schnozz right away—and, of course, it started pouring blood again. But I stayed in there with him for the full session.
Looking back, you could say that was my rite of passage. I said to myself, “I don’t think most guys would even get back in the ring with a freshly broken nose, never mind risk getting punched on the honker again.” It made me feel a little special. I thought about my father, and what he’d said to me that day on the street, and I knew I was tough enough. I knew I’d be okay.
By the way, three months later I owned Mowat in the ring. I could toy with him. I figured out how to slip his jab and nail him with a right uppercut to the body, followed by a hook to the head. Before the year was out, we ended up boxing in an exhibition at the Palace Pier and I beat the hell out of him.
MY first fight for Earlscourt Boxing Club was at East York Arena against a guy exactly twice my age: a 30-year-old Newfoundlander named Andy Humber, who was also a member of the Earlscourt club. The fight was televised, and even though I wanted to go for a knockout, my corner wanted me to go easy on him because we were from the same gym. Andy was a nice guy and I felt a little bad about laying a beating on him. I won an easy decision.
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