Amateur boxing in those days wasn’t nearly as well organized as it is today; there weren’t as many clubs, and competitive cards were few and far between. It was especially tough finding heavyweights to fight. I had a total of just 19 amateur bouts, plus a few exhibitions. Compare that to today, when most guys on the national team have more than 100 fights.
My only loss came in my very first appearance at Maple Leaf Gardens. It was to a guy named Eddie Smith. He was from Buffalo and had defeated Floyd Patterson in the amateur ranks a couple of years earlier. In my next appearance at the Gardens I beat the Michigan state champ, and before the year was out I beat the crap out of a French-Canadian guy from Sudbury to win the Ontario title.
On May 7, 1955, I knocked out Peter Piper in Regina to win the Canadian amateur championship. That was a very big deal, especially traveling all the way to Saskatchewan on the train. For most of the fighters representing Ontario it was our first trip out west, and we couldn’t believe that there was still snow on the ground in May.
My title fight was scheduled for 10 p.m. on the last night of the tournament, so at about three o’clock that afternoon I and another Toronto fighter named Willie Barboie went looking for something to eat. Willie was one-quarter black and three-quarters Italian and he talked like a New York street kid. He was fighting Edmonton’s Wilfie Greaves for the middleweight championship a couple of bouts before mine.
We walked into a restaurant in downtown Regina, and the waitress took out a little pad and asked us to write down what we wanted to eat. I’d never seen that before. I wrote down a steak with salad, dry whole-wheat toast and a cup of tea with honey and lemon. Willie ordered a big plate of bacon and eggs, a double order of buttered toast, a strawberry milkshake and a slice of strawberry shortcake. I couldn’t believe it.
“What the hell are you doing?” I asked him, but he just smiled and in that affected New York twang of his he said, “Don’t worry about me, Georgie. This is what I eat before every fight.”
Well, you can picture the scene a few hours later, when shortly after the opening bell, Greaves nailed him with a breath-robbing body shot: up came the bacon, the eggs, the greasy toast, the milkshake and the strawberry shortcake. Poor Willie puked his guts out all over the ring just before he got knocked out. The canvas was still wet and slippery from his projectile vomit when I went in to fight Piper, so I made sure to knock him out on one of the dry patches.
Greaves, by the way, went on to become a very good professional middleweight. Twice he gave Sugar Ray Robinson all he could handle, but for some reason he never got the recognition I think he deserved. And Piper became a pretty decent trainer and manager. He was one of the guys who helped put Winnipeg’s Donny Lalonde on the path to the world light heavyweight championship in the mid-1980s.
Winning the Canadian title was the highlight of my amateur career and paved the way for my first big-time TV appearance a couple of months later on The Wayne and Shuster Show, an enormously popular comedy/variety program that was produced by the CBC in Toronto and hosted by Johnny Wayne and Frank Shuster. I played the role of the referee in a boxing skit, and while I only had a couple of lines, it was a real thrill to be on the set with Canada’s most recognized TV stars. I almost didn’t make it, though. On the big night, I was stopped by a security guard outside the studio. When I explained that I was going to appear on Wayne and Shuster, the guy kind of looked me up and down and said, “What are you, a dancer?”
Another benefit of winning the national title was that I was the first of four fighters picked to represent Canada at the 1956 Olympic Games in Melbourne, Australia, which was quite an honor. Unlike today, however, there was no financial benefit attached to being on the Olympic team. No allowance for training or living expenses, not even a few bucks for traveling to other parts of Canada to defend my title.
There was no doubt in my mind that I’d do well at the Olympics, and it would’ve been a huge thrill to fight for my country, but it didn’t make economic sense, especially since the Summer Games were being held Down Under in November. With no money coming in, that was too long to wait.
I was being pressured to turn pro by Sonny Thomson and Dave Zuk, the guys who handled me at the Earlscourt Club, so they arranged to enter me in something called the Jack Dempsey New Talent Novice Tournament at Maple Leaf Gardens on April 23, 1956. I figured that was a good omen, because on the Catholic calendar April 23 is St. George’s Day—named for the Roman soldier who became a saint for slaying a dragon and refusing to renounce his Christian faith under torture.
The tournament was promoted by Frank Tunney and Jack Allen and was similar to what later became known as “tough man” competitions—except that a lot of the guys who entered had already turned pro. The rule was that you could have up to six pro fights and still qualify as “new” talent.
I didn’t care who they put in front of me, just as long as I got paid.
The big draw was that Dempsey himself refereed the final, so that pretty much guaranteed a big crowd and a lot of media attention. I ended up knocking out four guys—Ed McGhee, Ross Gregory, Jim Leonard and Gordon Baldwin—in a total of 12 minutes and 36 seconds, which made me the talk of the tournament. There were lots of sportswriters in attendance, and Dempsey said some nice things about me, how he thought I had a big punch and a lot of potential, that kind of thing. It was all pretty exciting stuff for an 18-year-old kid … and the $500 in prize money made me feel like a millionaire.
Any time a heavyweight debuts by knocking out four guys in one night, it’s going to attract some attention. But to be honest, I wasn’t surprised at my success. In the gym, I’d been more than holding my own sparring with old pros like James J. Parker and Earl Walls, who had been ranked No. 4 in the world just a couple of years earlier. I was pretty precocious in a lot of ways, starting with the fact that I was unusually strong for my age.
Parker was a guy I’d been studying for years. Originally from Saskatchewan, he’d been devastating as an amateur, once knocking out 25 consecutive opponents. He turned pro in early 1950 and won his first six fights by KO. That earned him a date at Madison Square Garden with world-ranked Dan Bucceroni just before Christmas, but Bucceroni, who was 28–1 at the time, stopped Jimmy in the second round.
Parker had mixed success over the next few years, beating guys like Charley Norkus and Jimmy Slade but losing to Nino Valdes and drawing with Walls in their Canadian title fight. In early 1956 he won a 12-round decision over South African champ Johnny Arthur, then KO’d German champ Heinz Neuhaus to earn a crack at Archie Moore, the No. 1 contender for the world title vacated by Rocky Marciano.
Just a week before Parker fought Moore at the Maple Leaf Stadium ballpark on July 25, 1956, I busted him up pretty good during a sparring session. I staggered him with a left hook, but just before I could finish him off, his trainer, Joey Bagnato, jumped into the ring to save him.
From that moment on, I knew I owned Parker. If I could do that at 18, what was I going to be like at 21?
A couple of years later, in just my 18th pro bout, I knocked him down three times in the first 90 seconds of our Canadian title fight. The fourth time he went down—exactly two minutes after the opening bell—he didn’t get up.
And Parker never fought again.
PART
THREE
MAIN EVENT
ROUND 1
THREE WEEKS AFTER THE DEMPSEY TOURNAMENT, with Jack Allen as my new manager, I made my official pro debut against Johnny Arthur, a world-ranked contender who had gone 12 rounds with Parker in January. He had a 30–7 record and had just fought future light heavyweight champ Willie Pastrano on TV’s Gillette Cavalcade of Sports.
Arthur was a big guy—at 228 he outweighed me by 25 pounds—and very experienced. But Allen, who was pushing 80, didn’t want to waste time by having me fight prelims. Nowadays, any manager who threw a raw 18-year-old kid into a debut against a veteran like Arthur would be run out of town, but things were different back then. For me, it was lik
e going from kindergarten straight into high school, with nothing in between. The learning curve was steep, but Allen expected me to just suck it up and take care of business.
Allen wasn’t so much a manager as he was a boxing impresario. He was as gay as a plaid rabbit, and everyone called him “Deacon” because of his dour demeanor. He preferred to conduct business only after dark because he claimed to be allergic to sunlight. Another quirk was that he always had a pint-sized mentally challenged guy named Mike Levinsky hanging around him. Mike was always dressed in a striped shirt, wide suspenders and an ever-present oversized bow tie. He also claimed he was Irish (Levinsky?) and that he had swum across the Atlantic to come to Canada. He called himself Allen’s social secretary, and any time a stranger wanted to talk to the Deacon, Levinsky would put out his hand and say, “Twenty-five cents, please.” I guess he had to make a living.
The Deacon was born in Fresno, California, but grew up in Sacramento, where he was introduced to the fight game as a kid by hanging around a saloon owned by Ancil Hoffman. Hoffman went on to manage Max Baer to the heavyweight championship, and Allen kind of looked up to him as a mentor. Allen later drifted up to Vancouver and opened a saloon of his own, which gave him an opportunity to start dabbling in boxing. He managed Canadian bantamweight and featherweight champ Vic Foley, as well as lightweight Billy Townsend, the “Blond Tiger” from Nanaimo, British Columbia, who was a popular headliner in New York in the early ‘30s.
Allen’s biggest success as a promoter had been a heavyweight fight between Earl Walls and Tommy Harrison in Toronto, which was the first time he hooked up with Frank Tunney. Tunney was the king of Toronto’s wrestling promoters, and they put together the Dempsey tournament that became my springboard to the pros.
I remember being nervous climbing through the ropes at Maple Leaf Gardens to fight Arthur. All my buddies were there, and because I’d created such a buzz by knocking out those four guys at the Dempsey tournament, I wanted to put on a good show. Arthur was slick, but after the first round I knew I had him. He had fast hands, but I was walking through his punches. And every time I landed a good shot, I could tell I was doing damage. I didn’t knock him out, but I won all eight rounds.
Allen didn’t waste any time lining up my next fight, a first-round KO over Joe Evans at the Gardens on September 10. Five weeks later he put me in with another world-ranked contender, Howard “Honeyboy” King, a big Texan who was 31–10–5 and coming off a draw with Archie Moore. King had been in the world’s top 10 for some time, but he was the kind of spoiler that everybody avoided. He had a style that made you look bad. I thought I hit him a lot more than he hit me—and harder, too—but he won the split decision over eight rounds. I got my revenge by knocking him out in two in our rematch 14 months later.
In between the two fights with King, I notched KOs over Sid Russell, Walter Hafer, Moses Graham and Emil Brtko at the Gardens, a decision over Bobby Biehler, and a KO of Joe Schmolze (fighting under the alias of Joe Olson) in Fort William, Ontario, and I dropped a decision to Bob Baker.
The Baker fight was my first 10-rounder and my second loss. With a record of 47–11–1, Baker was a top-10 guy whom not even Rocky Marciano would mess with. A few months before we fought, he was ranked No. 4 in the world by The Ring. I had him hurt on the ropes early, but I was too inexperienced to know how to finish him. I kind of went nuts after staggering him with a good shot to the head in the eighth, but he was a wily old pro who knew just exactly how to weather the storm. Every time I threw a flurry upstairs, he’d move his head or shoulders just enough to take the steam off my punches. It was like how you move your hand backwards when catching a ball to soften the impact. He did it expertly, and over the last two rounds I ran out of gas.
Baker wasn’t a big puncher, but he had a very good jab. That fight was also the first time my eyes really got messed up, and one of the very few times in my entire career that I remember feeling pain. He whacked me pretty good on the nose, and between the swelling of my cheekbones and the nicks around my eyes, I looked pretty messed up when it was over.
After the fight, Baker did a classy thing. He came to my dressing room and told me I had nothing to feel bad about. “George, the only thing that beat you tonight was my experience,” he said. “Don’t forget, I’ve had 60 pro fights and you’re just starting out. You’re going to beat a lot of guys and make a lot of money.” That made me feel a little better.
Through my first 14 fights, I was 12–2 against opponents who had a combined record of 179–77. Not a bad showing for a 19-year-old kid with only 49 pro rounds under his belt.
Fight No. 15 was against Cuban champion Julio Medeiros at Maple Leaf Gardens on January 27, 1958. Medeiros was a scary-looking guy: very black, with virtually no white in his eyes. When he looked at you, all you saw were little red bloodshot flecks around his incredibly dark, cold eyes. He was a hot-and-cold kind of fighter who in the previous year had split two decisions with Bob Satterfield, one of the hardest-punching heavyweights ever. And in 1955 Medeiros knocked out Roland LaStarza, a guy who had gone a total of 21 rounds in two tough fights with Marciano.
A week before the fight, I was getting ready for a run in High Park when it started snowing heavily. We had a Croatian boarder named Sigmund Schauer staying at our house, and he offered to drive me and my mother down to the park so they could wait in his car while I did my 45-minute run around frozen Grenadier Pond, a small lake about a mile long. For some reason—probably because it was so damn cold—I decided to run across the pond rather than around it. Just as I started doing so, I noticed a sign that said danger: thin ice! but I figured if I started to hear a cracking sound I’d just head for the shore.
There was no cracking sound. In fact, there was no sound at all until I suddenly found myself crashing through the ice and into the murky depths of Grenadier Pond. Now, I’d just run about three miles and was bathed in sweat, thanks to the cotton tracksuit I was wearing, along with heavy work boots. My first thought was that I was going to have a heart attack. I’m not the greatest swimmer in the world to begin with, and I was sinking fast.
To this day, I can still smell the stench of the weeds that were all around me. After what seemed like forever, I finally managed to thrash my way back up to the surface, where I broke off three big chunks of ice before finding a spot that would hold my weight. But by the time I dragged myself out of the water, I was almost too weak to stand. After catching my breath for a few seconds, I got up and ran like hell all the way back to the car, which was about half a mile away. I remember collapsing into the back seat and Mr. Schauer and my mother throwing their coats over me to keep me warm.
Amazingly, I never got so much as a sniffle from that little episode. I felt great going in against Medeiros, and I knocked him down twice in the second round. The second time was a whistling left hook that dropped him like a sack of wheat in the middle of the ring, and I thought it was all over. The referee was James J. Braddock, the old heavyweight champ. He started counting over Medeiros and got to nine when the bell rang. In those days you could be saved by the bell, so his guys dragged him back to the corner and brought him around. I should’ve put him away in the third, but my trainer, Tommy McBeigh, kept telling me to relax and take it easy, not to punch myself out like I did against Baker. The fight ended up going the 10-round distance, but I won it easily.
Three months after beating Medeiros, I got my revenge against Howard King by knocking him out in two rounds. I was now 14–2 and still unranked, but people were starting to notice. My next fight was back at the Gardens on June 20 against South American champion Alex Miteff. Though it turned out to be the fight that got me ranked in the world’s top 10 (at No. 8) for the first time, to this day it still leaves a bad taste in my mouth.
Miteff was from Maria Teresa, Argentina, where he’d compiled an incredible amateur record of 126–3–11, with 90 knockouts. With author Budd Schulberg (The Harder They Fall) as one of his sponsors, he turned pro after winning the gold medal at t
he 1955 Pan-Am Games in Mexico City and reeled off 12 straight victories before Mike DeJohn starched him in 77 seconds in Syracuse in 1957.
Miteff rebounded in his next fight to beat No. 5–ranked Nino Valdes in New York, which got him ranked No. 6 by the time we hooked up in Toronto.
Alex was a decent puncher. He tried to work the body, but everything he threw, I caught on my elbows. Because his shots were easy to block, he spent most of the night pounding on my arms and elbows. Meanwhile, I was using my jab and sharp one-twos to keep him on the outside, but apparently that strategy wasn’t impressing the judges. Maybe they should’ve asked the guy who was getting hit with them!
To make a long story short, in the 10th round I nailed Miteff with a big uppercut. You know how Mike Tyson used to twist and throw the uppercut from his hip? Well, that’s how I launched the one that cracked Alex flush on the jaw. He staggered backwards into the ropes, and for a second I saw his whole body shiver. He was still wobbly when I moved in and caught him with a hook and right then another left hook and right that knocked him almost completely through the ropes and onto the ring apron. With his left leg suspended over the middle rope, he landed so hard on his back and shoulders that he nearly kicked me in the crotch as he crashed onto the lip of the apron, just above the press table.
By the time referee Billy Burke extricated Miteff’s foot from between my legs and directed me to the neutral corner, Alex had been lying there for a good nine or 10 seconds. Burke turned to pick up the count from the timekeeper, an older Irish gentleman named Harry Campbell, whom I knew from the gym, but Harry was so excited and so happy for me that he forgot to start counting, so Burke had to start over again.
While this was going on, I looked over and saw Al Nicholson, a sportswriter for the Toronto Globe and Mail, along with a couple of other newspaper guys, and they were helping Miteff back on his feet, pushing him back through the ropes. Well, I went nuts. I started screaming at them: “What the hell are you doing? Leave him alone!” I was livid—but they just kept going, pushing Miteff back over the middle rope until both his feet were touching the canvas.
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