Chuvalo

by George Chuvalo

  Anyway, we pulled up beside this girl and Jack rolled down the window and started making small talk—“Hi beautiful, how ya doin’? Need a lift?” Pretty standard stuff. She didn’t hesitate about getting into the car, and to make a long story short, before very long I was having sex with her in the back seat at a drive-in restaurant, of all places. When we finished, I asked her, “How about taking care of my buddy, too?” She kind of balked at first, so I didn’t press her on it, but a couple of minutes later she agreed. Jack hopped in the back seat with her, finished his business (we both used condoms), and that was that. I drove back to where Jack had parked his car, and we all got out.

  Jack went to his car, and the girl and I started walking to the Premium restaurant, our regular hangout, which was just down the street. She said she had to make a phone call, which I thought was odd, but then I remembered she’d mentioned having a kid, so I assumed she was calling her babysitter. I went into the restaurant, sat down and ordered something to eat. When the girl didn’t come back from the phone booth after a few minutes, I just assumed she’d decided to go home. No big deal in my mind.

  I should have gone home too, but I didn’t. By now it was about four in the morning, so I went to another restaurant, a place called the Brazil on the corner of St. Clair and Lansdowne. After a little while I went back to the Premium. Just as I was getting comfortable, I looked up and saw the girl coming through the front door with a police officer. They walked right up to my booth and the cop said to me, “You’re under arrest. Come outside.” I was too shocked to even ask what the charge was, but when we got to the police station, the sergeant informed me I was being booked for rape.

  I was dumbfounded and horrified at the same time. A cop hustled me into a little room, where I was ordered to take off my pants and underwear for an examination. After they checked out the rest of my body for scratches, I was fingerprinted and photographed, then taken to a holding cell. A few hours later, after a paddy-wagon ride to court, I was released after promising to appear in the same court the following week, but by the time I got back home, the story—along with my picture—had already hit the front page of the morning paper.

  Looking back, I would rather have been charged with murder. Except for being an accused pedophile, nothing is worse than a rape charge. Once the story gets out, regardless of what the truth is, the public naturally assumes you’re guilty. I remember being in a store the following day and the clerk looking at me like I was the lowest piece of shit on the planet. Everywhere I went, strangers stared at me with a disgusted look that told me their minds were already made up. I was supposed to be the best man at the wedding of my buddy, Johnny Milkovich, but the priest phoned him to say I wouldn’t be welcome at the church. That hurt a lot.

  The lawyer I retained to fight the charge was a guy named Arthur Maloney, who years later became the Provincial Ombudsman of Ontario. I told him exactly what happened from the moment we saw the girl on the street, making it very clear that she hadn’t been raped or otherwise forced to do anything against her will. I wasn’t sure Maloney believed me, but at some point during our initial conversation he asked if the girl knew I was a fighter. I told him that shortly after we picked her up, she asked what I did for a living. As stupid as it sounds in hindsight, I told her I was a pro golfer. Don’t ask me where that came from. I told Maloney that before going to the drive-in we stopped to buy some gas, and when I took the money out of my wallet to pay the bill, my New York State boxing license fell out on the floor. I didn’t see that happen, but the girl scooped it up and handed it back to me a few minutes later, which gave her plenty of time to see what it was.

  The way the whole thing unfolded became clear a couple of weeks later when I was at a party at my cousin Marie’s house. I got called to the phone, and on the other end of the line was a voice that said, “George, you don’t know me, but I’m a cab driver and I’ve been trying to reach you because something happened to me this week that I think you should know about.” When I asked him what he was talking about, he said, “I picked up a fare, and when she got in the back seat of my cab she said, ‘Do you know who you look like? George Chuvalo, the fighter.’ I kind of laughed and said, ‘Oh yeah?’ And then, out of the blue, she said, ‘I’ve got him on a rape charge.’ Then she told me that you didn’t really rape her, but that she’d make a bundle of money out of it.”

  I was so stunned that I nearly dropped the phone. I got the guy’s name and number, and the next day he met with Mr. Maloney and repeated the exact same story. The following week, the cabbie was sitting in the back row of the courtroom at my preliminary hearing.

  When it came time for Maloney to question the girl on the stand, he asked her, “Do you recognize this gentleman?” When the cabbie stood up, the girl froze like a statue. She didn’t say a word, just sat there dumbfounded. Maloney repeated the question two more times, but she gave no response. Five minutes later, after being informed about the cabbie’s pending testimony, the judge ordered the charge dropped and the case was dismissed.

  Remember how my arrest was plastered all over the front page of the papers? The day after I was exonerated, a two-paragraph story about the charge being dropped was buried on the comics page. As for the little Italian cab driver who saved my butt all those years ago, I’m embarrassed to say that I can’t recall his name—but I’m eternally grateful to him.

  Even though my name was cleared, the rape charge haunted me for a long time. As hellish as it had been for me, it was even worse for Lynne. It’s a horrible, horrible thing to face a pregnant wife of three weeks and tell her that you’ve been charged with rape, but in an odd way it really showed how strong she was. Lynne knew how embarrassed and humiliated I felt, because she was going through exactly the same thing. And as awful as it was for me, it must’ve been 100 times worse for her. I wouldn’t have blamed her if she’d just packed up and left without a word, but on that day I came home from the police station, after she’d seen the headlines and faced the humiliation of people phoning her and telling her what an asshole I was, the first thing she said to me was, “George, I’m really angry and I’m really hurt … but I know in my heart that you could never rape anybody.”

  Lynne didn’t forgive me (and I don’t blame her), but she let me off the hook. And her belief in me made it a whole lot easier to face up to what was ahead. She was made of sterner stuff, which showed me how special she was.

  You don’t realize how crazy you can be sometimes. If I’d been respectful towards my wife, the whole episode would never have happened. And I couldn’t even imagine what my poor mother, father and sister must have felt. Same with Lynne’s parents. They believed in me, thank God, but we still had to talk about it. I remember telling them, “I’m in a lot of trouble because I did something very wrong. I was with another woman, but I didn’t rape her.”

  I was so overcome with shame and humiliation, and when it becomes public knowledge, you can’t take it back. I had disgraced them all—even my unborn son. And who would want their brand new son-in-law charged like that? But my in-laws didn’t start pointing fingers or berating me, and to their credit, they didn’t turn their backs on me. Their thoughts were with Lynne, and they didn’t want to make a bad situation worse.

  It took a couple of years for the rape charge to be completely behind me. Once in a while it came up in a newspaper story, but how could it not? Even now, 54 years later, how could I ignore it or gloss over it? It was on TV and the radio and in the papers, so it’s not like I could just pretend it would go away. I couldn’t take two steps without feeling like shrinking into a hole. I was stupid and I paid a price for that monumental stupidity. I just thank God there were no tabloids back then.

  As for the girl, I never saw her again.

  Five months later I returned to the ring and knocked out California’s Frankie Daniels in seven rounds at Maple Leaf Gardens. I thought all my troubles were behind me—but they were only just beginning.

  By the time I knocked out Daniels�
�two days after my 22nd birthday—I’d been a pro for nearly three and a half years. I was 16–3–1, world-ranked … and stuck in neutral. After blowing my New York debut against McMurtry, it didn’t look like I was headed back to the Big Apple anytime soon, and nobody was stepping up to challenge for my Canadian title, so I went into a bit of a tailspin.

  With a wife and new baby to take care of, my heart wasn’t much into training and I began to ponder how I could end my association with Jack Allen and Tommy McBeigh, the two guys who were supposedly overseeing my development.

  McBeigh handled all of Allen’s fighters. Sonny Thomson was the No. 2 guy, even though he knew a lot more about the game than Tommy. McBeigh was almost totally clueless. In the gym, all he ever did was smear Vaseline on my face and shout “Be first!” during sparring sessions—not exactly inspiring or instructive. He knew nothing about how to slip the jab or how to pivot, stuff like that. Everything I learned about the mechanics of boxing I picked up from the sparring partners that Allen brought up from Detroit (and those All-Wheat cards I collected as a kid!).

  For me, as a student of boxing, studying the different styles and skills of my sparring partners became a deliberate process. If you pay close attention you can learn a lot. And no matter how good you get, there’s always something new to learn.

  Boxing is very much a game of inches and angles, and it’s often the tiniest, most innocuous detail that makes the difference between winning and losing. Take a guy like Roberto Duran, one of the best pound-for-pound fighters in history. An opponent would be standing right in front of him with his hands raised in a perfect defensive posture, but Roberto, simply by sliding his right foot six or eight inches to the side, could shoot a left uppercut through the guard and a right hand over the top. Little things like foot movement make all the difference in the world, but McBeigh had no clue about stuff like that.

  The same goes for something as simple as blocking a hook. Just like when you slip a punch, you want to be moving closer to the other guy—not leaning back—when you block a hook to the head. That way, after catching the punch on your right hand, you’re in position to land one of your own. Obviously, anybody with a decent left hook is going to throw it to the body too, but McBeigh couldn’t comprehend the logic of keeping my elbows tucked in to absorb punches with my arms. He was always insisting that my arms should be extended way out in front.

  Working with old-school sparring partners like King George Moore and Billy Hunter, I discovered I could make a guy drop his hands just by quickly slamming the front of his shoulder with an open glove, then I’d nail him with a right hand or hook. Moore was the guy who showed me how to relax my arms in a clinch so I couldn’t be spun.

  It was also in sparring sessions with those guys that I first hatched the idea of stepping on an opponent’s toes so he couldn’t get away—which I later used with great success against Doug Jones. There’s nothing in the Marquess of Queensberry rules that says you can’t do that, so I worked on making it part of my repertoire. I’d plant my left foot on top of the other guy’s left foot so he couldn’t get away, then shoot a right to the body or head. It worked like a charm against taller guys, and to this day I regret not trying it with Ernie Terrell and Muhammad Ali.

  Even more frustrating than the fact McBeigh and Thomson couldn’t teach me any of the technical aspects of boxing was that Allen insisted I follow their instructions to the letter, even though most of those instructions were unbelievably stupid. But he was the manager, right? For example, they were so concerned about me not having sex for three or four weeks before a fight that they came up with a way of preventing wet dreams, which they thought weakened you.

  I’d always thought having a wet dream was Mother Nature’s way of kind of taking care of things if you’re not getting lucky, but then again I was only 18 years old, so what the hell could I know? For the first year of my career I acquiesced to McBeigh’s “solution,” which was for me to tightly knot a rubber band around the head of my penis before going to sleep—the idea being that getting an erection would be painful enough to wake me up.

  That theory crumbled when I had three wet dreams the night before I KO’d Joe Evans in the very first round. Still, a stubborn McBeigh ordered me to use a piece of thread next time, which was as painful as it sounds. The first time I woke up with blood all over the sheets was the last time I went with the thread.

  I’ve never bought into the idea that abstaining from sex makes a fighter meaner or sharper. You’d hear old trainers say, “His legs is gone!”—meaning their guy had sex and couldn’t possibly be ready to fight, but I always thought that was a load of crap. Sex is normal, and I think for guys who are very edgy before a big fight, it’s probably the best and most natural way to relieve tension. It depends on the individual, of course. I didn’t have to have it because I think I was a pretty cool customer going into a fight.

  I was never edgy or fidgety or what you’d call unnerved going into the ring. If anything, I just got real quiet. Some guys get very outgoing, very gregarious on the day of a fight, but that was never my style. If I was in Toronto, I liked to have a few friends around to listen to music or just sit around and kibitz with each other and have a few laughs. Anything was better than hanging with my trainer and manager, neither of whom was any good at keeping things light. Most trainers are naturally kind of somber, and managers are too wound up to know how to help you relax.

  Even later in my career, when Teddy McWhorter was my trainer and Irving Ungerman was managing me, they weren’t the best guys to hang with on the day of a fight. Far from it. Ungerman would get so keyed up that he couldn’t even speak intelligently; he’d just kind of babble about whatever popped into his head. It was as annoying as it was ludicrous. He had no clue about how to help me relax, and he’d even shoo away anybody who dropped by the dressing room to lighten things up.

  When you’re getting ready for battle, you don’t want to look at a couple of sad sacks with long faces that remind you of what you’re going to be doing in a few hours; you want to keep the atmosphere upbeat. You want a guy like Angelo Dundee, who was a master at creating a calm, serene environment, even in the circus atmosphere surrounding champions like Ali and Sugar Ray Leonard. I never had that.

  On the road, I liked to get away by myself and watch an afternoon movie. I found that getting absorbed in a good story up on the big screen was the perfect way for me to relax because it would take my mind off what I was going to do a few hours later. The films I recall most vividly are The Arrangement (when I fought Jerry Quarry), Joe (George Foreman) and Dirty Harry (my second fight with Ali).

  An incident that happened during training for my title defense against Yvon Durelle marked the beginning of the end of my association with Allen and McBeigh. It was my first defense—November 17, 1959, at Maple Leaf Gardens—and there was a lot of pre-fight hype.

  Durelle, the “Fighting Fisherman” from Baie-Sainte-Anne, New Brunswick, was a wild, powerful puncher and the reigning British Commonwealth light heavyweight champ. Half of his 85 wins had been by KO, and the previous December, in one of the greatest title bouts in history, he floored the great Archie Moore four times before the champ finally stopped him in Round 11. Still, I figured it would be like shooting fish in a barrel. I wouldn’t have to look for Yvon; with his wild style I was confident that he’d be right in front of me for the taking.

  Four days before the fight, during my final sparring session, a left hook thrown by Dave Shoulders, a pretty good banger we’d brought up from Detroit, punctured my right eardrum. It was a freak thing, caused by the impact of the air being driven into my ear. I knew what happened right away, because I suddenly couldn’t hear anything out of that ear. But when I told Allen and McBeigh that something was seriously wrong and I needed to get it checked out, McBeigh just laughed and said, “I never spend a biscuit on a doctor.” That was in the days before Canadians had free medical coverage, so I knew there was no way my manager was shelling out for an examination. Then
McBeigh chimed in with some rather sage advice: “Just pour some hydrogen peroxide in your ear and it’ll be as good as new.” I had never heard of that particular remedy, which in my ignorance sounded completely logical.

  I went home to Lynne and told her to administer McBeigh’s “treatment,” but she said I was crazy and refused to do it. It never dawned on me that, having worked as a hairstylist, my teenage bride was very familiar with hydrogen peroxide. Instead, like a jerk, I got mad and yelled at her to shut up and just do what she was told. I lay down on the bed and she poured the stuff directly into my ear.

  Well, I never felt that kind of physical pain in my life—before or since. It was like having a hot poker shoved into my ear. I was certain the hydrogen peroxide was frying my brain. I’m sure my screams could be heard a block away, and all I could hope for was that the river of tears streaming down my face would somehow find their way into my ear canal.

  No such luck.

  After what seemed like an eternity, the pain dissipated somewhat. But the following day—a Sunday—infection and swelling set in, and I knew I needed professional help. On Monday morning I went to see a doctor, who took one look at my ear and said that McBeigh should be horsewhipped for dispensing such stupid advice.

  The doc gave me some penicillin and strongly suggested that we call off the fight, which was scheduled for the following night. He told me that if I got whacked on the ear, I’d probably go deaf—permanently. I should have heeded his warning, but I really needed the $6,000 payday.

  Durelle was a street brawler who threw wide punches from every angle, but I figured I could take him out early, before he got a chance to land one on my ear. As it turned out, I dropped him with a left hook in the first round, then six more times before he was finally counted out in the 12th. Yvon was a very tough customer, strong and relentless, but I kind of let him off the hook. After every knockdown, instead of moving in to finish him off, I held back because I was worried about getting whacked in the ear. When he went down the last time, he was out cold and one of his legs was twitching, like when you shoot a horse. That was scary.