After the fight, Durelle was quoted in the papers as saying he could have beaten me if he were younger (he said he was 30, but he was really 29) and if he’d trained harder, but to me it just sounded like sour grapes.
Durelle fought only six more times after that, retiring in 1963 with a terrific record of 90–23–2. We hooked up again for an exhibition bout a couple of years later in Halifax to raise money for former Canadian lightweight champ Richie “Kid” Howard, whose young daughter had been killed in a traffic accident. I was still pissed off about some of the things Yvon had said after our title bout, and I’m ashamed to say that I slapped him around pretty good in that exhibition as payback.
Years later we met again at a sportsmen’s dinner, and without really saying anything or rehashing old grudges, we hugged and eventually became pretty good friends. I once visited his house in Baie-Sainte-Anne, and whenever we were in the same city we’d get together and talk about the old days. When Yvon died in 2007 I felt terrible about not being able to attend his funeral, but I was en route to Tanzania to cheer on my second wife, Joanne, who was climbing Mount Kilimanjaro to raise money for the Canadian Liver Foundation.
That punctured eardrum resulted in some long-term damage that persists to this day, but it wasn’t bothering me in my next outing eight months later, when I lost a 10-round decision to 1956 Olympic gold medalist Pete Rademacher. I wish it had been, because that bout was the worst one of my career.
I’d actually signed to fight Cuban veteran Nino Valdes in the interim, but that was canceled when a routine medical examination by the Ontario Athletic Commission revealed that Valdes, who was coming off a KO of England’s Brian London, was almost blind in his left eye. He never fought again.
The fact of the matter is that I was young and arrogant, and I didn’t train worth a damn for Rademacher. It was kind of ironic, because if I’d delayed turning pro and gone to the 1956 Olympics in Melbourne, I probably would’ve ended up fighting him for a medal. As it turned out, he KO’d a Czech, a South African and a Russian to win gold for the U.S., and a year later he became the first guy ever to fight for the world heavyweight championship in his pro debut.
Still, there’s no way in hell Rademacher should have beaten me in our outdoor fight at Maple Leaf Stadium in Toronto. Floyd Patterson knocked him out in six rounds in their 1957 title bout in Seattle (which overshadowed the fact that Floyd was decked in the opening round) but Pete wasn’t much of a banger. He looked like an accountant and punched like a florist. He piled up points because I just stood there like a dummy and let him hit me, without ever firing back more than one punch at a time. I knew I wasn’t in shape, and maybe I was a little cocky because at 7–3–1 he was only the third opponent who’d had fewer fights than me (the others were Sid Russell and Moses Graham, both of whom I KO’d in one round in ‘57), but that’s still no excuse.
Rademacher outboxed me and he won, fair and square. As the next day’s headline in the Toronto Star put it, “Chuvalo’s stock hits rock bottom after inept showing against Rademacher.”
It’s the only one of my 18 defeats that still makes me wince with embarrassment more than 50 years later.
The loss to Rademacher spiraled me into a long period of soul searching. Sure, I still had the Canadian title, but I wasn’t making any real dough and I was feeling more and more like a guinea pig running around in one of those little wheels. The harder I worked at it, the less I felt like I was accomplishing anything. I was definitely unhappy with my management and with what I perceived as a lack of progress.
The five-year contract I’d signed with Allen when I turned pro in 1956 still had a year to go (I didn’t find out until later that five-year deals were illegal in Ontario; the maximum allowed was four), and even though my end of each purse was two-thirds of the total (with the 10 per cent trainer’s fee and all other expenses taken off the top), I was constantly broke.
Twenty-eight days after the debacle against Rademacher, I went to Montreal to defend my Canadian title against Bob Cleroux. Bob was strong and awkward and fought out of a low crouch. A week after my fight with Rademacher, Cleroux jumped ahead of me in the rankings by knocking out Roy Harris, the pride of Cut ‘n’ Shoot, Texas. That was the first (and last) time that two Canadian-born heavyweights were ranked among the world’s top 10, so there was a tremendous amount of buildup for our fight, especially in Quebec’s French-language press.
All the publicity really took me by surprise. Sometimes there were seven or eight photos of me in the French papers in a single day, and twice as many of Bob. There’d be pictures of me running, eating breakfast, lighting candles at church. The pre-fight hype was unbelievable, but I loved it.
When we met on August 17, Jersey Joe Walcott was the third man in the ring and Cleroux ended up being awarded a split decision (notice I don’t say “winning”), which was a joke. Walcott indicated he was going to stop the fight after the 10th round, but Cleroux’s corner convinced him to let it continue. I don’t think I lost a single round, but in his hometown I would’ve had to kill him to get the win. Al Bachman, who was Cleroux’s manager, admitted as much when he was interviewed for a cover story about me in the January 1964 edition of Boxing Illustrated: “There was a natural indignation among French-Canadians about the way George had clobbered Durelle, and I knew they’d be banking on Cleroux to avenge their honor,” said Bachman. “It was my finest hour. Not only did we make more money than we would have in Toronto, we had the advantage of a Quebec ring and Quebec officials. Chuvalo should have got the decision, but he didn’t. We had the home advantage.”
Cleroux wouldn’t come to Toronto for a rematch, so we squared off again in Montreal on November 23, and this time I got the nod and regained the title. Before the bout, a guy who knew my manager told me if I bet $1,000 on myself and won, I’d pocket three grand. He said he could get those odds, but when he came back after the fight, he told me he hadn’t found anyone to take the bet. I knew he was bullshitting and had just pocketed the profit himself. Live and learn.
Still, getting my title back was more important than the money, especially since it was only three weeks after Lynne gave birth to our second son on November 2. I was in Montreal when he was born, and I couldn’t wait to get home.
Unlike Mitchell, who looked more like his papa (me), our new son looked like Lynne … and my mother. We picked Steven as his first name in honor of my father, but when Lynne said she wanted his middle name to be Fredrick (after her father), I quickly vetoed the idea. I really liked Lynne’s dad, but there was no way I was naming any kid of mine Fredrick, with all due respect to the Fredricks out there. Not a chance. Well, Lynne got mad, but I stood my ground. On the birth registration I wrote in “Steven Louis” (my middle name), and she reluctantly signed it.
With another mouth to feed in the Chuvalo household, I was looking forward to keeping busy and moving up the rankings.
I was supposed to fight British contender Brian London at Maple Leaf Gardens in early 1961, but a few days before the bout I got hit with the flu bug and lost eight pounds overnight. We asked for a one-week postponement, but London didn’t want to stick around. He claimed that the church bells across the street from his room at the King Edward Hotel were driving him nuts, so he hightailed it back to Britain.
In March, I won my rematch with Alex Miteff at the Gardens, then knocked out German champ Willie Besmanoff in four rounds in June. Besmanoff was a tough, durable guy with 44 wins, including decisions over Bob Baker and Pat McMurtry, two guys I’d lost to. He’d been cut up and stopped in seven rounds by Sonny Liston a couple of years earlier, but Liston couldn’t knock him down.
I dropped Willie seven times in a little over 12 minutes before his corner threw in the towel. That was the worst beating I ever gave anybody, capped by what I think is the hardest punch I ever threw. It came off a classic shoeshine: six shots to the body, then a left hook I threw from the hip. The punch exploded off his jaw. Poor Willie was out cold, but his legs were twitching like h
e’d been electrocuted. I felt pretty good about it, because not even Liston had been able to put him away like that.
On August 8, six weeks after starching Besmanoff, I fought Cleroux again in a rubber match for the Canadian title at Delorimier Stadium in Montreal. It was the only one of our three fights that was close. They gave it to him, and I couldn’t argue. Early on he whacked me with a right hand, and my ear swelled up to a couple of inches thick. It was painful, but losing the title hurt more. I’d been around long enough to appreciate that being introduced by ring announcers as the Canadian heavyweight champion was a lot better than just being another schmuck from Palookaville, and while it would be another couple of years before I got the title back, enough things were happening in my life to keep that goal on the back burner for the time being.
It wasn’t until after my last fight of 1961—a disqualification loss to former British Commonwealth champ Joe Erskine at Maple Leaf Gardens on October 2—that I finally concluded that my only shot at becoming world champion was to get out of Toronto. My climb up the rankings had been temporarily derailed, but I knew I hadn’t come close to realizing my full potential. I figured I could still get back on track if I just had the right people in my corner.
The disqualification against Erskine, a Welshman, was entirely my fault. We were wearing Frager gloves, which had the thumb overlapping the meaty part of the glove, so it was easy to poke a guy in the eye With the thumb, even if you weren’t trying to do so.
Erskine was probably the lightest puncher I ever fought, but in the first couple of rounds he thumbed me twice in the eye, and I got hot. Not being slick enough to headbutt properly, after Joe thumbed me the second time, I just reared back and smacked him with my forehead. It was stupid and immature—but then I did it a couple more times for good measure. It was a classic example of how not to butt an opponent. (Two-Ton Tony Galento later taught me how to follow a butt with a short right hand, making it look like the punch caused the damage.)
Unfortunately, Joe’s thumbing wasn’t as obvious as my retaliation, and after a couple of warnings, referee Sammy Luftspring finally disqualified me in the fifth round. I was mad at Sammy, but I should’ve been mad at myself. Erskine had a good record—he was 38–5–1 at the time, including a couple of wins over Henry Cooper and a decision over Willie Pastrano—but he wasn’t giving me any trouble. If I hadn’t lost my cool, I would’ve beaten him easily.
What ticked me off the most was that I had a verbal agreement to fight Floyd Patterson for the world championship on December 4 at Maple Leaf Gardens if I beat Erskine. Patterson had regained the title by knocking out Ingemar Johansson in March, and he wanted me for his first defense. Instead, Floyd ended up knocking out No. 7–ranked Tom McNeeley in four rounds.
Despite the back-to-back losses to Cleroux and Erskine, in early 1962 the World Boxing Association ranked me No. 2 on the planet, which only reinforced my decision to buy out my contract with Allen, dump McBeigh as my trainer and get the hell out of Toronto. I knew I could hold my own with anyone in the world, but I needed better training and better direction than I felt I was ever going to get with those guys.
What I didn’t count on was not fighting for 17 months while I scrambled to take my career in a new direction.
ROUND 3
MY FIRST MOVE AFTER CUTTING TIES WITH Allen and McBeigh was to switch gyms. I went from training at the Toronto Athletic Club to training at a smaller place run by the Bagnato brothers, but with no fights lined up for the foreseeable future and less than $200 in the bank, my top priority was to find an alternative source of income.
That’s when I got a call from a friend who was a janitor at a luxury apartment building. One of the tenants, a well-known Toronto stockbroker, had recently imported a brand new Aston Martin sports car as a gift for his wife. She didn’t like it, and finally, in disgust, the broker told my buddy that if he could sell it, he could keep anything over $2,000. My pal asked me to partner up on the deal, on the understanding that we’d split the profit if either of us sold the car. I put a small ad in the paper, and a day or two later I unloaded it for $3,000.
I couldn’t believe it was so easy to make $500—especially since I knew less about Aston Martins than I knew about astrophysics. If we’d been a little more on the ball we could have gotten five or six thousand, easily. One guy who came over to look at the car ran his hand over its flank like it was a horse or a slave girl, and he nearly cried when I told him it was already sold.
Still, I was pretty happy to make $500. For the next several months, when I wasn’t training at the gym, I learned the used car business. I wasn’t particularly successful at it, but I made enough money to keep the wolf from the door.
It was through my auto connections that I met a gentleman named Murray Schwartz. He was a well-known car dealer and a big boxing fan who occasionally dropped by the gym to watch the sparring. One afternoon, he said he’d drive me down to Detroit to meet somebody who might be interested in becoming my new trainer.
I was still contractually bound to Allen and McBeigh, so I begged and borrowed the $3,000 I needed from friends and relatives to buy my freedom.
On November 7, 1962, I walked into the Big D Gym in Detroit for the first time and Murray introduced me to a skinny little black guy who was doing the glove beat with Irish Billy Collins, a world-ranked welterweight from Nashville. The little guy’s name was Teddy McWhorter, and I liked him right away.
Teddy looked like he’d just stepped out of a cartoon. He had a pencil-thin mustache, all but three of his teeth were missing, and he was wearing a stitched floppy brown leather hat, oversized boxing shoes, blue denim work pants and a purple bowling shirt with “Sammy” stitched in red lettering on a white patch above the breast pocket.
But looks can be deceiving. Born in Alabama, McWhorter was an old-time fight guy who years earlier had befriended another ex-Alabamian who relocated to Detroit: Joe Louis. They’d trained together at Brewster’s Gym and remained close all through Joe’s career. Teddy had been a passable amateur fighter, but he never went pro. His real talent was in the corner. In addition to Collins, he’d trained guys like Chuck Davey, Yvon Durelle and Johnny Summerlin, a world-ranked heavyweight who lost back-to-back decisions to Sonny Liston in 1954.
Within five minutes, McWhorter agreed to work with me. I didn’t know anybody in Detroit, I was on my own as far as management was concerned and I was almost totally broke—but I couldn’t have been more pleased.
To me, the Big D was like the Garden of Eden. It represented the land of opportunity … the kind of environment I knew I needed in order to take that next step, and I was filled with a tremendous sense of anticipation.
For the next three years, I was one of the very few white guys training there, but that was never an issue with anybody. Right away, I was sparring with top-notch fighters like Sonny Banks, Cody Jones and Lucky Little. Earlier that year, Banks had dropped Cassius Clay (he wasn’t yet known as Muhammad Ali) before being stopped in the fourth round, and Jones would go on to become one of Ali’s favorite sparring partners.
Two of the young fighters who immediately caught my eye at the Big D were Hedgemon Lewis and Ronnie Harris. They were just 16-year-old kids, but I remember thinking that both of them were budding boxing geniuses. Lewis went on to become welterweight champion of the world, while Harris won lightweight gold for the U.S. at the 1968 Mexico City Olympics before launching a very respectable pro career.
Another young face around the Big D belonged to a quiet 18-year-old kid who was always willing to help out in the corner, run out for tea or coffee for the fighters or take care of any of the thousand and one little chores that come with helping pros prepare for battle. His name was Emanuel Steward. Years later he became the kingpin of the Kronk Gym stable and trained or managed more than a dozen world champions, including Thomas Hearns, Michael Moorer and Lennox Lewis. It was a huge loss for boxing when Manny died after a long illness in 2012. He was 68.
After watching me work a
t the Big D for a couple of weeks, a guy named Burns Stanley, who co-managed Banks with his partner, Ted Ewald, was impressed enough to offer to pay off the $3,000 debt I still owed for buying my freedom from Jack Allen. Stanley was a lawyer for the Ford Motor Company and a real Southern gentleman. Although there were no strings attached to his offer, he made it clear that he wanted to add me to his stable. We talked it over, but after what I’d just gone through with Allen, I wasn’t in the market for a new manager. Still, thanks to Mr. Stanley’s generosity, I essentially became a free agent. I figured that with McWhorter training me, I could handle all the rest of the stuff myself.
I moved into a seedy hotel called the Berkshire, which was right in the heart of downtown Detroit on Winder Street, not far from the gym. It was a black neighborhood, but there were a few other white guys living there. For the grand sum of $11.25 a week, I got a tiny room on the ground floor. There was a shared bathroom down the hall and the walls were paper thin, but it was home for the next couple of weeks until Lynne came down from Toronto. She was eight months pregnant and wanted to be with me when the baby was born, so I really had to watch my nickels and dimes.
Most of the time I was too broke to eat more than a piece of fruit or some toast and coffee for breakfast, and I never ate lunch, but every day after training, Teddy and I would go for tea at the lunch counter at Glen’s Pharmacy. One of us would plunk a dime in the jukebox to play “Our Day Will Come” by Ruby and the Romantics, and Teddy would snap his fingers as we sang the chorus together. Besides being a great tune, it kind of became our theme song because it embodied the dreams both of us had about winning the world championship.
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