In the evenings, I’d cook hamburgers on a hot plate in my room or munch on a big bag of Brazil nuts. That was a real treat! When I could afford it, I’d spend $1.25 to feast at one of the great soul food joints in the neighborhood. Fried chicken, collard greens, pinto beans, sweet potatoes, corn bread, black-eyed peas. Mmmmm! I’d scarf down as much as my meager budget would allow, then wash it all down with a bottle of Faygo strawberry diet soda.
When Lynne arrived, we moved into a little apartment block in Ferndale, on the southeast edge of Detroit, where it seemed like all the other tenants were black hookers. Our third son was born on November 21, and when Lynne brought him back from the hospital, all the working girls made a big fuss over him. I was stumped for a name until Lynne suggested the obvious—“Why not George?”—and since he was born in the U.S., we picked a middle name that sounded distinctly American: Lee, as in Robert E.
By the way, Georgie Lee was the recipient of the fastest circumcision I’ve ever heard of—he got clipped mere moments after making his way into the world. Lynne didn’t believe in wasting any time! A week later, my wife and our new son were back home in Toronto.
Meanwhile, I had to downsize to another fleabag hotel on East Euclid because I still had to come up with the monthly mortgage back home. More than once I had to sneak out of these dives in the dead of night to avoid paying the bill—which is how I became acquainted with how deft some of Detroit’s inner-city residents were at breaking into cars.
One night I parked in front of my apartment building, grabbed a bundle of stuff and locked the car door before heading inside. Unbeknownst to me, somebody on the street was watching and timing how long I was away from the vehicle—which wasn’t more than a few minutes. They waited for just the right moment to smack the top of the driver’s-side door with a karate chop—which made the window fall down—then helped themselves to my clothes and whatever else was lying around. This happened a few more times over the next couple of months (I had to keep buying new clothes) before it dawned on me to never leave anything in the car.
After living and training in Detroit for four months, I finally made my first foray as a self-managed fighter … and it was a disaster.
The date was March 15, 1963, the venue was the Graystone Ballroom and the opponent was a guy named Rico Brooks, who hailed from Arizona. It was my first fight since being disqualified against Joe Erskine 17 months earlier, and I was in the best shape of my life. Problem was, on the day of the fight, I had no boxing boots to wear. Mine were so worn out from all that work in the gym that they couldn’t be repaired, so I borrowed a pair from one of my sparring partners, Sam Poe.
The other—and far more acute—problem was that I was starving. I’d been unable to afford a real meal for a couple of days, so on the morning of the fight I took the two complimentary tickets the promoter had given me and sold them to a guy at Arturo’s Bar, which was next door to the gym.
A few hours (and one nice soul food dinner) later, I painfully discovered that Poe’s feet were a tad smaller than mine, but I managed to squeeze into his boots long enough to knock out Brooks in the second round for a princely purse of $200. Right after the fight, some cops showed up in my dressing room and arrested me for working in the U.S. without the proper papers. I hadn’t even given that a second thought when I came down from Toronto, but they were quite adamant that it was a serious charge. It took a few phone calls to get things straightened out, after which I was right back where I started: broke and hungry.
Over the next few months in Detroit all I did was train, eat and sleep while looking forward to sporadic (and minuscule) paydays. My daily gym routine consisted of a lot of work on the heavy bag, sparring with two or three different guys and working with McWhorter on little things like refining my footwork and mixing up my punches.
Teddy realized from the start that I was a brawler, not a boxer, so he never tried to change my natural style, God bless him. Another thing I liked about him was that he wasn’t a “do this, don’t do that” type of taskmaster. Teddy knew his stuff and he knew how to make a point, but a lot of what he taught me was just kind of passed along in our conversations over a cup of tea.
The more I got to know Teddy, the more I liked him and respected the way he did things. McWhorter trained all of his fighters in the same style—straight ahead, not much lateral movement, try to stay close and work the body. That was probably an error on his part, but it was great for me. Unlike anyone else I’d ever worked with, Teddy realized right away that my best weapon was my strength, so he concentrated on showing me how to muscle the other guy, get him against the ropes and pound to the body. That became kind of my personal trademark for the rest of my career. I could muscle anybody, as long as I could catch them. I ended up fighting some very strong guys—George Foreman and Jerry Quarry are at the top of the list—but I never felt that anybody was stronger than I was. Foreman was able to push me off a couple of times, but he had really long arms. I just couldn’t get in tight on him like I wanted to.
When I was training to fight Floyd Patterson, Teddy talked about our relationship in an interview with Sports Illustrated writer Gilbert Rogin: “When George came here he had all the qualifications; he just needed someone to bring them out. What he did he did as well as he knew how. For a kid to come through the fights he come through, they had to teach him something. But he had no confidence in his handlers. They had him moving around like a lightweight. Didn’t seem right, a big guy like him moving around like that. He has too much weight on him to run around. Big guy can do that just so long. Big guy like him, he’ll come to you. He’s willing to go forward all night, that’s the thing.”
Five weeks after stopping Brooks, I knocked out James Wakefield in six rounds across the border in Windsor, Ontario. Wakefield was a big, beefy guy with a fat gut. Every time I nailed him to the body, it felt like I was punching a bag of pudding. This went on for five rounds with no effect, and I was getting a little concerned. In the sixth, I started aiming for his chin, and the first shot I landed knocked him dead.
Seven days later, I KO’d Chico Gardner in four rounds in London, Ontario. A friend of mine who claimed to know something about promoting helped arrange those two fights, but I shouldn’t have taken him at his word. I only got a few hundred dollars for Wakefield, and my payday for Gardner (who later became one of my sparring partners) was exactly zero. There was a screw-up in the contract and I knew going in that I wouldn’t get paid, but I needed the work. Besides, a lot of people had bought tickets.
My promoter friend assured me he’d make up for it in my next fight—a two-round KO of Lloyd Washington in Battle Creek, Michigan, on May 18—and although it was still only $500, it was enough to get back home to Toronto to be with Lynne and the kids for the summer.
It was wonderful spending June, July and August with my wife and sons. I worked out regularly, but it’s not the same as when you have a fight coming up. When I wasn’t at the gym, I mostly just hung around the house, reacquainting myself with all the little domestic chores and savoring every moment with my wife and our three beautiful sons. Money was tight (the Chuvalo clan ate a lot of hot dogs and hamburgers that summer), but I wasn’t too worried. I was a world-ranked contender, and I figured that sooner or later a real promoter would come calling.
It finally happened on September 12, my 26th birthday.
I was back in Detroit, sparring at the Big D, when my buddy Ed Trotter called from the gym in Toronto and said he’d just gotten off the phone with Teddy Brenner, the matchmaker at Madison Square Garden. Brenner had an offer for me but didn’t know where I was. Playing middleman, Trotter told Brenner he’d put us in touch—for a piece of the action. To make a long story short, a few minutes later I was talking to Brenner in New York and he offered me $4,000, plus a percentage of the gate, to fight Mike DeJohn on the Gillette Cavalcade of Sports two weeks later in Louisville, Kentucky.
It was short notice because Ernie Terrell had pulled out, but all I could think about w
as that four grand. It was like manna from heaven! By the standards of the day, that was a real nice payday for a TV fight, and it instantly felt like a big weight had been lifted off my shoulders. No more worries about how to feed my growing family—not to mention making the mortgage and car payments for the next six months.
DeJohn was a big man (6 foot 5, 215 pounds), with a big record. A pro since 1951, he’d notched knockouts in 32 of his 47 victories, including first-round KOs of Alex Miteff and Charley Powell and a decision over Bob Cleroux. And he’d lost only 10 fights in 12 years. With just two weeks to get ready, I had my work cut out.
Teddy lined up Sonny Banks, Cody Jones and Chico Gardner for my sparring sessions and instructed me not to hold back anything in the workouts. There was no question that the best strategy against a tall, rangy boxer-puncher like DeJohn was to stay inside and bang to the body, so that’s what we worked on. I took McWhorter’s instruction so seriously that he eventually had to custom-order a thick rubber wraparound body belt that protected pretty much the entire torso of my sparring partners—none of whom were too thrilled about getting thumped in the belly
Banks and Jones were terrific to have in camp because both of them were fast on their feet, which forced me to swarm in and trap them on the ropes before I could start winging punches. And Gardner was quick and elusive. I had better, harder sparring in the 10 days before we traveled to Kentucky than I’d had in my entire career to that point.
Teddy and I flew to Louisville on a Sunday, four days prior to the fight. After we checked into the Holiday Inn at 4th and Walnut (it’s long gone now), we got a call from promoter Bill King telling us to report for the pre-fight medical the following morning.
When we got to his office, King pulled us aside and said, “George, Cassius Clay is here and he’s just signed a letter of intent to fight Wednesday’s winner. If you beat DeJohn, Cassius has agreed to fight you on November 8 in Miami Beach. If Mike wins, he gets the fight. Is that agreeable to you?” I couldn’t hide my glee. “Give me the paper,” I said. “I’ll sign right now!”
We went into the next room and there was Cassius, holding court with the press. Now, remember, he hadn’t yet joined the Nation of Islam or changed his name to Muhammad Ali, but he was already a larger-than-life man-child who’d reeled off 19 straight victories since turning pro after winning the gold medal at the 1960 Rome Olympics. Fifteen of those wins were by KO, and The Ring had just ranked him the No. 2 contender (behind Floyd Patterson) for Sonny Liston’s title. Thanks to my 17-month hiatus and the two losses to Cleroux, I’d been dropped to No. 12 by The Ring, while DeJohn was No. 15.
DeJohn and I were asked to pose for a picture with Cassius. This was the first time I’d met Clay in person, and to be honest with you, I wasn’t overly impressed. He was dressed like a preppy white guy, in a very conservative three-piece Ivy League suit over a starched white shirt and a thin, dark tie. He had a cocky air about him, but he was clean-cut and very polite.
The photographers posed him flexing his arms between Mike and me, and they asked us to grab onto his biceps. As the cameramen clicked away, I whispered to Clay, “Hey Popeye, you must have some big forearms, eh?” He pretended not to hear, so I repeated it a little louder: “Hey Popeye, you must have big forearms!” This time, he looked at me and said, “Why you callin’ me Popeye?” I smiled and replied, “‘Cuz you’ve got awfully small biceps!”
Some of the photographers kind of snickered, but Cassius wasn’t amused. “Alex Miteff talked that way … Willie Besmanoff talked that way … Sonny Banks talked that way … and I whupped ’em all!” he shot back. “Yeah, yeah,” I replied. “But they’re not me. Don’t worry about it; you’re not witty enough anyway.”
He looked startled—but there was no snappy comeback. That might have been the first time in the young career of “The Louisville Lip” that he was at a loss for words.
Another interested observer at that pre-fight medical was Green Bay Packers halfback Paul Hornung, who was a friend of King’s. Hornung had Hollywood good looks, thick blond hair and the kind of firm handshake you’d expect from one of the most versatile Hall of Famers in NFL history. He was a Louisville native who’d run into a little trouble earlier that season when a gambling scandal involving him and Alex Karras of the Detroit Lions led to both of them being suspended indefinitely by commissioner Pete Rozelle.
Hornung was one of the most beloved sports figures in all of Kentucky, but in talking to him I got the impression he was a little bit jealous of Cassius, who at 21 was already emerging as a media darling. He kept his distance from Clay and repeatedly referred to him as “that jackass.”
I went in against DeJohn at 212—10 pounds heavier than when I KO’d James Wakefield in Windsor five months earlier. I felt very strong at that weight and, thanks to the hard sparring in Detroit, I was razor sharp. And as a good-luck charm, I had a pair of my son Mitchell’s little brown socks in the pocket of my ring robe. They were ready for the washing machine but had inadvertently been stuffed into my bag before I left home.
Along with McWhorter, the other two guys in my corner were Freddie Dawson and big Ed Trotter, the “middleman” from Toronto who’d intercepted the phone call from matchmaker Teddy Brenner. Dawson, from Chicago, was one of the best lightweights never to win the world championship. He retired in 1946 with a phenomenal record of 101–13–3 and went on to become one of the most respected trainers in the business.
I was familiar with DeJohn, who hailed from Syracuse but trained in Miami under Angelo Dundee, and I knew he’d be gunning for a quick KO, hoping to catch me cold. Mike was a great puncher (as was his middleweight brother, Joey), and his trademark shot was a stiff, ripping uppercut. It was because of that uppercut that I began incorporating headstands into my training regimen, a little trick Sonny Liston used all the time. I’d stand on my head with my legs up against the wall and rotate my body weight on my neck, sometimes for as long as half an hour.
As expected, when the bell rang DeJohn stormed out of his corner with bad intentions. He moved well for a big man, but I was able to rake him with a couple of good body shots. Halfway through the first round, he unleashed an uppercut as I tried to move inside. The punch caught me flush on the chin, and looking back at the film, it was probably one of the hardest shots I ever took—including the bombs Joe Frazier and George Foreman landed on my noggin a few years later. Thank God for those headstands! I don’t remember being hurt by the punch, but it was the only time in my career that I felt my knees buckle ever so slightly for a split second. Still, I shook it off and won the round on two of the three scorecards.
In the second, Mike was a little more wary and we spent much of the first two minutes banging each other in clinches, which referee Don Asbury was slow to break. With 46 seconds left, I backed DeJohn against the ropes and ripped a left hook to the body that really hurt him. I felt his torso kind of cave in a little, so I followed up with a left hook to the head that dumped him over the top rope. It was like he did a backflip. The force of the punch bent all 6 foot 5 of him almost in half, and the weight of his body pushed the top rope to the waistband of his trunks.
When you get a guy in a position like that, there’s nothing in the rule book that says you can’t keep punching, so that’s exactly what I did. There was no way I was going to let him off the hook, so I just followed my natural instincts and pounded away. I hit him with eight punches that knocked him colder than a Missouri mule before his cornermen, Dundee and Joe Nietro, jumped into the ring screaming, “Foul! Foul!”—at which point Asbury pulled me away. DeJohn’s body slithered down the ropes until he was sitting on the canvas, and then he collapsed in a heap.
It was absolute chaos. The crowd was going nuts, Dundee and Nietro were screaming bloody murder and Asbury was frozen in indecision. They dragged DeJohn back into his corner as Asbury conferred with ringside commissioner Bob Evans, a short, fat white guy with a thick Southern drawl. But as far as I was concerned, the fight was over.
I
went back to my corner and told Teddy to take my gloves off, which he did. As he was cutting the wraps from my hands, Evans charged over and barked, “George, what y’all doin’?” I told him, “I won the fight fair and square, and I’m not fighting anymore.” His response was short and sweet: “George, y’all don’t fight, y’all don’t get paid.”
That’s all I had to hear. I told McWhorter to put my gloves back on. My right hand was still wrapped, but there was no time to rewrap the left one. From the time DeJohn collapsed on the canvas to the time the round resumed, more than 15 minutes had elapsed, which was more than enough time for Mike’s corner to coax him back from la-la land. After the long delay, the fight continued with just a little time left in the second round. To add insult to injury, the official ruling was that I had committed a foul and therefore lost the round by a 5–3 margin.
I went out for Round 3 figuring we were in a peck of trouble. If they weren’t going to count the knockout, what was I going to have to do to win this fight? In the fourth, I caught DeJohn at an awkward angle and slammed a left to his kidney, but as soon as the punch landed, I knew something was wrong. The impact tore my elbow ligament, so now I had something else to worry about. For the rest of the fight there was no pain when I landed a shot, but when I threw a punch that missed, it hurt like hell.
In the meantime, DeJohn had fully recovered his senses and was fighting back hard. In the sixth, he threw a big right that I managed to duck under and counter with a perfectly timed left hook to the chin that dropped him like he’d been shot. I thought he’d be out for a week, but Mike struggled to his feet at the count of seven and Asbury waved me back in.
Another flurry on the inside sent DeJohn tumbling through the ropes and onto his butt on the ring apron, but this time Asbury walked over, picked him up and dusted off his gloves before giving him a standing eight count. I couldn’t believe my eyes! I’d never seen a referee pick a guy off the canvas before, never mind help him get ready to keep fighting. It was ridiculous.
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