By the time we hooked up, Folley was 65–7–3 and had tangled with many of the top names in the division. He’d beaten Bob Cleroux and Henry Cooper, KO’d DeJohn and split two fights with top-ranked Doug Jones, but he’d also lost a decision to Ernie Terrell and been on the receiving end of a vicious knockout by Sonny Liston in 1960.
Folley was a very slick, highly skilled stick-and-move guy. In terms of pure boxing ability, he was one of the best I ever faced. That said, he wasn’t a big puncher. He only had 23 knockouts in 65 wins going into our fight (I had 19 KOs in 25 wins), but he was known as a guy who could take you out with either hand if the opportunity presented itself. Ranked No. 5 in the world, he was the biggest name on my résumé to that point in my career.
My training for Folley went very well, right up until we arrived in Cleveland two days before the fight.
On the morning of the official weigh-in and pre-fight medicals, I woke up in the hotel with a throbbing pain in my ear and the pillowcase smeared with dark brown pus. And when I went to get up, I noticed a slight change in my equilibrium. I was really worried that the fight might be called off, especially when the doctor told me that I had either a bad infection or boils inside the ear canal. But he assured me that a shot of penicillin and a dose of Demerol would clear it up within 24 hours.
When you watch the fight, it’s not hard to tell that the doc’s prognosis was a little off, to say the least.
Zora was a hell of a fighter, no question, but it’s pretty obvious that I wasn’t in any kind of shape to be mixing with the No. 5 heavyweight in the world. From the opening bell, I felt like I was fighting in a vat of toffee. I didn’t know what the hell Demerol was, and the powerful painkiller was still coursing through my system. Every time I threw a punch, it seemed to take 10 seconds to reach Folley. In the meantime, he was sticking and moving, dancing and jabbing. Not once during the entire 10 rounds did I hit him with anything close to what I should have been able to land, so the result was never in doubt. I managed to win only two rounds on one scorecard and three on the other two, dropping my record to 25–8–2.
Although I was still ranked No. 9 in the world, I was depressed as hell after the loss to Folley because once again I hadn’t been 100 per cent for a TV fight that could have catapulted me right back into the top five. The ear problem persisted for another month, but I didn’t have much time to dwell on it because we got a call out of the blue to fight Hugh Mercier for the vacant Canadian championship on March 18 in Regina. The title had become open when Cleroux gave it up after his loss to DeJohn in 1962. Bob wasn’t interested in a fourth fight with me, so the championship remained vacant for almost two years.
Mercier, billed as the “heavyweight champ of Saskatchewan,” was a big, strong guy from Ponteix, Saskatchewan. He had a linebacker’s build but not a lot of boxing skill. It turned out to be the quickest stoppage of my career. The bell rang, he threw one lazy punch and we clinched. Referee Vince Leier moved in to break us, and as I stepped back I could see Mercier had his hands down by his waist. There’s a real good reason why the ref’s final pre-fight instruction is always “Protect yourself at all times,” but Hugh obviously wasn’t paying attention when Leier said that. I ripped him with a single left hook that nearly sent him all the way back to Ponteix.
It took less than a minute to get my Canadian championship back.
Between my bouts with Folley and Mercier, another fight took place that would have a profound impact not only on my career but on all of boxing history—and the social history of the 20th century.
On February 24 at the Miami Beach Convention Centre, 22-year-old Cassius Clay entered the ring as a 7–1 underdog to challenge Sonny Liston for the world championship.
Like millions of others watching on closed-circuit television, I figured Clay was going to get his ass handed to him. But before the ring introductions, as I watched him bouncing lightly on his toes in the corner, occasionally executing the quick shuffle step that had become his trademark, I was struck by how cool he looked. Other than saucer-wide eyes, he appeared no more nervous than when I’d watched him knock out Archie Moore a couple of years earlier in the closed-circuit telecast at the Fox Theatre in Detroit.
A few moments later, with the nonchalance of a cat burglar on a routine heist, Liston climbed through the ropes in the opposite corner. As if to underscore his reputation as an executioner, Sonny wore a hooded robe and his dead eyes took in the scene with a look of detached resignation.
What transpired over the next 35 minutes was, I believe, the greatest performance of Clay/Ali’s career. He moved like a gazelle, scoring with lightning-quick jabs and lashing hooks before melting like a mirage, just out of range of Liston’s retaliatory bombs.
It was a masterful performance by young Cassius, and when Liston refused to come out of his corner for the seventh round, sports history was changed for all time. Clay’s ascension to the title provided a platform from which he could step beyond boxing to address the social and political questions of the day, and he became the first world heavyweight champ to make headlines around the globe for verbalizing his views on hot-button issues that transcended sport.
The very next day, Clay announced that in addition to being the new heavyweight champion of the world, he was a member of the Nation of Islam, a radical political sect that advocated racial segregation. A few weeks later he told the world that he was abandoning his “slave name” and would henceforth be known as Muhammad Ali.
Before that historic night in Miami, I’d come close to fighting Liston myself.
In early 1958 my manager, Jack Allen, got a call from Jack Kent Cooke, a business tycoon from Hamilton, Ontario, who’d relocated to Los Angeles. Cooke handled promotions for Liston’s management, and he offered Allen $25,000 for me to fight Sonny. That was a lot of money at the time, but Allen didn’t think it was enough to risk my 14–2 record against a top-ranked contender who was 23–1.
Five years later, shortly after I beat Mike DeJohn, I got a call from Jack Nilon, a mob-connected industrialist who was also in charge of concessions at Municipal Stadium in Philadelphia. Nilon was Liston’s manager of record, and he invited me down to Philly to discuss another offer to fight Sonny, who had just made his first defense by obliterating Floyd Patterson in their title rematch. I was excited at the prospect and figured Nilon’s offer would be at least $100,000.
We met in a warehouse, of all places, so maybe that should have been a foreshadowing of the gross disappointment that was to follow.
Nilon came right to the point. “You wanna fight Sonny, George?”
“Absolutely. How much?”
“Twenty-five grand. Take it or leave it.”
I was stunned. Twenty-five grand in 1963 didn’t have nearly the buying power that it did in ‘58, when we’d turned down Cooke’s offer of the same amount. I countered by saying I’d take the fight for $75,000. When Nilon rejected it, there was nothing left to talk about. I went back to Toronto, thinking Nilon would reconsider and offer me $50,000—which I would have accepted. But he never called again.
Meanwhile, my quick win over Mercier was memorable for more than just regaining the Canadian title. It marked the start of a long association and warm friendship with the inimitable Nikola Pavolych (Nick) Zubray, a Runyonesque promoter and entertainment impresario from Lethbridge in southern Alberta.
Zubray had originally scheduled me and Mercier for March 17, St. Patrick’s Day, but then changed it to the following day. “All the Micks will be too busy getting drunk to come to the fight,” he said.
I loved Zube. After immigrating to Canada from Ukraine, he settled in Lethbridge, where he made a living selling pipe for the oilfield industry before he was bitten by the promoting bug. After dabbling in wrestling and live theater productions, he moved to Edmonton and formed Continental Boxing & Wrestling Promotions.
Nick was the kind of throwback who should have been haunting the streets of New York with Tex Rickard and Doc Kearns back in the 1920s. The self
-proclaimed “King of the Ankle Express”—that was his quaint way of explaining a lifelong propensity for having to slink out of town, one step ahead of creditors, when his big ideas turned into flops—he exuded the kind of style that could take over a room in a matter of seconds.
Always immaculately dressed in a tailor-made suit with a pink carnation jauntily tucked in the lapel, Zube was also a master negotiator, whether dealing with fighters, hotel managers or one of his many girlfriends. Nick’s favorite tactic was to blow into town, check into the best hotel, and then talk the manager into extending him unlimited credit while he put together his fight card.
Working from the command post of his luxury suite—which was always overflowing with fresh flowers, opera music and empty bottles of his trademark pink champagne—no detail was left to chance. Zube would hammer out contracts with the fighters, design the poster, write the program copy, wine and dine the local media, line up TV and radio spots and oversee ticket sales. Money was never an object when he was planning his shows. “Don’t worry, it’ll flow,” he’d bark. “This is gonna be like shooting fish with an ax!”
In between, he’d entertain his girlfriends. No matter where he was, Nick seemed to know a local woman or three, and he had a briefcase filled with 8-by-10 glossies of most of them. When one was coming up to the suite, he’d pop her picture into a cheap frame and put it up on the dresser. Same routine the next night, but with a different lady.
Besides an affinity for wine, women and song, Zube had a photographic memory and a gift for the kind of blunt repartee that made him a sportswriter’s dream. He never forgot a face, and his signature expressions became legendary. “I won’t go back to Calgary; that town wouldn’t spend a nickel to watch Christ wrestle a grizzly bear,” he’d huff. Or, “My strategy for this show is simple, George: fart and fall back.” On one visit to the house, he peeled $200 off a thick wad of cash, handing a crisp $100 bill to my son Mitchell, who was only about 10, and a trio of fifties to Steven, Georgie Lee and Jesse. They squealed in delight. When I inquired how his own adult sons were doing, he just sighed, shook his head and replied, “They’re no fuckin’ good, George; too lazy to work and too yellow to steal.”
One of Nick’s dreams was to open a nudist colony on the outskirts of Edmonton—a city that happens to be on roughly the same latitude as Moscow! The bitter cold didn’t faze him. “Sure, the nudist season is kinda short out here, but how can I miss? Show me a kid in today’s generation who doesn’t wanna run around buck-naked!”
That was Zube. And when his dreams didn’t quite pan out, he always had a backup plan. “I’ve got a great deal for you,” he’d purr when a hotel manager inevitably came calling to settle his bill. “You help me put on my next show and I’ll guarantee you get all your money back—plus a nice profit!” Of course, there were the inevitable pitfalls—like in the spring of 1972, when he bought the closed-circuit rights for Ali’s fight with Mac Foster in Tokyo and planned to pack Vancouver’s Pacific Coliseum with fans willing to pay $7 to watch the bout on the big screen. It was only after Nick put the tickets on sale that he discovered the fight was being carried on free TV by a Seattle station that everyone in Vancouver could watch! The irony of it being held on April Fool’s Day wasn’t lost on him. “Screw it,” he said. “You go by limo or you go by boxcar … you’re still movin’!”
Nick ended up promoting 14 of my fights, from small towns like Lethbridge and Penticton, B.C., to my second bout with Ali at the Pacific Coliseum in 1972. He was fun to be around, always treated me fairly and never lost his zeal for life. He once told the Edmonton Sun that his proudest moment was finally getting his Canadian citizenship in 1980, “but after living here for 50 years, it’s only natural that some of the thrill has worn off.”
That was Zube in a nutshell. When he died in 1983, I lost one of the best friends I ever made in boxing.
The $3,000 I made for starching Mercier couldn’t have come at a better time. Still without a manager and with Lynne only weeks away from giving birth to our fourth child, I was once again feeling that old familiar financial pinch.
I knew that if I was ever going to be more than the heavyweight champion of Canada, I needed a manager—somebody with money and connections. Irving Ungerman, the owner of Royce Dupont Poultry Packers, where my mom worked, had been bugging me for years, and there was no doubt that he had the money. He first broached the subject of managing me when he drove me home after I KO’d Yvon Durelle in 1959. I’ll admit I was impressed with the fact he drove a shiny new Cadillac with a crapshooter’s license plate (7–11), and I remember Ray Charles was belting out “What’d I Say?” on the radio when Irving pulled up in front of our house and told me he was capable of “taking me places.” Still, I thought that was pretty brazen because I already had a manager—and Irving knew it.
Looking back, that little incident should have tipped me off that this was a guy I shouldn’t get involved with. Ungerman’s only saving grace was that he had money—millions and millions of dollars made off land development and the blood and sweat of piecemeal poultry workers, like my mother. Actually, my mother harbored no resentment toward Irving, and in a crazy kind of way she liked him. But looking back, I’m embarrassed and angry with myself to have been so closely associated with someone like him.
Ungerman loved to be seen and photographed with cops and politicians. I guess it reinforced his sense of power. Later on, I was also turned off by the fact he was such a bullshitter. He looked and talked like a dumpier version of Jack Ruby (the petty criminal who murdered Lee Harvey Oswald on live TV on November 24, 1963), and he tried hard to convince people that he wielded a lot of muscle around town, but that was just his delusional way of thinking.
To put it bluntly, Ungerman had the coin to take my career to the next level, and I appreciated his enthusiasm. I was in dire straits and I needed his backing. What he didn’t seem to have was any knowledge of boxing. He told people he had been a formidable 105-pounder in his youth and had boxed while serving in the Royal Canadian Air Force, but I had my doubts. He never showed me anything to indicate he had a clue about boxing.
In all the years we were together, Irving was never more than a cheerleader in the corner. He could bulljive with the best of them when the media was around, but with very few exceptions he was always a “me first” pain in the ass in our one-on-one dealings when it came to decisions about my career. I always had the impression he’d take care of himself before he took care of me—and that’s not the best way to think of your manager.
But I’m jumping ahead.
My immediate concern in the spring of ‘64 was the impending birth of our fourth child, but as thrilled as I was about the prospects of bringing another Chuvalo into the world, nothing could have prepared me for Jesse’s unorthodox arrival on April 7.
I remember it like it was yesterday. Lynne smacked me awake from a sound sleep at 3:30 a.m. with the unsettling news that her water had broken. “The contractions are killing me,” she said. “I think I’m going to have the baby right here.” That scared the hell out of me, but I still reacted like a jerk. With all the patience of a man waiting for his morning toast to pop, I made it clear there was no way she was giving birth in our bedroom. “Hold on,” I coolly commanded. “We’re going to the hospital.”
With no time to even get dressed, my poor wife threw on a bathrobe and waddled out to our rickety old wreck. It was obvious Lynne was in tremendous pain, but she was tough as nails. As I fumbled for the keys, she put her head on my right thigh and calmly exhorted me to get a move on. “No problem, honey,” I said. “We’ll be at the hospital in 10 minutes.”
Fat chance.
I roared up Weston Road, heading for Humber Memorial on Church Street. What I didn’t realize as I nudged the speedometer over 70 miles per hour was that a cop car had spotted us and was in hot pursuit. Just as I made the right-hand turn off Weston onto Jane Street, Lynne quietly said, “George, the baby is coming.” What could I do? Responding with my usual
flawless logic, I barked, “Close your legs, goddamn it!”
That wasn’t going to do it. Lynne was writhing in agony, so I reached down to remove her underwear. Meanwhile, I’m still speeding. Just as we started the climb up toward Dominion Bridge, she said, “It’s too late.”
I looked down and saw the back of a tiny head, moving left to right as if to say, “No, no.” I thought, “You’re saying no? Not now, kid!”
A second or two later, the baby shot straight out, attached to a long umbilical cord that looked like an inverted U. Staring down like my eyes were on swizzle sticks, I still managed to steer the car while trying to comfort Lynne, who was as cool as a cucumber.
“Put the baby on my stomach,” she said. I reached down and lifted the new arrival onto her stomach, where she bundled up her bathrobe. What a trooper! Lynne was great; only 20 years old, but she never flinched. I bragged about her for months afterward. I still do.
As the drama was unfolding in our car, the cops were still chasing me. I turned left onto Church Street, then squealed to a stop in the hospital parking lot. Even though I was panicking about cutting the umbilical cord, my primary concern was the gender of the baby. I lifted it up to take a look and instantly felt a great sense of relief. “Thank God, another son!” What a chauvinist I was! Mama Mia!
Leaving Lynne in the car, I ran into the emergency room, screaming like a crazy man: “My wife just had a baby in the car! Cut the cord, cut the cord!” They told me to relax, because the baby could remain safely “attached” for up to 48 hours.
It took about two minutes to round up a doctor, and when we got back outside, half a dozen embarrassed-looking cops were surrounding the car. They were flabbergasted at the situation, but after being assured everything was all right, they took off.
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