Chuvalo

by George Chuvalo

  It was a crappy fight, and I looked bad. Roy was a southpaw from Montmagny, Quebec, who’d made a name for himself by launching his pro career in 1964 with an eight-round decision over tough Yvon Durelle, who was 87–23–2 at the time. That was Durelle’s last fight. The only other “name” on Roy’s record was former world title challenger Tom McNeeley, who beat him in a split decision in 1966.

  Even though I hadn’t fought in almost a year, I didn’t expect to have much trouble. Boy, was I wrong! From the opening bell, Roy was in survival mode; all he did was run and grab. It’s very tough to fight a guy who just wants to do that. Joe Louis was the referee, but not once did he warn Roy about holding, nor did he threaten to deduct a point. Still, that’s no excuse for how bad I looked. I won the fight by decision, but I remember Zubray telling me afterward that I should think about quitting. “I think your career is over, George,” he said. It was that bad of a performance on my part.

  Three weeks later, I knocked out Johnny Featherman in 95 seconds in Penticton, British Columbia. Featherman, who was from Bisbee, Arizona, had a record of 27–11 … and a reputation as a head-butter. He tried butting me about 10 seconds after the opening bell, and I got mad. I bent him over with a series of body shots before ending it with a beautiful left hook that almost took his head off. Ironically, Featherman’s next fight was a TKO over Richard Steele, a pretty good southpaw from L.A. who compiled a 12–4 record before going on to become a highly respected referee, judge and member of the World Boxing Hall of Fame.

  September of 1968 turned out to be the busiest month of my entire career. On the 3rd, I knocked out Levi Forte in two rounds in Miami Beach, followed on the 17th by a three-round KO of Vic Brown in Toronto in the co-main event to world middleweight champion Nino Benvenuti’s non-title bout with USBA champ Art Hernandez (Nino won a boring 10-round decision). One week later, on the 26th, I was back in New York, headlining at Madison Square Garden against the biggest Mexican I’d ever laid eyes on: 6-foot-5 Manuel Ramos, who was ranked No. 4 in the world.

  Born in Hermosillo, Sonora, Ramos had been a soccer phenom as a youth before he started amateur boxing in his late teens. He turned pro in 1963 and won five in a row before going 0–6–2 over his next eight fights. But starting in the spring of 1966, he reeled off an impressive string of 15 straight wins (12 by KO), including a split decision over Eddie Machen and a unanimous 10-round verdict over Ernie Terrell, in which he decked the former WBA champ. He also knocked out James J. Woody, who was a pretty tough customer.

  The win over Terrell earned Ramos a shot at Joe Frazier for the New York State version of the world championship on June 24, 1968. Ramos went toe to toe with Smokin’ Joe and staggered him with a big right uppercut in the opening minute, but Frazier came back to deck Ramos for the first time in his career before stopping him in Round 2.

  My fight with Ramos was the main event on what was billed as “The All-Star Night of Heavyweights.” The Garden was packed to the rafters and there was a palpable sense of excitement in the air. I was pumped up, too; it was great to be back in the Big Apple!

  On the undercard, Buster Mathis knocked out James J. Woody, Chuck Wepner stopped Forest Ward, Billy Marquart beat Don Waldheim on a decision, and Johnny Gause got off the deck to KO big-punching Jeff Merritt in the third.

  For a lot of reasons, I think the Ramos fight was the best of my career. It was just one of those nights when all my moves were clicking like a clock. Staring across the ring at him during Johnny Addie’s introductions, I felt very calm. Only 15 months had passed since Frazier busted up my eye in the very same ring, but that seemed like an eternity ago. This was a chance to get back in the top 10, and I intended to make the most of it.

  At the bell, Ramos met me flat-footed in the middle of the ring and threw a jab that missed the mark. I responded with a left hook to the body that got his attention and then, like he did against Frazier, Manuel tried to use his long arms to keep me on the outside. It didn’t work. His jab was slow and easy to time, and by the end of the first round I was pounding him almost at will on the inside.

  That trend continued through the next couple of rounds: me jabbing my way inside, getting him to back up, then raking him with hooks to the body and head. By the fourth I was really teeing off on Ramos, and I sensed he wouldn’t last much longer. Early in Round 5 I shoe-shined six shots to the belly, followed by a hook and as good a right to the head as I’d ever thrown. A minute later I got him bent over the ropes and landed 17 consecutive punches before referee Zach Clayton moved in to wave it off. Ramos slid down the ropes and hit the canvas in a sitting position.

  Unfortunately, the only known film of the fight is the last 30 seconds of Round 4 and all of Round 5—but at least my wild victory celebration survives on celluloid. When Clayton signaled that the bout was over, I cut into an impromptu version of the Watusi, which on the film looks like my upper body and lower body are kind of disjointed. I don’t know where all those weird voodoo-like moves came from, but hey, I was a very happy guy. And they said I couldn’t dance!

  Ramos was never the same after our rumble. He was out of action for 12 months, then he won a decision over Tony Doyle before losing to Jack O’Halloran and Wepner. In 1970, he traveled to Argentina and was destroyed in one round by Oscar Bonavena. After that he became a stepping-stone for guys on the way up, including Ron Stander and Ron Lyle.

  After his boxing career ended, Ramos returned to Mexico, where he worked as an office manager for the navy and acted in a handful of movies. He was only 56 when he died of chronic health problems in 1999.

  In keeping with the year’s international theme of my opposition (a French-Canadian, three Americans and a Mexican), I capped 1968 by knocking out 6-foot-4 Italian champion Dante Cane in seven rounds at Maple Leaf Gardens on November 12. The card was billed as an “international doubleheader” because a couple of hours earlier Sonny Liston dispatched Roger Rischer in Pittsburgh in a bout that was televised by closed-circuit on a big screen at the Gardens before Cane and I squared off.

  There were 10,000 people in the stands, and I swear to God it was like fighting in Cane’s hometown of Bologna. As it does today, Toronto had a huge Italian community in 1968, so Cane was the “hometown” hero! Big surprise, eh? When we were introduced, the crowd cheered a lot louder for him than they did for me. I remember thinking to myself, “Where the hell am I?”

  No matter. Cane might have been big and strong, but he was slow and predictable, too. For such a big man his jab was almost nonexistent, and after the first couple of rounds it was obvious to everyone in the joint that he moved about as well as one of Michelangelo’s statues. He was willing to mix it—as evidenced by the cut he opened under my right eye in the sixth—but I was landing virtually every body punch I threw, including a big right hook that knocked him through the ropes in Round 7. To his credit, Dante pulled himself off the ring apron and tried to fight on, but I instantly dropped him again. He’d just made it back to his feet when his corner threw in the towel.

  Well, you can imagine the reaction. Within seconds, my hometown “fans” were screaming bloody murder and throwing stuff into the ring. The next day, Toronto’s Italian newspaper had a front-page photo of me hitting Cane low, and there was a long interview in which his manager, Bruno Amaduzzi, accused me of deliberately fighting dirty. “Next time we meet Chuvalo, we bring a pistol!” he fumed.

  A couple of days later, when I walked into Ungerman’s office to get paid, Irving was being berated by one of a long string of irate callers on his speakerphone: “Hey Ungerman, you ass-a-hole, that Chuvalo … he’s a dirty sonofabitch! He hit-a poor Dante right-a in da balls! Fuck-a you, Irving—I’m-a gonna go buy my chickens somewhere else!”

  It took about a week for the Italian community to calm down. In the meantime, I got a big kick out of the way a writer for the Toronto Telegram described Cane as “one of the most colorful boxers to ever appear in our city. After being tenderized by Chuvalo, his nose was red, his eyes were deep purp
le and his body seemed to be made from some strange, quivering thing that was sort of lavender.”

  Eight years later, the Telegram photo of my punch lifting Cane’s feet off the canvas just before I knocked him out of the ring got me a part in the first Rocky movie. Well, sort of.

  The photo was picked up by the United Press International wire service, and in the movie, Rocky (Sylvester Stallone) shows a clipping of it to Adrian (Talia Shire) when he takes her skating on their first date. To illustrate why he has a dislocated finger, Rocky pulls the clipping from his wallet and says, “I originally done it in the Baby Crenshaw fight. Look, I carry pictures from all my fights. Big Baby was about the size of an airplane, and I broke both my hands on his face. I lost the fight … but that’s a nice picture, don’t you think?”

  Decades later Stallone avoided a lawsuit by paying Chuck Wepner some big dough for being the “inspiration” for Rocky Balboa, but I’ve always thought the Italian Stallion bore a closer resemblance to me … at least in the first movie. For example, Rocky trains in a slaughterhouse—I trained in the slaughterhouse at Canada Packers. Rocky gets a shot at the world champion on short notice—I got my first fight with Muhammad Ali on 17 days’ notice. Maybe what tilts it in Wepner’s favor is that Rocky was more journeyman than top-10 contender.

  At any rate, by using my photo (for free, by the way) Stallone inadvertently turned my name into a great piece of movie trivia. And when we finally met in person at his 2011 induction into the International Boxing Hall of Fame in Canastota, New York, Sly shook my hand and said, “George, you’re my idol.”

  As pleased as I was about knocking out Cane to put an exclamation mark on my 6–0 comeback year, the coming Christmas season didn’t promise much cheer around the Chuvalo household. Quite the contrary, in fact.

  Back in October, I was showering after a workout at the Lansdowne gym when Lynne telephoned with some devastating news. She’d just come back from taking my mother to a medical appointment, and the doctor had confirmed that my mother had colon cancer. Instantly, I started crying like a baby. How could I not? I was a mama’s boy if ever there was one, and the thought of her not being around was just too much to process. Today, more than four decades later, I still tear up when I think about her.

  From the day I first put on those boxing gloves she bought for me at Eaton’s, my mother was my biggest booster—but she never saw me punch or get punched. She always said she couldn’t bear to look up, even in the early days when she sat at ringside. Just couldn’t do it. For a while, she attended all my fights at Maple Leaf Gardens, and I also flew her down to New York for my MSG debut against Pat McMurtry, but she always sat staring at the floor, never at what was happening in the ring. She told me she could tell what was going on by the reaction of the crowd.

  The cancer finally took my mother on February 6, 1970. At the end, she was just skin and bones, having dropped from 215 pounds to just 67. That hit me harder than anything I’d experienced to that point in my life.

  THANKS to those six wins—five by KO—in the five months since I beat Jean-Claude Roy, by the end of 1968 my record was 52–14–2 and I was rated No. 4 in the world by both the WBA and The Ring. Just before Christmas, Irving got an offer that potentially would put me right at the head of the line for another title shot: Teddy Brenner called and said he would pay us $20,000 to fight No. 6–ranked Buster Mathis on February 3 at Madison Square Garden.

  Mathis was quite a story. The youngest of eight children, he was born in 1943 in Sledge, Mississippi, but his family moved to Grand Rapids, Michigan, when he was still a baby. His father abandoned them a short time later, leaving Buster’s mom to raise the family. She died when Buster was 15, and soon afterward he quit school and for a time supported himself by playing defensive tackle for the Grand Rapids Blazers of the semi-pro United Football League. At age 16, carrying 275 pounds on a six-foot frame, he took up boxing at a police youth center in order to slim down.

  For such a big kid, Mathis was real quick. His success in regional amateur tournaments caught the notice of Al Bachman, the New York–based manager of Montreal heavyweight Bob Cleroux. Bachman was impressed enough to send Mathis north for a couple weeks to help Cleroux prepare for his fight with Zora Folley in 1962.

  By 1964, Mathis had shot up to 6-foot-3 and won the U.S. amateur championship. He beat Joe Frazier in a showdown to see who would fight at the Tokyo Olympics, outweighing Frazier by exactly 100 pounds—295 to 195—but Joe still made the team as an alternate. A week before they took off for Japan, Mathis broke a knuckle during an exhibition bout with Frazier and was forced to pull out of the Games. Joe went on to win the gold medal.

  Buster turned pro in June of 1965 after signing a four-year agreement with Peers Management, a syndicate that included Bachman. His first three fights were in Quebec: a KO and a four-round decision over Bob Maynard, and a KO of Johnny Shore. In his sixth fight, on January 7, 1966, Mathis stopped Chuck Wepner in a four-rounder at Madison Square Garden.

  Mathis was 16–0 with 12 KOs when trainer Cus D’Amato joined his management team in 1967, and that’s when Buster really started to gain notice in the heavyweight division. For starters, D’Amato trimmed him down to 235 in order to take full advantage of Buster’s natural speed. He also encouraged Mathis to embrace his sense of showmanship, which included dancing a little jig in his corner before fights and blowing kisses to the crowd. D’Amato also taught him to growl when he threw punches—a trick Cus supposedly picked up by watching Sonny Liston train.

  Ungerman set up my training camp at Grossinger’s Catskill Resort Hotel near the village of Liberty, smack dab in the middle of the borscht belt in upstate New York. Because Buster was a tall guy, I brought in a couple of sparring partners who were about the same size as him: Dick Wipperman and Everett Copeland. Wipperman had dropped a 10-round decision to Mathis a few months earlier and Copeland had been knocked out by Buster in ‘66, but I figured both guys would give me good work.

  A couple of days into camp, a short, stocky Italian-looking guy showed up and asked to see me. He was wearing one of those heavy flannel shirts and looked like a truck driver. Before I could even ask his name, the guy started talking excitedly in a real thick New York accent: “Hey George, I hitchhiked all the way up from the city because I wanna spar witchya!” I had to stop myself from laughing out loud. The guy was maybe 5 foot 7, but I didn’t want to be a rude jerk.

  “See those big guys over there?” I said, pointing at Wipperman and Copeland. “Those are the type of guys I need in order to get ready to fight Mathis. Nothing personal, but you’re the exact opposite of what I need. You can’t help me.” But he was persistent. “Oh George, please,” he pleaded. “I know I can help. I’m broke, but I thumbed up from the city because I know I can help you. All I want is for you to give me a chance.”

  What could I do? I felt kind of sorry for the guy, and he seemed sincere enough. “Okay,” I said. “Let me work with those other guys first, and if I’ve got a little steam left afterward, you can go a couple of rounds.”

  I needn’t have bothered. He was a tough enough kid, but green and fairly easy to hit. Still, he was an engaging guy, polite and friendly. Everybody in camp liked him. He told me his name was Jose and that he was Puerto Rican. We kept him around for a couple of days before sending him on his way with a couple of hundred bucks in his pocket.

  Just before he left, however, Jose and I went for coffee. The tab came to a grand total of 60 cents—pretty steep for java in 1969—and he handed over a pair of one-dollar bills and told the waitress to keep the change! As we said our goodbyes, I asked Jose what he did for a living. When he replied that he was an actor, I thought to myself, “If you act as well as you box, you’ll starve to death.” (Boy, was I wrong about that!) But I never forgot that generous tip.

  The next time I saw the guy was eight years later, in the fall of 1977. I was invited to be on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s Bob McLean Show to talk about my upcoming fight with Earl McLeay,
and as I sat in the green room in the CBC’s Toronto studio, waiting to go on, the talent coordinator came over and said, “George, guess who Bob’s interviewing right now? Burt Young!” The name didn’t register. “You know—the guy from the Rocky movie. Rocky Balboa’s brother-in-law! Would you like to meet him?”

  You guessed it. Burt Young was “Jose” … but I didn’t recognize him at first.

  “Hey Georgie, you remember me from Grossinger’s?” he asked—still with that thick New York accent. “Sure,” I lied. He tapped his chest and said, “I always held you in my heart here. You were nice to me, and I don’t forget.” We chatted a bit, but he had a cab waiting to take him to the airport for a flight back to Los Angeles. It wasn’t until he walked away that it dawned on me who he was. I ran down the hall, calling “Jose! Jose!” but he didn’t make the connection. Oh well. At the very least, I figured his cab driver was going to get one hell of a tip.

  Years later we ran into each other again, and when I mentioned that day in the studio, Burt asked why I kept calling him Jose. “When you were at Grossinger’s you told me that was your name, and that you were Puerto Rican,” I said. Burt let out a big laugh. “Nah … My real name is Dino and I’m Italian!”

  GOING into our fight, Mathis had a record of 28–1—his only loss being the stoppage by Frazier 11 months earlier. Since then, Buster had knocked out Mel Turnbow, Jim Beattie and James J. Woody, beaten Dick Wipperman in a 10-round decision and won a split verdict against tough Amos Lincoln.

  A crowd of 14,155 packed the Garden to watch former middleweight champ Emile Griffith beat Andy Heilman in the semi-main event before our fight, and in the dressing room I remember thinking how terrific it was to be back at MSG just a few months after my big win over Ramos. If I could bust up Buster the same way I whipped Ramos, I’d probably get another title shot before the end of the year.