Chuvalo

by George Chuvalo

  But it wasn’t to be. And I have only myself to blame.

  My performance against Mathis ranks right up there with the loss to Pete Rademacher (1960) as the worst of my career. When I see the film today, I can’t believe I fought such a dumb fight.

  For starters, I was far too erect. I’d been so successful standing straight up against Ramos that my new trainer, Maxie Kadin, figured the same strategy should work against Mathis, who was two inches shorter than Ramos. But Buster was a lot quicker. I should’ve crowded him the way Frazier did, but Kadin thought the best way to keep Mathis at long range and neutralize his jab was for me to attack from a much straighter stance than what I was used to.

  At 232, Mathis had a 25-pound advantage, but that didn’t bother me in the least because I could see he was soft in the middle. In the opening round, I hammered him to the body and backed him into the ropes, then shot a left hook downstairs that landed a little south of the border—unintentionally, of course. As referee Harold Valan started to warn me about the low blow, Mathis pushed him aside and tried to land one of his own. Game on!

  For the rest of the first round and into the second, I forced the action, but big Buster was much faster than he looked. He was a pretty decent sharpshooter from long range, but I shook him every time I got inside. By Round 6 his left jab and quick combinations opened cuts over both my eyes, but I still felt that I was holding my own.

  Everything changed after he caught me with a head butt that raised a big lump on my right cheekbone. As it swelled up, I started having difficulty picking up his punches—just like I did with Frazier. Another head butt split the cut over my right eye wide open in the 11th, but I came back to rock Mathis with a big left hook to the head. We were going toe to toe when the fight ended.

  The fans were on their feet and roaring with bloodlust when the final bell sounded, but the cuts looked a lot worse than they were (it only took 10 stitches to sew me up). I knew I’d lost, but I thought it was much closer. Valan scored it 10 rounds to two, while judges Al Berl and Jack Gordon had it 9–3 and 8–3–1, respectively.

  At the post-fight press conference, Mathis apologized for shoving Valan out of the way in the first round. “I was in pain and Chuvalo kept hitting me low and saying he was sorry,” he was quoted by the New York Post. “I told the referee, ‘Let me hit him low and tell him that.’ “

  I don’t actually recall telling Buster I was sorry, but it sounds like something a polite Canadian boy would do, right? As for those head butts, Mathis, along with his manager, Joe Fariello, Valan and Ungerman were summoned to a hearing convened by the New York State Athletic Commission the next day, but there were no repercussions.

  According to the follow-up story in Boxing Illustrated, Valan told the hearing he never considered stopping the fight “because there would have been a riot.” The story also said the referee was called on the carpet, not for letting the bout get out of hand, but for removing his tie at the end of the second round!

  I was still having some vision problems several weeks later, so I ended up taking a five-month hiatus to make sure there was no permanent damage. Then, in August, I got a call from McWhorter, inviting me out to Napa Valley, California, to spar with Brian London, who was preparing to fight Jerry Quarry on September 3 in Oakland.

  On the flight to San Francisco I was really looking forward to seeing Teddy again … and also to finally getting in the ring with London, who had pulled out of our fight in Toronto in 1961. It would be fun kicking his ass as payback for ducking me. Unfortunately, I never got that chance. Ten minutes after I arrived at the hotel, Teddy told me that London didn’t want to spar. Just like that. No explanation other than the obvious, unspoken one: I would’ve beaten the crap out of him.

  London’s refusal to spar annoyed me, but I stuck around for a few more days and ended up boxing with a guy who had once fought Jerry Quarry in a six-rounder and was now making a living running a soul food restaurant. It was good work for a few days, and I needed it because Ungerman had lined up a fight with Jamaican champ Stamford Harris on September 8 in Lethbridge, Alberta.

  Before I left San Francisco, I visited Quarry at his motel to wish him luck against London—not that he needed it. Jerry had a sense of self-assurance that bordered on cockiness, but he seemed like a nice kid. It was basically just a “Hi, how you doing?” thing, and we talked about boxing in general. He’d become very popular by beating Patterson and making it all the way to the final of the WBA tournament the previous year, and since then he’d won a decision over Mathis and been KO’d by Frazier in what was voted The Ring’s Fight of the Year for 1969. Little did either of us realize we’d be squaring off just over three months later.

  On the morning of September 1 I arrived in Lethbridge, where my buddy, promoter Nick Zubray, had booked Irving and me into the luxurious (for Lethbridge) El Rancho Motel. Shortly after checking in, I got a call from Teddy in California, telling me that Rocky Marciano had died the night before when the private plane flying him from Chicago to Des Moines crashed in a cornfield near the town of Newton, Iowa. Marciano, the pilot and another passenger were killed on impact. There were no survivors. An official investigation blamed the crash on pilot error.

  I was stunned … and saddened. We had our differences over the years, and I knew Rocky felt dissed when I turned down his overtures to manage me, but I liked the guy. He was cheap as hell but very entertaining and fun to be around. Ironically, September 1 would have been his 46th birthday.

  McWhorter arrived in Lethbridge on September 4, the day after Quarry KO’d London in two rounds in Oakland. Between Teddy being down in the dumps over the beating that London took and Irving being shook up about Marciano’s death, things were pretty somber for a day or two, but Teddy was soon back to his old self and I was happy to have him with us again.

  We didn’t expect any surprises from Stamford Harris. I’d sparred with him ahead of my fight with Ramos a year earlier, so we weren’t too worried. Harris was a durable guy with a blocky build that made him look like a taller version of Frazier (George Foreman sparred with him a lot before his fight with Smokin’ Joe), and he had a decent punch. He turned pro in 1953 as a 15-year-old middleweight, but two years later he was fighting as a full-fledged heavyweight and making a name for himself in Jamaica, Barbados and Haiti. He didn’t fight outside the Caribbean until 1968, when he beat Everett Copeland on the undercard of my bout with Dante Cane in Toronto.

  On fight night we were sitting in my dressing room at the Lethbridge Exhibition Pavilion when Zubray burst through the door, white as a sheet. “George, they’re gonna fuckin’ kill me!” he wheezed.

  “What are you talking about?” I said.

  “The fans! They want my blood!” snorted Zube. “All the Mexicans we brought up from Arizona are dropping like flies,” he said of the prelim fighters. “If you knock this guy out quick, they’ll lynch me. You’ve gotta carry him, George. You’ve gotta go at least three or four rounds.”

  I thought it was pretty funny. Nick had nickel-and-dimed on the undercard, as usual, and now his chickens were coming home to roost. The featured prelims had likewise ended quickly: Nafiz Ahmed, who was my sparring partner, knocked out Hugh Mercier in the first round, and Billy McGrandle, a world-class featherweight from Edmonton, stopped Gabe Espinoza in the second.

  “Okay, Nick,” I said. “I’ll take it easy for a couple of rounds, then I’ll go to work.” No big deal, right? Wrong!

  When the bell sounded, my plan was to just pussyfoot around and feel Harris out a little in order to time his jab. It’s what every fighter does when he wants to catch his breath or buy some time, but Harris had other ideas. Two minutes in, he whacked me on the temple with a good left hook that made my eyeballs spin like a slot machine. It happened in the flash of just a second or two, but when I blinked, I saw seven Stamfords. And when I walked back to my corner at the end of the round, I saw seven Teddys and seven Irvings. What an awful sight!

  At first, McWhorter and Ungerman d
idn’t understand what was happening. “I can’t focus my eyes,” I said to Teddy. “I see seven of him.” McWhorter could sense the concern in my voice. “Hit the one in the middle,” he said.

  It’s a horrible feeling to have your vision go from perfectly normal to totally screwed up in the flash of a second, but that wasn’t my main concern at that point. I was more worried about losing the fight. I wasn’t supposed to lose to Stamford Harris, not in a million years. But if I didn’t take care of business, that was a distinct possibility.

  When I walked out of the corner to start Round 2, I looked like Boris Karloff playing Frankenstein: both arms fully extended, pawing hesitantly at the closest of the seven Stamfords lined up in front of me. He didn’t try to back away, so after I grazed his forehead with a short jab to measure the distance, I pitched a hook to the chin that landed with full force.

  As soon as I felt Harris wobble, I went nuts. He was hanging on the ropes right in front of me, so I cut loose with everything I had, nailing him with 15 consecutive punches, machine-gun style. He was draped over the middle rope and sliding halfway out of the ring when the referee waved it off at 2:09.

  Zubray was crestfallen. He understood perfectly well why I didn’t want to risk losing the fight by letting it go longer, but that didn’t make him feel any better. Every bout on the card had ended in three rounds or less, and poor Nick was scared to death that the good folks of Lethbridge would tar and feather him before he could get out of town. Much to his relief, those fears proved unfounded.

  With my vision back to normal, on November 16 I headlined another Zubray promotion in another out-of-the-way place: the tiny ski resort town of Kimberley, British Columbia. We almost didn’t make it because of a mechanical glitch on the three-seat propeller plane Nick had chartered to bring me and my buddy Chuck Scriver across the Rockies from Calgary, but Chuck was able to fix the problem in 10 minutes—or about one minute longer than I needed to KO Leslie Borden at the Kimberley hockey rink. Good thing, too. I was anxious to make short work of Borden because I had a much bigger date circled on my calendar: a showdown with No. 4 world-ranked Jerry Quarry on December 12 at Madison Square Garden.

  ROUND 10

  IT’S NO STRETCH TO SAY THAT QUARRY WAS PROBABLY the most popular fighter on the planet in 1969. In fact, two separate polls conducted by Boxing Illustrated conferred that title upon the good-looking 24-year-old Californian, and he did his best to live up to it. Everywhere you looked, it seemed, there was Quarry—and not just in boxing-related settings. His picture made the cover of entertainment papers and teen idol magazines, and when he wasn’t doing the rounds of TV talk shows and variety programs, he was guest starring on hit series like Batman, I Dream of Jeannie, Adam-12 and Land of the Giants.

  Quarry’s father, James, got Jerry started in boxing when he was three years old, and by the time he was eight he’d won a junior Golden Gloves 45-pound championship. At age 13 Jerry was diagnosed with nephritis, a serious kidney ailment that required massive injections of penicillin and hospitalized him for three months. The doctors told him to forget about boxing and said he’d never be able to do a hard day’s work for the rest of his life, but Jerry wouldn’t accept that. He not only regained his health, he resumed his stellar amateur career and wound up winning the 1964 U.S. national Golden Gloves title.

  Co-managed by his father and Johnny Flores, a longtime L.A. fight guy, Quarry turned pro in 1965 and reeled off 12 straight wins before being held to a draw by Tony Doyle. Jerry made his Madison Square Garden debut with a draw against Tony Alongi in March of 1966, fought another draw with Alongi a month later back in California, then lost for the first time in 20 fights when Eddie Machen beat him in a 10-rounder at the Olympic Auditorium in L.A.

  In 1967, Quarry’s wins over Al Jones, Brian London and Alex Miteff and a draw with Floyd Patterson earned him an invitation to participate in the WBA tournament, which he opened with a majority decision over Patterson in their rematch. He then KO’d Thad Spencer to reach the final, which he lost to Jimmy Ellis. “I just didn’t have it,” Quarry told a reporter for the Los Angeles Times. “I didn’t have my rhythm and I couldn’t put any punches together.”

  Not everyone bought that explanation. In fact, Times columnist Jim Murray publicly pilloried Quarry for not being properly prepared. “As far as young Jerry is concerned, road-work is just something done by the state highway department or a lot of guys sitting on skiploaders under a parasol,” wrote Murray. “Jerry thinks jump ropes are for little girls with ribbons in their hair and lollipops in their mouths. The only bag he punches has cookies in it … and his idea of getting ready for a fight is to shave and get a haircut.”

  Pretty harsh words for the guy a lot of other columnists were already dubbing the new Great White Hope.

  Quarry rebounded from the loss to Ellis—and the bad press—to beat Buster Mathis in a 12-rounder in March of 1969, but three months later he got stopped on cuts by Frazier in a challenge for the New York State version of the world championship.

  With Ali in exile and Frazier and Ellis still largely perceived as gatekeepers of the fragmented title, Quarry’s colorful persona and boy-next-door demeanor struck a chord with fans. Being white certainly didn’t hurt, either. In fact, the day our fight was announced, one of the New York papers referred to Jerry and me as “the two toughest white men on the planet” and predicted the winner would become “the new hope of the heavyweight division.”

  I was bound and determined it would be me.

  The press conference to officially announce the fight was held at Madison Square Garden, and both of us made the usual speech about it being our big chance to secure another title shot. Quarry was ranked ahead of me, so he was the betting favorite. Jerry was very popular in New York, so there was already a lot of buzz about the fight—much more than for my bouts with Mathis or Ramos.

  I usually never put much stock in stuff that was said at press conferences, but when Quarry wrapped up his comments by making a crack that compared me to Canadian bacon, it got my dander up a little bit—not because of the context, but because I never touch swine meat. If Jesus wouldn’t eat it, why should I? So it kind of bugged me that he’d make such an inference. But I kept my mouth shut and just filed it away. I was confident I could make him eat those words.

  I think the fight more than lived up to its advance billing, starting with the great ring introductions by Johnny Addie. I can still hear his voice reverberating through the big arena: “Recognized as the heavyweight king of Canada … George Chu-val-o … Chuvalo!” Standing in the corner, I remember thinking how cool that sounded … and that I’d have to remind Lynne of my regal status when I got home: “Hey doll, sweep the floor! Do the dishes!”

  I came in at 217 pounds; Quarry was 202. The referee was my old pal Zach Clayton, and if you watch the film you’ll notice that after his final instructions, just before Quarry and I touch gloves, Zach asks, “Are there any questions, Chevalier?” I felt like Rodney Dangerfield (again). Clayton had refereed my fights with Ramos and Patterson, but he still pronounced my name like I was a French movie star.

  From the opening bell, it was a fast-paced fight. Quarry met me in the middle of the ring and landed a pretty good one-two to get things started. I guess if I had to compare his punching, he was similar to Frazier: a steady diet of left hooks. In the early going I relied mostly on my jab, which he couldn’t get out of the way of. Of course, if you listen to Don Dunphy’s blow-by-blow account—“Where did Chuvalo find that jab? Where did that come from?”—you’d think I’d never thrown one before in my life.

  Just before the first round ended, I opened a cut on Quarry’s nose, giving me a target to shoot for. In the third, we had a nice exchange of left hooks in the last 30 seconds and Jerry’s right eye started to swell up a little, but he came back in the fourth and nicked me under my right eye—just before he landed a low left hook that got him a warning from Clayton. By the middle of the fifth, my eye was pretty much completely closed, but it
looked a lot worse than it really was. Despite Jerry bouncing around a lot, I was still able to cut off the ring and nail him to the body, but I knew the aesthetics weren’t good.

  At the end of Round 6, I figured I was ahead—as I still do today—even though the scorecards showed that Clayton and judge Bill Recht had it 4–1–1 for Quarry, while the other judge, Tony Castellano, had it an even 3–3. Because my eye was such a mess, Dr. Harry Kleiman of the New York State Athletic Commission took a look at it between rounds and told Clayton he’d stop the fight if I took one more direct hit.

  That’s all I needed to hear.

  Quarry must have figured out what was going on in my corner, because he came out for Round 7 with a look of confidence, perhaps underestimating the recuperative power of “Canadian bacon.”

  We both landed some good shots, but in the last 30 seconds I opened up with one of the best sequences of my career.

  Here’s what to look for on the film: just before I knock him out, I trap him on the ropes and throw a flurry of punches to the body and two upstairs to the head. I shoeshine him with seven or eight shots to the belly, then come up with a right hook to the head. That stuns him. The punch is hard to see because Clayton blocks most of the view on the camera angle. Quarry bounces off the ropes and circles toward the center of the ring. As I move in, he hits me with a good uppercut, then another one. My balance is bad because I’m only peeping out of one eye, but as Jerry pulls his right hand back to telegraph a third uppercut, I step over on my left foot. He’s bent over a little bit, so I throw a short left—no more than six or seven inches. The punch doesn’t look that hard, but when it landed flush on his temple, I felt the shock go all the way up my arm.

  Immediately after he got hit with that left, Quarry stumbled backwards, then dropped to the canvas. He got back on his feet as Clayton tolled three, but even with one eye I could see he looked woozy and very unsteady. When he dropped to one knee and took out his mouthpiece, I remember thinking that he was probably okay and just waiting for Clayton to reach eight before he popped back up.