Chuvalo

by George Chuvalo

  But that wasn’t all. “The fight will be for the heavyweight championship of Haiti and will be held at the national soccer stadium in Port-au-Prince on September 5 … and you can pick your opponent, George,” the promoter said. “How much do you want?”

  I could sense there was something shady about these guys, but I decided to play along, just to see what happened. “Give me $5,000; but I want it in cash and I want to be paid before I leave Toronto,” I said. They agreed. The promoter handed me a list of potential opponents and asked me to pick one. None of them were household names, so I told him it didn’t matter which one of them I fought, just as long as I got paid beforehand. Then he asked if I could bring down a couple of other fighters to fill out the undercard.

  “Haiti is the poorest country in the western hemisphere and all of this is going to cost some serious dough,” I said. “How are you paying for it?”

  “I am well connected with one of the most powerful generals in the country, and he has guaranteed to provide 15,000 soldiers, each of whom will buy a $5 ticket to the fight,” said the promoter. “They will see great boxing, they will drink Labatt’s beer … everybody will be happy. And we will all make some money!”

  A few days later, still not quite sure of what we were getting ourselves involved with, Lynne drove me to the airport, where we met our contact. As promised, he paid me $5,000 in cash, which I handed to Lynne. “Here you go, doll,” I chuckled. “Don’t spend it all in one place.”

  An hour later, with my pals Ronnie Edwards, Ron DesRoches and Andy McCrory in tow, along with my sparring partner Nafiz Ahmed, Teddy McWhorter and my father, we boarded a jet bound for Port-au-Prince.

  We landed around 10 at night, and I remember being shocked that the airport—in fact, the whole city—was almost completely dark. We piled into waiting cars and were whisked over pothole-riddled roads to the Plaza Hotel in the center of the city. When I went outside for a stroll the next morning, the place looked like West Africa. There were vendors selling fruit and vegetables and scrawny kids with really bad rickets playing in the shadow of huge billboards extolling the virtues of President for Life François (Papa Doc) Duvalier and his son/successor Jean-Claude (Baby Doc). It was like something out of a Federico Fellini movie.

  And members of the Tonton Macoute were everywhere.

  The Tonton Macoute were the voodoo-inspired militia created by Papa Doc in 1959 to counter a perceived threat to him posed by the regular armed forces. After an attempted coup in 1958, Duvalier dissolved the army and all law enforcement agencies and ordered the execution of several high-ranking generals. In 1970 the militia was officially renamed the Milice de Volontaires de la Sécurité Nationale (Militia of National Security Volunteers), but Haitians called it the Tonton Macoute after a mythological Creole bogeyman (Uncle Gunnysack) who was said to snare misbehaving children in a macoute, or gunnysack, before carrying them off to be eaten.

  Members of the Tonton Macoute wore straw hats, blue denim shirts and dark sunglasses, and they were armed with machetes and pistols. Anyone who spoke out against Duvalier risked disappearing at night—or being attacked in broad daylight. The militiamen routinely stoned and burned people alive, often leaving the corpses hung in trees as an “object lesson.” Their victims ranged from supporters of banished politicians to businessmen who balked at “donating” money for public works—a source of funds for corrupt officials.

  The Montreal promoter and his Tunisian pals hosted wild parties at the hotel every night, and Tonton Macoute militiamen were the main guests. I stayed away in order to concentrate on getting ready to fight, but Edwards and DesRoches told me that after the militiamen complained about not having any white girls at the party one night, the following evening the promoter—who had promised to provide white girls—brought in a bunch of light-skinned black girls from the neighboring Dominican Republic … and had them all wear blonde wigs!

  All the incongruities were making me suspicious. A couple of days before the fight, I asked the promoter why there was no advance publicity—not even a poster. “We don’t need it,” he said in his thick French-Canadian accent. “My friend, the general, he will have his 15,000 soldiers there. It’s no problem, George.” That was on September 3. Later that day we met a dentist from Quebec who was staying at the hotel, and he informed us that the Russians had defeated the National Hockey League’s Team Canada the previous night in the opening game of the Summit Series in Montreal. Combined with the other absurdities that were unfolding around us, that disturbing news seemed oddly appropriate.

  The fight venue was Sylvio Cator Stadium, a 30,000-seat facility named for the Haitian who brought home the silver medal in the long jump at the 1928 Olympics and was later elected mayor of Port-au-Prince. When we arrived on the afternoon of the fight, there were thousands of people milling around outside the walls—always a good sign—but I was horrified to see the Tonton Macoute using their clubs to beat on kids who were trying to climb over the two-storey walls.

  When we got inside the stadium a few minutes later, the enormity of the sham hit me like one of Joe Frazier’s left hooks: there were 68 people in the stands.

  Sixty-eight!!!

  The general and his 15,000 soldiers were no-shows, and since tickets hadn’t been readily available to the public, we were essentially fighting in front of an empty house. To make matters worse, Ronnie Edwards’s opponent bailed out, so Ron DesRoches volunteered to step in as a last-second substitute. They were buddies, but we figured the show must go on, even if nobody was watching. DesRoches never fought pro and his last amateur bout had been about 15 years earlier, so you can imagine the scene. After being introduced as “Marcel Villemain from France” (the name was a combination of popular middle-weights Marcel Cerdan and Robert Villemain), he collapsed in a heap when Edwards tapped him with a jab 10 seconds after the opening bell. It was such a terrible acting job that the “crowd”—all 68 of them—started loudly guffawing while the referee pleaded at Ron to get up and fight. DesRoches managed to beat the count, only to flop down again a few seconds later.

  My fight with Charlie Boston wasn’t much better. I knocked him out in two rounds, and in the shower afterward he moaned about getting ripped off. “Man, I got fucked by a promoter in New York just last week. Now I come all the way down here to get fucked again! I was supposed to get $1,000, but all they gave me is $340.”

  I did the math in my head: 68 tickets at $5 each—yup, that’s $340. Well, at least they weren’t fudging the numbers. Thank God I’d asked to be paid up front!

  Back at the hotel a little while later, I told Nafiz to pack his bag. “We gotta get out of here … and fast!” I said. I knew the chickens were coming home to roost because everything the promoter had charged was about to come due: the rooms, the meals, the booze … not to mention those parties! My father, along with Teddy, Edwards, DesRoches and one of the Tunisians, joined me and Nafiz for the mad dash to the airport, where we jumped on the first flight headed north.

  I don’t recall ever being happier to get back to Toronto; and the look on my father’s face showed he was relieved to be home, too. Still, despite all the madness, the old man had a good time on that trip, and I was glad to have him there with us.

  As it turned out, our departure came not a moment too soon. Shortly after we took off, the promoter and his cronies were arrested and thrown in jail. They’d racked up a bill for more than $30,000 (plus my $5,000, which they’d borrowed from a Montreal loan shark), and nobody was going anywhere until the debt was cleared. Fortunately, one of the Tunisians owned property in Toronto, which he mortgaged to raise the money. With the help of the Canadian consulate in Port-au-Prince, he was able to pay everything off.

  Oh, yeah: I was never challenged to defend the title I won by knocking out Charlie Boston, so as far as I know I’m still the official heavyweight champion of Haiti!

  NEXT up on my dance card was supposed to be Earnie Shavers, the 29-year-old knockout artist from Warren, Ohio. Nicknamed “The Black D
estroyer” (and later, by Ali, “The Acorn”) he won the national AAU heavyweight championship in 1969 and then turned pro under co-managers Dean Chance and Blackie Gennaro. Shavers opened his punch-for-pay career by knocking out Red Howell in Las Vegas on November 6, 1969 and over the next four years he notched 42 KOs in 44 wins, including 17 first-round stoppages. His only losses were a six-round decision to Stanley Johnson and—somewhat surprisingly—a fifth-round KO at the hands of Ron Stander.

  Shavers really started to move up the ladder after the ubiquitous Don King paid $8,000 for Chance’s share of Earnie’s contract shortly after he KO’d Jimmy Young on February 19, 1973, in Philadelphia. A couple of weeks later, promoter Don Elbaum called me at home with an offer of $20,000 to fight Shavers on May 9 at the Cleveland Arena. I accepted immediately. Eight months had already passed since Haiti and I’d accumulated a bit of ring rust, but I figured a couple of months was more than enough lead time to get into decent shape.

  Shavers had certainly earned his reputation as a big puncher. We’d sparred together in Youngstown before I fought Charles Couture in 1970, so I was familiar with his style. Since then, he’d reeled off eight KOs in nine fights, with only the tough Venezuelan Vicente Rondon able to last the 10-round limit.

  By the time I arrived in Cleveland for a press conference to announce the formal contract signing in early April, the fight was already being hyped as “The Unstoppable Force vs. The Immovable Object.” A sharp-looking poster, designed by artist Dick Dugan, featured a sketch of Shavers throwing his left hook with “42 KOs” written on his glove, with me leaning out of the way below a speech balloon that read, “Foreman, Frazier, Ali, Quarry and 100 others couldn’t knock me down!”

  That poster apparently got some people thinking they could turn a buck on the bout. I didn’t take it seriously, but shortly after I checked into the hotel I got a telephone call from someone who said he was “well enough connected” to the Youngstown underworld to offer me a hefty sum to take a dive. He said the gamblers could get great odds on Shavers being the first guy to knock me down, but they needed it to be a sure thing before they placed their bets.

  I let the guy say his piece and then gave him my wordless answer by slamming down the receiver.

  The press conference attracted a nice crowd of reporters and TV crews, and I was impressed by their genuine enthusiasm. I hadn’t fought in Cleveland since my loss to Zora Folley in 1964, but some of the media guys who had been at that fight wanted to talk about it. Not surprisingly, my big edge in experience emerged as their main storyline. In his column in the Plain Dealer, Dan Coughlin wrote, “The difference between Chuvalo and Shavers was exemplified in this seemingly innocuous question: what was your toughest fight? For Chuvalo, it was going 12 rounds with Floyd Patterson. For Shavers, it was a 10-round knockout of Chuck Leslie. For this one, promoter Don Elbaum has matched a prince with a peasant.”

  Unfortunately, we never got to find out if that was true.

  Shortly after returning to Toronto, I sprained my back during a sparring session. We requested a postponement of the fight, but King and Elbaum were anxious to keep Shavers on a tight schedule. They said thanks, but no thanks. On May 12 he KO’d Harold Carter in one round, and five weeks later, after doing the same thing to Jimmy Ellis at Madison Square Garden, Earnie looked ready to step right into a title challenge against Foreman (at our press conference Shavers had recited a poem about one day beating Big George). That dream came crashing down in December when Jerry Quarry starched him in one round. That was followed by a loss to journeyman Bob Stallings, a draw in a rematch with Jimmy Young, then a brutal KO at the hands of Ron Lyle.

  Shavers finally did get his title shot, against Ali on September 29, 1977, at Madison Square Garden. While I provided color commentary alongside Don Dunphy for Telemedia radio in Canada, the bout aired on the NBC television network (Dick Enberg called the blow-by-blow, with Ken Norton doing color). In a first for TV boxing, the network made special arrangements with the New York State Athletic Commission to show the 70 million prime-time viewers a graphic with the official scoring after each round, and that proved to be Earnie’s undoing.

  In a stroke of genius, Angelo Dundee put a guy in Ali’s dressing room to watch the telecast, and he had a couple of other guys stationed at strategic points near the ring. They used hand signals to relay the scoring to the corner. Simple, but brilliant.

  Midway through the second round, Shavers hurt Ali when he unleashed a crushing right hand over Muhammad’s jab. “Ali took a great punch and he had remarkable recuperative powers, but I held back when I should have jumped on him. I thought maybe he was faking it,” Shavers said later. “I regret that.” Hmmm. That sounded just like what happened to me five years earlier in Vancouver.

  After Muhammad danced like the Ali of old in Round 5, the pace slowed considerably. Instead of running out of steam, however, Shavers got his second wind in the championship rounds to make it close.

  After the 14th, Dundee told Muhammad, “You don’t look so good; you gotta go out and take this one.” When the bell rang for the 15th, Ali looked like he was on his last legs. Still, he had enough left in the tank to launch his most relentless attack of the fight, landing punch after punch on Earnie’s head over the final minute and nearly dropping him with 20 seconds left. That sealed the deal on a unanimous decision.

  The next day, Garden matchmaker Teddy Brenner told the media he thought Shavers had won it. He also said he thought Ali should quit for good. Of course, Muhammad went on to fight for another four years—and Shavers was there for the finale. Earnie rebounded from a first-round knockdown to KO Jeff Sims on the undercard of Ali’s swan song, the “Drama in Bahama” decision loss to Trevor Berbick on December 11, 1981.

  Earnie had plenty left after that. On September 28, 1979, he got a title shot against Larry Holmes. That came after Shavers had KO’d Ken Norton in one round in March. He dropped Holmes with a huge right hand in Round 7 before Larry stopped him in the 11th.

  In 1981, while casting for Rocky III, Sylvester Stallone invited Shavers to spar with him because he thought it would be a nice touch to use a real heavyweight to play the role of Clubber Lang (which eventually went to Mr. T). Shavers initially refused to hit Stallone with anything more than a soft jab, but Sly kept egging him on until Earnie responded by landing a single hard shot to the liver. “That nearly killed me,” Stallone told the Associated Press. “I went straight to the men’s room and threw up.”

  Shavers retired in 1983 because of eye problems but then returned in 1987 to notch a first-round KO of Larry Sims in Cincinnati. Another long layoff followed, during which he became an ordained Christian minister; then, in the fall of 1995, he beat Brian Morgan in an eight-round decision and was stopped in two rounds by Brian Yates—after which Earnie retired for good.

  WHAT I thought would be a short break to allow my back injury to heal turned into a 12-month hiatus between knocking out Charlie Boston in Haiti and my next fight, a three-round stoppage of Tony Ventura on September 25, 1973, in Cheektowaga, New York. I came in at 230 pounds—the heaviest of my career to that point—and definitely felt the effect of the long layoff. Ventura was slower than when I knocked him out in Montreal three years earlier, but because of the ring rust, I had a little trouble catching up with him this time. When I finally managed to trap him in his corner late in the third, a double left hook to the chin dropped him like a stone.

  Five weeks later, I was back in Cheektowaga to take on Mike Boswell, the guy who’d been forced to pull out of our scheduled fight in 1970 after being shot in the back during a barroom brawl. At 195 pounds, Boswell was a bit of a speed merchant. He’d just come out of camp with Frazier, so he was in terrific shape. I, on the other hand, was not. My weight was still 230, and I felt slow and sluggish.

  My only sparring partner for that fight was the inimitable Chuck “Spider” Jones—my future co-host on Famous Knockouts. Actually, referring to him as a sparring partner is a bit of a stretch. Chuck would dut
ifully walk into Sully’s gym in Toronto, but as soon as he saw me he’d turn around and run back down the steps. I don’t know how many times I had to chase after him to coax him back into the ring, but our little game went on for about a week.

  My lack of preparation was very evident in the fight with Boswell, which ranks alongside my bouts with Pete Rademacher and Buster Mathis as one of the worst of my career. Boswell hopscotched like a rabbit for the first couple of rounds, which, combined with my lack of conditioning, made for very few meaningful exchanges. I had difficulty hitting him with clean shots, which made him more confident as the fight wore on.

  That should never have happened. Truth be told, Mike didn’t belong in the same ring with me, but he fought a smart fight. Finally, midway through the seventh round, I landed a decent left hook and he wobbled. He was in the corner, pinned against the ropes with his head over the turnbuckle, and I knew I had to suck it up and just keep punching. I wouldn’t let him fall, because I wanted to be sure he was out cold. After ripping him with more than a dozen clean shots, I stepped back to survey the damage and he slithered down and out. It was a nice, clean finish, but I was disappointed that it took so long.

  Looking back, the only good thing about that fight was that it marked Ungerman’s last appearance in my corner. By that time he hadn’t had a say in whom, where or when I fought for a few years, but he still liked to be seen between rounds, feeling important. When we’d first hooked up I sincerely appreciated Irving’s financial commitment and his enthusiasm in helping advance my career, and I’d stuck with him because of that. But over the years our relationship had soured to the point where we were at odds more often than not.