Chuvalo

by George Chuvalo

  Afterward, Irving told the Toronto Star, “Against Boswell, I saw things that really bothered me. George knocked him out in the seventh, but he didn’t look good at all. His reflexes were slow and his timing was bad. Boswell was nothing, but he was scoring points with his jab. If George hadn’t knocked him out, he might have won.”

  As much as I hated to admit it, Ungerman’s critique was right on the money—but I had no intention of retiring at age 36. What I didn’t know at the time was that I would be in boxing limbo for the next three and a half years and would be pushing 40 before I again climbed through the ropes with bad intentions.

  I never announced my retirement, but there wasn’t anyone to fight on the Canadian scene, and nobody was calling from the States.

  One day in the spring of 1974, Ungerman phoned to see if I was interested in a rematch with Jerry Quarry in Cleveland, but I knew it was never going to happen.

  With no contenders to challenge me, in late 1975 the pipsqueaks in charge of the Canadian Boxing Federation voted to strip my title for inactivity. They subsequently declared the championship vacant, but since nobody wanted to fight me, I remained the de facto titleholder.

  I still trained—albeit sporadically. Usually just light calisthenics or hitting the bag. Instead of working out, I devoted most of my time to taking care of business. I obtained my real estate broker’s license in 1976 and had pretty good success buying and selling properties (which continued until the real estate market went south in the early ‘90s). I also opened an import stationery firm called Office World Supplies, but it didn’t last very long. My most promising business venture was also the wackiest: George Chuvalo Fruit Punch.

  In the spring of 1976, I connected with a guy named Arnold Foote, a native Jamaican who’d recently relocated to Toronto. Foote owned a successful marketing and promotions firm in Jamaica and was anxious to put his expertise to work by launching some new ventures in his adopted homeland. Within minutes after we were introduced, he asked me what I thought about using my name to sell a fruit beverage.

  It sounded intriguing. We quickly worked out a deal, and in short order Foote, who was putting up the money, enlisted the participation of SunPac, a well-known independent Canadian food processor. With the company’s help we set about developing a line of vitamin C-enriched fruit drinks in lightweight, middleweight and heavyweight sizes.

  By the end of the year Foote signed distribution deals with a couple of national supermarket chains and we were ready to launch, but then the whole venture kind of fizzled out when his marriage broke up. Just as the first cases of George Chuvalo Fruit Punch were hitting the Ontario market, he had to hightail it back to Jamaica. A month or so later, we were out of business.

  In November of ‘76 I signed a contract with a Toronto group called Gemini Promotions Inc., headed by Norm Diflorio, a local guy who made his money in trucking and heavy construction. The deal called for me to be paid $10,000 to fight Bobby “Pretty Boy” Felstein for the “vacant” Canadian title on March 7 at the suburban North York Centennial Centre. Diflorio had no experience in boxing or promoting but he struck me as honest and sincere … and the 10 grand didn’t sound bad, either.

  The fight was formally announced at a press conference at Toronto’s downtown Holiday Inn on December 3—and it drew flies. None of the city’s three daily newspapers sent a reporter, and there were no TV cameras present. In fact, the only media representatives on hand to sample the elaborate spread of canapés and pasta casseroles were Brian Williams from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, a kid from the weekly Mississauga News and a guy from CJBC, the French-language CBC radio station.

  The promoters were crestfallen about the sparse attendance … and I was none too thrilled, either. Granted, I’d been out of the ring for more than three years, and Felstein, whom I could’ve knocked out in my sleep, wasn’t even a household name in his own household. Still, his pedestrian record of 16–12–1 was good enough for the CBF to rank him the No. 1 challenger for the “vacant” title, so who was I to argue? Perhaps it was naive, but I thought the novelty factor alone might generate some media attention. I was wrong—but that only made me more determined to ensure it didn’t happen again.

  When I began training for Felstein, my weight was up around 270 pounds. My goal was to get down to 230, so I had my work cut out for me. Teddy set a pretty rigid schedule for workouts and sparring at the Lansdowne gym and I put myself on a strict diet, but taking off the weight was a long, arduous process.

  When Gemini Promotions called another press conference a couple of weeks before the fight, I decided to help spice things up by creating a little bad blood. I phoned Felstein and told him that when he got up to speak, he should insult me. “I don’t care what you say, just make it good … nothing is offlimits,” I said. “Then I’ll pretend to get mad and we can take a couple of pokes at each other. We’ll play it by ear and see what happens, okay?” Bobby readily agreed.

  This time the conference was held at the Westbury Hotel, and there was a strong media turnout. When it was Felstein’s turn to speak, he came through like a champ. Pointing at my rather ample girth, he declared that he would have no trouble whatsoever “laying a licking on washed-up Georgie Jell-O.”

  Georgie Jell-O?? Not bad at all!

  I responded by leaping out of my chair in mock anger, but then as I started to approach him, Bobby turned and bolted for the door! It was priceless. He was running like hell, but just as I started to chase him, my lawyer stopped me so I could sign some mortgage papers. It was like a wacky cartoon.

  With the writers and photographers scrambling to keep up and TV crews bringing up the rear, I ran out to the parking lot to find Felstein frantically trying to start his car. I ran up to it and started kicking the door, the fenders … anything I could put a boot on. The media guys loved it.

  Unfortunately for Bobby (and unbeknownst to me), the car wasn’t his; it was a loaner from the shop where his vehicle was being repaired. I never asked him how he explained the caved-in door and dented fenders when he returned it, but I’m sure he was quick to put the blame squarely on the shoulders of one “Georgie Jell-O.”

  The fight wasn’t nearly as entertaining as that press conference—but more than 5,000 fans jammed the joint to watch it. I came in at 249 pounds and wore velvet powder-blue trunks to try to hide my gut (it didn’t work). Felstein was 220, but his lanky 6-foot-4 frame made our weight disparity look even worse.

  From the opening bell, Bobby’s fight plan was simple: hold when he could and run when he couldn’t. He might as well have brought along a pen and offered to sign a nonaggression pact. I was more than miffed, because some genuine animosity had built up between us over the past couple of months, and his all-talk-and-no-show tactics made me want to tear his head off.

  We were both huffing and puffing after three rounds, and on more than one occasion I growled, “C’mon and fight, you bastard!” The referee, Harry Davis, earned his pay by repeatedly prying Bobby’s arms apart when he grabbed me, but it still took longer than I expected to find my punching rhythm.

  As it turned out, I was the one who eventually got up on my toes (at 249 pounds!) and started firing the jab. I finally dropped Felstein with a left hook about 30 seconds into the ninth round. He regained his feet as Davis tolled eight, but there was blood pouring from Bobby’s mouth and he wore a frightened look that told me he was ready to go. I knew I had him. A right uppercut to the jaw, followed by a left to the ribs and another right to the head floored him again, and this time Davis didn’t bother to count. “Sorry, Bobby,” he said. “That’s all.”

  I felt euphoric afterward. It was nice to hear the cheers again, but what really made it special for me was that I’d shown up the Canadian Boxing Federation for what they were: a bunch of spineless twerps who never should have taken away my title in the first place.

  But the CBF was nothing if not mulish. Nine months later we went through the same ridiculous bullshit when the federation ordered me to def
end the championship against yet another No. 1–ranked pretender: “Cowboy” Earl McLeay of Calgary, Alberta.

  Unlike Felstein, McLeay at least had some pedigree. A former national amateur champ, he turned pro with a 31-second KO of Jerry Nolan in 1971, then won seven of his next eight—all by knockout—before moving to California and signing on as regular sparring partner for Ken Norton. Fighting at home for the first time in five years, McLeay won a 12-round decision over George Jerome at the Alsan Convention Centre in Calgary on February 27, 1977, to claim the bogus Western Canada heavyweight crown and elevate himself to the top of the CBF’s short list of challengers for my title.

  We met eight months later, on December 8 at the CNE Coliseum in Toronto. I think I trained for about 20 minutes—which is 18 minutes longer than the fight lasted. The Canadian Press described it as “the most mismatched title bout in Canadian boxing history.”

  I hurt McLeay with the first punch I landed: a short right hook to the head, just seconds after the opening bell. A minute later I backed him into his corner and threw a five-punch flurry that dropped him to his knees. He beat the count (barely), but was wobbling badly as I drove him back across the ring with left hooks. The last one, a right uppercut, dumped him between the bottom two ropes, where he teetered for a couple of seconds before dropping completely out of the ring and landing on the press table. He ended up on the floor, then got to his feet and started walking away from the ring in a northwesterly direction. I remember thinking it was like he was headed to the airport. It was all over at 2:24 of Round 1.

  PART

  FOUR

  POST-FIGHT

  AS I STATED AT THE BEGINNING OF THIS BOOK, what’s happened to my family and me since I left boxing has been a personal holocaust. Add up every punch I ever took, multiply the total by 10,000 and it wouldn’t come close to equaling the pain of losing Jesse, Georgie Lee, Stevie and Lynne to drugs and suicide.

  Physical pain is one thing; you suck it up, you endure, you heal. Emotional pain is something entirely different. I don’t think anything compares to being beaten down emotionally, because being punched in the heart and soul is a thousand times worse than being punched in the head.

  Even though nearly 30 years have passed since the nightmare started, in my heart it feels like yesterday. I’m constantly reminded of that.

  Jesse’s drug problem started after he had a dirt bike accident in May of 1984, just a few weeks after his 20th birthday. He wiped out while braking the wrong way, and the crash tore off his left kneecap. The complicated surgery to reattach it involved removing a piece of muscle from his left thigh and reconnecting the tendons and ligaments, after which his doctor prescribed Demerol for the pain. But a week later the same doctor (our next-door neighbor) took Jesse off the powerful painkiller. I didn’t know it at the time, but Lynne asked for the prescription to be canceled because she was afraid Demerol was too addictive. My son was then put on Tylenol 3 for a few weeks, but it didn’t help. I remember seeing him sitting on his bed, rocking back and forth with both hands cupped over his knee. Even though I had no idea how much he was hurting, I thought he’d be okay.

  Not long after his surgery, Jesse went to a party in Toronto’s east end. He complained to someone about the pain in his knee, and that someone replied that he had something that would help. That was my son’s introduction to heroin.

  Four months later, before I fully realized that I had one heroin addict under my roof, I had three of them. Georgie Lee and Steven were hooked, too. Bing, bing, bing … just like that. But I was oblivious. My life was very chaotic at the time because Lynne and I had separated. When that happens, when you don’t have somebody to talk to about problems with your kids, sometimes you don’t see the red flags. For the most part I was walking around like I was deaf, dumb and blind. I had no idea they were routinely shooting up in the basement of our house.

  Jesse took his mother’s absence extra hard because he believed it was his fault that she left. It wasn’t. Lynne had had issues—mostly with Georgie Lee—for a long time before that, but never with Jesse. Everything came to a head the night she kicked Georgie Lee out of the house shortly after he came home from another stint in prison. He was drinking heavily again, and she wouldn’t stand for it. The only problem was that Lynne had the same affliction. With all due respect, she needed help every bit as much as Georgie Lee did. “Do as I say and not as I do.” That was her inflexible stance. I told her that she and Georgie Lee should go to Alcoholics Anonymous meetings together. She didn’t like that. She promptly kicked him out of the house and I just as quickly let him back. But it was the lull before the storm.

  The very next day, Saturday around noon, as I recall, Lynne announced that lunch was ready. As I left the kitchen to walk into the dining room, I looked up to my left and saw a 6-foot oar in flight with the sharp side of the blade headed towards the top part of my unprotected skull. Crack! Twin rivulets of blood seeped into my eye sockets, as I searched for a towel to staunch the flow of claret.

  And in order to maintain a sense of calm and order while under extreme duress, I waved a castigating finger in my wife’s face. With the panache of Paul Newman playing Cool Hand Luke, all the while resisting the temptation to knock her for a loop, I proudly announced, “Now Lynne … that wasn’t nice!”

  That same day, I gave her 14 grand to rent a townhouse nearby so she could stay with our daughter, our granddaughter Rachel and our daughter-in-law Jackie for a year in an allfemale home. She moved out the next day.

  I didn’t realize how much Jesse misunderstood the situation until one evening when I woke up close to midnight. As I looked up at the hallway window, I saw a sliver of light that looked like it was coming from the garage. I was curious, so I went out and opened the door. What I saw froze my blood: Jesse was standing on a chair, trying to throw a noose over a beam.

  “What the hell are you doing? Are you crazy?” I shouted. I remember feeling like my heart was pounding so loudly that I had to really yell, thinking I was only seconds away from seeing my son die right in front of me. Jesse looked scared and confused, but eventually we both calmed down enough that he was able to tell me how upset he was about his mother leaving.

  My youngest son’s sensitivity was evident from the time he was a little kid. I remember when he was about five years old, I took him fishing at a stocked pond in the town of Orangeville, just north of Toronto. The first time Jesse hooked one, he excitedly ran around the pond with a huge grin on his face. That was the start of his lifelong love affair with fishing and the outdoors. Years later, when other kids his age were more enamored with Playboy, Jesse’s preferred reading material was Field & Stream and Outdoor Life.

  Jesse got into trouble a few times and went to jail as a young offender for something he didn’t do. Regardless of the circumstances, he always seemed to be on the wrong side of the law—a pattern that was set the first time he got arrested.

  It started one afternoon when Steven, who was 16 at the time, was out walking with his girlfriend, not far from the house. Jesse, who was 12, was kind of tagging along behind. The three of them were minding their own business when another kid, about Stevie’s age, started hassling the girl about tossing a pop bottle on the grass. Bottles on the boulevard were a common sight in the neighborhood, so Stevie told the guy he was wrong, that his girlfriend wasn’t responsible.

  Well, the argument escalated to the point where the two of them started to wrestle. When they fell backwards on the pavement, Stevie hit his head so hard that he was groggy and couldn’t defend himself. When the other kid grabbed Stevie by the hair and started pounding his head on the pavement, Jesse screamed at him to stop. When he didn’t, Jesse smashed a bottle and threw it at him.

  The throw was accurate enough that the bottle cut the kid’s face. He immediately released his grip on Stevie and took off, howling in pain. Meanwhile, someone had called an ambulance for Stevie, who was unconscious. He was taken to Etobicoke General Hospital, while the other kid went to Humb
er Memorial to get his face patched up.

  A short while later, after a couple of police officers interviewed the kid, they showed up at the house, demanding to talk to Jesse. He wasn’t home, so I told them to come back the following afternoon. I also informed them that Stevie was still at Etobicoke General if they wanted to get his side of the story.

  When the same two cops returned the next afternoon, I let them in and told them I’d get Jesse, who was downstairs. Instead of waiting, they handed me a pink slip of paper: a notice that 12-year-old Jesse Miles Chuvalo was formally charged with assault. I was dumbfounded. “You’re charging my son based on what the other kid said?” All I got was a blank stare. “Did you speak to my other son, the one who’s still in hospital after being knocked unconscious?”

  “No,” one of the officers replied. “We don’t have to.”

  I went insane. There’s no other word for it. We were standing in the kitchen, and I actually jumped up on the counter, which was about four feet high, and started screaming every obscenity in the book at the two cops. “Get the fuck out of here before I rip your fucking heads off.” If they’d chosen to pull their guns, I would’ve been dead. Instead, they turned around and vamoosed out the front door.

  Jesse and Georgie Lee applauded my stand—“Way to go, Pops, way to go!”—but it marked the start of a very acrimonious relationship between my family and the Toronto police department that lasted for years. I got pulled over so often, you’d think I was Al Capone. The assumption was that if my kids were troublemakers, I was responsible. And it only got worse when Jesse’s case went to court and the judge told the cops they’d arrested the wrong kid. It was one of the few times my son ever got off. (By the way, over the years my relationship with the police gradually improved, and I’m happy to be on very good terms with them today.)

  About a year after that incident, Jesse had another serious scrape with the law following a fight with a 27-year-old who was 5 foot 10 and about 270 pounds. It started when Jesse and another kid, who was a few years older, got into a fight in the parking lot of a nearby apartment complex after the kid made a snide remark about my son’s scarred mouth. Jesse was working him over pretty good when the big guy jumped in and clamped a headlock on him. The guy yelled, “Call the police, I’m making a citizen’s arrest!” to a couple of girls who were standing nearby, but in the meantime he was squeezing Jesse’s neck so tightly that my son started choking.