Boxing

BOXING

Boxing Decline

The sport of professional boxing seemed to be in decline at the beginning of the 1960s. Boxing had been the most frequently televised sporting event during the 1950s because it was easy to produce: the action between two men in a small ring could be captured easily and cheaply by a single camera. By the end of the 1950s fights appeared routinely on television; Pabst Blue Ribbon Beer sponsored the Wednesday night fights on ABC, and Gillette sponsored the Friday night fights on NBC. Televised fights used up fighters and distorted an already-corrupt sport.

Television and Boxing

Television imposed a level of commercialism on fighting that the sport had never confronted before. Television audiences, and thus television sponsors, demanded more glamour and more drama than the sport could deliver, There were not enough white hopes or inspiring role models in boxing to supply televised fights at least two nights every week and more nights most weeks. Moreover, there was increasing evidence that television boxing was corrupt. The International Boxing Club, controlled by mobster Frankie Carbo, monopolized the promotion of fights for television, and Carbo was under investigation at the beginning of the decade. By December 1960 he had been sentenced to a prison term for what amounted to the rest of his life for violation of the Hobbes Act, which prohibited inter-state extortion. Television no longer needed boxing by 1960—the networks had developed the technical proficiency to televise other sports action—and NBC was the first network to announce cancellation of its weekly fight programming in September 1960, Audience share had fallen to about 10 percent from a high of 30 percent in the mid 1950s. The other networks followed suit, and the big-money boxing matches were given over to producers of closed-circuit, pay-per-view broadcasts.

Scandals

The image of boxing during the early 1960s was tarnished by testimony before the Senate Anti-trust and Monopoly Subcommittee in December I960, chaired by Sen. Estes Kefauver, in which mob interests in boxing were thoroughly examined. Two deaths in the ring caused escalated expressions of outrage at what critics called the barbarity of the sport. On 24 March 1962 Emile Griffith met Benny ("Kid") Paret for the world welterweight championship at Madison Square Garden in New York City. Before a live television audience Griffith beat Paret to death, pounding the defenseless champion against the ropes in the twelfth round. Paret was taken from the ring unconscious, and he died a week later in the hospital. In 1963 featherweight champion Davy Moore fought Sugar Ramos for the world title. Moore fought gamely through nine and a half rounds; then Ramos unleashed a two-fisted attack that ended with Moore falling into a corner and striking the back of his head against a ring post. Moore died two days later, and the call to ban boxing resumed.

Heavyweights

The heavyweight division dominated boxing interest during the 1960s, and with good cause. It was the decade of Muhammad Ali, a talented boxer and a remarkable sports personality capable of taking full advantage of the expanded arena provided by the media. Cassius Clay won the gold medal in boxing at the 1960 Olympics in Rome, and he promptly turned pro. He was handsome, skilled, fast, and flashy. He seemed to enjoy himself both in and out of the ring, and he had a brash yet engaging personality, in stark contrast to the sullen and silent Sonny Liston, who had been a gangland enforcer and looked the part, or the shy, self-effacing champion Floyd Patterson, who brought disguises to his second and third fights against Ingemar Johannson so he could slip out of the boxing arena without embarrassment should he lose.

The Bear

After Patterson hung on to the championship by beating Johannsen in their second (a fifty-round knockout on 20 June 1960) and third fights (a sixth-round knockout on 13 March 1961), it was Liston's turn. He was 25 pounds heavier than Patterson, who weighed only 189 pounds for the fight, and he had a ferocious attitude enforced with a devastating left jab and left hook. In their first fight in Chicago on 4 December 1961, Liston knocked Patterson out in two minutes, six seconds of the first round before a live audience of 18,894 and a closed-circuit audience of more than 700,000. It was the third fastest knockout in heavyweight championship history. In their rematch on 23 July 1963 Liston took two minutes, ten seconds to knock out Patterson before a live audience of 8,000 fans and closed-circuit audiences in some 160 locations throughout the nation who paid over $2 million to view the action.

TWO BOXERS OUT OF THE RING

It was commonly held during the 1950s that boxing attracted a bad element. At the beginning of the decade about one-third of all active fighters had criminal records. Boxing is not for choirboys, defenders argued.

Oscar Bonavena was not a choirboy. He was a brawling heavyweight from Argentina who was good enough to give Muhammad Ali a tough fif-teen-round fight in December 1968 and to knock Joe Frazier down twice, but he fell short of championship caliber. Like many professional boxers, he had a giant sexual appetite that was not ternpered by good sense. Bonavena liked the girls at the Mustang Ranch, the legal brothel near Reno, Nevada, especially the owner's wife, Sally Con-forte. Her husband Joe, described as a "proud Sicilian" by his friends and as a mobster by the police, was not prudish when it came to his wife's liaisons with other men, but Joe Conforte did not like Bonavena.

On 16 May 1969 someone broke into Bonavena's trailer and stole some of his personal papers. Apparently believing that Joe Conforte had arranged the break-in, the hot-tempered Bonavena showed up at the Mustang Ranch six days later and demanded to see the owner, or else. One of Conferte's men, a former con, chose the latter option: he shot Bonavena in the chest with a .30-06 rifle and killed him. The gunman, Willard Rose Brymer, pleaded guilty to voluntary manslaughter and served two years in prison.

Bob Foster was light heavyweight champion from 1968 to 1974. He won the title and proved his worthiness of it by being the first man to knock out Dick Tiger. Foster went on to defend the title a record fourteen times. His first defense against Frankie DePaula, a five-to-one underdog, was meant to be routine. DePaula came out swinging in the first round and with his first flurry knocked the new champion down. Fostergot up and started to work. He knocked DePaula down three times before the round was over. The referee stopped the fight, awarding Foster a TKO.

DcPaula had been a respectable fighter before his match with Foster, but afterward training, which had never been his strong point, seemed to be too much trouble, especially when there was better money to be made outside the ring. In May 1969 DePaula was tried for hijacking $ 75,000 worth of copper ingots from the Port Newark docks. He was acquitted on charges of theft and possession of stolen property, but the jury was unable to reach a verdict on the charge of conspiracy. While awaiting retrial in June 1970, DcPaula was shot and killed in his girlfriend's apartment. He had apparently bought some drugs from a local hood and refused to pay. "He was the kind of kid you knew from the beginning was gonna end up like Swiss cheese/mused his trainer, Al Braverman. "By that I mean, he had to get shot. He was that kind of crazy, crazy human being."

Source:

Nigel Collins. Boxing Babylon (New York: Citadel, 1990).

Liston and Carbo

Liston was an unpopular champion. He had a criminal record and was known to have connections with organized crime. Indeed, Frankie Carbo owned a 50 percent interest in Liston's boxing career and promoted his fights indirectly from jail. As a result of his criminal connections, Liston was denied a license to fight in many states. Liston was also functionally illiterate and felt uncomfortable among reporters, unlike his first challenger after Patterson, Cassius Clay.

The "Louisville Lip."

Clay, called the "Louisville Lip" after his hometown and his loquacious manner, was given no chance against Liston by outsiders. He was young, innocent by contrast with his opponent, and seemed hysterical before the fight. Liston was supremely confident and apparently prepared himself to go no more than four rounds. Clay had calmed by fight time, and when the bell rang he delivered on his prefight promise to "float like a butterfly and sting like a bee." He proved himself a superior boxer, dancing rings around Liston and frustrating the champion's attempts to land a haymaker left. By the end of the third round Liston was exhausted, and in the corner he asked his manager for the secret weapon, eye-stinging liniment that was rubbed on his gloves. At the end of the fourth round Clay was blinded by the liniment, and he continued the fight only at the urging of his manager. He danced through the fifth round, and Liston was unable to capitalize. In the sixth Clay was back in full form, punishing the champion. Liston sat on the stool in his corner for the seventh, a mouse under his left eye but otherwise unmarked. He was too tired to go on. Liston's handlers sought to counter charges that the fight was fixed or that their fighter was a quitter by claiming Liston had torn a muscle in his left arm early in the fight, but it was a story believed only by those who wanted an excuse.

Down and Out

In a rematch in Las Vegas on 25 February 1964 Liston went down in the first minute of the first round the first time he was hit. Clay stood over him, gesturing and daring him to get up, but Liston stayed down for a long count. Because Clay would not retreat to a neutral corner, the referee did not begin marking Liston's time on the canvas for nine seconds. But Liston wanted no more. In subsequent years he continued to fight and had more brushes with the law. He died under mysterious circumstances in 1970, perhaps of a drug overdose.

Muhammad Ali

After his first fight with Liston, Cassius Clay announced that he had joined the Nation of Islam, known as the Black Muslims, and that he had abandoned his slave name Clay. He called himself Cassius X briefly until Muslim leader Elijah Muhammad changed his name to Muhammad Ali. Boxing fans were outraged, but Ali had only begun his assault on white culture. After the second Liston fight he was classified 1-A by his draft board. Claiming exemption because of his religion and because he was a conscientious objector, Ali refused to accept the authority of the government to draft him. "Keep asking me, no matter how long. / On the war in Viet Nam, / I sing this song / I ain't got no quarrel with the Viet Cong" was All's statement on the matter. He fought what he called his bum-of-the-month schedule (inviting comparison with Joe Louis, who first used the phrase), dispatching Eddie Machen, George Chuvalo (twice), Floyd Patterson, Henry Cooper, Doug Jones, Brian London, Karl Mildenberger, Cleveland Williams, Ernie Terrei, and Zora Foley in a two-year period before the federal courts challenged him. On April Fools' Day 1967 Ali was formally ordered to report for induction into the armed services. He refused, and on 20 June he was found guilty of draft evasion.

Frazer's Rise

The appeals process took nearly three years, and during that time Ali was banned from the ring. He was still champion in the view of most fight fans though. While many considered his behavior obnoxious, clearly Ali had a magnetic charm uncommon among boxers. Joe Frazier was the dominant heavyweight during the last years of the decade, but he had to wait for Ali's return before he was accepted as a great boxer, and he had to beat Ali before he was considered a champion.

Sources:

Sam Andre and Nat Fleischer, A Pictorial History of Boxing (Secaucus, N.J.: Citadel, 1987);

Jeffrey T. Sammons, Beyond the Ring: The Role of Boxing in American Society (Urbana & Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1988).