A good 20 seconds had elapsed since I’d dumped him, and there was no way in hell he would have beaten the count without those guys helping him. But what could I do about it? The final bell sounded half a minute later, and Miteff wobbled back to his corner.
The fight was scored a draw, which was total bullcrap, but in the July rankings I was No. 8 in the world. Nicholson said afterward that he was “only doing the Canadian thing” when he and those other clowns pushed Miteff back into the ring, but that’s a load of you know what. As far as I’m concerned, they cost me a knockout—and probably a higher ranking. The Canadian thing, my ass. More like the Benedict Arnold thing.
What really galled me was that Nicholson played it up like he was some kind of hero and couldn’t fathom why I was so upset. Did those guys think that Argentinean sportswriters would help me beat the count if the fight had been in Buenos Aires and I was the one getting knocked out of the ring? Forget about it!
About the only good thing to come out of that mess—other than my breaking into the top 10—was that Toronto Telegram photographer Lou Turofsky’s shot of me blasting Miteff out of the ring ended up being named United Press International’s sports photo of the year.
The fight got me some international notice, too. The following week Sports Illustrated mentioned it in the “For the Record” section, and the August 1958 issue of The Ring ran a feature story by Lew Eskin headlined “Heavyweight Hopefuls.” Eskin named me as one of the three best “up-and-coming” heavyweights on the planet, along with Charley Liston of St. Louis and a guy from Nampa, Idaho, named Roque Maravilla. Liston, of course, soon dropped the “Charley” and became known to the world as Sonny (more on him later). As for Maravilla, I never heard of him before or since.
Miteff and I hooked up again at Maple Leaf Gardens on March 27, 1961, and—big surprise—I had to nearly kill him to get a 10-round split decision. It was a memorable outing for two reasons: one, I was sticking and moving and using my jab more than I ever had to that point, and two, it was the first time an opponent spoke to me during a fight, and in retrospect, I felt terrible about it.
When I tell people today that at one time I was a pretty good stick-and-move guy, they either burst out laughing or they think I’m bulljiving, but it’s true. Remember, I was pretty much self-taught, so early in my career I relied less on strength and power and more on the kind of boxing skills I picked up from more experienced sparring partners. Besides that, Tommy McBeigh was convinced that the best way for me to fight was at longer range, so at least for a while, I became more of a boxer.
The incident that prompted Miteff to talk to me during our rematch was a direct result of that. From the opening bell I was up on my toes, moving in and out, stabbing with the jab. I hit Alex early and often, and by Round 4 he was badly cut over his right eye. Every time I jabbed him, more blood flowed. But the referee, a guy named Bobby Laurence, refused to stop the fight.
By the eighth round we were both covered in Miteff’s blood and I was really frustrated at Laurence for not stopping it, so I decided to force his hand by getting inside and throwing a head butt to open the cut even wider. It was a rotten thing to do, but I was only thinking about ending the fight.
Late in the round, I got Alex against the ropes and tried to slam my head into his cut, but he slid sideways and I just kind of banged him on the cheek. As we fell into a clinch he sighed and wearily said, “George, you don’t have to do that to win this fight.” He was so exhausted and so bloody that it made me feel like a piece of crap for even trying.
Alex wound up taking 27 stitches around the eye, but fortunately his face eventually healed up nicely. Later that year he snagged a small part in the movie Requiem for a Heavyweight, starring Anthony Quinn and Jackie Gleason, along with a very young Cassius Clay, who appears in the opening scene.
The sting of what happened with Miteff was still fresh in my mind three months later, and on September 15—three days after my 21st birthday—I vented my frustration on James J. Parker, whom I’d first sparred with when I was 16.
I knocked Jimmy down with my first punch just 30 seconds after the opening bell, then dropped him twice more before referee Sammy Luftspring counted him out exactly two minutes into our showdown for the Canadian heavyweight championship. It was Yom Kippur, and I wanted to send Luftspring home early to celebrate.
Parker, who came into the ring that night with a record of 30–6–4 and 25 KOs, never fought again.
The euphoria of becoming the youngest fighter ever to win the Canadian title lasted exactly 32 days. On October 17, I made my New York debut in a 10-rounder against “Irish” Pat McMurtry at Madison Square Garden. And I blew it, big time.
McMurtry was a former Marine sergeant from Tacoma, Washington, who had been ranked No. 5 in the world in 1957. He had a great amateur career, winning 103 of 105 fights, and he was also the first guy I ever heard of who got a boxing scholarship, to Gonzaga University in Spokane.
Pat turned pro in 1954 after serving in the Marine Corps and had only lost two of his 32 fights, scoring 25 knockouts. But like his idol, Gene Tunney, McMurtry was more of a boxer than a puncher. The gamblers made me the 9–5 betting favorite, and I was equally confident about my chances. Too confident, as it turned out.
I wasn’t in the kind of shape I should have been in for such an important bout, but that was nobody’s fault but my own. To be honest, I think the combination of being the newly crowned Canadian champ and headlining at the Garden for the first time at such a young age made me a little cocky. I’d dreamed of headlining in New York since the first time I listened to Don Dunphy broadcast a fight from the Mecca of boxing, but I probably didn’t take it as seriously as I should have. Later on in my career it wasn’t such a big deal to fight at MSG, but the first time was something pretty special, and it was a bit overwhelming.
Compared to Toronto, New York seemed very sophisticated. I was like John Boy Walton going to the big city for the first time. Everything was new and different and exciting, from the food vendors in the street to the way the kids hustled newspapers. I remember buying a papaya fruit drink at a little stand just around the corner from the Garden and thinking that I’d never quaffed anything so exotic!
To add to the excitement, the fight was televised on the Gillette Cavalcade of Sports, so I knew all my buddies in Toronto would be watching, along with several million fight fans across North America. Jimmy Powers called the blow-by-blow action, and he made a point of telling everybody out there in TV Land that I was wearing custom-made size 12½ boxing shoes.
In the second round I staggered McMurtry with a good left hook off a jab that pretty much had him ready for the cleaners but, as had been the case in my fight with Bob Baker, I couldn’t finish him. Later on in my career I became a much more accomplished finisher, but at that point I just wasn’t experienced enough to know how to do it efficiently.
Pat managed to remain vertical, and in the third round he went to work behind his jab. He threw short, quick shots straight up the middle, and because I was looping my hooks, he started to tag me flush on the nose. Every time I threw a hook to the body, he fired back with two, three or four stiff jabs to my face. By Round 5, my schnozz was so banged up I was having a lot of trouble breathing, and when that happens in the ring, you get tired pretty quickly. By the 10th I was bone tired, and when McMurtry was awarded the decision, I could only blame myself.
When you lose a fight—any fight—it’s the worst feeling in the world. First of all, you feel like you let down your corner. Then you think about all your friends and relatives that were watching, which only compounds the disappointment. My parents and my sister, Zora, were there at the Garden, along with some of my buddies from Toronto, and I felt like I really let them down. Worst of all is that you start second-guessing yourself, wondering why you did this when you should have done that. You replay the fight over and over in your head, punch by punch, and inevitably you conjure up mental images of how you should have responded rather than how
you actually did respond. It’s a pretty lonesome feeling, and it can drive you nuts.
I was more embarrassed than disappointed after losing to McMurtry, because in my heart I knew I hadn’t prepared properly. Deacon Allen told the newspapers that “maybe George was a bit overmatched…. McMurtry has never fought better, and my guy couldn’t have been worse.”
I was despondent for months afterward. I started lifting weights again and bulked up to 255 pounds, but then Allen got worried about my weight so we spent a couple of weeks at a resort in Hot Springs, Arkansas, to sweat some of it off. That trip was a real eye-opener for me. A lot of mobsters and entertainers went to the resort, but they seemed just like regular people. We stayed at the Arlington Hotel, where I met comedian Henny Youngman, and Allen introduced me to an old-time gangster named Owney “The Killer” Madden, who looked and talked like a Baptist minister.
Madden’s connection to boxing stretched back to the early 1930s, when he was partners with the mobsters who managed Italian giant Primo Carnera and arranged all the fixed fights that eventually led to Carnera winning the heavyweight championship. In 1932, Madden was apparently mixed up in the murder of a guy named Vincent “Mad Dog” Coll, who had allegedly been extorting money from Billy Duffy and Jean DeMange, who promoted Carnera’s conqueror, Max Baer. Allen knew Madden through his connection to Baer’s manager, Ancil Hoffman.
Madden might have had a sordid past, but I found him to be an interesting and thoughtful old gent to talk to. You’d never have guessed he was at the top of the FBI’s Most Wanted list just a few years earlier.
If losing my New York debut taught me one thing, it was that I needed better preparation in the gym. Allen was a real cheapskate when it came to paying for good sparring partners—and he’d only bring them in for a week, at most—but they were the only guys who helped me in those days. You can learn a lot on your own, just by watching, but I was young and I needed the benefit of experienced fighters in the gym, something Allen rarely provided. One of the few exceptions was an old pro by the name of King George Moore, who came up from Detroit. He’d fought some name guys, including Cleveland Williams, and he taught me a lot, including how to spin a guy and how to avoid being spun. Little things like that.
Tommy McBeigh, my so-called “trainer,” was basically just a yes-man for Allen and absolutely clueless when it came to instructing me. He threw a left hook like Stan Laurel’s wife, and his idea of a fighting stance was something out of John L. Sullivan’s day: standing straight up with arms extended and fists pumping up and down, like riding a unicycle with your hands. It sounds ludicrous, but that was the way he wanted me to fight.
Lousy training aside, another reason why my head wasn’t where it should have been against McMurtry was because I was in love—and my girlfriend was pregnant.
The first time I spoke to Lynne Sheppard was in front of the Toronto-Dominion Bank on the corner of Keele and Dundas streets a year or so after I turned pro. A buddy named Bill Lehman and I were on our way to the gym, and he introduced us. Bill knew Lynne from the neighborhood, and she seemed like a nice kid. The Sheppard family roots went back to the Mayflower; they were United Empire Loyalists who moved up to eastern Ontario during the American Revolution. What Bill didn’t tell me—and you sure couldn’t tell by looking at Lynne—was that she was only 14 years old. She had a steady boyfriend at the time, but he was history once we started dating.
It was pretty casual at first. Lynne worked after school at a hair salon not far from the gym, so when I finished my workout we’d meet for a walk around the Junction. I liked her a lot, but as much as we enjoyed each other’s company, we always seemed to end up arguing about some little thing.
Lynne was very pretty, with a great smile. She reminded me of Sandra Dee, the cute actress who lit up the big screen as the star of Gidget a couple of years later. Lynne’s hair was blonde at the time because she dyed it. That’s one reason I thought she was older; working in a salon after school seemed kind of sophisticated. She was also smart and quick-witted, which I found very attractive. She could size things up in a second and a half, and she was usually bang-on. Our favorite song was “Could This Be Magic” by The Dubs, which we used to sing to each other.
Once in a while I brought Lynne down to the gym to watch me train, but Deacon Allen and Tommy McBeigh got upset because they thought it was a distraction, so eventually she stopped coming. (Incidentally, when I first met Lynne on the northeast corner of Keele and Dundas, I had no idea the woman who would become my second wife, Joanne, was living a block and a half away. I guess I like girls from the same neighborhood!)
Lynne was very headstrong, which I wasn’t used to, and she wasn’t shy about expressing her opinions. It didn’t occurr to me how young she was even though I would pick her up at Western Tech Commerce (where our son Mitchell became a teacher 30 years later). Here I was, a 19-year-old professional fighter, and I was dating this kid who was in Grade 9! If I had known how old she was, I would’ve felt like Jerry Lee Lewis, the cradle-robbing rock ‘n’ roller.
Love is kind of a double-edged sword when you’re that young, and neither one of us was ready to deal with the consequences. When Lynne got pregnant at 15, I almost had a stroke. To begin with, I couldn’t believe how ignorant I was. We’d been going together for about a year and half and I was crazy about her, but that didn’t change the fact that this wasn’t exactly the most ideal situation for either of us. The fact was that her father had to go to city hall to sign permission for Lynne to marry me; that’s when I found out she was only 15. I thought she was 17. But in the end it didn’t make any difference. We ended up tying the knot on March 31, 1959, and Mitchell Aaron was born four months later on July 25—four days after Lynne’s 16th birthday.
I was proud and thrilled when Lynne delivered the son I’d been rooting for. Mitchell was Lynne’s mother’s maiden name, and we both liked the name Aaron. That was Moses’s brother in the Bible … and also Elvis’s middle name!
Becoming a father for the first time and being responsible for another life was a bit overwhelming. All of a sudden I found myself thinking about his health, his education, all that stuff … and he was still a brand new baby! I just wanted to protect him and do my best to guide him. What’s a bigger responsibility than that?
Mitchell was a happy little guy, but he had a serious side, too. From an early age he was very inquisitive, and he went on to become an excellent student. He skipped a grade in elementary school (just like me), and after high school he was awarded a full-ride football scholarship to play fullback at Florida State. After injuring his knee, he transferred to the University of Guelph back in Ontario, where he earned his degree.
Mitchell later taught and coached at Toronto’s Western Tech—the same high school Lynne was attending when she became pregnant with him—and in 2000 he won the NFL and CFL’s Youth Coach of the Year award, which recognizes volunteer coaches across Canada who dedicate themselves to the development of young players both on and off the field. Today he’s a teacher and wrestling coach at University of Toronto Schools, an independent secondary institution for academically gifted students, affiliated with the University of Toronto.
Getting married and then almost immediately becoming parents took our lives in directions that neither of us was prepared for, but to be honest, Lynne handled it with much more strength and maturity than I did. To put it bluntly, I wasn’t ready or willing to make the adjustments that necessarily go along with being a new husband and father.
It’s not that I didn’t love my wife; it was more a case of me loving her on my own terms. In our rush to do what in those days was called “the right thing,” I felt pressured—to the point where I resisted making those adjustments and instead made some stupid, terrible mistakes.
For starters, I was disrespectful to my wife. That sounds trite, but in retrospect it was a horrible, selfish way to start our life together. Of course, I never thought anything about it at the time because my buddies and I were all cu
t from the same bolt of cloth, and I honestly didn’t think that being a married man should change any of that. That’s how ignorant and disrespectful I was. And the fact I didn’t want to change only made matters worse.
Did I mess around? Yes, I did. Was it right? No, not in any way, shape or form. But in some small corner of my brain, that herd mentality took over and I convinced myself that nothing had changed, that I could continue doing the things my pals and I had always done before a wife and baby came into my life. And that’s exactly what it was, a herd mentality. When everybody’s doing it, that kind of life doesn’t seem so immoral. But it was, and I got into some bad trouble because of it.
Three weeks after I took my marriage vows, I was arrested for rape.
ROUND 2
THE RAPE CHARGE WASN’T MY FIRST RUN-IN WITH THE law. As a kid, I was arrested for fighting on the street and spent two and a half days in Toronto’s Don Jail, which was more than enough to convince me I never wanted to return. I was put in what was known as “Gunsell’s Alley,” the under-21 area with a bunch of other young guys. You’d get handed somebody’s comic book, passed from cell to cell, to use as toilet paper. The toilet was just a wide-mouthed spittoon. That was most unpleasant especially when you consider that in those days the used spittoons in the cells weren’t changed until the next morning—but nothing compared to what I was about to face.
Instead of being at home with my pregnant wife on that April night in 1959, I was out with a buddy named Jack, cruising around Chinatown in my car, when we spotted a girl walking down the street. It sounds crude and ridiculous today, but I’d picked up so many girls in bars and on the street just by talking to them that it had almost become second nature, and the fact that I was now a married man didn’t even enter into the equation.
Chuvalo Page 5
