Classic American West Coast Boxing

[kikibalt]

Say anything about playing golf but, with gals like that, I'll play anyday.

Btw, that my cousin, Johnny Adame, third from left, Johnny lives in Reno, Nevada

[Rick Farris]

Jack Johnson

Beautiful, Roger.

[kikibalt]

Helen Humes with Dizzy Gillespie

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7xnuXsrQlCk

"HEY BABA LEBA"

[Randyman]

[kikibalt]

Same to you, Randy.....

[Randyman]

Simons Brickyard



The houses that we lived in.

Frank, that was some pretty interesting stuff on Simons Brickyard. Lots of history there.

Randy

[Randyman]

I ran across this great article on the Ring Magazine Blog and thought it was worth sharing-Randy


Classic Column: What makes a good fighter?
Posted May. 19, 2009 at 12:06pm
By W.C. Heinz

Classic Columns by magazine founder Nat Fleischer and other RING magazine writers over the past 86 years are posted Tuesdays. Today's column was selected because of all the talk about the best fighter pound-for-pound and the fighter of the decade. W.C. Heinz provided his thoughts on what makes a good fighter in the July 1951 issue.


Joey Maxim was in New York to fight Olle Tandberg, the heavyweight champion of Sweden. This was three years ago, and we were sitting in the dressing room he was using in Stillman’s and he was telling us about the time Curtis Sheppard caught him cold in the first round and pinned him in a corner and knocked him out.

“Believe me,” Joey said, “there’s no other feeling in the world like the feeling of being knocked out. You can’t imagine what it’s like.”

“I can’t,” Francis Albertanti said. “You tell me.”

“I come to in the dressing room,” Maxim said. “Everybody is standing around with long faces and tears in their eyes. It’s like I just died. I start crying myself, I’m saying: ‘I’ll go to work. I’ll dig ditches. I’ll do anything.’

“After a while I feel better. I have my shower and I get dressed and I go up to the office to get paid. Sheppard is up there, and he’s a real good guy. He knows he was lucky and he won’t catch me like that again, and he tells me he thinks I got a bad break and I’m entitled to a return.

“Three weeks later I go back with the guy and this time I win it in 10,” Maxim said, looking at us and nodding his head “How do you like that? The guy knocks me out and he’s willing to take me back.”
Francis and I were walking down Eighth Avenue about a half hour later. I was thinking about what Maxim had said.

“He sits there,” I said, “and he tells us what a great thing it is that Sheppard, who has just flattened him, is willing to take him back.”
“I know,” Francis said.

“While he’s talking,” I said, “I’m thinking what a hell of a thing it is that Maxim wants to go back.”
“I know,” Francis said. “I am thinking the same thing myself.”

Joey Maxim is a good fighter. He is good enough to be a champion of the world. His fights do not inspire enthusiasm and his style appears controlled by his caution, and yet if you ask me to enumerate the qualities that go into the making of a good fighter I must give you Maxim and the way he went back with Sheppard. More than that, I must give you his casual acceptance of his own act, his amazement that Sheppard would take him back.

We are thinking about good fighters, the ones of our time, and so Joe Louis belongs in this. The things that make any fighter good, or great, are many, and in the days when Louis was great they analyzed this great¬ness as deriving from fast reflexes, fast hands, and proper schooling in the use of these gifts.

There was nothing wrong with this definition, except that it left those who knew Louis only from a distance perplexed. The placid, unchanging expression of his face, his slow, uninspired manner of speech gave rise to the opinion that his was only an animal ability, and some, at least, concluded that boxing greatness does not require agility of mind.

That is where they were wrong, and Louis proved it on a number of occasions. He proved it on a day in Pompton Lakes in 1946. He was training to meet Billy Conn for the second time, and we were all standing around, crowded, in the dressing room watching Manny Seamon wrapping Joe’s hands.

We were not saying much. We never did say much around Joe, but it had been written many times that Conn looked fast and that his speed might befuddle Louis, and then, as we all stood there, somebody mentioned this.

When he did, Louis said something. He raised his eyes slowly, from watching Manny, and then he came out with the best line that was spoken or written about that fight. Then he went back to watching Manny.

“Billy can run,” Joe said, simply, “but he can’t hide.”

Lines are our stock in trade, not Joe’s, but he did not surprise those of us who knew him as much as it was ever possible for us to know Joe. He had given us one of those rare opportunities to look into that mind, the mind that could recognize an opening and use it. He had explained, without trying to do so, the ability to take the single opening that Paolino Uzcudun gave him in four rounds, and with one punch, probably the most devastating single punch Louis ever threw, flatten Uzcudun.

It is generally agreed that Joe’s greatest fight was his second fight against Max Schme¬ling. Goaded by hurt pride he angrily annihilated in less than a round a good fighter who had previously knocked him out. Emotional excitement inspired his most creative performance and made it his best. Thus it comes down that the good fighter is the creative fighter, the one who is able to rise above the mech¬anical limitations of the sport.

Such a one was the Rocky Graziano who, on July 12, 1947, won the middle¬weight championship of the world. Far from a master of the moves of the sport, the Graziano of that time was a fighter whose creative ability, coupled with his right hand, more than made up for his lack of technical talent.
It was a few minutes after Graziano had knocked out Tony Zale in the heat of the Chicago Stadium and in one of the most fierce fights of our era, that several of us were crowding him in the closeness of his dressing room. His one eye was closed and a clip held together the flesh above the other, and someone asked him to try to explain how he felt during the fury of that fight with Zale.

“I wanted to kill him,” Rocky said. “I don’t know why. I got nothing against him. I like him. He’s a nice guy, but I wanted to kill him. I don’t know why.”

The greatest fighter of his time and one of the greatest of all time is Ray Robinson, the middleweight champion of the world. It is probable that in him, more than in any other fighter of today, are combined more of the qualities that go into the making of a great fighter.
Among the fighters of the present there is, for example, no more avid student of the sport. Robinson has been thus since the days when he started to box. As a four-round preliminary boy he made it a practice to sit at ringside in his ring clothes, before and after his own fights in order to study the others on the card.

One day we were talking in the Uptown Gym in Harlem. He was explaining how he had learned to fight by watching others and fighting others, and I asked him from whom, among those he had fought, he had learned the most.

“Fritzie Zivic taught me a lot,” he said, speaking of the former welterweight champion. “He was about the smartest I ever fought. Why, he showed me how you can make a man butt open his own eye.”

“How?” I said.

“He’d slip my lead, like this,” Robin¬son said, demonstrating. “Then he’d put his hand behind my neck and he’d bring my eye down on his head. Fritzie was smart.”

We were sitting one day in Robinson’s office on Seventh Avenue, just south of 124th Street. He had fought Kid Gavilan twice. The first time they had fought Gavi¬lan had given him trouble. The second time, for the welterweight title in Phila¬delphia on July 11, 1949, he had handled the Cuban with ease, and I wanted him to tell me at least one of the things he had learned about Gavilan in their first fight.

“Well, I noticed one thing.” Robinson said. “I noticed that when he throws his hook he’s not in position, so he shifts his right shoulder forward maybe an inch or two. When he does that you know the right hand is dead, and you how the hook is coming.”
I was not amazed by this, because I had ex¬pected some such revelation. I was merely im¬pressed that of the many who have fought Gavilan and of the many more who have watched him closely, this is the only one to find this weakness.

I was not amazed, moreover, when Robin¬son told me that he knows fear. I have never known a really good creative artist, whether he be a writer, painter, or boxer, who has not confessed that he often doubts himself, experiences nervous¬ness when the big project is at hand.

“Accidents happen in a ring,” Robinson said. “You can never tell when you’re liable to be hit with a good punch.”

He remembered the night he fought Artie Levine in Cleveland in November of 1946. Levine had a dozen pounds on him and so Robinson was fighting it the way you should fight it, moving and throwing no more than combinations and piling up the points.

“In the ninth round,” he said, “he started a right hand and I reached over to catch it. When I opened my glove it wasn’t there and I heard the referee say: ‘Four.’ I thought to myself, Man, he’s startin’ awful high.”

Robinson got up at nine, and in the next round he knocked Levine out. He has never forgotten this, however, but the fear that Robinson knows is the limited fear that inspires a degree of caution and out of this gives birth to inspired performance.


http://www.ringtv.com/blog/685/classic_ ... d_fighter/

You're right, Randy, this is a great article.

Man, I hung on every word. An outstanding article. Alot of fighters today should read that quip by Maxim. I laughed at the awe of the writer over the fact that Maxim was humbled by Sheppard 'allowing' him a return. How protective fighters today are over perfect records and how back in the day all they could say was, "I'll get him in a rematch." How times have changed.

Scartissue

I thought you guys would enjoy the article. This is a great piece of writing. Like you Dan, I hung on every word. Not only was the content so interesting but it was almost a primer on how to write. The article goes hand in hand with the way we feel about boxing on this thread.

Randy

[Randyman]

I just read that Mike Tyson's four year old daughter Exodus is in a Phoenix hospital and in critical condition. She was playing alone on a treadmill and was found by her mother, hanging from the power cord. Tyson has since been notified and is at the hospital with her. Keep her and the Tyson family in your prayers and thoughts.

[dagosd2000]

Cpl. Joe Esposito USMC 1945 Theater of Operations: Okinawa,Pelileu,China

My Dad

[dagosd2000]

Jack Johnson

Beautiful, Roger.

Thanks Rick. I have another Johnson. I'm going to bring some paintings up with me the 13th. I'll also have a portfolio of portraits of about 20 to 30 fighters that I'll have in an album.

[dagosd2000]

Helen Humes with Dizzy Gillespie

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7xnuXsrQlCk

"HEY BABA LEBA"

Frank
I was in L.A. Friday. Drove down Central Avenue. No more clubs. I didn't know what to make of it. Area seemed desolate. Watching this video clip makes me think areas like Central Avenue must have seen a lot of action at one time.

[dagosd2000]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eoSAPaThWJE

Let Me Off Uptown

Anita O'Day,Gene Krupa, Roy Eldridge

[dagosd2000]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QCCP8ZKY5i4

Bugle Call Rag

Glenn Miller(A good one for Memorial Day)


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wd0PJ4cFs80

American Patrol

Glenn Miller

[kikibalt]

Helen Humes with Dizzy Gillespie

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7xnuXsrQlCk

"HEY BABA LEBA"

Frank
I was in L.A. Friday. Drove down Central Avenue. No more clubs. I didn't know what to make of it. Area seemed desolate. Watching this video clip makes me think areas like Central Avenue must have seen a lot of action at one time.

Rog...I used to cruise Central Ave. back in the day of the Nite Clubs, I would see the Cats walking with their ladies up and down the avenue, I was of course too young to go in the clubs back then.

[kikibalt]

Helen Humes with Dizzy Gillespie

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7xnuXsrQlCk

"HEY BABA LEBA"

On the left is "La Baba Leba", aka Delia Segura, Baba Leba was the sister of my late friend Gilbert Segura, aka Pachie, until Saturday at the Simons reunion I hadn't seen Baba Leba since 1952, she was just a little the last time I seen her.

Virgie Diaz is sister of my school days best friend, Coy, Coy and I went through K-12 together.

[kikibalt]

Simons Brickyard



The houses that we lived in.

Frank, that was some pretty interesting stuff on Simons Brickyard. Lots of history there.

Randy

Randy....If I don't forget, I'll take the book that I bought Saturday to Tom's Farm on June 7th, so you can take a look at it.

You know looking back and looking at the photos on the book, it seen so surreal, like it was another life time.

[Rick Farris]

I just read that Mike Tyson's four year old daughter Exodus is in a Phoenix hospital and in critical condition. She was playing alone on a treadmill and was found by her mother, hanging from the power cord. Tyson has since been notified and is at the hospital with her. Keep her and the Tyson family in your prayers and thoughts.

I'll say a prayer for Mikes daughter. His wife Monica is a real good lady.


-Rick Farris

[Rick Farris]

Jack Johnson

Beautiful, Roger.

Thanks Rick. I have another Johnson. I'm going to bring some paintings up with me the 13th. I'll also have a portfolio of portraits of about 20 to 30 fighters that I'll have in an album.

That will be great.

-Rick

[kikibalt]

Carmen Basilio vs Gaspar Ortega

[bennie]

I'm off to the Black Country Musuem today, an industrial heritage site (26 acres) in the heart of England where you can eat old-fashioned fish and chips, drink old-fashioned ale, go underground into a coalmine, etc, and just see how people lived in the 19th century. The Black Country used to be black by day, hence its name. Queen Victoria famously pulled down the blind in her train carriage when she passed through it.

Bennie
Sounds like you're going to have a great day. I can't wait to go back to England. When I do, give me the directions to the Black Country Museum. Sounds very interesting. Tally Ho Rog

I had a few pints of 19th century cider called "Summat Else" (seriously). Man, it went down like a two-bit whore. I also discovered that miners and other industrial workers were allowed to drink at work, given the terribly long hours, the backbreaking work and the dreadful conditions (dust and smoke). The drink was laid on free and they would drink two to three gallons a day. Most of the workers died young, anyway, from the sheer toll of the work. Doctors would write "worn out" on the death certificates. They simply died of exhaustion.

[bennie]

Say anything about playing golf but, with gals like that, I'll play anyday.

Btw, that my cousin, Johnny Adame, third from left, Johnny lives in Reno, Nevada

Jesus, those girls look pretty useful, and I'm not talking about playing golf!

[kikibalt]

Say anything about playing golf but, with gals like that, I'll play anyday.

Btw, that my cousin, Johnny Adame, third from left, Johnny lives in Reno, Nevada

Jesus, those girls look pretty useful, and I'm not talking about playing golf!

Bennie, Bennie.....

[dagosd2000]

BRUCE BRUNO

I would have never thought growing up as a kid in Chicago that I'd be hanging out at the beach in Southern California,but that's what happened when my folks moved out here in the mid 50's. When I'd go back to Little Italy for a visit, I still had enough of the grease ball in me to relate to the surroundings. I know if my nephews would have come out to sunny California, they would have lasted about as long as a scoop of spumone on the beach at Malibu in July.

Going back was an experience that I liked to experience less and less. It was like those guys in the neighborhood were stuck in time. Everything in the world was changing,but them. Not to say that the worldly changes were for the better,but staying at my grandmother's house was something Fellini could have put in a script.

One of the biggies for the boys to do in the neighborhood was to rent a hall and have a Doo Wap concert. Maybe on Oakley Boulevard you'd spell it Doo Wop. Maybe that's how you spell it anyway considering all the Italians that tried their hand trying to sing it.

Once my cousins,Frankie and Joey,enticed me to go with them to some hall to one of these cannoli concerts. They told me they had a part of the action. The featured singer ,they told me,was going to make everyone forget about Frankie Valli. I wanted to tell them that everyone had already forgot about him.

We get to the hall and it's packed to the doors. Now I've always liked the way Italian girls look. Dark hair and eyes. The olive skin,but when they start to open their mouthes I feel like calling a sit down to make a hit. Loud. With that Bronx accent and they ain't even from New York.

All the dudes have the open collar with the chest hair and the gold chains with St. Christopher. I wanted to call them all Mario. My cousins,Frankie and Joey,are nudging me about how the star of the evenings' entertainment is about to make his debut. The announcer hops on stage with a sequin suit and shouts to the world that it's time to hear Bruce Bruno,the next teenage idol,at least of the Southwest Side.

Out comes Bruce Bruno in a green jacket and I thought the walls were going to come down. He starts to sing,but I can't hear him because the the crowd is going absolutely ape. When they finally calm down a little,I can finally hear the next coming of Frankie Valli. But he ain't no Frankie Valli. He ain't even Rudy Valle. He's Death Valley.

I'm looking at my cousins,Frankie and Joey,and they're giving me the thumbs up. All I could think about was a nice stretch of beach in sunny California and watching the surf come up.

[Randyman]

Mike Tyson's daughter passed away today as a result of a freak accident at home. My condolences to Mike and the Tyson family.

[Chuck1052]

In regards to the tragic death of Mike Tyson's daughter, I hope that Tyson and the rest of his family accept my condolences.

- Chuck Johnston