Curious about career of Jeff Merritt...

[Sweet Scientist]

I vaguely remember Jeff Merritt being a promising heavy in the early/mid '70's.....what happened to him?...

What I remember:

Hard puncher...reputation as viscious sparring partner (broke a couple guy's jaws?)...KO'd an old Ernie Terrell in 1st round...had a good W-L record...
Did his career end suddenly?...what happened in the Clark fight when he was KO'd in the 1st? Remember reading a few fight reports about him in the Ring years ago, not much else...
Boxrec has him at 23-3-1, was he ever ranked?...with a record like that, why no more good fights after 1973???

[overhand_right]

never had a great chin (decked by heavy hitting ropy tiger williams en route to winning an 8 rd dec), decayed body & mind with serious heroin addiction, leading to his shocking 1 rd kayo loss to light hitting henry clark, whom he had already beat.

some people seem to believe he was a killer puncher of the foreman/tyson level (holmes says so, and he would know i guess)

had ali in severe trouble in a heated 1970 sparring sess, ali had to rally to kayo 'candy slim', as he was known.

tried comeback a while later, but in a barkley/hearns manner, was savaging toughie stan ward till ward bounced back in rd 3 with a classic haymaker, wiping jeff out for good.

to hear more about his more recent misadventures as a homeless, shoeless, jheri curl wearing crack head, seek out my old thread entitled something like "once upon a time on bvoxrec by edgar allen-overhand", something like that. you'll have to delve a bit i think i made it last christmas. seems a few of the old boxrec crew got a kick out of that one.

everything you need to know about jeff, and some stuff you didnt want to know, is contained there.

[Alister]

All I know about him is that he was Don King's first fighter and that King dropped him like a hot potatoe once he got himself KO'd back to back vs. Henry Clark and Stan Ward.

Supposedly he is homeless now, or at least close to it, in Las Vegas and always shows up outside the venues of the big fights and begs people for money. I read somewhere a few years ago that he had a nasty crackhabbit going too. Too bad, because Earnie Shavers and Larry Holmes both agree that he was quite a fighter in the early 1970s.
Just another sad life of a boxer.

Alister

[overhand_right]

... or it could have been authored by freaky deaky, erm, not my alter ego but a buddy of mine who really does exist and no i wasnt breaking boxrec rules by having two aliases.

[Sweet Scientist]

Thanks for the info guys...

Overhand, I clicked on your name, then clicked on the 'find all posts by' link...I searched for about 30 minutes, haven't found it yet, but I will...
takes a long time to search 2700 posts...

[Eric the Viking]

Thanks for the info guys...

Overhand, I clicked on your name, then clicked on the 'find all posts by' link...I searched for about 30 minutes, haven't found it yet, but I will...
takes a long time to search 2700 posts...

That's not the right way - to do a targeted forum search, click on the "Search" button at top of any forum page, then enter e.g. "candy slim" in the keywords box, and click "find all terms" to narrow your search to only threads. That brings up about a dozen threads, including the following one by Overhand Right:

JEFF MERRITT, AKA "CANDY SLIM" - Boxers of the Past (BOTP) forum, 7. January 2002

...the legendary 2-part overhand-right-and-his-trusty-muscle-former-boxer-turned-crackhead-jeff-candy-slim-merritt saga by Overhand Right's alter-ego/erstwhile-lover Freaky Deaky:

ONCE UPON A TIME........................................ - Current Scene, 30. May 2003

THE SAGA CONTINUES, by Edgar Allen Overhand - Current Scene, 8. July 2003

...and last but not least, the following post from a Sparring sessions I wish I could have seen thread (BOT, 22. Nov. 2003) by British Scene Forum editor bennie:

Don King's first ever fighter was Jeff 'Candy Slim ' Merritt, who at 6'5" and 220 pounds had a deserved reputation as a dangerous puncher and, like King, had done a stretch in jail. He took out Ernie Terrell in one and was then brought in as a sparring partner for Earnie Shavers by Earnie's trainer at the time, Archie Moore.
'The Acorn' was preparing for his Madison Square Garden headliner with Jerry Quarry. Their fight was scheduled for the summer of 1973, until Merritt shattered Earnie's jaw in sparring and the fight was postponed until December. It was reported that Shavers's jaw was resting on his chest.
Quarry was furious. "Merritt isn't someone you get in the ring to spar with. You don't get in the ring with him unless it is for money, real money." Quarry insisted Moore was incompetent as a trainer and that he wished he was still a fighter because, "I would love to knock him out." This caused lasting bad blood between the two of them.
Unsurprisingly, Shavers's management fired Moore because of the incident. Quarry went on to destroy Shavers in the first round that December at the Garden. As for Merritt, drug problems continually plagued him, and, after stopping Ron Stander in his first fight after Terrell, he was knocked out by the light-hitting Henry Clark and then by Stan Ward. He now shows up at big fights in Vegas begging for money.

[overhand_right]

jeez, reading over that old overhand allan-poe thread i actually found it embarrassing the stuff i wrote. i guess over time its lost relevence because you had to be on the forum at the time to understand all the names and references to then-famous (or infamous) debates that were ravaging.

we really need a classic threads archive. my absolute all time favourite had to be pringles 'jeff jordan' thread. i believe my kidneys burst and soaked my inneds with urine through laughing so hard.

newbies should not be denied the opportunity to be similarly maimed like i was.