"irish" Mickey Walker on YOU BET YOUR LIFE (1955)

[Caractacus]

the great Welterweight and Middleweight Champion at age 54 yrs.
( at about 12:30 of this clip).

[gilgamesh]

Awesome! I have several episodes of You Bet Your Life recorded, but never saw this one. Great find. I love Groucho, and obviously with the Boxing factor thrown in there it's double cool

[Caractacus]

[Caractacus]

Here is some rare film footage of Mickey Walker 30 years earlier (1925).
85th professional fight-January 1925

Could one possibly look more "Irish" then Mickey Walker ? (except maybe someone like Jimmy Cagney).

[APerno]

Yea Walker certainly looks like a Son of Erin and Greb looks like the classic pug, what a nose.

Here is a wonderful anecdote about Arnold Rothstein the infamous gambler, and the Greb-Walker fight. I wonder if it is true. I do not understand why the author would think the fight went 14 rounds though - he needed a better fact checker; the 14th round was where Greb dominated though (Boxrec) -- still a great book, worth a read, much about AR's questionable involvement with Tunney and Gibson.

[APerno]

Every time I look at one of those 1920s rings, with three loose ropes, you can see how easy it was for Firpo to put Dempsey out of the ring.

Slow the speed down to .75 it looks much better.

[Caractacus]

99th professional fight-June 1927

[Ilya Muromets]

the great Welterweight and Middleweight Champion at age 54 yrs.
( at about 12:30 of this clip).

That was great! TV was worth watching back then! I get the impression that Mickey Walker was a good guy too.

[APerno]

Ah! The good old days not one mention of the word "boxing" --- it was all prize fights; fighters; the ring; the prize ring; (Groucho even had the balls to use the word 'punchy.) Give me the 1950s when we didn't apologize for the fight game, back when it was a game of men, not this pussy Mayweather Jr. crap "I'm going to spend 12 rounds scoring points and wait for three fat men to tell me I won" pussy sport. Na! none of that boxing crap, no boxer here, just a real 'prize fighter.'

I was born too damn late and now I'm stuck here with you all. "Oh, I'm not into the violence and brutality I'm a boxing aficionado, I can can appreciate the the finer elements that the common fan just doesn't understand . . . . blah, blah , blah." Give me a prize fighter, you keep your pussy boxers; you pay $100 bucks to watch Mayweather not fight!

On a serious note: notice how every generation always thinks the game was better in the days of their youth, no matter what the date is? Here it was the mid 1950s and Groucho was dissing the current group of fighter (except Marciano), and Walker was trying to be polite and not go along with it.

[Caractacus]

110th professional fight-March 1929




112th pro fight-October 1929

[Caractacus]

[Caractacus]

July 31-1931

[Caractacus]

September 1932


1974 (age 73 years)

[APerno]

Loughran looks style wise (stance and hands) like a fighter from the Corbett-Fitzsimmons era, Walker looks more like a modern fighter.

[Ilya Muromets]

I watched the Schmeling-Walker fight. What an uppercut Max had - and Walker put up a terrific fight! Schmeling weighed 188 to Walker's 174, fourteen pounds difference. Modern heavyweights weighing 201 are now up against top guys weighing 240, 250, or more. Usyk will be facing that, how much depending upon what his new natural heavier weight will be, but now they call guys weighing 210, or even 220, "too small".