My View from the Corner Read online

  I can't claim that I knew what was going on at the time. Later I would be able to connect the dots. But all I knew then was secondhand, gleaned by way of rumor or partial information that filtered down or from what Chris would say in that closemouthed way of his. And I certainly wasn't prying around, trying to find out. As the new kid on the block, I fully subscribed to the trainers' eleventh commandment: "Thou shalt not stick thy nose into other people's business."

  After all, what could I do other than what Carbo had so unsubtly told me to do the first time I met him: look the other way? Jimmy Breslin, who was on the scene back then, best summed up the trainers' arm's-length relationship with the criminal element when he told a writer: "Nobody mentioned them. It was like the hidden, secret sin. That's the business end. Your job is just the fighter. What are you gonna do? Are you gonna make statements and change America? It couldn't be done. I mean, what shot did you have causing trouble?" And so, no matter what I may have heard or suspected, even that my brother Chris may have been doing a little business "with the business end" just to stay afloat, I looked the other way, too.

  There was one time, however, when I didn't look away. It was a decade later, and I was in Washington, D.C., with my fighter Jimmy Beecham for a middleweight matchup with Willie Vaughn on a fight card put together by Washington promoter Goldie Ahearn. The two had met twice before, each getting a decision, and this was to be their rubber match. The Uline Arena bout was a crowd-pleaser, but, unfortunately, it ended in a draw, although naturally I thought my guy had won.

  Now I wanted to get out of there and go home, back to Miami. But the problem was that it was snowing. No, make that blizzarding. Everything was at a standstill, including the airports, which were socked in. (I've always thought that during the cold war the Russians only had to seed the clouds, not bomb Washington; Washingtonians are unable to do anything in snowy weather.) Anyway, with my flight canceled and nothing else to do, I thought I'd catch a late-night bite and remembered that Goldie's brother, Johnny Goldstein, owned a restaurant where the fight mob always hung out; I decided to go there rather than eat at the hotel.

  Catching a cab, seemingly the only one out that night, I directed the driver to the Golden Parrot, right off Connecticut Avenue at DuPont Circle, where I hoped to catch some of the fight crowd and get a sandwich and a bowl of soup or a glass of hot milk or something to warm me up on a cold and blustery night. As I walked into the restaurant I was surprised to find the joint empty, but a friendly Goldie Ahearn greeted me and took me to a table in the back, promising to join me later for a drink. After dinner Goldie returned to share a glass of wine and fight talk before he hurriedly ran off to greet the late-arriving crowd who had finally made their way through the snow. A couple of them paused as they went by to tell me that they thought Jimmy had won the fight, though, after some thought, I was happy with the draw.

  I paid my bill, asked the waiter to get me a cab, and began to make my way to the front door when I heard a voice call out, "Hi, Angie, how ya doin'?" I turned and saw three men seated near the door, one of whom I faintly recognized. But when one of the three said, "Frankie thought the other guy won, but I thought Beecham sneaked in," I remembered who the face belonged to: Frankie Carbo, the same Frankie Carbo I had first met in the elevator years before.

  "Sit down; have a drink," the face with a name said. But a little voice went off inside my head saying that somehow that wouldn't be a good idea, and so I mumbled something about having a cab waiting outside and beat a hasty retreat with a quick ciao.

  But apparently I wasn't hasty enough, for two weeks later I got a call from Charlie Goldman. "Angie," he said in a distressed voice, "I've got some bad news for you." And with that, he went on to explain that Carbo had been under surveillance by the authorities and that there were two detectives at the next table at the Golden Parrot that snowy night. "The whole night's friggin' conversation was taped, including yours." Mine? What the hell had I said? Ciao. But apparently the New York State Athletic Commission was threatening to take away my license for "consorting" with Carbo. All this for a hello-and-goodbye? Hell, I had met the guy only twice, and now they were threatening to take away my license?

  I finally arranged a meeting with the counsel to the Athletic Commission, and although they had found nothing incriminating in my taped conversation, they felt I was guilty by association with the man they were investigating for everything from bribery to criminal infiltration into boxing, fixed fights, and all manner of things up to and including, at least it seemed, dining at the Golden Parrot and talking, albeit momentarily, to yours truly. The counsel believed I was just plain unlucky to have been there that night and just an innocent victim of circumstances. He said that he would inform the State Athletic Commission and the DA's office of my unwitting involvement and recommend that my license not be revoked but advised me to apply the following year for renewal when the investigation would be concluded.

  All this for one "hello-goodbye." So, for one year, I would not be able to work in the state of New York, courtesy of Frankie Carbo. But hell, I was already in Miami anyway. Which is another story ...

  Chris was always on the phone—make that phones, most times working two phones, one to each ear, like earmuffs—almost from the moment he walked in the door to the time he left the office for his home in Long Beach at the end of the day. At times he would be talking to promoters who might want his star pupil, Georgie Abrams, and Chris would say something like, "Look, I'd let you have Georgie, but use my kid Tommy Bell and let me see how he is, and then I'll come down there later with Georgie Abrams. Bell's big 'cause he fought [Sugar Ray] Robinson ... he fought everybody." Other times he would bark detail-thin instructions in my direction for me to jot down, all of which sounded like, "Chicago ... third week ... March ... middleweight ... Sunnyside ... February 4 ... headliner, ..." but instructions I understood anyway, writing them down as fast as Chris shouted them out in the usual fast-paced chaos that engulfed his office.

  On one particular day, the day one of his fighters, Jackie Cranford, was to fight in the Garden, we set a new high in chaos as both Chris and I fielded calls from anyone and everyone seeking free or "house" tickets—called "Chinesees" by Damon Runyon because they had holes in them like Chinese coins. Now, as Chris tried to take care of all the people wedged into Room 711 at the Capitol, the phone kept ringing with all the callers trying to get tix—newspapermen, hangers-on, and just plain friends and friends of friends—all on-the-cuff, of course. And guess who was assigned this wonderful task?

  Well, anyway, about 5:00 the frenzy was over, or so I thought, and I was just about to lock up to go see the fight when the phone rang. "Hi. Chris Dundee's office," I answered. The voice on the other end, a pleasant female voice tinged in a syrupy southern drawl, came back with, "Hello ... this is Jackie Cranford's cousin. I'd like three seats for the fight, please. I'd prefer them ringside." Great, I thought. "Oh, you would, would you?" I responded, by now tired of all the requests for "Chinesees" and tempted, like Chris, to just blurt out, "You wanna ticket? Just go across to the Garden and buy one." But instead I said something to the effect of, "Why, honey chile, we're all out of ringside," giving it my best try at a southern accent. "Look here," the suddenly unsweet voice shot back, "I'm Jackie Cranford's cousin, and I need the tickets for his Auntie Mildred, that's my mother, my sister Frances, and me."

  Three free tickets! Chris would shoot me. He hated people putting the arm on him for freebies. He would tell those deadbeats, "Go over to the Garden and buy them yourself," and slam the phone down. Now I had a mind to do the same thing to the syrupy voice on the other end of the phone. And so I shot back, "You're Jackie's cousin, eh? How come he didn't get you tickets?" I was tired of all these requests, and all with some sort of dodge, up to and including, "I'll pay you later." Apparently the southern drawl had had enough too and now asked, "Is Jackie there?" in an icy, aggravated, surely not syrupy tone. "No, Jackie ain't here; I'm here...." "Now listen here," the voice broke i
n, "I'm Helen Bolton from North Carolina, and Mr. Chris Dundee told me to call for tickets." "Well, doll, this is Angelo Dundee, ..." and here I stole a line from Chris's handbook and said, "Why don't you buy three tickets?" Then, as an afterthought, I threw in, "And after the fight, come over to Toots Shor's; we're going to be there with your cousin and a writer named Will Grimsley, and he's going to write a story on Jackie and say that we're ready to make a fight with Joe Louis for the championship...."

  So what happens? The fighter Chris had been promoting as "the Next Great White Hope" and a possible challenger for Joe Louis's heavyweight crown was thoroughly beaten by Gino Buonvino. And now here we were at Toots's saloon after the fight trying to drink away our miseries. Among those at the "party" were writers posing as Sir Lunchelots, friends of Chris's and Jackie's, and friends of friends. And there were three pretty ladies, one of whom, upon being introduced to yours truly, stared straight through me with an expressionless gaze.

  Her name, she said, was Helen Bolton, the same Helen Bolton I had had that little phone to-do with earlier that afternoon. Not only that, the seats she had purchased were an eagle's perch, way up in the rafters. I tried to be nice, especially because she was a strikingly good-looking gal, and asked, "How did you like the fight?" In a deadpan response that would have done Buster Keaton proud, she answered, "Great, I was up so high I only had a minor nosebleed."

  That should have been the end of the story and the short-lived acquaintanceship right then and there. But it wasn't. As the Cranford party, if you could call it that, was making somewhat polite conversation to fill the dead-air time, Jackie made the mistake of asking his cousin, "I can't understand what happened tonight. What happened? I mean, I felt great in the first round...." And his cousin, whose name I now knew to be Helen, in her straightforward and honest manner, replied, "Jackie, you just didn't fight." And that was the end of the questioning. And the beginning of my infatuation with this straight-talking, no bullspit—and did I say beautiful?—girl.

  Soon we were joined at our table by the man himself, Toots Shor. Now Toots Shor was what might be called a character. The stories about him abound, like the time he was chatting with the discoverer of penicillin, Dr. Alexander Fleming, when the then-manager of the New York Baseball Giants, Mel Ott, came into the restaurant and Toots excused himself with an "Excuse me, somebody important just came in." Or the time Charlie Chaplin complained about the wait for a table and Toots told him, "Just stand there and be funny, Charlie," and walked away. Or when he and Jackie Gleason got into a drinking contest and bet one another who could run around the block faster, each going in a different direction around the block, and Toots came back huffing and puffing to find Jackie at the bar already celebrating, only to find out later that Jackie had taken a cab around the block. Now the great man was seated alongside us drinking from a bag-wrapped bottle produced by Auntie Mildred from out of her purse.

  Somewhere during the goings-on I managed to strike up a conversation with the attractive girl I had hardly done a favor for earlier that evening with the "nosebleed" seats and found out she was single and working in New York as a fashion model. I even worked up the nerve to ask for her phone number.

  But caught up in work, and hustling for more, it would be another six months before I got around to calling her. After all, boxing was my first calling, and I was working 'round the clock, both at Chris's office and in fight arenas around the area. In fact, I was now training my first fighter, Bill Bossio, a featherweight out of Pittsburgh who was referred to Chris by an old friend, Bill Brennan from Norfolk, where he had promoted fights before coming to New York. And Bossio turned out to be a winner, even headlining in the Garden.

  I finally got around to calling her even though I was to find out that in the meantime others had discovered her as well, one of whom was—get this!—Jack Dempsey. But it made, as Helen said in her southern drawl, "no never mind," and we began seeing each other regularly. I don't know, maybe she figured what a handsome guy I was. And I figured she needed glasses. But even though I thought this lovely lady was nine feet tall, what she really needed was flat shoes because she towered over me in heels.

  It was, as they say in the movies, the beginning of a beautiful relationship, one that would last a lifetime. And while her mother couldn't quite conceive of an Angelo Mirena from South Philly and a Helen Bolton from North Carolina becoming an "item," it, as they say in the South, "took."

  By the beginning of the '50s, the very nature of the sport was changing—and not for the better. Boxing had planted the seeds of its own destruction by televising boxing matches. Now fans were staying at home to watch free televised boxing shows every night of the week—except, again, on Sundays—rather than attending them. And the grass roots of boxing, the small-town and neighborhood boxing clubs where boxers as well as trainers had a chance to earn their spurs and learn their trade, were drying up. First it was Sunnyside Garden; then, like Agatha Christie's ten little Indians, they began going down one by one. By 1952 there was only one small club left for every ten that had existed in the postwar boom year of 1946.

  Chris had worked up some figures that showed just how bad it was. The IBC, which had a contract calling for the production of some eighty-plus fights on Wednesday and Friday nights for $1.5 million, lost more than that in live gates. According to Chris's back-of-the-envelope calculations, thirty-three dates in 1946 at Madison Square Garden yielded a total of 406,681 fans and a gross of $2,062,000. Twenty fights in '52 pulled in only 137,381 fans and $435,450, a total loss in revenue of more than $1,600,000.

  With its farm system drying up, its small clubs going out of business, the New York boxing scene was suddenly a wasteland. And trainers, who only a few years before couldn't keep up with the work, were now scrambling to find any.

  Chris decided it was time for him to look elsewhere; searching for new territory in which to plant his promotional flag, he found it in Miami Beach. And where Chris went, Angie was sure to go.

  THREE

  Miami Beach and My First Champion

  Copyright © 2008 by Angelo Dundee and Bert Randolph Sugar Click here for terms of use.

  By the beginning of the 1950s the seeds boxing had sown were all but destroying the sport, the hard core of customers getting their fix on a black-and-white screen a little larger than a lunchbox. The appeal of getting something for nothing was keeping them home, away from the live bouts. Even Madison Square Garden, once the mecca of boxing, was little more than a set for virtual TV shows, most of the crowds masquerading as empty seats. Hell, they could have held live fights in a telephone booth for all it mattered because fans were content to stay at home and watch the bouts for free—which is somewhat like eating a ham sandwich with the waxed paper on as far as I'm concerned.

  But television was far less interested in building the sport than in building its audience and selling its sponsors' products. John Crosby, writing in the New York Herald-Tribune, may have discovered why sponsors were so happy with boxing. One CBS executive, Crosby wrote, decided to try a little experiment one night. Watching the Pabst Blue Ribbon Wednesday night fights over his own network, the executive decided to follow the advice of the between-rounds announcer who sternly advocated that viewers were to visit their refrigerators and repay the kindness of the beer company for bringing them the fights for free. Gulping furiously, he managed to stay up with the announcer, getting a new bottle every time he was told to. The result: the losing fighter was knocked out in the tenth; the executive was flat on his back by the end of the ninth.

  Looking for a way to continue building their audience and selling their sponsors' products, TV began looking for rising young stars, prospects who were little more than made-for-TV fighters. One writer even went so far as to compare them to "artificially ripened tomatoes." These kids were thrown into the ring way ahead of schedule and over their heads, long before they had learned the basic ABCs of boxing and not yet ringwise enough to take care of themselves. All of a sudden, a so-called pr
ospect who had been a rugged and ambitious kid became a soft-chinned has-been and little more than an opponent.

  Take the case of Chuck Davey, boxing's first made-for-TV fighter. A college graduate, Davey had twice won the NCAA featherweight championship and once the NCAA welterweight title. With ninety-three wins in ninety-four amateur fights, the white, college-educated, and handsome to boot—even sporting red hair, although somewhat sparse on top—fighter was the perfect prospect for TV to tie their kite tail to. Turning pro in 1949, he had won thirty-seven of his thirty-nine fights—the other two draws—with twenty-five knockouts and had become a staple of the Pabst Blue Ribbon Wednesday night fights. Now TV determined he was ready for a shot at the welterweight crown, then held by all-time great Kid Gavilan. The fight was no fight; Gavilan embarrassed and undressed Davey, even turning around to mimic Davey's left-handed stance and continually beating him to the punch—Davey possessing a stylistic quirk that had him bouncing on his right foot three times before throwing a jab, and Gavilan, able to count to three, beat him to the punch time and time again somewhere between the counts of two and three. The fight ended in the tenth round—and with it TV's search for boxing's version of the "American Idol."

  But except for a few fighters who continually fought on TV—one writer complaining that he was "fed Ralph 'Tiger' Jones more times on Fridays than fish"—the rest fought in private. Whitey Bimstein complained that at nine-tenths of the boxing shows you might as well be fighting in a telephone booth, only the feature bouts being televised and the fighters in the prelims laboring in private.

  Not only that, purses were down across the board, lower than they had ever been. Back in boxing's heyday, the 1920s, principals would get as much as twenty thousand dollars a fight. Now they were lucky to get four thousand dollars or so from TV and 25 percent of the gate, if there was any. And the prelim fighters were getting the same as they got thirty years before, bubkes—Madison Square Garden paying $150 for four-rounders, $500 for six, and $1,500 for eight.