The last time I met George Chuvalo was the day after the last time Canada’s most famous boxer lost a fight. It was also the first time I met Chuvalo.
His loss was a 12-round decision to Muhammad Ali, for something called the “North American Boxing Federation” championship. Six years earlier Ali had beaten Chuvalo in Toronto, a 15-round decision, and I was among the sportswriters who covered the rematch in Vancouver. By then, Chuvalo was 34, and that fight was his 86th in an already-punishing career.
“I said before the fight that if he took a beating, I’d want him to quit,” his manager Irv Ungerman said the next day. “It’s time for him to hang up his gloves.”
Ali wasn’t buying it: “He’s a very tough man. I don’t think he should quit.”
Nor was Chuvalo: “I’m still just a punk kid, so what the hell. As long as I feel good, and as long as I can still function as a fighter, I’ll continue.”
He continued for seven more fights over the next six years, all of them victories, all of them knockouts of mostly forgettable opponents. That last defeat left him with an admirable record — Chuvalo was never knocked down, not in 27 rounds against Ali, not in a 93-fight career.
Yet he was to be flattened by the losses he suffered in retirement.
They are well-documented. Three sons died of drugs. After the second son’s death, his wife committed suicide. A family of seven became a family of three. Chuvalo fought back by speaking to groups of young people, hoping to spare them the pain his family endured. Like many boxers, he was financially ruined. Like most, he would also become a victim of boxing’s elephant in the room: dementia.
Chuvalo will turn 87 next week, in a Toronto care home where he can’t talk and can’t walk, or barely move. He is waiting to die. In Chatham, 300 kilometres away, the manager of a youth organization Chuvalo visited annually until 2019 was moved by W5’s touching update last year. Floyd Porter, a retired campus police officer, volunteers to sing at retirement and nursing homes in the area. He approached Mitch Chuvalo, the surviving son, about singing for Chuvalo.
Porter sang five songs: My Girl, The Dock of the Bay, Stand By Me, Groovin’ and Folsom Prison Blues.
“I put my hand on his forearm and I said, ‘How you doing, champ?’” Porter told Mark Malone of the Chatham Daily News. “He reached out with his right hand to try to shake my hand and he tried to talk. He was trying to communicate with me. Mitch said: ‘Oh, you must have sparked a memory or something because he usually doesn’t do that.’”
The day after losing to Muhammad Ali, Chuvalo had been upbeat. He chuckled that one of his boys, George Jr., wanted to follow in his dad’s footsteps.
“He calls himself ‘flashy, dashy Georgie’,” Chuvalo laughed, “but there is no way that I would ever want him to be a pro.”
Flashy dashy Georgie, aged nine, had already fought four times. He was destined to become a memory, losing the only fight that really mattered, to heroin.
