Often, trying to explain “the way it was” is a challenge. Try telling somebody, for example, that boxing used to be stop-the-press news, and the blank stare will leave you speechless. For decades, sports fans were mesmerized by championship fights that attracted the best sports writers, primetime television cameras and thousands of spectators that included the rich and the glamorous.
It was the place to be. Often, it was the lead story on sports pages everywhere.
I wrestled with boxing for a long, long time. How could such a pacifist be so enamoured with such a violent sport? Was I just seduced by the black-and-white photos and bold headlines? Did a part of me live vicariously through the action, also black and white, on television every week from Madison Square Garden?
It probably started with Friday Night Fights, a title that sold a lot of Gillette razors with its catchy jingle (“Look Sharp, Feel Sharp, Be Sharp”), a title that unquestionably was parlayed into what is now Friday Night Lights. It probably took hold the first time Canada’s Yvon Durelle fought Archie Moore for his light-heavyweight championship. The fight was in Montreal, a city that would much later be my home, and all of Canada was watching…including me. When I saw Moore, this old black man (he was 42) get off the canvas four or five times to win the fight, I was hooked.
Those two fought just twice in an era when many boxing championships were trilogies: Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier, Sugar Ray Leonard and Roberto Duran, Floyd Patterson and Ingemar Johansson. One of them, Emile Griffith and Benny Paret, ended in Paret’s death…a Friday night fight seared in my memory forever and revived many years later when I learned of Paret’s homophobic slurs that angered Griffith. This all came in what baby boomers who cared called the golden age of boxing. As one of them, I considered it a major sport.
In time, I would cover Ali’s battering of George Chuvalo, Canada’s best fighter, in Vancouver…interview Leonard before his first fight with Duran, in Montreal…sit down to talk with Johansson at his motel in Florida…and meet Patterson by chance when he was starting to slur his words badly, at an airport in Cleveland, not many years before he died of Alzheimer’s.
That’s what those boxers often did — they died from taking too many punches. It was the price they paid for the headlines they made. Ali was mentally crippled by Parkinson’s. Johansson died of dementia. Cancer took Frazier at 67 before he faced the inevitable. Chuvalo is in a care home, unable to speak, waiting his turn.
Boxing has paid a price, but what was ever attractive about seeing an athlete being pounded into submission? Yet is that any different than a 360-pound defensive end demolishing a ball carrier half his size, or a 250-pound power forward crushing a smallish hockey player into the boards?
Once, boxing was as compelling as Super Bowls and Stanley Cup finals.
Now?
Defensive-end tackles and power-forward hits still bring fans out of their seats. Meanwhile, boxing is so yesterday…does anybody even know who the heavyweight champion of the world is?
