Beruflich Dokumente
Kultur Dokumente
32 0 0
a b v g f d
It was an accident. It was a tragedy. It became a political issue. You Can Read (and So Can
This Computer)
By Sheila Liming
Governor Edmund “Pat” Brown called for the abolition of boxing, as did
Los Angeles Times columnist Jim Murray. A similar entreaty came from Pouring One Out for
Anthony Bourdain
Pope John XXIII. By Olivia Durif
A year passed, then two. Those who had usurped the moment — the
politicians and the pontiffs, the sportswriters and the songwriters —
were consumed by other matters. The assassination of President John F.
Kennedy, the March on Washington, Vietnam.
The two people most affected by Davey Moore’s death had to get on with
their lives. Moore’s widow, Geraldine, took a job and raised five children
as a single mom.
Fifty years have passed. The memory of Davey Moore lingers like a
whisper.
¤
He loved football, but he wasn’t big enough for that. He also grew up at
a time when, according to Malcolm X, “Every Negro boy old enough to
walk around wanted to be the next Brown Bomber [a.k.a. heavyweight
champ Joe Louis].”
At age 16, he met his future wife, Geraldine. She was an only child, also
originally from Kentucky, the daughter of a steelworker. “David and a
group of his friends used to play street football by the house during the
summer,” she said. “They would ask for a drink of cold water, and I
would bring out a pitcher of water and cups. He took a liking to me, and
I took a liking to him. I thought he was a cute little fellow. He sort of
caught my eye.”
They married in 1952, the same year Moore won the national AAU
bantamweight title and powered his way onto the US Olympic team. He
was part of an impressive squad that won five gold medals in Helsinki,
including Floyd Patterson (then a middleweight) and heavyweight Ed
Sanders (who defeated a fast-retreating Ingemar Johansson).
Moore did not medal in Helsinki, losing a decision to South Korea’s Joon
Ha Kang. He returned to Springfield with few job prospects. He and
Geraldine were expecting their first child. He took temporary
construction work before turning pro in 1953. He was 19.
“He could really punch,” promoter Don Chargin said. “He had a great
right hand and a terrific left hook. One of the things that set him apart
was that he had a good jab. He would fight taller guys and out-jab
them.”
Moore was also discovering that his size and skin color were
disadvantages. The big bucks went to the big guys — the welterweights,
the middleweights, the heavyweights — not the shrimps. And, with a
passionate fan base that had promoters salivating on their stogies, Latino
boxers were fast becoming the most lucrative drawing cards in the
lighter-weight divisions.
“Willie always had a shadow,” said Eddie Foy III, who assisted in Moore’s
corner. “He wasn’t a rabbi. He knew his job and he knew it well.” (Foy
was also a prominent Hollywood casting director. His grandfather was a
vaudeville star; the family act was called “Eddie Foy and the Seven Little
Foys.”)
The hub of this market was on the West Coast, in bullfighting rings and
dance halls that stretched from Mexico City to El Monte, from Baja to
San Bernardino. The heartbeat of the scene pulsed inside the Olympic
Auditorium, a concrete slab that anchored a seedy street just south of
downtown Los Angeles and drew weekly crowds of fanáticos.
“I don’t have no rooters,” he told one reporter. “I’d like to have someone
out there say, ‘Come on, Davey!’ I’d like to hear a word or two of
encouragement from the crowd. But they don’t come out to cheer for
poor old Davey.”
Once, after beating Kid Anahuac in Tijuana, a live snake was thrown at
him. When asked whether it was poisonous, he replied: “I never stopped
to examine him.”
“Davey had a degree in street,” Eddie Foy III said. “He knew how to
handle himself.”
Moore often worked out at Gilman Hot Springs, in the sleepy town of
San Jacinto, along the old route to Palm Springs. Under the watchful
glare of trainer Teddy Bentham, he sweated off the pounds he gained
from Geraldine’s home cooking. There was nothing to do but run, spar,
read the Bible, and play horseshoes.
In March of 1959, Moore got his title shot at the Olympic Auditorium.
Ironically, his opponent was not from Mexico, but from Nigeria: Hogan
“Kid” Bassey, who won the featherweight crown vacated by the
legendary Sandy Saddler.
Moore’s tonsils were infected, and he had a fever. He twice fell to the
canvas after swinging and missing with punches. In the sixth round, he
unleashed a barrage that staggered Bassey. He pounded away until Bassey
was blinded by his own blood and the fight halted.
He kept busy, he said, for the money. His purses were modest: he earned
a $25,000 guarantee when he beat Danny Valdez at the Olympic in 1961,
which he had to split with Ketchum and Bentham and then pay taxes
on.
“You gotta make that bread while you can,” Moore told the Los Angeles
Times. “Man, boxing is a business. I’m in it to make money.”
SUGAR MAN
The way Ultiminio “Sugar” Ramos tells it, his name is a misnomer. He
was supposed to be the last — or “Ultiminio” — of his parents’ 11
children. But he adds, with a wink, his parents couldn’t help themselves
and produced another after him.
Born just days before the bombing of Pearl Harbor, Ramos grew up in
poverty in the city of Matanzas. He cut sugar cane and quit school after
the fourth grade to shine shoes for pesos. He read comic books —
“mostly for the pictures,” he said — because he was semiliterate.
Fighting was family business: his father boxed, as did one brother. “I
decided to go into boxing following my father’s advice,” he said through
an interpreter. “He always told me I had to be someone in life and in
boxing.”
Like many Cuban kids, Ramos admired the exploits of Gerardo González,
better known as Kid Gavilán. A rugged, slick stylist who wore a
pompadour and white shoes inside the ring, Gavilán was known for his
“bolo” punch — a bit of deception that scored points and made his
opponent look foolish.
Ramos started boxing at age 12. He claimed to have never lost in the
amateur ranks, including one time when he had to ride a horse to reach
the other side of the island.
He lied about his age to turn pro, at 15, in 1957. Fighting almost
exclusively in Havana, Ramos reeled off 26 consecutive victories before
encountering an intractable opponent: Fidel Castro. Although he allowed
amateur boxing and Cubans continued to compete in the Olympics, El
Jefe banned professional boxing soon after consolidating power.
Ramos was forced to decide: family, homeland, and Communism, or
professional boxing? His last fight in Havana took place on December
30, 1960. He joined an exodus of other established fighters, including
Jóse Nápoles and Luis Rodríguez, and left behind his parents and
siblings, a girlfriend, and two children.
He moved to Mexico City and placed his career in the hands of trainer
Kid Rapidez and manager Carlos “Cuco” Conde, a well-known radio
announcer from Havana. Miami-based trainer Angelo Dundee was hired
to help with the American market.
Ramos’ first fight on US soil took place in Los Angeles in 1962, when he
defeated Eddie Garcia at the Olympic Auditorium. The locals were
impressed. “He’s the same kind of sugar as Sugar Ray Robinson,” said
trainer Howie Steindler, who operated the Main Street Gym, Los
Angeles’s premiere sparring site. “Ramos is the best I’ve had in the gym
since I’ve been here.”
He was 21, with a sparkling smile and skin the color of café de leche. He
wore a pencil-thin mustache, like a Hollywood troubadour. He loved
listening to Afro-Cuban music and playing the bongos. Reporters began
beating the publicity drum: Ramos was ready to challenge for Davey
Moore’s title.
Ramos was eager for the fight to happen. There was only one subject he
refused to talk about. “Let’s keep politics out of it,” he told Times
columnist Sid Ziff. “I’m a fighter. I’ll answer anything you want about
my boxing career.”
Safety, too, was in the headlines. In 1962, Benny Paret faced Emile
Griffith at Madison Square Garden for the welterweight title. Paret
allegedly called Griffith “maricón” (or “faggot”) at the weigh-in.
Apocryphal or not, the fight turned into a slaughter as Griffith
hammered Paret senseless.
He went down more slowly than any fighter had ever gone down, he went
down like a large ship which turns on end and slides second by second into its
grave. As he went down, the sound of Griffith’s punches echoed in the mind like
a heavy ax in the distance chopping into a wet log.
Less than six months later, Alejandro Lavorante faced Johnny Riggins at
the Olympic Auditorium. Lavorante was a game but overmatched
heavyweight from Argentina. He had lost his previous two bouts, to
veteran Archie Moore and to future champ Cassius Clay, at the Los
Angeles Sports Arena. (“Lavorante will fall in five,” Clay predicted, and
he was accurate.)
After Lavorante was again knocked out, he collapsed and fell into a
coma.
Critics used the incidents to indict the sport. “Boxing should have to go
back to the barges,” wrote Jim Murray wrote in the Times. “Its calloused
indifference to its own, its disdain for the simple dignity of a human
being has earned it no other consideration. No civilized society can put
its stamp of approval on it in its present form.”
Moore and Ramos did not need sports columnists to lecture them about
the dangers in boxing. Moore’s teammate on the Olympic team, “Big Ed”
Sanders, succumbed to injuries after being knocked out in 1954.
Back when he was fighting in Cuba, in the 12th fight of his career,
Ramos knocked out an opponent named José Blanco. Four hours later,
Blanco died from a brain hemorrhage.
¤
THE FIGHT
The anticipated crowd was too big for the Olympic Auditorium. Eaton
made a deal to stage the fights at Walter O’Malley’s gleaming baseball
palace, Dodger Stadium. It would be the first card held at Los Angeles’s
newest sports venue, with the ring positioned atop the pitcher’s mound.
Parnassus and Eaton predicted a gate of over $300,000, along with a
national TV audience. Tickets were priced at $5–$30.
Moore sounded confident. “I’m gonna win,” he told the Los Angeles
Herald Examiner’s Morton Moss. “But I’m not Cassius Clay. I won’t pick
the round. I’ll take any round.”
Geraldine left the kids in her mother-in-law’s care and flew to Los
Angeles. “David wanted me to come out,” she said. “He knew that I
didn’t want to see him fight, but he wanted me there for the festivities
after the fight. It didn’t work out that way.”
During the week, caravans of cars came from Mexico to cheer for
Ramos, Rodríguez, and Torres. Times columnist Jim Murray predicted a
traffic jam “complicated by the presence of 10,000 Mexican nationals in
vintage buses and muffler-less Mercuries cornering around the parking
lot on two wheels with clutches in and brakes out.”
The day scheduled for the fight, a major storm lashed the region with
rain and chilling winds. Just 15 minutes before the first fight, officials
canceled the card.
Ramos donned dark trunks, trimmed with red suede, emblazoned with a
horseshoe and the name of his hometown, Matanzas. Jimmy Lennon,
the ring announcer, introduced the fighters with his trademark velvety
cadence.
Moore began briskly, stunning Ramos with double right hands. Ramos
countered using his reach. His left jabs hurt Moore and kept him off-
balance.
As the crowd chanted “Arriba! Arriba!” Ramos’s jab began to dictate the
pace. He cracked Moore’s mouthpiece in the fifth round and sent it
flying. Bleeding inside his mouth, Moore was swallowing blood.
He got to his feet. Ramos kept attacking. As the bell rang, Moore’s head
and upper torso were bent awkwardly through the ropes.
Moore sat on the rubdown table in his trunks. His mouth was cut up,
but his face was unmarked. His eyes were slightly unfocused. The words
came softly and slowly.
Suddenly, Moore slumped over. “He said, ‘I’m going out, man. I gotta go
to sleep,’” Foy said. “I looked at Willie and said, ‘Get a doctor.’”
“My head, Willie!” Moore cried. “My head. It hurts something awful.”
She hurried to the hospital. “I was standing there, but he didn’t know I
was there,” she said. “They had him packed in ice. To see your husband
lying there like that, that’s a sight I won’t ever forget.”
POST MORTEM
For 72 hours, the headlines on the front page of the Los Angeles Herald
Examiner newspaper detailed Davey Moore’s deteriorating condition:
DEATH OF A FIGHTER
THE FREAK THAT KILLED DAVEY
The outrage began. Governor Edmund “Pat” Brown called for the
“complete abolition of this barbaric spectacle” and proposed a statewide
referendum on the sport. He urged California voters “to vote
professional boxing out of this state in 1964.”
Jim Murray, who had used his column to hype the event, reversed
course. “Better to lose readers than lives,” he wrote. “Right is right and
boxing isn’t.”
In New York City, Bob Dylan was busy recording The Freewheelin’ Bob
Dylan. It was his second album and, with such songs as “Blowin’ In the
Wind,” “Masters of War,” “A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall,” and “Don’t Think
Twice, It’s All Right,” he would soon become, in the vernacular, “the
voice of a generation.”
Dylan quickly wrote “Who Killed Davey Moore?” He may well have been
influenced by one of his contemporaries, folksinger Gil Turner, who had
recorded a song entitled “Benny ‘Kid’ Paret,” about the Cuban fighter’s
death.
The “answers” to the question “Who Killed Davey Moore?” are a series
of disavowals, disguised as verses, beginning with the referee:
Next to deny responsibility are the crowd, the manager, the gamblers,
the press. Until, finally, Dylan concludes the song with Sugar Ramos:
Hang his gloves upon the wall, shine his trophies bright clear,
another man will fall before we dry our tears
For the fighters must destroy as the poets must sing,
as the hungry crowd must gather for the blood upon the ring.
But neither song was heard widely on the radio in 1963–64, and the
outrage over Davey Moore’s death, however palpable, did not coalesce
into a national movement. The proposal to outlaw boxing never made it
onto the ballot in California. Reforms were minimal; officials added a
fourth rope around the ring, and better padded those ropes, in the hope
of avoiding injury.
Boxing will never escape the specter of death and brain damage. One
such incidence occurred at the Olympic Auditorium in 1980, when
Welsh boxer Johnny Owen died after losing to bantamweight champ
Lupe Pintor. It was one of the last major bouts at the venerable arena.
Today, the building houses a Korean-American church. To this day
Dodger Stadium has never hosted another fight card.
But in its brutal honesty and wretched beauty, the fight game survived
to find a unique niche, even enjoying several renaissances, led by the
voluble Muhammad Ali, who attracted a salon of literary luminaries
(Mailer, Baraka, Plimpton, and Talese, among others), and extending to
George Foreman, Roberto Durán, Sugar Ray Leonard, Marvin Hagler,
Oscar De La Hoya, Manny Pacquiao, and Floyd Mayweather.
LIFE, INTERRUPTED
Sugar Ramos resumed boxing four months after Davey Moore’s death.
He won six in a row before losing the featherweight title to Vicente
Saldivar in 1964. He never regained the championship.
“Why did he have to die?” he asked a reporter once. “It was my night,
my glory. I won fair and square. […] Then he dies and nobody
remembers that Ramos fought a good fight and won. They only
remember Davey Moore died. Some even say I killed him. I work hard
and beat him. I am not a killer.”
Another time he said, “I have thought about Davey Moore till I cannot
think about it anymore. For my first fight [afterwards], I was unable to
strike the other man hard. Now I hit as hard as I can.”
Today, at age 71, he has found acceptance. “Moore landed in a very bad
way,” he said. “What happened to him could have happened to me.
That’s the way it was. It hurt me. It was something very hard. But as a
professional boxer, I had to go on and overcome the situation.”
Two months ago, Ramos returned to Cuba. It was his first time back in
more than 50 years. He went to Matanzas and visited with relatives who
had stayed, including two children. He was welcomed with affection, he
said, but he “felt like some kind of stranger because it had been such a
long time.”
Ramos and Geraldine Moore met only once: at White Memorial Hospital
in Los Angeles as Davey Moore lay dying.
Geraldine absolved him. “You are the lucky one,” she told him. “It was
God’s act.”
She flew home with her husband’s body. Over 10,000 people paid their
respects at the funeral home, including the entire student body of Keifer
Junior High School.
Moore’s manager, Willie Ketchum, told reporters that he had helped the
fighter amass a considerable fortune, with investments in a fitness
center and an annuity. Geraldine soon discovered the reality: there were
few assets.
“Willie did not have anything set up for us,” Geraldine said. “After the
fight, Willie and Teddy [Bentham] got their money. What was left wasn’t
a whole lot.”
She had to sell the big house and move to a smaller place. Governor Jim
Rhodes, a Springfield native, promised help. Within weeks Geraldine
found work in Columbus as a notary clerk for the state of Ohio.
Geraldine’s parents and Davey’s family pitched in to help her with the
kids. “Being sad about it wasn’t going to bring my husband back,” she
said. “I was fortunate to have a wonderful support group. They were
solid rocks.”
She remarried in the early 1970s, but the marriage was short lived. She
kept her job for more than three decades before retiring in 1995. She
moved back to Springfield to care for her aging father.
Geraldine is now 77. Family remains at the vital center of her life: she
has nine grandchildren, 21 great-grandchildren and one great-great-
grandson. “The Moore family survived and is doing okay,” she said.
Recently, she watched footage from the fight at Dodger Stadium. It was
the first time that she had ever seen it. “It was sad,” she said. “When it
came to the last round, I kind of closed my eyes.”
Not long ago, Springfield officials hired noted sculptor Mike Major to
create a series of statues depicting distinguished citizens from the city.
Six have been erected; the economic downturn prevented the
completion of a statue of Davey Moore.
Until now, that is. Geraldine and the family have been assured that
funding is in place to finish the statue this year. A bronzed figure of
Davey Moore, the Little Giant, will soon stand eight feet high atop a
peaceful knoll that marks the entrance to Springfield.
“It’s going to be at a beautiful location,” she said. “When they put the
statue up, when they stand it up, you can’t help but see him from
everywhere.”
Notes:
* There had been few socially conscious songs about sports. Most of these could be
classified as celebratory, like “Duke Kahanamoku,” by lap-steel master Sol Hoopii,
about the Hawaiian surfing-swimming pioneer, and “Did You See Jackie Robinson
Hit That Ball?” about the Brooklyn Dodgers star. The exception was Joe Louis, who
inspired nearly 50 songs, according to author David Margolick, including one
recorded by the Count Basie Orchestra, with Paul Robeson on vocals and lyrics by
Richard Wright.
Bob Dylan did not release “Who Killed Davey Moore?” as a single or on a studio
album. A live performance of the song is available via Dylan’s The Bootleg Series.
Sports Illustrated recently ranked “Who Killed Davey Moore?” as the best sports
song of all time. Of course, Dylan later wrote a song about boxer Rubin
“Hurricane” Carter. According to Los Angeles magazine, Dylan likes to train in a
boxing gym he owns in Santa Monica.
The author wishes to thank Tito Gonzalez, for his interpretation assistance with
Sugar Ramos, as well as Mauricio Sulaiman, secretary general with the World
Boxing Council, for arranging the interview at the WBC offices in Mexico City.
Thanks also to John Hall, Don Fraser, Bruce Bebb, Terry Cannon, Albert Kilchesty,
and Mark Cirino.
Name
△ ▽ • Reply • Share ›
✉ Subscribe d Add Disqus to your siteAdd DisqusAdd 🔒 Disqus' Privacy PolicyPrivacy PolicyPrivacy