Another Tainted Star in the IBHOF

 

He stood five feet, ten inches tall, which was enormous for a featherweight. Compare him to, say, Sandy Saddler, who was considered freakish at five feet eight, and you understand the size of Diego Corrales. Even as a lightweight, he was taller than most. This, possibly, was why opponents came at him so hard. He once said to me, “I can box a lot of different ways, but I always end up in a brawl.” He was a physical anomaly. At full height in the center of the ring, he looked like a King Cobra rising to strike.

Yet he was hardly snakelike. The fact is that Corrales, who will be inducted into the International Boxing Hall of Fame next June, was more like a junkyard dog, willing to fight with his ears and tail torn off. Alas, it wasn’t until the later days of his career that we truly appreciated Corrales’ fighting spirit. He’d always been a fighter we wanted to see, but near the end, he was a fighter we had to see.

He was always smiling. Smiling at how he had lived his boyhood dream to become a professional fighter; smiling at how he became a titleholder at 23; and absolutely beaming after any of the 40 wins on his record. He reacted to each of his victories like a kid who had been surprised by an unexpected birthday gift.

That’s why it was always hard to reconcile this likable, oversized boy with the fact that he had a history of violence against women and once served 14 months in a state prison for felony spouse abuse. What went on in his mind? We’ll never know.

He was 29 when it all ended. He’d lost three fights in a row, which is hard to come back from. He was on his third marriage, and it, too, was falling apart. He had problems with the IRS and was running out of money. Friends said he was optimistic about his career and his troubled marriage, but Corrales seemed like a man with an uncertain future.  Just weeks after his most recent loss, he was riding his Suzuki motorcycle northbound on Fort Apache Road in the Las Vegas Valley. He was drunk. Along with hitting women, he had a history of drunk driving arrests. On this night he rammed into the back of a car. The impact left the Suzuki looking like a crushed Coke can, and sent Corrales hurtling 100 feet. When Corrales landed, he was struck by another car. He died hard.

He had become a legend of sorts by then, all because of one fight – and it is largely because of that one fight that he has been selected for enshrinement in Canastota – a stunning, 10th round come-from-behind knockout of Jose Luis Castillo in 2005. It was contested in a half-empty Mandalay Bay Center for alphabet belts that no one remembers, but a generation of boxing fans considered it the best fight in history. Who could argue? Corrales and Castillo had battered each other. Their faces and torsos were beaten into colors we’d never seen on human flesh. The bruises weren’t black and blue; they were grey, or muddy brown. It was as if the contusions were in pain, screaming for mercy.

Castillo was about to win, having sent Corrales to the canvas twice in the 10^th, but somehow Corrales landed a right on Castillo’s cast-iron jaw. Jose Luis sagged into the ropes unable to defend himself. Corrales threw a few more punches until referee Tony Weeks stepped in. It was instantly an all-time classic.

“We were going to box,” Corrales said later, “but I kind of shredded that game plan once the fight started. I was just in the mood to fight.”

That gritty side had existed in Corrales all along. There was a bout with Joel Casamayor where Corrales was bleeding so badly from a cut in his mouth that the ringside doctor called for the fight to be stopped. Corrales argued, wanting to continue even as gore spurted from his lips.

The same was true of his loss to Floyd Mayweather Jr. Corrales had been dropped five times and was so far behind on points that his step-father/trainer stopped the fight. Again, Corrales was outraged. There were still two rounds left. When a man can punch like Corrales, he always believes his fortunes can change.

His time at the top was brief. He met Castillo for a rematch five months later and was stopped in four. Two more losses followed. The first war with Castillo made Corrales the toast of boxing, but it also ruined him. He was never the same.

It is possible that Corrales could’ve achieved more in boxing. He always had that urge to show the world what he could do. After his second bout with Casamayor, in which he had boxed with finesse and won by split decision, Corrales turned to the cameras and smiled. He said, “See? I told you I could fight like that.” As much as he loved a good rumble, he wanted us to know he was more than a brawler.

Corrales wasn’t a great fighter, but he was a good one. He was gutsy and he could punch. There was his bout with Acelino Freitas, a strange one that saw Freitas simply stop fighting in the middle of a round and walk to his corner. It was a mystery as to why Freitas surrendered, though his manager later told me the reason. “He said Corrales hit him so hard that he was seeing triple; there were three Corraleses in front of him and he didn’t know what to do.” Such was Corrales’ power.

There were stories of Corrales’ gentler side. He was a gourmet cook who loved TV soap operas and designer clothing. When reporters made fun of him early in his career for having too many piercings, he felt embarrassed and removed them all. He seemed eager to please. He could charm you. I recall his mild voice, excitable but friendly, like a teen. Our few conversations had been nice. He was personable, happy to talk about his career and upcoming fights. But as LA writer Bill Dwyer said of Corrales many years ago, he was “a con artist with a twinkle in his eye.”

Corrales was pleasant to me, but was I just another person taken in by the Corrales con?

“Face to face, he was a wonderful kid,” said publicist Bill Caplan at the time of Corrales’ death.

But when no one was looking, Corrales became something less than wonderful.

Corrales put his second wife in the hospital with a broken collarbone, bruised ribs, and other injuries. She was pregnant at the time. On another occasion she was seen with Corrales’ handprints on her neck. Choke marks. The powerful hands that had made him a champion were used to strangle a woman who was nearly a foot shorter than him, and weighed less than 100 pounds. You don’t put your hands on a woman’s throat unless you mean to kill her. How close did he come to snuffing her out? He’d beaten up his first wife, too, so you can’t say it was just bad chemistry between Corrales and wife number two. The man was a serial abuser.

Corrales hadn’t been a shoe-in for the IBHOF. It took 16 years for him to be inducted. The IBHOF didn’t return calls for this story, but one can imagine the response would be typical of his defenders, something about his personal life not having an effect on his being selected. But one wonders if 16 years were needed because it took that much time for people to forget the worst things about Corrales, and to just remember the fights.

Corrales has always had supporters. Contemporaries who knew him from California gyms will smile and say, “My man, Chico!” Loved ones will cry at his memory. Journalists will try to put a romantic spin on him, saying that he lived recklessly and died recklessly, that he was a thrill seeker. They’ve always done that for Corrales, idealizing him as a “Raging Bull” type of character, a man of extreme emotions, a man with a dark side. They will say his misdeeds are unfortunate because they taint his legacy. I think they’re unfortunate because a couple of women are probably still having nightmares about him.

There’s a history of fighters being given a pass for abusing women. There seems to be an unspoken deal, in that the fighter entertains us, so we forgive his wrongdoings. In that way, boxing fans aren’t much different than the folks in Ozone Park who revered John Gotti, a Mob killer, because on Independence Day he supplied them with fireworks and sausages.

Corrales will be honored this spring. Hardcore fans who make the yearly trek to upstate New York for the inductions will cheer his name. Why not? His fight with Castillo made us all love boxing again, and that may be reason enough to place him among the great ones. And he’s certainly not the only wife beater in the hall. He’s just the latest.

Inducting Corrales gives people a chance to recall his best moments in the ring, but it will also give us a chance to think about the way we continue to glorify these men who hurt women. To say Corrales served his time is far too simplistic, as is the tendency to glamorize him as a man tortured by demons. The tough guy who thrives in a violent profession but beats his wife is an archetype that has been around too long, and one we no longer need.

 

- Don Stradley

Nick Charles, Hall of Famer

 

He was ill. Everybody knew it. But some kind people at HBO invited Nick Charles of Showtime onto one of their Boxing After Dark broadcasts and let him commandeer a mic. It was for an undercard bout, not the main event,  but he handled it with the grace and professionalism that had been his trademark. In no more than 12 or 15 minutes, he put on a clinic of how to lead a boxing broadcast. 

Did I imagine it, or did I hear a kind of joy in Nick Charles' voice that night in 2011? He'd let it be known that he wanted to call one more fight before his time on Earth ended. Some people did the right thing and let him work. As I listened to him, I felt I was hearing a man doing what he loved one last time, and he was relishing every second of it.

In the annals of people on their last legs putting in a command performance, I think of Nick Charles' last call  and I rate it up there with some of the all time greats: John Wayne suffering through The Shootist; Warren Zevon pulling himself together to record one last album; David Bowie doing the same. Yes, I put a boxing commentator in the same breath as actors and singers because for Nick Charles, broadcasting was his art.  Some were more famous, but few were better.

A dozen years later it is still incredibly moving to think about that final call. It wasn't just the smoothness of his delivery - he'd turn it over to analyst Max Kellerman like Bob Cousy doing one of those behind the back passes - but we could almost sense him taking in the fight atmosphere, absorbing it, breathing it all in, trying to take it with him, wherever he was going. He had lived a rich life full of children and grandchildren and awards. Yet boxing had a special place for him. Nick Charles really loved boxing. He loved the fighters, and he loved the milieu. Maybe that's what I was hearing.

My first encounter with Nick came after I'd written a story about women's boxing and all of its problems. He contacted me to say he agreed that the women were struggling. At that time, a lot of the women in the business didn't know  the fundamentals. Many of those early women's bouts looked like two ladies flailing away in a parking lot. It wasn't fun to watch. He thought women's boxing was going to fail, simply because there weren't enough women at the top level to sell it. The women eventually improved, but it took a long time.

In that conversation, I could sense how much he loved boxing, how he admired the best practitioners, and how it actually hurt him to think of these fledgling women being thrown into the ring just for the sake of novelty. I thought at the time, this guy really loves boxing. He cared about it. I've met other broadcasters, and not all of them cared as much as Nick Charles did.

To look at him, you'd think he was just a garden variety TV personality. He would've fit in on any morning show, or  news program, any place you could stick him before a camera. In fact, he was CNN's anchorman on their 1980s show, Sports Tonight. He was once voted "America's Sexiest Sportscaster" by the U.S. Television Fan Association, a distinction he accepted with grace and humor. 

True, he had a great look and was always immaculate. He was a bit like that other "Nick Charles," the famous fictional detective of The Thin Man movie series played by William Powell. I guess if you're named Nick Charles, there is a chance you'll be a suave and sophisticated chap. And while I can't vouch for William Powell, I can say with confidence that Nick Charles looked that way all the time. I saw him a few times during off hours, with no cameras around, and he was still immaculate. He was one of those guys who could walk through a rainstorm and not get wet.

But the handsome clotheshorse was drawn to boxing. It was his juice. Even when he was ill, he used boxing jargon to talk about it. "I'm in the late rounds," he wrote to me in an e-mail. "And I'm behind on points. But I plan to score a come from behind knockout."

Once, at an HBO event in Madison Square Garden, I noticed him and his Showtime broadcasting partner, Steve Farhood. They were sitting together a few seats away from me. Why were they there? They weren't working. Farhood may have been writing a story for a magazine. But Nick? He was just there to enjoy the action. He could've taken the night off and watched from home. But there he was, looking as clean and pressed as if he were  ready to go on camera. And with each fight on a rather bland undercard, his eyes were riveted on the ring. He wasn't there to schmooze with people or be seen with other celebrities. He was just a fan watching the fights.

Showtime's Saturday afternoon show, ShoBox: The New Generation, was a pet project of his. He purportedly helped create it, and his presence gave the show some class. He thought it was important to introduce new fighters, and he was right. He'd had a long career, and as it was winding down, he was telling us about the young boxers who were hoping to make an impression. 

Nick Charles will be inducted into the International Boxing Hall of Fame next June. If inductees were elected based on how much they cared about the business, he would've been in a long time ago. I wish he was still around because I would love to hear his acceptance speech. I know it would be elegant and professional. And I know he'd talk about his love of boxing, and how proud he was of ShoBox.

Posthumous inductions are always bittersweet.  It's nice that Nick Charles will be honored, but sad that he won't be there. Of course, it gives us one more chance to remember him, which is also nice. I'll remember his style. I'll remember his kindness. And I'll always remember his gallant last stand on HBO, the way he sounded as he made what he must've known was his final call. 

And I'll think of that mysterious quality in his voice that night, and what I imagine he was telling us. 

Do what you love. Love it a lot. Love it like you'll never see it again.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Last Days of the Wolf

 

Wolf Larsen was not yet 30-years-old when he made the long walk down Woodhull Street in Brooklyn on his way to the Bethesda Mission. With his busted up features and cauliflower ears - unfortunate reminders of his career as a prizefighter - made worse by the bloating effects of liquor, Larsen didn't look like a young man. Most thought he was well into his 40s. Maybe a few people recognized him. Maybe they'd seen him brawling with cops, or singing in the street in a loud, drunken voice. Maybe he just looked like another local mug going to the mission for help. The kind people there took him in. They let him rest on a cot.

He would be dead inside of 18 months, worn down by a decade of heavy drinking and reckless living. But as he did in many of his fights, he managed a rally. There was almost always a moment in Larsen's fights, usually when he was well behind, when he'd start throwing haymakers, gambling on his heavy right hand. Those desperate moments were exciting, but ultimately, he'd just tire himself out and barely make it to the final gong. That is, if he didn't get knocked cold. The way he rallied at the mission was by making himself useful as a cook, handyman, and night watchman, fixing things and sweeping up and being respectful. But as usually happened when Larsen tried one of his late round bursts, it wasn't enough. Still, the people at the mission spoke well of him when he died. They said he was a good guy. He’d been helpful in his final months. 

It was as if Wolf Larsen knew his days were numbered and he wanted to change the way people saw him. 

He was born Magnes Andreas Larsen Ros on May 14, 1901 in Ostre Moland, Norway. According to legend, or the imaginings of a slick press agent, he was the grandson of the sea captain Wolf Larsen, a character fictionalized by Jack London for his novel  The Sea Wolf. Like most of the men in his family, he became a seaman at a young age. For amusement he would often box his fellow seafarers. At age 18 he found himself face to face with none other than Battling Siki, the great Senegalese fighter who would soon be the light heavyweight champion. 

Like any folk tale, the Siki story was told in many ways. Sometimes it happened on a ship, or at a circus. The most fantastic was that Siki was scheduled to fight but his opponent didn't show, and Larsen came out of the crowd to fill in. However it was told, it always ended with Larsen and Siki in an impromptu 10-rounder, with Larsen getting the best of it.

When Siki went on to win the light heavyweight title from Georges Carpentier of France, it was Larsen himself who told a version of the tale to The Brooklyn Daily Eagle, explaining that he and Siki had been sparring partners at the Amsterdam Club gymnasium in Holland. 

"He was striving to pick up the fine points of the game," Larsen said, "and was anxious to have me box with him. He knew little about boxing, but possessed some hitting ability. I was very much his master at that time, and still think I am, granting that he has improved much since then."

But even this version of the story is suspect. From what we know of Larsen  - a New York writer once described his style being as "wide open as a Havana cafe" -  we can't imagine him at 18 being remotely familiar with the "fine points of the game." Also, by 1919, Siki had been a professional for years, and had earned medals for bravery during the war.  It's doubtful he would be schooled by Larsen, a novice. 

Regardless, after the alleged encounter with Siki, Larsen left Holland for Australia, did a bit of boxing down there, and then shipped off for the states. Once in New York, some buddies coaxed him into entering an amateur tournament. Larsen was a thrill seeker, and brawling for an audience seemed more exciting than being an anonymous figure on a schooner. At the time, Jack Dempsey was the biggest thing in the country, and boxing was enjoying unprecedented coverage. It's no wonder Larsen wanted in.

By dominating the local amateurs in New York, and winning the AAU title at 175 pounds, Larsen became a hero to the Norwegian Turn Society, a collection of immigrants that had started their own athletic organization. Though boxing wasn't as popular among Norwegians as gymnastics and wrestling, Larsen won his countrymen over with his free-swinging style.

Larsen entered the professional ranks on the winds of blowhard manager Tom O'Rourke. We can probably thank O'Rourke for the hype that accompanied Larsen during the early months of his career. This included everything from Harry Greb wanting to fight him, to Dempsey wanting to hire him as a sparring partner. This was probably all nonsense, but it was good stuff. It could almost distract you from the fact that Larsen lost his first two professional bouts.

The downhill skid was on.

With only five fights on his resume, Larsen found himself matched against Gene Tunney.  O'Rourke should've been strung up by his ears for putting a rookie in with a sharpshooter like Tunney, who at the time was undefeated in 42 professional bouts. On October 25, 1921, at New York's Pioneer Sporting Club, Tunney stopped Larsen in seven rounds. The New York Tribune called it "a slaughter, pure and simple," and reported that Larsen  "absorbed enough punishment to put the average boxer in the hospital for several months." Other reports describe Larsen as "clearly outclassed," and "cut to ribbons." Tunney would recall Larsen a few years later as a "powerful and rushing slugger," but "an easy one, a 'wolf' in name only."

Larsen's next handful of opponents were unknowns - soldiers returning from the war, a local fireman who had taken up boxing to cash in on the Dempsey craze, young Irish and Jewish men trying to make a buck with their fists - perhaps fed to him to rebuild his confidence; he knocked most of them kicking. 

There was more talk, obviously planted by O'Rourke, that Larsen was being groomed to meet Dempsey. In reality, Larsen had all he could handle from such characters as Tarzan Larkin, the "Minnesota Cave Man," who decked Larsen six times before finding himself on the wrong end of Larsen's right hand. 

More often than not, Larsen simply got his head beat in. He became known as an entertaining opponent, a lovable loser. His October 1922 loss to California's Billy Shade earned raves from The New York World, particularly in the late rounds when, "to the astonishment of the spectators," Larsen "suddenly braced and stuck his stout jaw out inviting Shade to hit (him) at will." 

By 1923, New Yorkers had seen enough of Larsen. Under the guidance of new manager Jim Buckley, Larsen began a two-year stint in the Boston area with a few stops in Maine and Canada. He lost most of those fights, too. He was often matched against bigger men, on a schedule that saw him fighting (and losing) sometimes three times per month. In one of his Boston bouts, Larsen grew angry when he thought the referee had tried to trip him; he let his frustration out by knocking the ref down with a single crack on the chin. Not waiting to hear that he'd been disqualified, Larsen fled the ring and went home. 

Still, Larsen kept fighting. Boston newspapers called him the "Swinging Swede.” After a TKO loss to Hambone Kelly at Mechanics Hall in Boston, Larsen collapsed and had to be taken to a local hospital. It turned out he was fighting too soon after an appendix operation and shouldn't have been in the ring, anyway. 

Larsen never got near Dempsey, but he did fight and lose to some pretty good men, including Kid Norfolk, Ad Stone, and Lou Bogash. A valiant losing effort against heavyweight prospect Jim Maloney earned him praise from The Portsmouth Herald's Norman Brown. Larsen, Brown wrote, "gave Maloney one of his toughest battles," and nearly "knocked him cuckoo."  

Boston dried up, and then it was back to New York where the losses continued. By the summer of 1926, after a 'no contest' in Brooklyn with a character named Johnny Urban, Larsen disappeared from the scene. According to one columnist, an altercation with the police had left him with such injuries that he had to stop boxing for a while.

Why didn't Larsen live up to the promise he'd shown as an amateur? True, he didn't exactly look after himself. He preferred drinking to training, and his management treated him like a piece of meat. But the real reason may go back to the Tunney fight. When Larsen saw how a seasoned professional handled him with ease, he may have realized that he was simply an awkward second rater. So, in the words of one journalist, he decided to  "live a life of enjoyment." By the time Larsen heard the news that his old sparring partner Siki had died in the gutter, he was well aware that being a top fighter didn't guarantee a good life.

When he couldn't get fights, Larsen worked as a seaman on the Great Lakes, or bounced around Red Hook. Though he tried to present himself as a sort of roguish playboy, he was just a local lunatic, a rock-bottom alcoholic known for crazy street brawls that sound like the stuff of silent movies. He once knocked a man through a wooden wall at the Columbia Street subway station. "He won plenty of decisions," Buckley said. "But more of them were against cops than prizefighters."

Larsen became a kind of walking urban legend. Among the slew of farfetched tales he inspired was one that involved his attempt to steal a pony from a neighborhood fish peddler. As legend has it, Larsen simply picked the animal up and started walking in the direction of the nearest pawnshop. When the police asked him where he was going with the pony, Larsen said, "Pony? I thought it was a calf."

But not all the stories were fun. On one of his aimless strolls along the waterfront, Larsen saw a couple of men breaking into a speakeasy. Thinking this might be a nice way to score some liquor, he tried to assist the robbers. They responded by cutting Larsen's face and leaving him for dead. He survived, though. In January 1929 he was stabbed again in a restaurant brawl in Red Hook. 

Larsen's final ring appearance took place in April 1929 against journeyman Joe Lill at the New Broadway AC in Philadelphia. John Webster of The Philadelphia Inquirer wrote that Larsen, "gamely stood up under a hail of leather until the referee halted the bout in the third." Fittingly, Larsen went out with an "L." His record was approximately 28-40-2, but anyone who says they know Larsen's exact record is a liar.

By 1930, Larsen was homeless, sleeping in a stable, and seen regularly in New York breadlines and Salvation Army kitchens. 

"Broadway is a funny place," Larsen said. "Everybody'll give you a drink, and nobody'll  give you anything to eat."

Ironically, a successful film version of Jack London's The Sea Wolf began playing in New York around that same time. There was a "Wolf Larsen" on the big screen, played by Milton Sills. There would also be, in the ensuing years, a number of "Wolf Larsens" in football, baseball, and wrestling. But the Wolf Larsen of boxing was now on the streets of New York, drinking as if he had a personal vendetta against the Volstead Act.

At the Bethesda Mission, Larsen behaved himself. He never mentioned having a home or a family; it was as if he'd been born simply to drink and fight. For several months, he was a model citizen. Then, during the first week of July, 1931, he wandered out into the evening and returned drunker than he'd been in a long time. He died a few days later at King's County Hospital of pneumonia.

But, if one may use this soggy old cliche, he was a fighter to the end, literally, as a mission volunteer named John Olsen recounted. Upon hearing Larsen had died, Olsen told the press, "I saw a fellow he hit the night before he went to the hospital, and the fellow was still bent over, a cripple."

 Why write about Wolf Larsen? Well, fighters like him provide the grease and fuel on which the boxing machine runs. Sometimes they're named Wolf Larsen. Sometimes they're named Augustus Burton, or Garing Lane. Without them, how would the young, well-connected contenders fatten their records? Dismiss Larsen as cannon fodder if you like, and maybe you wouldn't want to be around him when he was drunk, but he deserves a tip of the cap. Besides, he spent the last months of his life cooking for other lost souls at the Bethesda Mission. That deserves a tip of the cap, too.

- Don Stradley