Teddy Ballgame
06-12-2005, 01:15 PM
- I have had the honour to meet George Chuvalo and he is an incisive, interesting, articulate person whose courage and humanity inspires me and many others. Read this and you'll see what I mean.
The glory days are a long-ago memory for George Chuvalo, the Canadian boxer who rattled Ali and inspired Rocky, but inside still beats the heart of a fighter. Earl McRae takes a trip to the movies - and into the past - with our greatest pugilist ever, seeing a remarkable moment in boxing history through a ... FIGHTER'S EYES
By Earl McRae -- For the Ottawa Sun
TORONTO -- The movie we're going to starts in 45 minutes and he hasn't arrived yet. I sit waiting for him in a doughnut shop on Kipling Ave. not far from his Toronto home where he lives with his wife Joanne who saved his life after his first wife committed suicide only four days after death by drug overdose of Stevie, who, like two of his brothers, ended his own life.
Suddenly, I see him. Crossing the parking lot. In jeans, sandals, and a black T-shirt, walking in that quick, light, slightly pigeon-toed, balls-of-the-feet way of his. His big bare arms held out from his thick body, his fingers splayed. His hair short on the sides and back and full on top, combed back, a 1940s look. He doesn't apologize for being late, nor do I expect him to.
"Good to see you again," he says raspily, sticking out his hand that is small and surprisingly soft. "You too, George."
He's walked from his home. His T-shirt is wet from the compassionless heat, his broad, handsome, Croatian face flushed. He wipes the sweat from his face with a napkin. "Geez, champ, you never age." He grins. His face doesn't look its 67 years. Maybe 50. That, despite its misshapen nose, its hills and gullies, its dark eyes in narrow channels of flesh. That, despite its having stopped the hardest fists from the hardest punchers over the 21 years he reigned as this country's greatest pugilist ever, champion for most of them, consistently world-ranked, as high as No. 1, never once in his 93 bouts knocked off his feet, never once knocked out, 63 of his 73 wins by kayo, two draws.
his face has the smooth skin and good colour of one who has never tasted alcohol, never tasted cigarettes except for nine months when he was 15 and then quit in deference to the fierce discipline he knew he'd need if he was to achieve glory as a professional boxer, the sport he'd taken up five years earlier in the tough, seedy, working-class section of Toronto called The Junction, where his fists, he discovered, were often the only silencer for the taunts thrown at him in the predominantly Anglo-Saxon neighborhood: Jewboy, bohunk, honky, foreigner.
"By the way, champ, congratulations on the Walk Of Fame."
"Yeah, yeah, thank you."
Three days earlier, Chuvalo had been inducted into Canada's Walk Of Fame in Toronto. The Walk Of Fame was the latest of Chuvalo's many honours that include the World Boxing Hall Of Fame, The Canadian Boxing Hall Of Fame, The Canadian Sports Hall Of Fame and the Order Of Canada, the latter not just for his magnificent contribution to boxing but, more so, his relentless and successful waging of the biggest and most important battle of his life that transcends by far those he had in the ring -- his one-man national crusade to steer young people, and adults, away from drugs in the wake of the deaths of three of his five children and his wife.
As a father, a husband, he'd lived the debilitating despair and their deaths were his greatest losses, and his survival from six weeks of being unable to get out of bed from the emotional devastation after the deaths of Stevie and four days later, Lynne, in which he was able to vanquish his own thoughts of suicide through gusts of rationality that he had to live for the sake of his grandchildren, was his greatest comeback.
At the house, Chuvalo heads to the bedroom to change into a short-sleeved shirt. I talk to Joanne, a former nurse, now a private investigator, the woman to whom he writes love poems, and, as a friend of the family at the time, the guardian angel who comforted, consoled and counselled the broken champ, mending him slowly with a love and respect that grew and deepened.
Joanne administers her husband's anti-drugs program, George Chuvalo Fights Drugs, that sees him criss-cross the country with his stunningly powerful and compelling show in which he speaks to youth groups and school children and young offenders as well as drug-afflicted adults, accompanied by home videos of his own late children and as a father who saw, smelled, fought, and lived the horrendous and heartbreaking daily hell that consumed his essentially good and decent children, and who is tougher, wiser and street-smarter than any of those he speaks to his talks are raw and graphic and gut-connecting emotional.
"George has turned around many children," says Joanne, working at the computer on the dining room table. Returning from the bedroom, Chuvalo says: "At a high school in Calgary, during my talk, a student went over to his teacher and turned in his drug. It was ecstasy. In Ottawa at a school, a boy ran from the auditorium. He was crying in the hallway. He was a known dealer. He said he didn't realize until my talk the awful consequences of his actions. The people destroyed. The families. He said he'd never do or sell drugs again. I can give you lots of stories like that."
"George," says Joanne, "gets tons of e-mails and letters from kids thanking him for getting them off drugs. And from parents and teachers."
He shows me another photograph. Chuvalo driving a left hook into the side of heavyweight champ Muhammad Ali at Maple Leaf Gardens in March 1966, the first of their two bouts. Ali was in his absolute prime, knocking out all opponents and accurately predicting the rounds. He said six for Chuvalo who he called The Washerwoman. Some Washerwoman. Ali hit Chuvalo with every ruinous punch in his arsenal, but the fight went the distance, 15 rounds. Ali won the unanimous decision. Chuvalo won the war of the bodies. After the fight, Chuvalo went dancing with his wife. An exhausted Ali went to St. Mike's hospital overnight, urinating blood from Chuvalo's body shots, his hands swollen and hurting. To this day, Ali says George Chuvalo was the toughest man he ever fought.
We reach the mall with four minutes to spare.
In the movie Russell Crowe plays James J. Braddock. The Cinderella Man. The depression-era heavyweight of no great renown and no money who had to toil on the New Jersey docks to support his impoverished family of a wife and three small children in a dingy, decrepit apartment, finally getting a shot he didn't deserve at the heavyweight champ Max Baer who'd killed two men in the ring and, against all odds, winning the crown in a 15-rounds decision, one of the biggest upsets in boxing history.
"Did you know that Russell Crowe was born the same day and year as my youngest son Jesse?" says Chuvalo as we walk down the carpet to the theatre. "April 7, 1964. And when Braddock fought Baer? My mother was pregnant with me. Interesting, eh?" Chuvalo has always had a thing for mysticism.
We take our seats in the cool, dark theatre. It's empty but for two other people. "I spent a day watching them filming," he says. "Maple Leaf Gardens. I went to the set to see my old friend Angelo Dundee. He used to be Muhammad's trainer. I met Ron Howard. The director. Good guy. Have you ever seen a movie being made? Most boring thing in the world. Film for a few seconds. Stop for half an hour or an hour. Film for a few seconds. Stop. They had thousands of dummy figures in the stands mixed with a few real people. Saved paying extras.
"Crowe and the guy playing Baer, they'd choreograph a few punches and moves. All in very slow motion. Stop. Change the lighting. Crowe would smoke cigarettes while waiting for them to set up again. Film a few more seconds in slow motion. On and on this way. It didn't even look like they were fighting."
Drawing parallels
"Did you meet Crowe?"
"No. He's small, eh? Just a little guy. Braddock was bigger, but they can shoot to make you look bigger. The angles."
The movie begins. In the faint illumination from the screen, shadows shunt eerily across the ridges and canyons of Chuvalo's face. It is soon apparent that George Chuvalo is seeing not Jimmy Braddock on the screen, but himself, drawing parallels.
When the electricity is cut off in the winter because Braddock can't pay the bill, his wife and children freezing in the dark, with Braddock forced to submerge his huge pride and humiliatingly ask for money from players in the fight game, the napkin in George Chuvalo's right hand moves to his eyes.
He says: "I know what that's like. Not having any money. Not being able to pay the bills. Having to ask for money. I like it that they're showing how the wife is affected, her role, they're not ignoring it. One time I was driving back to Toronto from Detroit with Lynne. We had three kids and Lynne was pregnant with Jesse. We had no money. It was in the winter. The old car we had was falling apart and one of the back windows wouldn't go up. I jammed a suitcase in it to keep the freezing air out.
He watches in silence until the scene where the top contender for Baer's title pulls out at the last minute and the promoter, more out of rare sympathy for his financial circumstances, offers the opportunity to Braddock, unprepared, considered no threat to the champion.
"It was like when I first fought Ali," says Chuvalo. "He was signed to fight Ernie Terrell. This was when the Black Muslims were controlling Ali. Terrell's manager went to Herbert Muhammad, Ali's manager, and told him Terrell had better win the fight or else.
"The next day, Terrell's manager was found beaten to a pulp. They never found out who did it. He wound up in the nuthouse where he died from the injuries. Terrell bailed out of the fight on some excuse, I forget what it was, and I got the call to replace him against Ali. I only had two weeks notice."
It is now June 13, 1935, 70 years ago tomorrow, and on the screen the bell rings for round one between James J. Braddock and Max Baer, the heavyweight championship of the world. For the first time since the movie started, Chuvalo moves forward in his seat. He places his arms along the top of the seat in front of him. He stares transfixed, all of his senses absorbing the ferocity of the action, the roar of the crowd, the screams from the cornermen in the brutal game that, once upon a time, was his whole life, and that brought him both jubilation and torment.
As we leave the theatre he says: "I was getting depressed watching it. It was too dark and gloomy all the time. Even the daytime scenes on the dock. Like being in Helsinki. No sun. It was good entertainment, but watching it through a fighter's eyes, I saw things. Crowe doesn't have a fighter's build. His neck's too thin. His chin, he was putting it right out there to be hit. Some of his moves, his balance. A lot of his punches he was throwing out the window. But, look, it was okay, it was okay."
I asked George if he visited the graves of his wife and sons very often and he said he never does.
He turns to look at me. His voice softens. His words drawn out, slowly. "They're not in a cemetery. They're in my home. On a shelf in my bedroom closet. In boxes. Their ashes. I see them every day. I don't talk out loud to them, but in my mind I do." He pauses. "I've never opened the boxes." And then: "I don't have the courage to do it."
George Chuvalo, this great champion, this great man, this great national treasure, can be forgiven his one and only forfeiture of courage in a lifetime of being it's human definition.
The glory days are a long-ago memory for George Chuvalo, the Canadian boxer who rattled Ali and inspired Rocky, but inside still beats the heart of a fighter. Earl McRae takes a trip to the movies - and into the past - with our greatest pugilist ever, seeing a remarkable moment in boxing history through a ... FIGHTER'S EYES
By Earl McRae -- For the Ottawa Sun
TORONTO -- The movie we're going to starts in 45 minutes and he hasn't arrived yet. I sit waiting for him in a doughnut shop on Kipling Ave. not far from his Toronto home where he lives with his wife Joanne who saved his life after his first wife committed suicide only four days after death by drug overdose of Stevie, who, like two of his brothers, ended his own life.
Suddenly, I see him. Crossing the parking lot. In jeans, sandals, and a black T-shirt, walking in that quick, light, slightly pigeon-toed, balls-of-the-feet way of his. His big bare arms held out from his thick body, his fingers splayed. His hair short on the sides and back and full on top, combed back, a 1940s look. He doesn't apologize for being late, nor do I expect him to.
"Good to see you again," he says raspily, sticking out his hand that is small and surprisingly soft. "You too, George."
He's walked from his home. His T-shirt is wet from the compassionless heat, his broad, handsome, Croatian face flushed. He wipes the sweat from his face with a napkin. "Geez, champ, you never age." He grins. His face doesn't look its 67 years. Maybe 50. That, despite its misshapen nose, its hills and gullies, its dark eyes in narrow channels of flesh. That, despite its having stopped the hardest fists from the hardest punchers over the 21 years he reigned as this country's greatest pugilist ever, champion for most of them, consistently world-ranked, as high as No. 1, never once in his 93 bouts knocked off his feet, never once knocked out, 63 of his 73 wins by kayo, two draws.
his face has the smooth skin and good colour of one who has never tasted alcohol, never tasted cigarettes except for nine months when he was 15 and then quit in deference to the fierce discipline he knew he'd need if he was to achieve glory as a professional boxer, the sport he'd taken up five years earlier in the tough, seedy, working-class section of Toronto called The Junction, where his fists, he discovered, were often the only silencer for the taunts thrown at him in the predominantly Anglo-Saxon neighborhood: Jewboy, bohunk, honky, foreigner.
"By the way, champ, congratulations on the Walk Of Fame."
"Yeah, yeah, thank you."
Three days earlier, Chuvalo had been inducted into Canada's Walk Of Fame in Toronto. The Walk Of Fame was the latest of Chuvalo's many honours that include the World Boxing Hall Of Fame, The Canadian Boxing Hall Of Fame, The Canadian Sports Hall Of Fame and the Order Of Canada, the latter not just for his magnificent contribution to boxing but, more so, his relentless and successful waging of the biggest and most important battle of his life that transcends by far those he had in the ring -- his one-man national crusade to steer young people, and adults, away from drugs in the wake of the deaths of three of his five children and his wife.
As a father, a husband, he'd lived the debilitating despair and their deaths were his greatest losses, and his survival from six weeks of being unable to get out of bed from the emotional devastation after the deaths of Stevie and four days later, Lynne, in which he was able to vanquish his own thoughts of suicide through gusts of rationality that he had to live for the sake of his grandchildren, was his greatest comeback.
At the house, Chuvalo heads to the bedroom to change into a short-sleeved shirt. I talk to Joanne, a former nurse, now a private investigator, the woman to whom he writes love poems, and, as a friend of the family at the time, the guardian angel who comforted, consoled and counselled the broken champ, mending him slowly with a love and respect that grew and deepened.
Joanne administers her husband's anti-drugs program, George Chuvalo Fights Drugs, that sees him criss-cross the country with his stunningly powerful and compelling show in which he speaks to youth groups and school children and young offenders as well as drug-afflicted adults, accompanied by home videos of his own late children and as a father who saw, smelled, fought, and lived the horrendous and heartbreaking daily hell that consumed his essentially good and decent children, and who is tougher, wiser and street-smarter than any of those he speaks to his talks are raw and graphic and gut-connecting emotional.
"George has turned around many children," says Joanne, working at the computer on the dining room table. Returning from the bedroom, Chuvalo says: "At a high school in Calgary, during my talk, a student went over to his teacher and turned in his drug. It was ecstasy. In Ottawa at a school, a boy ran from the auditorium. He was crying in the hallway. He was a known dealer. He said he didn't realize until my talk the awful consequences of his actions. The people destroyed. The families. He said he'd never do or sell drugs again. I can give you lots of stories like that."
"George," says Joanne, "gets tons of e-mails and letters from kids thanking him for getting them off drugs. And from parents and teachers."
He shows me another photograph. Chuvalo driving a left hook into the side of heavyweight champ Muhammad Ali at Maple Leaf Gardens in March 1966, the first of their two bouts. Ali was in his absolute prime, knocking out all opponents and accurately predicting the rounds. He said six for Chuvalo who he called The Washerwoman. Some Washerwoman. Ali hit Chuvalo with every ruinous punch in his arsenal, but the fight went the distance, 15 rounds. Ali won the unanimous decision. Chuvalo won the war of the bodies. After the fight, Chuvalo went dancing with his wife. An exhausted Ali went to St. Mike's hospital overnight, urinating blood from Chuvalo's body shots, his hands swollen and hurting. To this day, Ali says George Chuvalo was the toughest man he ever fought.
We reach the mall with four minutes to spare.
In the movie Russell Crowe plays James J. Braddock. The Cinderella Man. The depression-era heavyweight of no great renown and no money who had to toil on the New Jersey docks to support his impoverished family of a wife and three small children in a dingy, decrepit apartment, finally getting a shot he didn't deserve at the heavyweight champ Max Baer who'd killed two men in the ring and, against all odds, winning the crown in a 15-rounds decision, one of the biggest upsets in boxing history.
"Did you know that Russell Crowe was born the same day and year as my youngest son Jesse?" says Chuvalo as we walk down the carpet to the theatre. "April 7, 1964. And when Braddock fought Baer? My mother was pregnant with me. Interesting, eh?" Chuvalo has always had a thing for mysticism.
We take our seats in the cool, dark theatre. It's empty but for two other people. "I spent a day watching them filming," he says. "Maple Leaf Gardens. I went to the set to see my old friend Angelo Dundee. He used to be Muhammad's trainer. I met Ron Howard. The director. Good guy. Have you ever seen a movie being made? Most boring thing in the world. Film for a few seconds. Stop for half an hour or an hour. Film for a few seconds. Stop. They had thousands of dummy figures in the stands mixed with a few real people. Saved paying extras.
"Crowe and the guy playing Baer, they'd choreograph a few punches and moves. All in very slow motion. Stop. Change the lighting. Crowe would smoke cigarettes while waiting for them to set up again. Film a few more seconds in slow motion. On and on this way. It didn't even look like they were fighting."
Drawing parallels
"Did you meet Crowe?"
"No. He's small, eh? Just a little guy. Braddock was bigger, but they can shoot to make you look bigger. The angles."
The movie begins. In the faint illumination from the screen, shadows shunt eerily across the ridges and canyons of Chuvalo's face. It is soon apparent that George Chuvalo is seeing not Jimmy Braddock on the screen, but himself, drawing parallels.
When the electricity is cut off in the winter because Braddock can't pay the bill, his wife and children freezing in the dark, with Braddock forced to submerge his huge pride and humiliatingly ask for money from players in the fight game, the napkin in George Chuvalo's right hand moves to his eyes.
He says: "I know what that's like. Not having any money. Not being able to pay the bills. Having to ask for money. I like it that they're showing how the wife is affected, her role, they're not ignoring it. One time I was driving back to Toronto from Detroit with Lynne. We had three kids and Lynne was pregnant with Jesse. We had no money. It was in the winter. The old car we had was falling apart and one of the back windows wouldn't go up. I jammed a suitcase in it to keep the freezing air out.
He watches in silence until the scene where the top contender for Baer's title pulls out at the last minute and the promoter, more out of rare sympathy for his financial circumstances, offers the opportunity to Braddock, unprepared, considered no threat to the champion.
"It was like when I first fought Ali," says Chuvalo. "He was signed to fight Ernie Terrell. This was when the Black Muslims were controlling Ali. Terrell's manager went to Herbert Muhammad, Ali's manager, and told him Terrell had better win the fight or else.
"The next day, Terrell's manager was found beaten to a pulp. They never found out who did it. He wound up in the nuthouse where he died from the injuries. Terrell bailed out of the fight on some excuse, I forget what it was, and I got the call to replace him against Ali. I only had two weeks notice."
It is now June 13, 1935, 70 years ago tomorrow, and on the screen the bell rings for round one between James J. Braddock and Max Baer, the heavyweight championship of the world. For the first time since the movie started, Chuvalo moves forward in his seat. He places his arms along the top of the seat in front of him. He stares transfixed, all of his senses absorbing the ferocity of the action, the roar of the crowd, the screams from the cornermen in the brutal game that, once upon a time, was his whole life, and that brought him both jubilation and torment.
As we leave the theatre he says: "I was getting depressed watching it. It was too dark and gloomy all the time. Even the daytime scenes on the dock. Like being in Helsinki. No sun. It was good entertainment, but watching it through a fighter's eyes, I saw things. Crowe doesn't have a fighter's build. His neck's too thin. His chin, he was putting it right out there to be hit. Some of his moves, his balance. A lot of his punches he was throwing out the window. But, look, it was okay, it was okay."
I asked George if he visited the graves of his wife and sons very often and he said he never does.
He turns to look at me. His voice softens. His words drawn out, slowly. "They're not in a cemetery. They're in my home. On a shelf in my bedroom closet. In boxes. Their ashes. I see them every day. I don't talk out loud to them, but in my mind I do." He pauses. "I've never opened the boxes." And then: "I don't have the courage to do it."
George Chuvalo, this great champion, this great man, this great national treasure, can be forgiven his one and only forfeiture of courage in a lifetime of being it's human definition.