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Award-winning columnist Tom Archdeacon — an old-school storyteller in a brand-new venue — writes about sports, the city, southwest Ohio and anything else that catches his fancy… or yours.Home > Blogs > Through the Arch > Archives > 2012 > February > 02 > Entry
Angelo Dundee — Saying goodbye to an old friend
I lost one of my pals Wednesday.
Angelo Dundee, the most famous trainer boxing has ever known, died in Tampa at age 90.
I knew Angie for over 35 of those years. Back when I was at he Miami News, I used to cover boxing and I’d spend a few days a week over on Miami Beach at the Fifth Street Gym, which his older brother Chris ran and where Angelo trained his fighters.
He was the guy who first introduced me to Muhammad Ali and Sugar Ray Leonard, Luis Rodriguez and Florentino Fernandez and Jimmy Ellis and so many other of his fighters, some champs, some just undercard ham and eggers.
He taught me a lot about the fight game and about people in general. I’d watch him work a corner, where at one time or another, he’d be a psychologist, magician, medic, task master, cheerleader, con man, and, when all was said and done, simply a kind man.
I’d listen to his stories and his kibitzing with Chris and all the other gym regulars, guys like “Sellout” Moe Fleischer, Sully Emmit and Jerry White, “the 1932 lightweight champ of New Jersey”. Afterwards I’d sometimes join the Dundee brothers for a bite to eat at Wolfie Cohen’s or one of their other Miami Beach haunts.
Once I moved to Dayton, I saw less of Angie. I’d still catch him at fights now and then and I met with him a few times when I came back to Miami on vacation or assignment. I’d get Christmas cards from him, occasional letters or maybe a phone call to talk up a fighter or tell me about somebody’s passing in Miami or maybe just to see how I was doing.
He was one of the nicest guys I knew in sports and I’ve made sure he and Chris were featured prominently in the Punchers & Painters photo exhibit we’ve put on at the Color of Energy Gallery in the Oregon District the past two summers here.
I took out some of those old photos again tonight and found myself smiling as I went through them. I also found a column I wrote on Angie back in 1995.
Here it is. It will tell you a little more about a fight guy I really loved,
Xxxx
CORNERMAN KNOWS ALL THE ANGLES
LAS VEGAS - When Willie Pastrano was the light-heavyweight champ of the world back in the 1960s, he had trouble making the 175-pound weight limit because - in the words of his trainer, Angelo Dundee - he was “a degenerate for water fountains. He always was water-logged.”
To discourage his fighter, Dundee would stick lighted cigars in Pastrano’s water glass at the training table.
When Muhammad Ali - then called Cassius Clay - fought Henry Cooper in England in 1963, he was dropped by a left hook at the end of round four.
As he wobbled back to the corner, Dundee sat him down and began working his hands over one of his padded mitts. And the next thing Cooper’s camp knew, Dundee was calling the referee to the corner to show him how the leather on Clay’s glove had suddenly split.
The maneuver bought time - new gloves had to be found - and Clay’s head cleared. He knocked Cooper out in the next round.
Then there was Sugar Ray Leonard’s fight with Daniel Gonzalez in Arizona in 1979. Moments before the bout, Dundee just happened to walk into Gonzalez’s dressing room and notice the challenger wasn’t sweating a drop.
Hurrying back to Leonard, Dundee said, “This guy is cold as ice. He didn’t warm up properly. I want you to jump on him immediately.”
Leonard knocked Gonzalez out in the first round.
Now comes tonight’s HBO-televised fight between champ George Foreman, 46, and Axel Schulz, a German challenger 20 years younger, at the MGM Grand.
With Dundee, 73, in Foreman’s corner, what can we expect?
At Foreman’s last fight - when he shocked the world and knocked out Michael Moorer to become the oldest man in boxing history to win the heavyweight crown - we know Dundee told Foreman to lure Moorer into a trap.
“I figured the kid being a southpaw was made to order for George,” Dundee said. “When a southpaw moves naturally, he moves right into George’s power. They had Moorer moving the other way, but I figured if George just pitty-patted him for a while, the kid would get confidant and step into George’s sights.”
That’s exactly what happened and in the 10th round - losing on every judge’s card - Foreman flattened Moorer with a right hand and took the title.
So what’s up for tonight?
Well, Dundee - tape measure in hand Friday, as it was for the last fight - was checking out the heights of stools Foreman could use in the corner. So much for those standard milkmaid deals, Foreman needs a barstool.
“See, he don’t sit down between rounds - it’d be too hard getting back up each time,” Dundee said. “So we gotta find one he can just lean on.”
When you are “older than dirt,” - as Foreman calls himself - you get advantages where you can.
But then that’s why Foreman pulled Dundee into his fold four years ago.
Dundee is the most famous cornerman in all of boxing. Since he began slipping through the ring ropes some 47 years ago, Dundee has tutored 13 world champions.
“As a cornerman, Angelo is the best in the world,” Muhammad Ali once said. “He’s aware of the mistakes you are making and also he knows how to take advantage of the other guy’s mistakes. If he tells you something during a fight, you can believe it.”
The cornerman’s role is the most fascinating in all of boxing. In between rounds, he’s got just 60 seconds to mix strategy, psychology and magic. All this while icing down bruises, stanching cuts with Q-Tips and bismuth and working Vaseline to the face, life into the legs and will into the heart.
On a cornerman’s instincts, championships are won and lost.
“In that one minute, Angelo is Godzilla and Superman rolled into one,” Ferdie Pacheco — the fight doctor who worked a decade with Dundee - once told writer Phil Berger.
In the corner, Dundee may cajole, berate, praise, pinch, slap, insult or simply pull the guy’s waistband out and dump ice cubes into his trunks.
That abrasive style Dundee sometimes shows in the corner is nowhere to be found when he is outside the ring ropes. He avoids confrontation, so much so, that he has something of a Pollyanna reputation when he ruminates on most subjects.
Using a vernacular all his own, he calls himself a mixologist and in crowds is the nonstop kibitzer.
That was the case Friday afternoon as he circulated around the Grand Garden Arena.
He said Helen, his wife of 43 years, was at the beauty parlor, so he had time to talk. “Just an hour though, she said I can’t be late,” he said, feigning a henpecked look.
The youngest of five boys, Angelo Mirena he had followed brothers Joe and Chris into the fight game.
Joe was a boxer and had adopted Dundee - the name of some of the best Italian boxers before World War II - as his ring name. Chris, who worked Joe’s corner, changed his name, too.
Eventually Chris — who made hustling an art form — went to New York, where he began to manage and promote. He worked out of a room at the Capitol Hotel. When Angelo joined his brother, he was given a few bucks a week to type, make phone calls and help with boxers.
He slept on a couch in the office and in the afternoons he’d hang out at Stillman’s Gym. Working fight shows at night, Angelo carried the spit buckets for veteran trainers like Ray Arcel and Chickie Ferrara.
He learned the trade from the bottom up and when Chris moved his operation to Miami Beach - and the Fifth Street Gym - in 1950, Angelo joined him a year later and the legend began.
Dundee succeeded because he knew fighters, knew “they were a special brand of cat.”
Today, he still has a stable of boxers he trains and manages. Several are from Europe. Some are contenders. None are like Ali.
“There was only one Muhammad,” Dundee said with reverence. He grew quiet and finally started to laugh:
“So I’m on the road in 1958. Had Willie Pastrano in Louisville for a television fight. We’re sitting in the hotel room and the phone rings. This kid is calling me from the lobby hollering in my ear. He’s a Golden Gloves champ. He wants to come up and see me.
“I put my hand over the receiver and tell Willie, ‘There’s some nut wants to come see us, said his name is Cassius Marcellus Clay and he’s gonna be a champ.’ “
The two men were together for two decades and though their relationship changed, their bond always stayed.
Dundee kept Clay from quitting against Sonny Liston when Liston’s liniment got in his eyes. He guided his comeback after a nearly three-year layoff during his Vietnam War exile, and he helped engineer Ali’s destruction of George Foreman in Zaire in 1974.
That fight is why Dundee will be in Foreman’s corner tonight. “I would put a whipping on Ali, round after round and he’d go back slow into his corner,” Foreman said. “Then after that minute with Angelo he’d come out fresh and give it back to me. I wanted some of that this time around.”
Not that Foreman is likely to need it tonight. He’s a 7-1 favorite and the pick here is that he’ll knock Schulz, 26, out in the middle rounds of their scheduled 12-rounder.
Few people know exactly what to expect from Schulz. Although he’s 21-1-1, all but two of his fights have been in Europe, and in Las Vegas he has trained behind locked doors.
Dundee smiled and said: “Well, he’s not quite a mystery. See I trained another German heavyweight - Reiner Hartmann - a while back. Lives in Miami, married my friend’s daughter. Well one day, Reiner brought another kid with him to train in my gym for a while.”
Dundee shrugged: “… Kid’s name was Axel Schulz.”
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By Turf
February 3, 2012 12:13 PM | Link to this
Arch, I wish I had more time talk to you. You have met so many people. Great story. Turf