Subj: The BAWLI Papers No. 57
Date: 99-02-12 00:27:21 EST
From: Oldfallguy@aol.com
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The BAWLI Papers
(Boxing As We Liked It)
Edited by J Michael Kenyon
Issue Number 57
Friday, February 12, 1999
New York City, New York, US of A
___________________________
IN THIS ISSUE: LEGENDARY TEX O'ROURKE DEAD AT 77; MORE PRAISE FOR REMNICK
_____________________________
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Readers are welcome to submit interesting and otherwise noteworthy articles
concerning professional boxing's long and storied past. The emphasis,
generally, should be on the foremost fighters, managers, trainers and
promoters, and events that otherwise were of some moment in the sport's
history. Either transmit the articles via e-mail or mail them to the editor at
the following addresses:
J Michael Kenyon (oldfallguy@aol.com)
244 Madison Avenue, Suite 145
New York City, New York 10016
__________________________________
HEARING VOICES FROM THE PAST
(Ring Magazine, November 1961)
By Jersey Jones
A voice may be stilled, but ofttimes its memories linger on . . . especially
if it belonged to a Pete Prunty or a Harry Balogh.
It was something of a grim coincidence that Prunty and Balogh, two of the best
known sports announcers ever produced in New York, should have passed on
within a few brief weeks of each other recently. Prunty had lived to a
mellowed 94; Balogh had just reached the biblical allotment of three score
years and then.
The current generation of sports addicts would not know of Pete Prunty -- he
had been in retirement for a quarter-century or more -- but oldtimers have
pleasant recollections of the urbane, affable gentleman who was so well liked
during his busy career as a public barker.
Well educated, and never at a loss for the proper words to use, Prunty didn't
confine his announcing talents to boxing. His early training as a choir singer
gave his trilling tenor delivery a pleasant musical quality. Constantly sought
for other major sports events, Peter was frequently seen, and heard, at
athletic meets, automobile races, wrestling matches and six-day bike grinds.
Prunty was a product of an era that preceded the public address system, or
"lou speaker," when the main requisite of an announcer was a strong voice,
capable of reaching the outermost regions of the arena or the stadium in which
he was working. A natural target for hecklers, he also had to be quick at
repartee, and something of a student of mob psychology, with the ability to
keep a potentially unruly crowd under control.
Prunty flourished in a period when an announcer was something more than just
that. He often was an attraction in himself, and an important part of any
sports enterprise, particularly boxing. Unlike Prunty, whose English was
flawless, the usual announcer didn't have to be a grammatical purist.
Generally, he wasn't, but he spoke the language of the crowds and his gift for
mispronunciation was considered part of his quaint "charm."
Joe Humphreys, for a notable case, realized his limitations and didn't go in
for elaborate gestures or speeches. What he had to say was brief and to the
point. Born and bred in New York's teeming East Side, Joe's schooling had been
limited and words beyond two syllables often posted a problem for him, but his
plain language was all the more effective because of its simplicity.
Humphreys had certain set lines for introductions of fighters. Inevitably one
would be the "game and aggressive West Sider." Another was certain to be a
"pugilistic product" of somewhere. A visitor was almost always the "idol" of
his home town. In a title match, the champion never failed to meet "the worthy
challenger."
Joe did develop one little distinctive feature in his announcing. If, in
giving out a fighter's weight, there was a half-pound involved, Joe would
bellow "and a hawf." In time, he didn't bother to announce the fraction. He
would slice the air with his right arm and that would be the signal for the
galleryites to chorus "and a hawf!"
We recall Humphreys spending most of one afternoon practicing the Spanish
pronunciation of "Luis Angel Firpo" to use that night when he introduced the
burly Argentine for his bout with Bill Brennan in old Madison Square Garden.
Painstakingly, Joe rehearsed "Loo-ees . . . Ong-hail . . . Feer-po" until he
was satisfied he had it right. All his conscientious efforts went for naught,
however, when he clambered into the ring for the pre-fight presentations. When
he got to Firpo, Humphreys boomed out in his purest East Sidese: "Loo-ee Ain-
jell Foi-po!"
Beginning with the late '90s and spanning across three decades, New York came
up with one of the most colorful collections of announcers the rugged industry
probably has ever produced in one generation.
Prunty and Humphreys were two of that crowd. Before he turned to managing
fighters, Charley Harvey was announcer at most of the major New York clubs.
When he left, Johnny Dunn replaced him. The "Human Brass Band," they called
Dunn, because of the strange noises that issued from his lusty larynx. Chuck
Oldis was Brooklyn's top announcer, and he officiated in baseball as well as
boxing.
Some years ago Jack Skelly, a top featherweight in his youth, and later a
sports writer in Yonkers, published a book of reminiscences, devoting
considerable space to the announcing profession during the early years of
prizefighting in the United States.
In Skelly's time, the promoter usually was his own barker. In fact, he often
was a one-man organization, an ex-fighter who knew what had to be done and did
it himself. He looked after the pairing of the fighters, the construction of
the ring, the seating, if any, and handling of the customers. He did just
about everything but the actual fighting -- and often enough he had to do that
with the fans.
Wrote Skelly: "Uncle Bill Tovee was the first announcer I remember. He was a
retired English bare-knuckle warrior, who had come to America and settled down
on Clove Road in Brooklyn. Uncle Bill made a living by giving boxing lessons
and he started out some good knuckle-dusters. Clove Road has long since been
lost in a maze of modern buildings, but in those days it was a rural highway
and Tovee's gymnasium was an old shed with one side open to the air.
"Many fine fighters were developed at Tovee's, and Uncle Bill's fame spread
rapidly. Soon he was master of ceremonies at virtually all the important
fights held in the eastern part of the United States. He loved especially the
announcing part of the work and was not without wit. Tovee announced at my
first fight, and his chatter ran something like this:
"'A little h'order 'ere, gents; a little h'order, please. We're goin' to 'ave
a bloomin' pretty set-to 'ere, as pretty a one as you h'ever did see. Battlin'
'Arry 'Owes of H'Ingland an' Jack Skelly of H'America, gents. A little
h'order, me boys, as h'its goin' to be a 'ot 'un, bless yer, me coves.'
"Tovee was a merry old fellow and very popular. He lived a cheerful, contented
life, and was 81 when he died.
"Later came Pop Whittaker. He had a voice like a locomotive whistle and he
liked to talk. Sometimes it would take him twenty minutes to introduce the
fighters and the spectators would almost mob him. Whittaker, who had only one
arm, officiated at nearly all of John L. Sullivan's early fights in original
Madison Square Garden.
"Two other former fighters who became popular announcers about that time were
Steve O'Donnell and Fred Burns. Burns was the first announcer at the Coney
island club, and one of the bouts at which he officiated was the one in which
Jim Jeffries knocked out Jim Corbett."
During the era of the Frawley law, which governed boxing in New York from 1911
to 1917, it was no uncommon thing for promoters in the neighborhood clubs to
do their own barking. It was too expensive for them o hire a Prunty or a
Humphreys.
One of the most entertaining was Jim Buckley, who operated the little upstairs
Sharkey Athletic Club on Amsterdam Avenue, around the corner from where the
St. Nicholas Arena still functions.
Buckley was a serious-minded sort and couldn't stand criticism. Realizing his
sensitive nature, the New York sports writers took fiendish delight in
ruffling his feeling. In reporting fight results at the Sharkey, they'd manage
to slip in a line or two finding fault with some little thing at the club, and
at the next show Buckley would be certain to answer them in person from the
ring.
When Jim read in one of the papers that his club was a hangout for
"questionable characters," he really exploded. At the following show he roared
from the ring. "Everybody watch your valuables. We have pickpockets and
newspapermen present!"
It was in 1936, when Humphreys died at the age of 65 that Harry Balogh moved
into the big time scene. Harry had acquired something of a reputation for
himself as an announcer at fight cards in the armories and neighborhood clubs.
A fastidious dresser, Balogh "elevated" the profession by his immaculate
appearance in the ring. Until Harry's advent, announcers did their jobs in
their street clothes, but Harry added what he called "class" and "dignity" to
the profession by his elegant sartorial displays. Along with his slicked dark
hair and black bowtie, he sported a dinner jacket for his Madison Square
Garden assignments and a white tuxedo for outdoor jobs in the baseball parks.
Unfortunately, Balogh encouraged a tendency to overplay his role. He became
entirely too long-winded and repetitious, and his listeners were often
annoyed, rather than entertained, by his tactics. Redundancy ran rampant with
him, and he refused to limit even the simplest announcement to a brief twenty
or thirty words if he could stretch it out to a hundred. He frequently
perpetrated such specimens of "Balogh-ney" as "May the better participant
emerge victorious," and it was the usual thing for him to inaugurate the
evening's festivities with a load of language that ran something like this:
"Ladies and gentlemen, a very good evening to you, and may I take this
opportunity to wish each and every one of you a thoroughly enjoyable evening.
At this time, I beg leave to trespass on your time and good nature to the
extent of asking your forbearance while I make a few announcements requested
by the management. Silence, please. Quiet, please. I crave your indulgence for
just a moment."
Balogh once introduced a fighter as "a former native of New York." There was
the time he beseeched his audience to "applaud a good ovation," and another
occasion when he exhorted the crowd to "display no prejudism." Then there was
the time he leaned over the ropes, looked down at a gal reporter in the
working press section, and tossed this bit of intended flattery at her: "You
look positively famishing tonight."
________________________
TEX O'ROURKE PASSES AT AGE 77
(Ring Magazine, July, 1963)
By Billy Williams
One of the most flamboyant personalities of this century reached the end of a
long, adventurous trail when "Tex" O'Rourke, 77, died following an operation
in a New York hospital.
O'Rourke's career read like something out of the vivid, fanciful imagination
of a Hollywood script writer. He had been a Texas Ranger, a soldier of
fortune, a boxer, a writer, a painter, a sports promoter, a radio commentator
and a master of ceremonies at prominent social functions.
Nobody, aside from O'Rourke himself, knew what his given name was but, being a
Texan, it was inevitable that he would be known as "Tex." He was the son of a
United States marshal and a circus equestrienne. Born and reared in the little
town of Ysleta, Texas, he received very little normal schooling, but he had
some very good tutors in Wesley Hardin, a noted gunslinger and bandit, and Bob
Fitzsimmons, one of boxing's all-time greats. Hardin taught O'Rourke how to
shoot a six-gun, and Fitz gave him some valuable lessons in fist-tossing.
As a boy, O'Rourke was "adopted" by a troop of Texas Rangers. In quest of
further excitement, he ambled along to Central America and teamed up with
other soldiers of fortune in fighting for any revolution that came along.
Returning home, he became a boxer, managed by the fabulous Bat Masterson.
A husky lad, standing 6 feet, 2 inches and scaling close to 200 pounds,
O'Rourke was making fine progress as a heavyweight until an eye injury forced
him to hang up the gloves.
A keen student of boxing, O'Rourke became a member of Jess Willard's advisory
council when the Kansas giant was training for his title-winning fracas with
Jack Johnson in Havana in 1915.
Continuing his interest in boxing, O'Rourke was credited with having drafted
the bill which then State Senator Jimmy Walker -- later Mayor of New York City
-- had enacted into the law which restored professional glove-tossing to the
Empire State in 1920.
While the bill was pending, O'Rourke helped to organize the International
Sporting Club of New York, patterned after the plush National Sporting Club in
London, but after he had arranged for the Battling Levinsky-Georges Carpentier
light-heavyweight title bout in Jersey City, one of O'Rourke's colleagues
scooted off with the club's treasury, and another Tex, Rickard, took over the
promotion.
O'Rourke was one of the founds of the National (now World) Boxing Association,
and served as its first secretary.
Tex had much to do with organizing the noted "Circus Saints and Sinners Club"
of New York, whose membership embraces many top names in the business,
political and entertainment fields. O'Rourke became vice president and
toastmaster at its regular banquets, and his main assignment as m.c. was to
"spoof" celebrities. Tex was a past master of the art. At one of the last
dinners at which he presided, O'Rourke observed that he had been sure
President Kennedy was the sort who'd never make a mistake. "But I
underestimated him," Tex added.
Along with his many other accomplishments, Tex learned how to play a circus
calliope, became a clever cartoonist, an articulate lecturer and a superb chef
in all sorts of foreign dishes.
For a while during the 1930s, he was part owner and manager of the now-defunct
Coliseum and Starlight Park in the Bronx, and he also served as president of
the Adventurers Club in New York.
With a keen sense of humor, O'Rourke enlivened his toastmastering assignments
with plenty of bon mots. One of his best known was about the time a fighter
was floored and as he started to rise his manager yelled across the ring at
him: "Take it easy; don't get up until eight."
The fighter blinked back at him and mumbled: "Okay. What time is it now?"
Quite a guy, Tex O'Rourke. As George Gobel would have it, "They don't hardly
make them like that no mor."
____________________________
HOW ALI BECAME CHAMPION OF HYPE
(Sunday Times, South Africa, Feb. 7, 1999)
By Ray Hartley (reviewing KING OF THE WORLD, Random House, by David Remnick)
Most retrospectives on the boxing life of Muhammad Ali concentrate on his big-
money clashes with George Foreman, Joe Frazier and Ken Norton, the men he beat
to claim the title "The Greatest" in the '70s.Most recently there was the
dramatic television documentary When we were Kings, about the "Rumble in the
Jungle" between Ali and Foreman in the then Zaire in October 1974.
That encounter was immortalised in Norman Mailer's classic documentary novel
The Fight, which was as much about the fight as it was about Ali's efforts to
tap into the Africanisation politics of the then Zairean dictator Mobutu Sese
Seko.
These, along with the more recent Thomas Hauser biography and Ali's
autobiography, The Greatest, have all regarded the '70s contests as the
defining bouts of Ali's career.
Remnick's book takes a refreshingly new angle. It is an account of how Ali
came to be, in a phrase from the book's subtitle, "an American hero" despite
his conversion to a radical Islamic sect and his refusal to participate in the
Vietnam War.
To do this, Remnick goes back to Ali's early career, when he faced his
toughest physical challenge in the form of Sonny Liston, the bludgeoning,
brutal bad man of boxing, who was believed by bookies and his Mob handlers to
be indestructible.
Ali's strategy was revolutionary, changing the face of boxing and introducing
a new dimension to professional sport in general. He worked on "out-psyching"
Liston. He already had a reputation as a loudmouth -- the Louisville Lip --
with his habit of composing poetry denigrating his opponents and praising his
own prowess. But against Liston, who was every bit as fearsome a creature as
Mike Tyson in the opinion of many, Ali took pre-fight hype to a new level.
He sensed that the things that made Liston physically strong -- his stays in
jail, his activities as a Mob hatchet man and his aggression -- betrayed a
psychological weakness.
Ali confused Liston by arriving unannounced at his training camp and holding
an impromptu press conference at which he called Liston "a big ugly bear". At
the weigh-in, Ali erupted in a hysterical verbal assault. The sum total of
this barrage -- at a time when such pre-fight hype was not common -- was to
confuse the slow-thinking Liston, lulling him into believing Ali was running
scared.
The rest, as they say, is history. Ali's triumph over Liston represented not
only the world's greatest boxing upset, but the birth of the phenomenon of the
borderless sporting cult figure. Although he would not earn the respect of
the Establishment for another decade, Ali became the most recognisable face in
the world and its first truly global sporting figure.
Remnick's fascination with Ali's rise to the position of King of the World is
engrossing for its description of Ali's boxing tactics or, some would say,
antics. But he also describes how the world of boxing writers viewed Ali
through the lens of racial and religious prejudice, in some cases continuing
to use the name Cassius Clay long after Ali had adopted his new persona.
Remnick brings the reader into the circle of writers who surrounded the
fighters, including Mailer, James Baldwin and The New York Times's observant
Robert Lipsyte.
There is, however, about Remnick's work the same suspension of disbelief that
overcame Mailer, autobiography shadow writer Richard Durham and the makers of
television documentaries on the fighter.
Even when Remnick reflects morbidly on the place of boxing in modern society,
how it is "fading away", he does so with a passion for its golden era, talking
about how the gyms where Ali and his generation sparred have been shut down.
"Boxing," writes Remnick, "is becoming the anachronistic entertainment of
gambling towns, on a par with Wayne Newton and Siegfried and Roy."
As a sport designed to stun the brain, he writes, boxing has come to represent
utter lack of opportunity rather than opportunity itself. Afterthoughts
notwithstanding, Remnick's book is ultimately a tribute to the sport of kings.
______________________________
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