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01/19/2004 Archived Entry: "CBZ TO PUBLISH FIRST NEW 'FLASH' GORDON MATERIAL"
CBZ TO PUBLISH FIRST NEW 'FLASH' GORDON MATERIAL IN 16 YEARS!
By GorDoom
The CBZ will be publishing the first, new material from the legendary, almost mythical, boxing scribe, Malcolm "Flash" Gordon, in the next issue of our magazine, WAIL! We will also soon be adding a new section to the CBZ that will contain the best articles from Flash Gordon's inimitable newsletter.
More about Flash
By M. Wolgast
Malcolm "Flash" Gordon surfaced in the late 1960s selling his underground boxing newsletter outside fights at Madison Square Garden, mostly at the then-named Felt Forum. He did this without a license and his newsletter quickly became the most sought-after reading material in the business because IT TOLD THE TRUTH.
There were fight fans who would go outside the Felt Forum on fight nights just to buy his newsletter, then leave without even attending some of the shows. Johnny Bos worked with Gordon in those early days, hawking the newsletters which served as programs for the fights.
Flash would run down every single fighter on the card with photos of the fighters he took himself in the New York gyms. He would describe each guy's style--even in the four-rounders. He also was an accomplished artist and did beautiful black-and-white drawings of trains that were posted in the book store in the train station under Madison Square Garden and also at other book stores in NYC.
Eventually, he began doing these programs outside of New York, especially at the Blue Horizon in Philadelphia when Russell Peltz began promoting there in the fall of 1969.
He also began mailing out the weekly newsletter/programs around the country to subscribers.It was Flash Gordon who first exposed the fraudulent Don King/ABC tournament in 1977 about the way non-qualified boxers were admitted to the tournament over more-deserving ones like Marvin Hagler and how Ring Magazine writer Johnny Ort (or as Flash called him 'Johnny Bought" or 'Johnny Caught') added phony wins in the Ring Record Book to make some of these guys look better than they were. Alex Wallau, working in the mail room then at ABC, picked up on this and this helped propel Wallau up the ladder at ABC and he got the credit for what Flash first uncovered.
Flash liked to say that he printed his programs on his own printing press which he had bought with his Bar Mitzvah money.
There was one night outside the Singer Bowl in Long Island where Floyd Patterson was fighting Pedro Agosto. I forget the year, you can look it up. Anyway, Flash was arrested that night by local police for selling his program without a license. I think only a single program had been sold before the cops came and one guy had it and everyone gathered around that one guy trying to read over his shoulder about what Flash had written in his latest newsletter. That's how powerful he was and what a cult figure he had become.
In addition to the rundown on the fighters, he would spend a few pages exposing all the corruption in boxing and he was pretty much right on target. He had no $$ so the bad guys couldn't sue him. He had an ongoing feud with a low-rent booking agent by the name of Ben Greene, who wrote boxing for one of the racing newspapers and Flash called him Ben "Booze" Green since Ben was known to inbibe now and then.
One night at a fight in Atlantic City where Flash was selling programs, Green attacked him (Green was about 75 at the time) and grabbed Flash by the ear. Flash pulled out his pen knife and tried to cut Greene and they were pulled apart by fight fans who loved Flash and detested Greene.
On his upcoming fights schedule, he would make up names for opponents of fighters when he didn't have the entire card or when he knew the opponents would be turkeys. His most fanmous opponent was "Willie Standup" and he had many derivations of Willie.
Flash stayed in business until the early 1980s, I believe, and then he disappeared. What made Flash different from a lot of the so-called muckrakers on the internet today is that Flash knew who the good guys were and who the bad guys were and he rarely confused them. He was always on target and rarely knocked someone who did not deserve it. However, in the later years, it seemed like he spent too much time knocking and it took up space he could have used for news of what was going on.
Jack Obermayer, as KO-JO, wrote for Flash and I believe Johnny Bos did also.
Flash is probably in his early to mid 50s today.
Replies: 1 Comment made on this article
DAMN IF HE CAN MAKE A COMEBACK SO CAN I JOHNNY BOS .BY THE WAY DON MAJESKI AND BRUCE TRAMPLER ALSO WROTE FOR US IT WAS ME WHO GAVE JACK OBERMEYER HIS FIRST SHOT AT BECOMING A BOXING WRITER ANY WAY ITS GOOD TO SEE MY OLD BUDDY BACK P.S I WAS ALSO ARRESTED WITH FLASH AT THE SINGER BOWL AFTER WE WERE GIVEN THE RIGHTS TO SELL THEM THERE BY PROMOTER STEVE BROWN
Posted by JOHNNY BOS @ 01/19/2004 11:44 PM EST
