Ray Arcel: A Boxing Biography by Donald Dewey

Author:Donald Dewey [Dewey, Donald]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2012-06-09T21:55:00+00:00

Ray Arcel, with cotton swabs in his teeth, works over Tony Pellone between rounds. He has handled more champs - and more victims of Joe Louis - than anyone.

Years later, however, Arcel had a more nuanced, sentimental opinion of Jacobs, undoubtedly influenced by the interim ascent of James Norris, a pure foe, as professional boxing's primary business figure on the East Coast. As recorded by Budd Schulberg in Ringside: A Treasury of Boxing Reportage, Arcel was quoted as saying: "He was a lone operator. He played all his cards close to the chest. I don't think he ever let anybody get very close to him.... Some of the biggest people in this city call him Mike, and yet he hasn't got a single close friend."

And again: "Sure, maybe it was a monopoly and all that, but Mike knew how to fill a house. And the more money he made for himself, the more he made for our fighters.... He drove the toughest bargain he could, but once he said you had a deal, it was like money in the bank. You didn't need a contract. If Mike said 25 percent, he didn't pay off on twenty-four and a half. He stabilized this business."6

Arcel's admiration for Blackburn, on the other hand, knew no nuances. It was also notable because he often brought up the trainer's name without prompting and more often than not without including him in a laundry list of fellow professionals worthy of praise. Speaking with Frank Graham in 1946 some years after Blackburn's death, he said about the first significant black trainer:

I don't have to say it because everybody has known about it for a long time. But Blackburn was the greatest trainer and teacher of boxers in our time, maybe anybody's time. As a fighter, he fought most of the good ones from Joe Gans to Sam Langford and Gunboat Smith. That was covering quite a range in weight since most of the time he was a real lightweight and I don't think he ever weighed more than 160 pounds going into a ring, and he must have been as smart a fighter as ever lived. Nobody that I've ever known had the sound boxing knowledge he did, and no one I've ever known had the knack for teaching young boxers that he did.7

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.