Metro Detroit Boxing

By Lindy Lindell

Boxing seemed to spring up in Detroit as early as 1900: heavyweight champ Jim Jeffries and future heavyweight champ Tommy Burns fought that year. With the emergence of Joe Louis in the 1930s and Thomas Mearns in the late 1970s, Motown enjoyed surges of interest in the sport. At the dawn of a new millenium, the presence of three casinos has given the sport another revival of interest in the city.

Metro Detroit Boxing showcases over 180 photographs that reveal not only the personalities who have enlivened the sport in the Detroit area, but also the places in which boxers, trainers, managers, and promoters fought, trained, lived, worked, and recreated. Photographs include where Joe Louis went to school, trained, and fought. Various boxing celebrities, including Muhammad Ali, are caught for the camera, socializing with eminent politicians and other figures of the day.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Arcadia Publishing
• Release date: Sep 18, 2001
• ISBN: 9781439630006

Lindy Lindell

Author Lindy Lindell had only intermittent contact with the sport until January 13, 1979, when he attended a match between Thomas Mearns and Clyde Gray in Detroit's Olympia Stadium. From his nosebleed seat, Lindell saw the boxers as being slightly larger then outsized ants; he determined to get closer and did, respectively as a journalist (initially for Hank Kaplan's Boxing Digest), a Michigan boxing matchmaker, and as a booking agent.

Book preview

Zimmerman.

INTRODUCTION

Michael Eric Dyson, the Loyola University educator and essayist, has said upon publication of his recent book on Martin Luther King, I May Not Get There With You: The True Martin Luther King, Jr., that a moratorium should be called on his I Have a Dream speech because it has become a kind of sound-bite of the consciousness of the American public, and, in particular, to the black-American public. Dyson feels that a typical American’s consciousness slots into the phrases intoned by King in that speech to the sacrifice of everything else the man stood for.

In other words, Americans in general are content to ignore the real story behind the story while basking in the glory of the up-front story which is presented in half-hour and hour installments nightly on prime-time, network television.

The appeal of the sport of boxing to those who enjoy it is largely that it is a one-on-one confrontation between two men caught in a primal situation of time and place that it, for all the ties and associations the individual boxers may have, is still an individual sport that champions the individual and the company/corporation be damned. Those who know something about the inner-workings of the sport realize that such is not often the case, but the potential for that prototypically level playing field is there and if the astute follower of the sport pays attention, the viewer is probably afforded more of what the Las Vegas oddsmakers call pick ’em matchups than the so-called major sports in championship competitions.

Baseball and boxing were the two major sports in America for the first half of the 20th century. With the advent of television in the first part of the century’s second half, boxing enjoyed a surge of popularity that continued for much of the decade of the 1950s. Television was, however, the plastic bag of cocaine that broke once ingested into boxing’s sphere. Why on earth would one want to go downtown to the small club to watch low-level prizefighters (clubfighters) and pay for the expense to do so when one could watch more famous (if not better) fighters on television? Unlike baseball and other sports when television was in its infancy, boxing came across well on the tube because it was no problem to cover a 20-foot square. Boxers such as Chuck Davey of Detroit became media darlings, partly because one could in those days actually follow the careers of boxers on a regular basis because they fought six, eight, sometimes ten times a year. It was possible to follow the careers of Davey and Joe Miceli and Cisco Andrade, none of whom became champion. As for champions, housewives knew who they were for God’s sake. My mother knew squat about boxing, but the tube was on and that’s how she found out and followed the career of Joe Walcott. I want him to win, she said, because he has a lot of kids and he needs the money.

Joe Louis was on the front page of the Detroit dailies (picture and banner headline) when he won the AMATEUR national championship (AAU) in 1934 in the light-heavyweight classification. When Lonnie Zaid of Detroit won the National Golden Gloves Title in the super-heavyweight class in 2001, his name was nowhere to be found, even on the agate-print page. What does this say about a sport that was 1-2 with baseball? Quite simply, boxing has been marginalized to the point of invisibility. The summer of 2001 has been a season of more boxing on the tube since the glory days of the ’50s, when it was on up to four days a week, and with Motor City boxing, up to five days a week. But who watches it? Certainly not the public at large. ESPN2 boxing, the only year-round, weekly boxing show, rarely attains a 1 percent viewership level and is usually in the .6 to .7 range.

Tom Vacca has made more matches than anyone else in the state of Michigan over the last two decades and he said this about two years ago: Boxing is dead. We’re just walking through the ashes now. He exaggerates, but not by much. As recently at the early-1980s there were ten or more middleweights in the Detroit area who were main-event fighters or worthy of same. If there is one now, I can’t think of who it might me. As a booking agent and matchmarker myself, I have trouble thinking of one name of someone who is willing to fight when I get a call and that guy, invariably, can find a reason not to fight; in the 1980s, I could give my caller a choice of several names. I’ve been fired by practically every promotional group in town; the ones that didn’t fire me, didn’t pay. Two boxers from Detroit have turned pro in the last two years and the amateur program is in such shambles that most of the boxers from this area who went to the National Golden Gloves Tournament didn’t have to fight a single time to go there. Guys fight once a year, sometimes less, and call themselves professional fighters. They CALL themselves fighters and they often beg for fights but rarely take them. I know of a case in which an 0-3 light-heavyweight told a well-heeled friend that he was 2-1 so that the friend would manage him and give him money; I know of another case in which Joe Willie DeMeyers told two credulous Detroit bus drivers that an 0-3 heavyweight was an undefeated prospect and convinced them that they should give him $10,000 for his contract; they did and Joe Willie blew town. Tom Vacca is a helluva lot more right than he is wrong.

The foregoing book does not attempt to be a