For the first half of the 20th century there were only two sports that held a national following: professional baseball, which reigned as America’s “national game” and strangely enough, professional boxing, especially the heavyweight division. College football was largely an alumni phenomenon with the exception of Notre Dame and its largely Catholic subway alumni, and the military academies during World War II. Professional football, basketball and hockey were minor-league sports with limited followings. Golf and tennis were sports for the rich.
Heavyweight championship bouts like those of Jack Dempsey or Joe Louis were front-page news and were followed avidly on the radio by millions of listeners during boxing’s Golden Age, 1920-60.
When Joe Louis was champion (1937-49), he was admired not only by African Americans for whom he was their first great sports idol, but also by white audiences. As a 10-year-old in 1946, I listened with my family to the hugely anticipated Louis-Billy Conn rematch of their celebrated bout before the war.
Boxing in those years was filled with popular fighters – not only Conn and Louis, but champions like Sugar Ray Robinson, Rocky Graziano, Tony Zale, and Willie Pep, Sandy Sandler, to mention just a few. Among those figures of boxing’s great era one of the most underestimated and largely forgotten is the heavyweight champion who succeeded Joe Louis and who fought two great bouts with the other dominant boxer of the 1950s, Rocky Marciano. I speak of the now forgotten Ezzard Charles.
Charles was born in Cincinnati in 1921. He was a sensitive young man with an interest in music, especially jazz — he played the bass — and he took up boxing like many young African Americans as a way of making a living during the depression. After a distinguished amateur career, he turned professional in 1940, fighting as a middleweight and quickly established himself as a top contender by winning 17 consecutive bouts before losing his first fight to a former champion, Ken Overlin. After two years in the military, he returned to boxing in 1946 as a light heavyweight. Between 1946-49 he beat every major figure in the light heavyweight division, including future champs such as Joey Maxim, Gus Lesnevich, and the legendary, “Mongoose” Archie Moore three times, once by a knockout. He was unable to get a bout for the light heavyweight title and in 1949 although weighing just 180 pounds he moved up to the heavyweight division. His timing was perfect. Joe Louis had retired, and boxing was looking for a new heavyweight king.
Knockout turned deadly
When Charles entered the heavyweight ranks, he was no longer the clever boxer and hard puncher with a string of knockouts. Everything about his career changed one night in February 1948. Charles knocked out Sam Baroudi, a ranked light heavyweight contender. Charles beat him so badly that he died after the fight. Charles was devastated and was never again the same hard-hitting fighter of the past. Always sensitive for a fighter, he was haunted by Baroudi’s death and wanted to quit boxing but was talked out of it. The legendary trainer, Ray Arcel, summed up what the Baroudi bout had done to Charles: “He is like a good horse who won’t run for you.”
When Charles resumed fighting in 1949 after Louis’s retirement, he made short work of the top heavyweight contenders, winning the championship in a unanimous decision over Jersey Joe Walcott in June 1949. When Louis, desperate for money, mounted a comeback the next year, Charles easily outpointed him to solidify his claim as the heavyweight champ. He idolized Louis and said he couldn’t bring himself to go for a knockout because as he said he “admired the man who did so much for the Negro in boxing.”
Charles successfully defended his title four times over the next two years, but was unimpressive in his victories. He was regarded as colorless, and dubbed a “cheese champion” by some in the press. When he lost his title to Joe Walcott by a knockout in July 1951 it looked like his career was over. Charles fought his way back into contention over the next three years, earning a title bout against the new heavyweight champ, Rocky Marciano.
Redemption at Yankee Stadium
Not much was expected about the bout. Among the boxing press the common view was that Marciano would make short work of Charles. Instead, Charles’s two bouts with Marciano were among the bloodiest battles of the decade.
Before a crowd of 48,000 in Yankee Stadium watched by celebrities like General Douglas MacArthur, Humphrey Bogart, and Bob Hope and over 200,000 watching on pay television, Charles put on a fight that redeemed his reputation.
Instead of hitting and running as in recent bouts, Charles took the fight to Marciano, pounding away at his midsection to wear him out. He stunned Marciano again and again with hard blows to the head, opening a terrible cut over his left eye. But he couldn’t put the champ away. By the eighth round, Marciano began to assert himself and pounded away at Charles. But Charles wouldn’t go down and even won a some of the late rounds. The decision was close, but all three judges gave the fight to Marciano who called it the “toughest fight” of his career.
The fight was regarded as one of the best heavy weight championships bouts of recent years with some writers ranking it alongside Louis’ knockout of Conn in 1941 and Marciano’s crushing of Walcott for the title in 1952. Charles had redeemed himself in the eyes of the press and earned a rematch with the champ.
Three months later Marciano and Charles fought an even more brutal battle. Both men took serious punishment — Charles split Marciano’s nose in the sixth round leaving his left nostril bleeding profusely. Marciano’s cornermen stopped the bleeding but the ring doctor came near to stopping the fight. In the eighth round with the possibility of the fight being stopped, Marciano finally caught up with Charles and knocked him out.
Accolades came after Charles’ death
Charles continued to fight after the Marciano bouts, but was never again a major contender. The two fights with Marciano, however, had reestablished his reputation as a great fighter. He died at age 53 of Lou Gehrig’s disease and didn’t live to see his career re-evaluated. He was elected as part of the inaugural class to the International Boxing Hall of Fame in 1990, along with Sugar Ray Robinson, Muhammad Ali, Rocky Marciano and his idol, Joe Louis.
The website BoxRec, by some complicated metric, ranked Charles pound-for-pound as the No. 1 fighter of all time. I believe that is going too far, but a case can be made that he was the greatest light heavyweight fighter in the history of that division, a view confirmed by the web site The Fight City that ranks Charles ahead of Tommy Loughran, Gene Tunney and Archie Moore. Not bad company for someone once dismissed as a cheese champion.
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