How good was he ?????? Controversial SD with SRR ! Anyone here ever watched him ??? Burt ?? Tell me something about, please fellas ! :good
His losses to robinson seem very close but i'm not convinced they were robberies. He didn't seem overly keen to give robinson a title shot. To be honest I view his claim as a bit of a joke because cochrane is one of the worst ww lineal champs going and that includes baldomir. Red beat zivic who was coming off a loss a pound or two above the limit and then didn't fight at ww for about 6 years cos of the was before losing to servo who decided to retire quicktime. Maybe my view is harsh and uninformed but my opinion of servo is quite low and I wouldn't put him in my top 40 (give or take) welterweights.
Marty Servo ,whom I never saw in person was a very good lightweight turned WW. He had 50 bouts and lost 2 very close decisions to the great Ray Robinson in 1941-2, a great feat unto itself. He won the WW title in 1946 by koing Freddie Red Cochrane from New Jersey and was going great guns, until his manager Al Weil [ later on managed Rocky Marciano ], did the dumbest thing of his life, matched up little WW champ Servo, with the new middleweight sensational Rocky Graziano, who gave such a beating to the smaller Marty Servo, koing him in the second round,and damaging his beak so severely that Servo was finished as a top fighter at a young age. Were it not for a Ray Robinson at WW, and the foolish match-up with the pre Tony Zale , Rocky Graziano , Marty Servo might have been WW champ for a number of years...A clever, rugged fighter ruined by a mismatch with a prime MW bad boy Rocky Graziano...Such is life...
been doing a bit of research on him recently. seems he was a bit of a mallinaggi of his day. i was always under the impression that the beating he took from graziano left him unable to defend his welter title that bell and robinson went on to fight for as a vacant title...but some of my reading says he vacated before the graziano fight as his manager (al weill) didnt want him to defend against robinson, which has me head scratching a bit as he had the two previous fights, last one being a split descision loss to robinson which seemingly the crowd boo'd.....but i suppose that was a young robinson a few years previous who would have improved a lot in those years. those early 40's and titles were a bit messed up with the war...sometimes hard to judge who was better than who.
I don't really know but I have often wondered if Robinson took it easy on Servo hoping to get a future fight with him perhaps for the title.
