Fritzie Zivic and Al "Bummy" Davis

Couple of articles related to these two which i found quite an enjoyable read....


Zivic And The Bright-red Cadillac


It was the afternoon of October 4, 1940 and a flat-nosed little man named Fritzie Zivic pressed his nose even flatter against a large plate-glass window on New York's Eighth Avenue, staring at the shiny new automobiles on the showroom floor. As a kid in the Lawrenceville section of Pittsburgh, Fritzie had pressed his nose against bakery windows in the same hungry way. Now he was to take on Henry Armstrong in Madison Square Garden, and the prize, for Zivic at least, was not so much the welterweight championship of the world as a new Cadillac.

If he won the title, he was prepared to blow the entire purse on a car. He walked into the showroom, his eye on a bright-red convertible. The salesman took one look at the battered fighter's face, at the mail-order suit—then turned his back and fled.

"I followed him into the office," Zivic remembers, "and tried to tell him that I was fighting for the championship of the world in Madison Square Garden in just a few hours. He ignored me."

Back at his hotel, Zivic ate his last meal before the light—steak, rare, and baked potato—and tried to take a nap. "I couldn't sleep," he says, "but it wasn't because I was nervous about fighting Armstrong. I just couldn't sleep, thinking about how I would look behind the wheel of that Cadillac."

Zivic was still dreaming about the new car when the fighters were introduced to the crowd. The referee, Art Donovan, gave his instructions—and Armstrong promptly belted Zivic back to reality. "When Armstrong started punching me," says Zivic, "I saw the car turn and head for Chicago. By the time we finished the seventh round, the Cadillac had passed California and was on a boat to Hawaii. Armstrong was belting me around pretty good. As I came out of my corner for the eighth round, that car was close to halfway around the world."

Shortly after the start of the eighth, however, Armstrong hit Zivic with a rabbit punch while moving out of a clinch. Fritzie Zivic had never been mistaken for a boy scout in the ring. He promptly stuck a thumb in Armstrong's eye in retaliation, and the rest of the round rapidly went downhill from there. Eventually, Donovan gave up all hope of restoring order. "If that's the way you boys want to fight, it's all right with me," he said.

"When the referee said that one sentence," Zivic remembers, "the Cadillac turned around and started back on the boat to the United States.

"By the 10th round, the Cadillac was safely in California and headed back East. With the sound of each bell, it was closer to my garage. When the final bell rang, I was all set to drive that big car down the streets of Pittsburgh."

The announcer bellowed over the microphone, "The winner and new champion of the world, Fritzie Zivic."

Zivic collected his share of the purse in cash and went across the street to his room, dumping the money on the bed. Then he bounced the bedspread and watched the bills float around the room. "I thought I was the richest man in the world," he says.

Zivic had a long career after winning the championship—he had his last fight in 1949—but he always treated money as he did in the hotel room the night after the fight.

Red Cochrane won the title from Zivic, and after Fritzie's career was interrupted by wartime service he never did get a chance to win the title back.

Today, Zivic is a familiar figure in Pittsburgh. He sells automobiles, something which he should have learned all about the night of the first Armstrong fight. That was the night he was supposed to achieve his dream of owning a Cadillac.

"You know," he says, "I never did get it. Some smart salesman collared me in the locker room right after the fight and sold me an Oldsmobile."

 

The Question: Fritzie Zivic Says You Have To Fight Dirty To Be A Ring Champion And Mentions Some Prime Examples. Do You Agree With Him?

JACK DEMPSEY
Former heavyweight champion
Los Angeles
That's a ridiculous charge for Zivic to make. Where does he get his facts? A fighter can be rough without being dirty. Sure I was rough, plenty rough, but never dirty. I probably hit some foul punches, but never intentionally. The better a fighter a man is, the more of a gentleman. Look at Gene Tunney.

JACK LESCOULIE
Television personality
Whittier, Calif.
Nonsense. Henry Armstrong held three world titles and never made a dirty move. The same goes for Joe Louis, who wasn't even mean, except in his second fight with Max Schmeling, who had previously knocked Joe out. Carmen Basilio knows every dirty move in the ring but never uses them.

GENE TUNNEY
Retired undefeated heavyweight champion
Stamford, Conn.
That's a stupid statement. No one can talk about dirty fighting better than a dirty fighter. The one way not to become a great fighter is to be a dirty one. You can't point to any champion in the history of the game and say he was a dirty fighter. Dirtiness and championships simply can't be mixed.

WILLIAM KEEFE
New Orleans Times-Picayune
Sports editor
I don't believe it. There are many champions who fought clean—Tony Canzoneri, Pete Herman, Freddy Welsh from Wales, Jack Johnson, etc. Sandy Saddler, a champion, was the dirtiest fighter I ever saw. Jack Dempsey's relentlessness made him appear dirty at times. But what foul play is there in that?

RED SMITH
New York Herald Tribune
Sports columnist
There have been many deliberate violations of the rules. There's no question that Willie Pep, Sandy Saddler and Jack Dempsey paid little attention to the rules, but I wouldn't call them dirty fighters. Marciano has been accused of dirty fighting. I disagree. He may have been carried away with a fight, but his morals weren't.

JIMMY BURNS
The Miami Herald
Sports editor
Well, fighting is a pretty primitive business. A man has to fight savagely to win a championship and hold it. Where do you draw the line between savage and dirty fighting? How much difference is there? Rocky Marciano has hit after the bell but it was unintentional. Such a thing often happens in the ring.

NAT FLEISCHER
New York Ring magazine
Editor and publisher
I violently disagree. Zivic used foul tactics, but no champion I ever watched was a dirty fighter. Dempsey was occasionally called a dirty fighter because he never went to a neutral corner and he would crouch over a fallen opponent for the kill. He was within his rights; there was no neutral-corner rule at that time.

FURMAN BISHER
The Atlanta Journal
Sports editor
It all depends on what you call "dirty." Zivic, Saddler and Galento were real rough boys, but I never called the native viciousness of Dempsey, Marciano and Louis dirtiness, which as I see it, is merely a rank, raw substitute for the killer instinct in fighters who don't have it. Boxing, after all, is a tough sport.

TOM SILER
Knoxville News-Sentinel
Sports editor
I don't agree. Joe Louis was perhaps the greatest heavyweight. He won without dirty tactics. So did Gene Tunney, Tony Zale, Barney Ross, Tony Canzoneri, Benny Leonard and many others. I'm sure that the champions who used dirty tactics could have been champs without the fouls.

BEN WOOLBERT
Los Angeles Examiner
Sports editor
No. Most champions are clean fighters. Rocky Marciano was rough, but he wasn't dirty. I personally know that it hurts him to hear someone say he was a dirty fighter. All that is necessary is to inform the public, and any dirtiness or abuse will be cleaned up. Habitually dirty fighters have never had much of a following.

 

Below The Belt With Bummy


New York's Madison Square Garden—the one at Eighth Avenue and 50th Street, that is—has seen its last athletic contest. There's a new Garden now and they're going to show movies or rent apartments or do some such quiet thing where the fight fans used to yell. But it will be a long time before the echoes of some of the wild nights at the old Garden die down. Close your eyes tight now, and maybe you can hear the screams of the crowd the night Bummy Davis met Fritzie Zivic there some 27 years ago.

Like those of Ivan the Terrible, Charles the Mad and Eric the Red, the nom de guerre by which one Abraham Davidoff (alias Al Davis) entered history is both lurid and misleading. Bummy earned it as a kid along Livonia Avenue in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn. Yet his reputation as a "dirty fighter" rose out of a single 154-second rampage in the Garden in 1940. Before that, Bummy's deportment in the ring was as exemplary as that of any other man who earns his living trying to convert the gray matter encased in the skull of an opponent into runny gelatin. Bummy's real sin was artlessness.

His opponent on that memorable night was a boxer who pursued his craft with genuine deviousness. To poke a soggy thumb into a clear blue eye, to grasp an unwary head and pull it down into the path of a short uppercut, to lay open an eyebrow with a well-placed butt—these were the grace notes with which Fritzie Zivic embellished his performance.

The best of Pittsburgh's five fighting Zivic brothers, Fritzie had boxed for 10 years all over the country with indifferent success. In the course of his travels he had inflicted considerable damage with his various extremities on local heroes. In turn, his nose had fronted such violent storms that Red Smith likened its shape to "a mine cave-in."

Fame and a modest fortune reached Fritzie simultaneously in October 1940, when he met and defeated Welterweight Champion Henry Armstrong in New York. Exhausted after 15 brutal rounds and blinded by his own blood, Armstrong could not withstand Zivic's closing surge and lost the title. Six weeks later, on November 15, Zivic was matched against Bummy Davis in a non-title bout.

The first round was a true measure of the ability of the two fighters. Davis, his record nourished by soft touches in the small clubs and sustained by a truly lethal left hook, was face to face with a thoroughly experienced champion. He rushed Zivic crudely, trying to put over his one effective punch. Zivic simply moved away and stabbed Bummy with long left jabs. Occasionally, as Bummy bore in, Fritzie hit him with straight rights to the head. At the end of one round the blood was bubbling out through Bummy's thick lips.

The treatment dished out in those first-round clinches proved to be more than a proud son of Brownsville could endure. At the bell for round 2, Davis walked across the ring and fired a left hook that landed, according to one reporter, "about a foot above Zivic's knees." Zivic's face screwed up in pain, then settled into righteous indignation as he glanced at Referee Billy Cavanagh. Cavanagh was looking elsewhere.

Davis returned to the attack. Another low blow brought a chorus of boos from the crowd. Zivic backed away, but Davis pursued him, ripping two more left hooks into his groin. Fritzie, his face contorted with pain, hopped stiffly, first on one leg, then on the other. He fired back at Davis, rocking his head and drawing blood again from his mouth. But Bummy, in his passion, was impervious to punishment. He crowded Zivic, hooked him low, shifted his attack to the ribs and then lowered it once more. Only once did Referee Cavanagh warn him to keep his punches up.

Most of the crowd was standing on chairs now, roaring protestor encouragement. A wadded newspaper landed in the ring, then somebody's hat. The referee kept his fascinated gaze on the fighters, like a young lab assistant observing a couple of ferocious insects. General John J. Phelan, the elderly chairman of the New York State Athletic Commission, left his seat and toddled through the aisles outside the ring, looking for all the world like an agitated Mr. Pickwick as he frantically wigwagged at the referee. Davis dug another left into Zivic's groin. Finally, at 2:34 of the second round, jolted from his rapture by the sight of General Phelan, Cavanagh stopped the fight.

Or, at least, he tried to. But Bummy was not yet ready. His answer to the referee's restraining gesture was to bounce a left hook off Zivic's skull. Faced with a more orthodox attack now, Zivic quickly solved it by hooking Davis twice in the face, bloodying his nose. Handlers from both corners, as well as a squad of burly special cops, poured through the ropes and tried to drag the berserk Davis to his corner. Bummy, his arms pinioned now, aimed a kick at Zivic, who had plunged into the struggling mob. Missing the intended target area on Fritzie's trunks, the kick instead caught Referee Cavanagh in the thigh. Bummy finally was hauled, spitting and cursing, from the ring.

The fight was awarded to Zivic on a foul. Even while the excited crowd streamed out of the Garden, journalists and politicians prepared to publish their outrage to the world. General Phelan, calling the fight "the most disgraceful thing I ever saw," banned Davis from boxing in New York state "for life."

Unfortunately for his own well-being, Davis was offered too many opportunities to redeem himself. Having joined the Army shortly afterward, he was granted a pass by his commanding general and a pardon by General Phelan on condition that he fight Zivic again for an Army charity. In a bout notable for its strict adherence to the commission's regulations, Zivic dealt Davis a savage beating and stopped him in the 10th round. But this orthodox defeat did nothing to break Bummy's rebellious spirit. Some four years later he was shot to death as he charged, bare-handed, into an armed gang trying to hold up the store of a friend in Brownsville. He was still trying to get that left hook across when he went down.

 

Last Round For Bummy

Willie and Charlie Beecher's Gym was located back of a poolroom on Livonia Avenue in the Brownsville section in Brooklyn. It was a prizefight gym where Bummy Davis, Lou Feldman, Bernie (Schoolboy) Friedkin and half a hundred other ring figures first learned their trade. For over 20 years its walls echoed the drum fire of punching bags and the thud of falling bodies and it smelled of sweat and liniment. Now it is no more. About 10 years ago the poolroom changed hands. The fellow who bought it had no interest in boxing and he wanted more room for more tables. So the fighters had to move out.

The Brownsville section was a melting pot like the lower East Side, a pushcart and pickle-barrel marketplace, an area that is known to most people as the home ground of Murder, Inc. But Danny Kaye and Phil Silvers came from Brownsville, as did lots of doctors, lawyers and legitimate businessmen.

Charlie Beecher was a good featherweight boxer in the era of Johnny Kilbane. Brother Willie was a topnotch lightweight just before the rise of Benny Leonard. They were both good teachers of boxers, but the presiding genius of the gym in its heyday was a character called Froike. His real name was Benjamin Katz, but he had boxed under the name of Frankie Kane and Froike is the Yiddish equivalent of Frankie. At least 10,000 kids must have passed through the gym. Every boy who grew up in the neighborhood was in Beecher's at sometime or another, either trying to be a fighter or trying to manage fighters, or training them or just watching them.

To get to Froike you approached the dingy building in the shadows of the Livonia Avenue El and scurried up the stairs past the pool tables and characters like Benny Toomel, Fats Yerna, Smoke, Mousey and Munis the Shylock. You always wore your long pants because if you wore knickers you were sure to get the bounce; kids weren't allowed in the poolroom.

Froike could have been a rich man. There's no telling how much money he could have made because he had from the beginning many good fighters who went on to Madison Square Garden main-event stardom. He could have kept them and made a lot of money with them, or he could have sold them, keeping a small piece of their earnings.

But Froike was a simple man. He always felt that in the boxing game he was a small man and he looked with awe on managers like Joe Jacobs, Hymie Caplin and Pete Reilly. When he realized that he had a promising fighter he would tell one of the famous managers about the prospect.

"Take him," he would say. "Maybe he will be a great fighter someday. I can't do any more for him. He needs a manager like you."

The only fighter he stuck with long enough to work his corner in Madison Square Garden before being squeezed out was Al (Bummy) Davis. Davis had a formidable left hook, which earned him many thousands of dollars. It didn't make him popular though. He was one of the most hated main-eventers ever to fight at the Garden.

Froike started to teach Bummy boxing when Davis was about 13 years old. Amateur boxing had a tremendous following, especially in Brooklyn, with places like the Trinity Club, Knights of Columbus and Golden City Park in Carnarsie. As in the case of Walker Smith ( Sugar Ray Robinson), the borrowing of an older boy's baptism certificate in order to get an AAU card was a common practice. When he was not quite 15 years old, more than a year under the legal requirement, Albert Abraham Davidoff climbed into the ring and was introduced as Giovanni Pasconi, unattached, 126 pounds. As Pasconi, he won a lot of bouts by knockouts. He got his nickname of "Bummy" after an AAU inspector heard him in a Yiddish conversation with his father. (Abraham in Yiddish is Ahvroom, which was corrupted to Boomy and then Bummy.)

As a pro Davis knocked out one opponent after another. He began to attract a tremendous following and was soon boxing star bouts as a lightweight. A meeting between Davis and Schoolboy Friedkin, who had preceded Bummy into the pro ranks by a couple of years, was arranged. Friedkin also had a large following, and the biggest single event for the entire Brownsville neighborhood until the U.S. entered World War II was the night in 1938 when the pair met at the Garden. They were first matched to box outdoors in Dexter Park. It rained on one Monday night and was postponed. It rained again and again, and the fans were roused to a tremendous pitch of suspense.

Mike Jacobs bought the ready-made attraction from Johnny Attell, the Dexter Park promoter, and put it on at the Garden. Bummy was not old enough to box over six rounds but Davis vs. Friedkin topped the card. Everybody from Brownsville who possibly could be there was jammed into the gallery.

Davis didn't need six rounds anyway. Friedkin briskly outboxed him in the first round and the second round was maybe even. Bummy was stronger and midway into the fourth round he looped a left hook to Friedkin's jaw to knock him out. Davis was on his way to loads of money, bad press notices, some good wins, a couple of frightful shellackings—and death at the age of 25.

Always with him along the way, however, was his reputation as a mean fighter. Davis fought in the ring as he did on the sidewalks of Brownsville when he was growing up and he occasionally forgot the rules. He finally went too far the night he met Fritzie Zivic in what the New York Times called "one of the most disgraceful exhibitions in the history of boxing." After Zivic jabbed him in the eye with his thumb at the start of the second round, Bummy went berserk and punched Zivic below the belt ten times before the referee disqualified him.

Despite this display, Froike always championed and excused Davis. "Bummy wasn't a bad kid," he once said. "He was really a good kid, but his life was mixed up and nothing ever worked out right for him. They put him in with Tony Canzoneri, which they shouldn't have done, because Tony had been a great champion but now he was washed up. And when Bummy knocked Canzoneri out everyone hated him.

"Bummy belted a guy in a candy store even though I think the guy was asking for it. Then came his dirty, foul fight with Zivic at the Garden. Everything went wrong for him right down to the night four stickup guys walked into the bar that Bummy had just sold to his pal Dudy. No local hood would of thought of sticking up what had been Bummy's joint. The tough guys knew him and respected him and the joint was off limits. But some out-of-towners have to come and Bummy told them they shouldn't stick up Dudy. You know the rest."

One of the gunmen told Davis—in very offensive language—to mind his own business and to get over to the wall and put his hands up. No man talked to Bummy Davis like that and got away with it. So the graceful left hook made an arc through the air accurately for the last time. The stickup man dropped, his jaw broken in two or three places, but he held onto his gun. He retaliated with a slug that pierced Bummy's throat. The gunmen lammed out the door with Davis going right after them. He died outside on the sidewalk.