Craziest out-of-the-ring stories?

In 1918, Billy Miske was told by his doctor that he had Bright’s disease, a kidney related condition, and that he had five years to live, if he was lucky...especially in a sport where punches to those kidneys were likely.
Miske decided to keep the news from his family, only telling his manager, and he continued to box, most notably losing to Jack Dempsey in a third-round knockout in 1920.
Despite that loss to Dempsey, Miske continued to fight and win for the most part, only losing one fight from over twenty between 1921 and 1922, but by 1923 his health was failing and his time was running out.
In November 1923, struggling financially and with a strong desire to give his wife and three kids one last memorable Christmas together, Miske convinced his manager Jack Reddy to get him a fight.

................................

“Jack,” said Billy, “get me a fight.”
“You must be kidding, you’re in no condition to fight,” Jack replied.
“Get me a fight anyway!”
Jack shook his head. “I won’t do it.”
“Look, Jack,” pleaded Billy, “I’m flat broke. I know I haven’t long to go, and I want to give Marie and the kids one more happy Christmas before I check out. I won’t be around for another. Please get me one more payday. I want to make Christmas this year something Marie and the children will always remember me for.”
“Look,” said Jack, “you know as well as I do that if you were to fight in your present condition you might be killed.”
“Sure, but I’m a fighter and I’d rather die in the ring than while sitting home in a rocking chair.”
Jack pulled out his wallet. “Let me help you. How much do you need?”
“No way,” Bill put his hand up like a wall. “I’ve never taken a handout and I’m not gonna start now.”
“Here’s what I’ll do,” Jack said. “You go to the gym and start working out. If you get into any reasonable kind of shape, we’ll talk about getting you a match.”
“You know I can’t do that,” Billy replied. “It’s impossible for me to train, but I’ve got to have one more fight for my family’s sake. Please do it for me. Please.”
Jack sighed. “I’ll live to regret this.” He stuffed his wallet back into his pocket. “Let me see what I can do.”
...............................

His opponent was Bill Brennan, whom he knocked out, taking a $2,400 payday in the process, which he used to make his last Christmas with family unforgettable. Billy bought a piano for his wife Marie, who was an accomplished singer, and piles of gifts for his three children. The next day, Billy called Jack Reddy and asked Jack to take him to the hospital. En route, Billy told Marie for the first time that he was dying.

Miske died on New Year's Day. He was 29 years old.

 

The Champion who literally had an iron chin.

Eugene Criqui whose jaw and part of his chin were shattered in WW1 by a snipers bullet. Surgeons rebuilt his face with iron and titanium.

After the war he resumed boxing. He won the French featherweight title in 1921 and the next year won the European Boxing Union featherweight championship. On June 2, 1923, he beat Johnny Kilbane by a sixth-round knockout in New York City to win the world featherweight title.

Had over 100 bouts with a reconstructed iron jaw and chin.

 

The story of the first meeting between heavyweight champion Max Baer and, unknown to him, Joe Louis.


"Say, kid, if i'm keeping you up, let's both go to sleep." - Everybody laughed, except Joe...


http://classicboxingsociety.blogspot.ie/2015/02/the-story-of-first-meeting-between.html?m=1

 

"At about seven o'clock in the evening on Monday, December 14, his wife met him on the stairs to their flat on West Forty-second Street. The house they lived in still stands, a house of dingy brick with ten walk-up apartments, two on each of its five floors. He told Mrs. Siki he was going "out with the boys" and would be back in time to help her pack for a trip they were making next day to Washington, where Siki was to appear in a theater. Shortly after midnight on the morning of the fifteenth, Patrolman John J. Meehan, of the West Thirtieth Street station, walking his beat along Ninth Avenue, had a brief encounter with Siki, whom he knew by sight. Siki, wobbling a little as he turned under the "L" tracks from Forty-first Street, called to Meehan that he was on his way home. The patrolman told him to keep going that way. At 4:15 A.M., Meehan walked past the intersection of Forty-first Street and Ninth Avenue again and saw a body lying about a hundred feet east of the corner in the gutter in front of 350 West Forty-first. Approaching it, he recognized Siki. The body was taken to Meehan's station house where a doctor pronounced the fighter recently dead from internal hemorrhage caused by two bullet wounds. Detectives examined the deserted block of Forty-first between Eighth and Ninth avenues. In front of No. 346, some forty feet east of where Siki had died, they found a pool of blood on the sidewalk. It seemed to them that Siki might have been trying to crawl home after he was shot. They could not tell just where the shooting had taken place. The gun, a vest-pocket .32-caliber pistol, was lying in front of No. 333, on the other side of the street. Only two bullets had been fired from it. An autopsy showed that these had entered Siki from behind, one penetrating his left lung and the other his kidneys. The autopsy showed something else which surprised Siki's neighbors a good deal when they heard of it: he had suffered from an anemic condition.

At his wife's request; Siki was given a Christian funeral service at the Harlem funeral parlors of Effie A. Miller. The Reverend Adam Clayton Powell delivered a eulogy. However, seven Mohammedan pallbearers in turbans carried his body to the he****, chanting prayers as they did so, while a crowd of three thousand people looked on. The body was clothed in evening dress, as Siki would undoubtedly have wished. His estate, estimated at six hundred dollars, was awarded to his wife in Surrogate's Court after Levy made out an affidavit in her favor. The words of the affidavit while perhaps not strictly accurate in point of fact told the broad truth about Siki's place in the world better, I think, than the editorial that spoke of Achilles, Siegfried, and "natural man." To the best of his knowledge, Levy said, Siki left surviving "no child or children, no father, mother, brother, or sister, or child or children of a deceased brother or sister." He lived as a man without kin or country, roots or guides, and that, it seems to me, is a hard way to do it.

Siki's murder was never solved. There was an abundance of suspects, but none of them suited the police at all until one day in March 1926 a young man of eighteen who lived a block or two from Siki's house was arrested and booked on a homicide charge in connection with the killing. Detectives disguised as truck drivers had heard him making incriminating remarks, they said, over a telephone in a bootleggers' hangout at Tenth Avenue and Fortieth Street. On being arrested, he allegedly signed two statements which gave two different accounts of the crime. One said that Siki had staggered into a coffee pot at Eighth Avenue and Fortieth Street in the early morning of December 15 and had thrown a chair at the eight men, including the deponent, who were gathered there. Deponent ran out of the place in alarm and heard shots fired in the restaurant behind him. The other statement, which fitted the physical facts of the killing a little better, said that a short while after the throwing of the chair, he, the young man under arrest, lured Siki to Eighth Avenue and Forty-first Street on the promise of buying him a drink. At the corner they were joined by two other men, one of whom, as the party walked west on Forty-first, shot Siki in the back. The young man was held in the Tombs for eight months, until the fall of 1926, and then was released by the court without trial, presumably because the state was not satisfied with its case. I might add that in May 1927 this same young man got five to ten years for second-degree robbery, committed in April in the vicinity of Ninth Avenue and Forty-second Street against a tourist from another state. That was clearly the wrong part of town for a tourist to go to."

(by John Lardner)

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Battling Siki (September 16, 1897 – December 15, 1925), aka Louis Mbarick Fall, was an American-Senegalese light heavyweight boxer born in Senegal who fought from 1912–1925, and briefly reigned as the lineal light heavyweight champion after knocking out Georges Carpentier.

 

Ed Beattie, who had open heart surgury when five fights into his professional career and left him with a scar from armpit to armpit...and then went on to continue that career with fourteen straight wins including winning the Canadian Lightweight Title in 1960.

pic here...

http://classicboxingsociety.blogspot.ie/2015/01/ed-beattie-ed-beattie-who-had-heart.html?m=1

 

In one of his sober moments, Mickey Walker had made Doc Kearns promise they would take a trip to Ireland. His father’s people had come from Roscommon, his mother’s from Kerry, and his mail bag was always full of letters from people claiming to be cousins or related in some way, warm, friendly letters, and Mickey wanted to meet them. So Doc gave Walter Friedman a roll of bills and told him to book the trip to the Emerald Isle. **

Friedman was a Broadway character labeled “Good-Time Charley” by Damon Runyon. Friedman didn’t know anybody in Ireland, but he did know a cute little French actress with whom he had been keeping company in London, and she was returning to Paris the next day. Problem solved. He bought a bunch of tickets for Paris and took them to Kearns. Doc was just as happy about the new destination. He didn’t know anybody in Ireland either. **

Mickey had been in Paris a couple of days before he realized that he wasn’t in Ireland, and that the people were speaking French, not Gaelic. By that time he didn’t seem to care. He was having too good a time.

 

After an operation whereby ******'s testicle glands were grafted into his body, Frank Klaus, former Middleweight Champion, will attempt to come back in the roped arena and regain his crown.

"I never was in better physical health in my life than I am right now and I believe my vitality is stronger every day" he says.
Klaus kept the operation a secret at first, no-one but his wife knew that the operation was performed.

"I was advised by a friend who returned from France a few months ago to try the operation" said Klaus. "Through the aid of a prominent Pittsburgh doctor, who is at the head of one of the largest hospitals here, I had the job done."

Klaus has had offers to fight in England and Belgium and will sail for the latter country next month.

(The Milwaukee Journal - Feb 10, 1920)

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"One of the most interesting chapters in the long history of the male hormone involves the medical career of Dr.Serge Voronoff, a Russian-French surgeon who earned an international reputation—and a great deal of money—back in the 1920s by transplanting slices of ****** testicles into aging men seeking a new physiological lease on life. Even today,many people who lived through the 1920s and 1930s will recall the term “****** glands” and what it suggested about the men who sought to have them implanted on or near their own ***ual organs.

The ****** gland operation played a very marginal and rather bizarre role in the sporting life of that period. A former middle-weight boxing champion of the world named Frank Klaus, clearly hoping for a comeback, publicly announced his own operation, but even the simian glands could not revive his career.
Meanwhile, similar operations had been underway at San Quentin Prison in California. From time to time the testicles of executed criminals were transplanted into other inmates who were judged to be gland-deficient. At the prison’s Thanksgiving Games in 1923, sports medical news was being
made. As the medical historian David Hamilton reports: “Gland transplanted inmates did well, and the seventy-year-old John Person, who was carrying an extra grafted testicle, came a good second in the fifty-yard dash, beating several younger inmates with only two testicles.”