Watched his rematch bout with Kid Chocolate today, just highlights but LaBarba really impressed with his aggresive style, but very skilled approach. I was particularly impressed with how he outjabbed Chocolate by getting underneath and popping out his own jab then following up with hard hooks to the body. And Chocolate is someone I rate very highly and LaBarba doing this very much impressed me. Anyone shed some more light on him? Or have any thoughts/commentry on him?
Doesn't seem that way, and that's shame because he was obviously an excellent fighter with a LOT of good to great names on his resume.
LaBarba was given a chapter in Peter Heller's book 'In this Corner'. About a dozen pages or so of him personally discussing his amateur and pro career. Doesn't say much about the rematch with Chocolate, but does tell the story in regards to how he got his left eye damaged just a few days before their title fight in the third meeting. Suffered a detached retina when he was caught by a sparring partner's elbow and eventually suffered the loss of sight in it. After a failed attempt at operating, I'm assuming it's what ended his boxing career at a still relatively young 27 years of age.
He was an olympic gold medalist at flyweight, won a world title at flyweight before moving up, had two fights with chocoate, losing one and wnning one before fighting him for the world featherweight and junior lightweight titles, chocolate won but apparently it should have gone to LaBarba (i cant comment cause i aint seen the fight). he then fought newcastles (England) British Champion Seaman Tommy watson wherew he was a big favorite but watson scored a big upset (the bout was an unofficial no1 contender match for Chocolates World titles). He retired after one more win. Not sure when but at some point in his carreer (aparently peak years) he retired to concentrate on his degree as he wanted to be a architect or something but was eventually talked back into boxing on the grounds that he could make a lot of money fighting for world titles and then go back to his education. nonetheless La Barba made a lot of money which he invested in the stock market only to lose the lot in the wall street crash.
