How good was Thad Spencer?

You would have to be a good fighter growing up with the name Thad.

 

The fight was next after Folley, Ali would of Slaughtered him easily. Look at whom spencer lost to prior to the tournament.

 

He was a lazy fiucker who nevertraine and it showed.

 

He was pretty average but strung together a couple of good wins and briefly got considered as a top contender. Poor trainer, drug addict, alcoholic, and serious issues with his wife/kids. After his career he was a promoter for a while and quickly got a reputation to being a cheat, often stiffing people out of money he owed them. Fantasists think he was some kind of a threat but those same people never saw him fight beyond his close victory over Terrell and his blowout loss to Quarry.

 

not too bad; he was inconsistent but had a few notches on his belt and was on the way up; he just fought the wrong fight against Quarry and it ruined his career, he attempted to slug with Mac Foster too, and several other guys who were far more powerful than he. Spencer does his best as a boxer though. I don't think he could have won a title, but he could have had a decent career that may have lasted into the mid 70s. Who knows.

 

He was kind of a head case with limited self-esteem, which caused him to act out and motivated him for a while, but when he got into drugs, it doomed him to eventual failure. He was a sparring partner for Bobo Olson and Eddie Machen in Portland, OR. He learned about infighting from Olson and he picked up quite a few boxing tricks from Machen. He idolized Machen, but Eddie was into cocaine and nightlife, and Thad picked up those habits from him too. He was also handicapped with a bad ankle due to a boyhood accident. He could move forward just fine but he couldn't move backward at all which added to his woes particularly later in his career when he slowed down and word got out that he had trouble handling aggressive fighters.

I only recently learned this stuff (including Machen's drug habits which goes a long way to explaining Machen's mental and physical decline) in a book about Spencer and the 1960s boxing scene in Portland entitled "The Name of the Game" by Adam Heach. It bases a lot of its information on interviews with Willie Ketchum who trained Lew Jenkins and managed Jimmy Carter, Davey Moore, and finally Thad during his prime years. The book was particularly interesting to me because as a young man I exchanged a few words with Willie (and got his autograph) when he managed Dick Gosha for a couple of fights in Seattle. I also met and talked for about 10 minutes with Spencer at a VBA picnic in Portland in the late 1990s or early 2000s.

My apologies to William Walker for misleading him about Machen's use of drugs in an earlier thread.

 

A good fighter that had a lot of potential, but like a lot of guys before him and after him he couldn’t handle prosperity and beat himself outside the ring.

 

I recall reading on here awhile back this fight was never filmed, which I found distinctly unusual. BBC at the time used to show boxing, yes they really did! I think Martin-Spencer was a Mike Barrett promotion, from memory at the Albert Hall and would have been routinely filmed for their delayed transmission on the Wednesday night.
Great if it somehow surfaced.
Another I’d love to see is Tiger - DePaula, evidently copies were destroyed in a fire.

 

Very slick fighter who defeated Ernie Terrell in 1967, in the WBA Tournament, but was stopped by Jerry Quarry on Feb 3 1968, TKO 12.

 

Do me a favor fellas. Don't mention Cocaine anymore...unless you got some. .

JK