John Tate

Given all that we know about Tate, I'm still surprised he defeated Coetzee. In South Africa, no less.

Just amazing. I've always believed, if they fought 10 times, Coetzee would win nine of the 10. But they only fought once, and that was the one time Tate held it all together.

 

Indeed, Coetzee in 1979 was a very hungry fighter... but he basically was a plodding heavyweight who had a powerful right hand... Still... I have to give him credit, he stuck with it and eventually won the title. During the early 1980s in the heavyweight division there were 10 or 12 top contenders and only one of them was consistent. In terms of talent, Thomas, dokes and Witherspoon were the top three. Tate was also very talented & surprisingly swift on His feet... But God, that glass chin!

 

I was a big Coetzee supporter back then and would analyze every fighter's pluses and minuses to every big fight and there was nothing there about checking a box saying Tate's chin was iffy. He was done like dinner after the Weaver fight. A fight which he had in the bag for 14 1/2 rounds. But the Coetzee fight he boxed brilliantly, just like the Weaver fight. The Knoetzee fight he counter-punched brilliantly (on a par with Marlon Starling's counter-punching performance against Lloyd Honeyghan). The Bobick, Mercado and Gorosito fights he proved he could really bang. Again, too much is made of Tate's post-Weaver career slide. I still feel he was multi-faceted.

 

John would come to my hometown 40 miles from Knoxville to train sometimes, afterwords
we played some basketball. He was a kind hearted big kid,,,after he got the money the same ole story. Hanger on bums who introduced him to drugs and to be honest John was not a real smart guy and he got taken advantage of. I believed the rumors that after the Coetzee fight he coked up and he changed after the Weaver fight. As has been pointed out Ace Miller was a pretty good teacher,,,but a horrible manager. He should have taken a year off after Weaver and come back against a C- fighter. He was arrested many times after his career was over and died with cocaine in his system.

 

Tate had the reputation for an iffy chin as an amateur, too. In the National Golden Gloves, he was dropped face first to the floor (like he did against Weaver) out cold by Chapman. He was stopped in international dual meets. He was knocked out in the Olympics.

He wasn't supposed to even make the Olympic team. He went on a great run, beating Dokes and Stinson. I give him total credit for the wins he had. He definitely improved on the way up.

Any time I watch that Coetzee fight, I'm still surprised he put on the performance he did.

 

Yes, surprising that Coetzee didn't drop Tate himself with that bionic right hand.

 

Coetzee had some adjusting to do when he stepped up with the big boys.

Tate ragdolled him for the most part and he gassed so bad against Weaver that the fight is almost unwatchable — he’s holding and then pushing Hercules to the ropes and reaching around him with both hands and grabbing the ropes, even took a near-running start a time or two and tried to push him over the ropes. It was horrible to watch and he should have been DQ’d, but wasn’t even warned by his friendly South African referee.

I think a big, imposing guy with fundamentals like Tate beats him 9 out of 10, with maybe one chance for that lucky right hand to get through.

 

Yup ... go to 36:05 here

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Tate was probably prepared for it. Weaver at the time wasn't huge name. John may not have been as focused. The mental part of it. Tate may have been looking ahead to an Ali bout.

 

I'm sure he was a little bit. People still really wanted to see Ali fight. PeanutHead had only been the champion for about 20 months or so at the time of the Tate Weaver Bout. A bout with Ali would have been a massive Payday for Tate.

 

It’s easy for us to sit back and judge because we’ve seen the greatest (not just Ali, but all the greats) who embrace all the pressures, rise up and overcome them.

But this is a young guy who grew up poor making his first title defense in his (adopted) hometown. He’s a local hero. He probably can’t pay for a meal or a drink anywhere he goes. He’s the champ.

And fighting at home, everybody thinks they own a little piece of you — they want tickets, they want autographs, they want to introduce you to their friends to show off that they know someone famous. That **** can wear on you. You go to the gym and all of a sudden there’s people who never showed up when you worked out before hanging around outside wanting to slap hands.

Not to mention every slimeball hitting you up for money, asking you to fund their get-rich-quick scheme, to lend your name to their business, to get you to hire them to carry a towel, etc., etc.

I think he might very well have beaten Weaver if they had fought in Vegas or New York where he didn’t have that pressure. I met him once pretty late in his life when a boxing trainer near Nashville took him in and let him work with kids in the gym. Sweet guy. Very simple. But also pretty drug-ravaged and life-worn. We’ll never know.

 

Andy Ganigan. Now there's a name. Sadly wound up similar to poor old Tate.

 

What a fantastic post. This is the reason I come on here. I remember Tate coming over to the UK to fight Noel Quarless. It was shockingly sad to see him so out of shape and clearly just there for the payday, which probably wasn't a lot anyhow. Even then Noel couldn't stop him.
I guess you can't save a guy from himself.