Post your Stanley Ketchel pictures & stories here!!

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cool story bro

 

Nat Fleischer who knew Ketchel well in New York and wrote a bio about Stanley, tells about an afternoon in New york where Ketchel was driving his expensive auto,and Fleischer was in the passenger seat...Ketchel was weaving in and out of the steel girders under the elevator trains near his training camp in the upper Bronx. NY. Ketchel was defying death shooting at high speeds around the massive steel elevator supports and Fleischer surely thought both he and Ketchel were not long for this world, so Fleischer begged Ketchel to slow down, and Ketchel replied "oldtimer, I know I will be dead before I'm 30 years old ,so what's the use "? Well they survived
his daredevil driving that afternoon, but Ketchel would be dead in a year from a rifle blast in the back...And Fleisher would live another 60 or so years...Fate...

 

This is a story I related previously in the Ketchel/Greb thread:

In the early 1900s, in Brick, New Jersey, there was a very large man who claimed to have beaten Stanley Ketchel in a 'street fight' on the banks of Kettle Creek. He claimed that Ketchel hurt his hand when he struck the body of the man, who was wearing a coat filled with walnuts in the lining. The man then knocked Ketchel "stiffer than a stilliard!"

Of course, nobody believed this tale, even though the man told it as though he himself really believed it. It was considered just another of many tales in local folklore, such as German U-boats being seen in this same creek during WWII with the periscopes hidden by orange crates (a creek I waded across in my teen years).

 

Stan

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Mean & Moody

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Pictured here with Notorious Bandit Emmet Dalton

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What's the best bio on him? I know I haved asked before but there seemed to be no agreement.

 

I posted a little bit of local folklore on the other thread.

In general he was known for being intense, moody, and unpredictable. He fits the profile of someone suffering from major mental illness. Today he'd almost certainly be diagnosed with some sort of personality disorder. Was known for walking around like he was lost in his own world.

Interestingly Ketchel's famous rival Billy Papke was also a strange man. But Papke is less famous, because he was marginally less great and less crazy than Ketchel.

Unlike Ketchel, Papke had a pleasant side to his personality. He was usually very affable, goofy, charming etc. The accounts of how he romanced and eloped with a beautiful heiress (from Quebec I think) are really funny, as the couple had to criss cross the country in disguise as the story of the socialite and ex-middleweight champ became national news and the Papke's became the subject of a police investigation.

Unfortunately Billy mental health slowly deteriorated as his marriage soured and the concussions started to take their toll on his skill. Once he retired he was living in a world of paranoid delusions, obsessed with finding some way to win back his terrified wife, who had long since divorced him. In the end he shot Edna to death in a psychotic rage before turning the gun on himself.

Papke and Ketchel were both linked by blood spilled in the ring and blood spilled in their death's amid smoke and gun powder. Ketchel was a crazy opium addict, but he somehow managed to outfight just about all the non-crazy non-opium addicts.