The Best of the Rest: 160lbs Tier II Tournie - Round 1 - Fight 2: Joey Giardello UD15 Cocoa Kid

What i've done is i've lifted top tiers out of my top fifty at the poundage and organised them into a seeded tournament to uncover "the best of the rest" at the poundage, with you, the denizens of the world's greatest boxing history forum, casting the deciding vote. The difference between this middleweight tournament and the equivalent at 175lbs is that I've left ALL the guys with no footage in this time. I understand that makes things difficult and for some, frustrating but there are just far too many excellent and intriguing fighters from middleweight history. I understand this makes making a pick very hard, but i hope you'll still place a vote and make a post because obviously without your input the whole thing becomes meaningless.

Pick your man! Write however many details you like or don't in a post below. But maybe try to post, to keep things moving a little bit. You have three days.

And let's be nice. No reason for disagreeing over total fantasies after all!

15 rounds, 1950s rules and ref. Ten points must. Weigh in is 18 hours before the fight.

I'll only vote if it's tied, then I'll decide the result.

Round of Thirty-Two Fight Two: Cocoa Kid vs Joey Giardello


COCOA KID (176-56-11)
The Cocoa Kid, born Herbert Lewis Hardwick, out of Mayaguez, Puerto Rico, is one of the legendary Murderer’s Row of black middleweights who terrorized the division throughout the 1940s. The Kid, more than any of the other men that made up that reluctant cabal of shadowed figures, was drawn into the silent corridors of the back-alleys he was forced to do business in. Rumors of fixes, bribes and coercion stalk him down the years and render his paper-record a curious document, one twisted by a fifth dimension, one we cannot quite see and therefore judge. The single concession given to the mystery surrounding some of Cocoa Kid’s shadier dealings is that it is considered very likely that he is better than the numerous losses his record describes. There is certainly plenty of evidence in support of this.

The crux of the matter is Cocoa Kid’s dominance of Holman Williams. Williams has one of the better resumes in the history of the division and thereby the sport. Cocoa Kid beat him consistently in their shared days in the welterweight Murderer’s Row and he continued to dominate him when the two moved up to middleweight. The measure of their series was 3-2-1,and it swung dramatically between styles and fortunes as Williams, a genius by any measure, sought the road that would lead to mastery over his nemesis; his success was limited. Williams clashed repeatedly with every member of the Murderer’s Row in their shared primes that helped define those halycon days – only the Kid dominated him.

JOEY GIARDELLO (99-27-8)
Joey Giardello was one of the middleweight division’s greatest survivors. After turning professional in the late forties, Giardello spent years slogging his way through a hellish apprenticeship that saw him turn out sixteen times in 1950 alone. Naturally there were losses; naturally, for a fighter of his quality he broke into the Ring rankings in 1952. He would remain there for most of the fifties and for much of the 1960s, including a spell as champion despite his sharing an era with the terrifying Dick Tiger, a fighter he had to face on no fewer than four occasions. Like Tiger, his long wrestle with contendership makes his eventual rise to the summit more and not less impressive.

Giardello’s arrival looked to be anointed by his superb 1954 stoppage of the ranked puncher and favourite Willie Troy in a fight in which Giardello found the point of Troy’s chin from the first, all the while taking the best the Virginian could dish out. Troy was saved by the bell in both the first and the second but Giardello slowly bricked him up with a scything, brutal right-hand and a cuffing, debilitating left all while giving ground. Troy was all in after seven and rightly plucked from danger by referee Al Berl.

Giardello came undone in his next fight with the fearless and often brilliant Frenchman Pierre Langlois but bounced back with a minor controversy in his win over Bobby Jones, also ranked, but tumbled down the rabbit hole of contendership once more after losing out to Charley Cotton; and so it went for a fighter who seemed perennially one fight away from a title shot.

In many ways, Giardello is the anti-Cerdan. He did not, like the Frenchman, go unbeaten, but nor was his middleweight journey tragically cut short. He fought there for years, meeting more ranked men and accruing losses. Where Giardello edges ahead for me is in the twilight of his career when, upon defeating an aged Sugar Ray Robinson, he found himself in the ring for a third time with Dick Tiger with whom he had previously gone 1-1; now the title was at stake.

Aged 33, a veritable pensioner for the era given his sixteen years as a professional behind him, he did not fail in his last best chance at a title; he boxed his way to a decision over Tiger and then cemented his reputation as fearless in matching the destructive Rubin Carter in his first defence. He could not manage another, losing out to a brilliant Tiger in a fourth and final contest in 1965, an astonishing ten years after his defeat of Willie Troy.

Giardello’s career is simply too storied to recount here entirely but he can be surmised as being perhaps not among the greatest champions in middleweight history, but very much among the greatest contenders.

 

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Nobody with a word?

And nobody fancies Cocoa Kid, who at his mercurial battered the legend that was Holman Williams like a drum!

 

Joey Giardello stunned the boxing world with the ease of his defeat of a bewildered Cocoa Kid who appeared in the fight only for a short spell in the tenth and eleventh during which he twice scored with booming right hands to stagger Joey. Throughout though, Giardello was the one who was able to bring the more experienced Kid onto hooks and uppercuts that clearly troubled the Peurto Rican. A stinging jab paid Cocoa Kid off when he attempted to bring Giardello forwards instead of pursuing him and cost the loser rounds as he tried to adjust his strategy, but was unsuccessful in doing so.