The mysterious saga of Fake Archie Moore

So in June of 1940, a man billed as “Archie Moore of St. Louis” showed up in New Orleans to stop little-known Teddy Clark, a local lad with a 2-0 record, in the eighth round of a scheduled 10-rounder.

Archie weighed 155 1/2, his opponent 156 1/4. Well that’s a tad light for the future light heavyweight champ but he was fighting at middleweight at the time and generally coming in around the 160 mark. And being that the man who would come to be known as the Old Mongoose had 50 fights under his belt by this time, you’d expect him to win handily against a novice.

But this wasn’t, apparently, that Archie Moore.

The real Archie fought two weeks before in Australia and would fight there again two weeks after. This is before the days of convenient commercial air travel and it would have been quite the chore for him to get back and fourth halfway around the world in that span … and probably not lucrative enough to do it — no promoter would pay that freight and the purse in New Orleans (one of three scheduled 10s on that card) wouldn’t have been such that he could pay it out of pocket and profit from it.

Of course, the real Archie did grow up in St. Louis and was associated with that city, so there seems to have been some appropriation going on here.

Boxrec doesn’t recognize this bout on the real Archie’s record. In fact, it lists the winner of this fight as … Fake Archie Moore. We know the bout took place because there was an account in the New Orleans newspaper, the Picayune, listing Archie Moore of St. Louis. The likelihood of it being the Archie we all know is further undercut by the fact that this Archie was originally scheduled to fight Henry Jackson, a journeyman Louisiana welterweight nearing the end of his career whose known weights around this time were 138 and 143 — and Boxrec suggests the opponent switch was because Moore was too heavy for that fight to go forward and Teddy was a substitute. No way Archie is taking a fight against a small welter halfway around the world if he’s expected to cut weight to make 147 or whatever.

This is the only fight on Fake Archie Moore’s record. There are a few other Archie Moores listed on boxrec but they were gone from the scene long before or started long after this character showed up in the Big Easy.

So who was Fake Archie Moore? Is there perchance a historian here who knows the Midwest/St. Louis scene of this time well enough to venture a guess at a smallish middleweight who might have decided to take Moore’s name and ventured to the Deep South while the real Archie was overseas to pick up a payday using his name? I gather you don’t find a lot of complete novices who could win by KO in eight rounds over a guy with two wins without at least a bit of pro experience, although I guess it’s possible … but more likely it’s some pro of the time who said ‘what the heck’ when the call came for need of a guy to fight in NOLA and grabbed the chance.

Any takers? Any speculation? Any guesses?

 

One more tidbit: everyone else on the card was of local vintage. There’s a lightweight named Gene O’Dell of Newark, Ohio, who fought on it — he ended up with 13 pro fights, the first four of which were in Ohio. But he relocated to New Orleans, apparently, because every fight on his record thereafter (starting the bout before this card) took place there.

So it seems unlikely he was Fake Archie’s stablemate/travel partner for this fight, which makes it even more curious. Rarely would a promoter import a guy from so far away (St. Louis today is nearly 10 hours by car with from New Orleans with modern vehicles and interstate system — in those days it was probably a long train ride or boat ride down the Mississippi River) for a single fight that wasn’t a main event or a draw to make it worth the trip.

 

Well, Lee Harvey Oswald was born in New Orleans but less than a year earlier. So he was there but I doubt he was quite ripe to fight pro or that he weighed enough for this venture.

Also, by my research it appears Lee Harvey wasn’t around in 1969 — it appears per Wikipedia that he died some years before from a gunshot wound — so I think we can eliminate him as a suspect from being either Fake Archie or the fake Archie who came to your high school, haha.

 

I’m not going to get off on a tangent when we have a Fake Archie Moore to track down. This imposter needs to be brought to justice, although his career 1.000 winning and KO percentage bears examination.

 

It’s possible but an Archie Moore who also hails from Saint Louis and won his only fight and didn’t fight again seems less than likely.

FWIW, I looked at all cards in St. Louis on Boxrec from 1939-41 to see if may there’s an Arch Moore or an Archibald Moore on an AJ Moore or whatever, as well as those in Kansas City in that span and nothing remotely similar showed up.

He’s a one-fight-and-vanished guy, but I have trouble thinking a debut guy is getting a 10-round fight that far away from home. The most logical assumption here is that he appropriated the real Archie’s name, whoever he was, and to go eight rounds with no experience is a stretch too. I found some amateur results from St. Louis Golden Gloves in some years before and, again, no similar name.

We have a genuine mystery on our hands here.

 

Great finds! Yet curiouser and curiouser.

The Bobby Birch fight certainly makes sense as being the right guy. He was fighting in New York up until mid-1939 before he shows up for a series of bouts in New Orleans (presumably including this one, which is not on his boxrec slate as you noted) and fought there through the end of 1940 before migrating to the Left Coast.

Is the account of the Birch bout from the Picayne newspaper?

 

You seem to have tapped a vein that Boxrec historians have not yet mined with regular activity in this era in Shreveport. Their search shows no activity in that city in the years surrounding 1940 but clearly there was a lot going on.

Here’s what I was able to find on the Palace Park Club: http://shreveportconfidential.blogspot.com/2018/03/palace-park-and-club-66-part-ii.html