Which boxer do you feel most sorry for?

LukeO · Feb 26, 2010

hagman1989 said: ↑

its ok fell im finished with this idiot anyway
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Oh snap! you showed me!!!

JM22 · Feb 26, 2010

Ali.

BoxingFanNo1 · Feb 26, 2010

Mind Reader said: ↑

Didn't he also have to turn to pro wrestling??? I think his name was the "Brown Bomber" and later died penniless. Certainly a sad story, for a true great of the sport.
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I know can you believe it. The guy earned something like 1/4 of what he should have.

He gave money to friends and family but also failed in business a couple of times which cost him dear. But it was the IRS who couldn't get enough. But still, no man like that should ever be a door greeter.:-(

It's crazy to think that here we are 50 years later and it's simmilar with Tyson and Holyfield, but you'll never see them door greeting.

Thread Stealer · Feb 26, 2010

Mind Reader said: ↑

Didn't he also have to turn to pro wrestling??? I think his name was the "Brown Bomber" and later died penniless. Certainly a sad story, for a true great of the sport.
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He also got addicited to cocaine and grew so paranoid that he was convinced that people were listening in on him through the air conditioning vents in his hotel room.

He went to a mental institution a little after that.

mightyd40 · Feb 26, 2010

not a single shout out to gerald mccllelan? i am surpised, off of the list i would pick either tyson, louis or taylor

Thread Stealer · Feb 26, 2010

http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/vault/article/magazine/MAG1016550/1/index.htm

Fighting Back
Hall of Fame heavyweight Jimmy Bivins is on his feet again, only a year after he was found neglected and near death, a virtual prisoner of his own family

William Nack

At 6:30 p.m. on April 6, 1998, two rookie patrolmen from Cleveland's Sixth Police District, Christopher Gibbons and Matthew Putnam, answered a call from social-service workers to pick up a six-month-old child whom they believed was suffering from neglect. By the time Gibbons and Matthews entered the house of the infant's parents on Glencoe Road in northeast Cleveland, the mother, Josette Bivins-Banks, had fled with the baby out the backdoor. This left the two rookies facing her belligerent husband, an ex-con named Darrell Banks, who told them they could not have the child. "You're gonna have to arrest me," Banks said. So the cops obliged him, reading him his rights as they cuffed him for "obstructing official business."

As Putnam walked Banks to the squad car, Gibbons stayed behind to search for the infant. At one point, he says, Banks's seven-year-old son pointed upstairs and asked, "You know who's up there?"

"No, who?" said Gibbons.

"That's Jimmy Bivins up there," the boy replied.

Gibbons vaguely recognized the name, but it meant little to him until he saw the boxing pictures lining the walls of the stairway as he climbed to the second floor. Moments later, he was approaching an open bedroom door. The room was almost dark, with blankets thrown over the windows and a single socket hanging bulbless from the ceiling. The only light came from a small television screen on which was playing an episode of The Simpsons. Gibbons stood at the door, his eyes ad******g to the darkness. He winced at the foul, acrid odor that suffused the air.

Stepping inside, Gibbons glanced about the room, from the TV to a single bed off to the side. There, through the reek, he saw a pair of bony hands. He drew closer until he made out the emaciated figure of a man in repose. "I thought he was dead," Gibbons recalls.

"Jim?" Gibbons whispered. "Jim? What's goin' on?"

The 78-year-old Bivins raised his head, brightening when he saw the uniform. "Oh, hey!" he said. "How are you?"

The patrolman asked him how he was doing. "Oh, not too good," the old man said. "I haven't been eating too well lately."

Gibbons leaned over and looked closer. Bivins was covered with bedsores; his clothes and blanket were soaked by urine and flecked with excrement. Frail and sticklike, with sunken cheeks and with skin as dry as parchment, he looked to Gibbons like a Somalian refugee or a death-camp survivor. The middle finger of his right hand was cut to the bone and crudely bandaged, and Bivins kept cradling it in his lap as though in pain. His legs were swollen, and he did not have the strength to rise. He knew his name and Social Security number but not what year or day it was. "I was kind of horrified," Gibbons says. "I'd never seen a person alive in that condition."

The officer tried to roll up the sweatpants that Bivins was wearing so he could photograph the old man's legs, but the calves were so swollen that the pants "looked like sausage casings," Gibbons says. "I tried, but I couldn't do it." Later Gibbons went out to the car and told Putnam what he had found. "We gotta call the paramedics," he said.

Two hours later Bivins was being wheeled into Meridia Euclid Hospital, where he began a long struggle to survive.

Bivins's weight that day, 110 pounds, was nearly 75 pounds below his fighting weight of the mid-1940s, when he was the No. 1-ranked heavyweight contender in the world. (The undisputed tide, held by Sgt. Joe Louis, had been frozen while he served in the Army during World War II.) Over a 15-year professional career, from 1940 until 1955, Bivins had 112 fights, of which he won 86, 31 by knockout. He whipped eight men who had been, were or would soon become world champions, from Joey Maxim to Ezzard Charles to Archie Moore. A graceful, smart and very quick ambidextrous boxer schooled by the renowned Cleveland trainer Whizzbang Carter, Bivins took on everyone and feared no one.

Indeed, when he fought his way through a 26-bout undefeated streak, beginning with a decision over Maxim on June 22, 1942, and ending when he lost a split and much-disputed decision to future heavyweight champ Jersey Joe Walcott on Feb. 25, 1946, Bivins ruled a boxing mecca. Cleveland was the hometown not only of Bivins but also of Maxim and former light heavyweight champ Anton Christoforidis, and the three young fighters used to pack the city's old Arena. Bivins loomed nearly as large on the national sporting scene as that other black hero from Cleveland, Jesse Owens.

Bivins was born in Dry Branch, Ga., but moved to Ohio as a boy with his parents and three sisters. Jimmy came of age in the Depression, tracking his father, Allen, from job to job, whether it was cutting wood or cleaning and firing up boilers. "My dad took me everywhere he went," says Bivins. "He taught me boiler work until I could do it as well as he could. He bought a Model T Ford and taught me how to drive when I was eight years old."

The family lived in an integrated, middle-class neighborhood on the east side of Cleveland, and Jimmy, like many of that city's youths in the 1930s, idolized Owens. "I used to go out and watch Jesse practice running at East Tech," Bivins recalls.

The pivotal event of his youth came the day an uncle took him to the Globe Theater to see former heavyweight champion Jack Johnson. "Johnson fought an exhibition," Bivins says. "He was after the money then. I said, 'I want to be like him.' "

Bivins was an honor student, and a cocky one at that. He says, "I used to hold up my homework in class and say, 'Can you beat this?' I was smarter and more studious than the other kids. They chased me home every day. They never could catch me. One kid chasing me was a Golden Gloves fighter. I got to a place where I couldn't run anymore, so I stood and fought. I beat the stew out of him! The day I stopped runnin' is the day I started fightin.' "

That led him into the arms of Carter. "Whizzbang taught me the manly art of self-defense," Bivins says. After an amateur career in which he won two city Golden Gloves titles, Bivins turned pro as a welterweight on Jan. 15, 1940, and stopped a pug named Emory (KO) Morgan in the first round at Cleveland Public Hall. His first paycheck: $25. Bivins had 20 fights in '40 and won 19, rising to the middleweight division along the way and becoming the world's No. 6-ranked contender. Except for 1944, when he had only one fight before entering the service, Bivins fought at least eight times a year from 1941 through 1945, and the record shows him beating one roughneck after another, including former middleweight champions Billy Soose and Teddy Yarosz and former light-heavyweight champ Melio Bettina.

When he first fought the great Charles, on Jan. 7, 1943, as a light heavyweight, Bivins tipped the scales at 174½ pounds, nine more than Charles. Bivins put the future heavyweight champ on the deck four times and won nine of the 10 rounds. "He was tryin' to knock me out, but he couldn't hit me," says Bivins. "I was slippin' and slidin' with Ezzard Charles."
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Thread Stealer · Feb 26, 2010

http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/vault/article/magazine/MAG1016550/3/index.htm

After whipping Tami Mauriello in a 10-round decision on March 12, 1943 (Mauriello's pal Frank Sinatra sang the national anthem before the fight and wept afterward), Bivins was crowned the "duration heavyweight champion of the world," which is to say, the unsanctioned champ until the war ended. In a ceremony held that July, the spiffily uniformed Louis presented Bivins with a crown bearing the title DURATION CHAMP. "You're the champ while I'm gone," Louis said. But then Louis added that in his first bout after the war, he wanted to fight Billy Conn, the white light heavyweight who had nearly beaten him in '41.

Bivins fought on, facing whomever Whizzbang put in a ring with him. "One of the truly great fighters," says 86-year-old Larry Kent, who trained Sugar Ray Robinson for 14 years and sent Curtis Sheppard against Bivins four times, losing them all. "And Whizzbang, what a character! The both of them thought alike. Nobody wanted to fight the guy. Anytime Bivins and Whizzbang got offered a fight, they took it. Bivins met every situation. If he was in there with a rough guy, he boxed. In there with a boxer, he became a rough guy. He made all the adjustments."

Bivins may have been the greatest modern heavyweight who never got a shot at that crown. Or at any title, for that matter, after the '39 Golden Gloves. "They froze me out," he says. "A mob guy came down from New York and told me I'd get this or that if I 'played ball.' I told him I was a fighter, not a ballplayer."

On March 11, 1942, in a nontitle bout against reigning light heavyweight champion Gus Lesnevich, Bivins won so easily that he killed any chance he had to fight Lesnevich for the title. "We'll never fight Bivins again!" one of the beaten boxer's managers, Lew Diamond, cried. "He's too good for Lesnevich."

Bivins stiffened Moore, a future light heavyweight champ, in Cleveland on Aug. 22, 1945, knocking him down seven times on the way to a sixth-round knockout. Even so, Bivins was not the same swift fighter he had been before his year of service in the Army. The next year, at age 26, Bivins lost three straight decisionsto Walcott, Lee Q. Murray and Charles. He never beat Moore again, losing to him four times before the end of his career.

Louis, meanwhile, was true to his word: After mustering out of the Army, he passed over the No. 1-ranked contender, Bivins, and fought Conn again, knocking him out. Then Louis walked through Mauriello, Sinatra's pal. Louis's handlers were loath to match him against black heavyweights. He defended his title 25 times, but on only three occasionstwice against Walcott and once against John Henry Lewisdid Louis risk it against a black man.

Bivins still savors the memory of the day he finally fought Louis. The former champ had come out of an 18-month retirement in search of his old crown, and on Aug. 15, 1951, he fought Bivins in Baltimore. This was to be Bivins's biggest payday, $40,000, and he meant to earn it. Louis announced at the weigh-in that Bivins would fall in four. "You got to hit me first, Big Red," Bivins told him, using the fighters' nickname for Louis.

Staying in front of Louis, Bivins baited him with calls of, "Hit me if you can, Big Red!" He still laughs about it today. "Around the sixth round," he says, "we were in a clinch, and I told him, 'I'm still here, Big Red.' Made him so mad he could've jumped out of his skin." Louis won the fight on all cards, but he failed to land a damaging blow, and almost 50 years later Bivins squirms with joyous indignation when he recalls that fight: "Shoot, how is he gonna knock me out if he can't even hit me! Shoot!"

Bivins left the prize ring in 1955 and joined the Teamsters. For the next 28 years he drove a delivery truck. Like many old fighters, however, Bivins never really left the gym. He spent his leisure time training fighters for the Golden Gloves and the Olympic trials. In the 1960s he trained Gary Horvath to four Ohio Golden Gloves titles. In 1988, Bivins took a 38-year-old Cleveland cop named Jim Davidson, who had never had any formal training as a fighter, and in only six months molded him into the 175-pound boxing champion at the National Law Enforcement Olympics. "I'd never have won if it hadn't been for him," Davidson says of Bivins. By 1995, the year his wife, Elizabeth, died, Bivins had a band of former students and gym rats who were devoted to him.

Not long after he was widowed, Bivins moved in with the Banks familyhis daughter, Josette; her husband, Darrell; and their four childrenand over the ensuing two years his friends and his sisters Maria and Viola began to see less and less of him. By mid-1997 they were finding it difficult to reach him at all. The Reverend Emory Kirk, a longtime friend of Bivins's, says that when he showed up at the house on Glencoe Road to pay the old man a visit, Josette told him he could not talk to her father, and Kirk threatened to call the police. One of Bivins's boxing friends, a cabbie named Tom Mangan, recalls that three times he arranged to take Bivins to the gym. "Jimmy's not feeling well," Darrell Banks would tell Mangan when he called to say he was on his way to pick Bivins up. "He can't go to the gym."

Horvath says that he tried repeatedly to see Bivins, his mentor, but that Banks would turn him away. "It got worse and worse," Horvath says. "[Banks's] stories and his alibis." In the fall of '97, Horvath called to ask about Bivins, and Banks said, "Tell everybody: Stop coming around. He doesn't want anything to do with you boxing guys anymore."

By then Bivins had sold both of the houses he ownedthe one he had bought in 1943, where he and Elizabeth had lived, and the house he had bought for his mother. Davidson, the boxing cop, who had become commander of the Third District of the Cleveland police, recalls visiting Bivins in the fall of '97 and noticing that the diamonds were missing from his ring. "What happened to the stones?" Davidson asked him.

Banks, who was present, jumped in and, according to Davidson, said, "Oh, the stones got loose and fell out."

"You lost your stones, Jimmy?" Davidson asked.

"Yeah, I guess," Bivins said.

That winter, Bivins's friends say, he was nowhere to be found. Banks told callers that Bivins had moved to South Carolina.

Horvath and others came to believe that Bivins was a captive in that house. Once, when no one answered the door, Horvath walked around the place calling Bivins's name, only to hear a child's voice yell from within, "Nobody's home!"

No wonder such a firestorm broke when patrolman Gibbons found that skeletal man lying alone in the dark in a stinking room. It was the turning point in a crisis that had begun unfolding weeks before. On Feb. 11, 1998, Banks took Bivins to Meridia Euclid Hospital and reported that the former prizefighter was "talking like a baby" and "falling down more frequently" He was suffering from dementia as well as hypothermia (low body temperature) and pancytopenia (reduced red and white blood cells and platelets). During his two-week stay at the hospital Bivins also suffered a gash on his right middle finger, and nurses soaked the hand in Betadine.

On Feb. 24, Bivins was transferred from the hospital to a nursing facility. There, over the next 11 days, the former top-ranked heavyweight contender lost 38 pounds, from 164 to 126perhaps, one of his doctors said, as a result of edema, depression or loss of appetite. On March 8 he was released from the facility, and Banks, claiming to be Bivins's son, took the responsibility of caring for him. Bivins was considered a "functionally impaired person" who, under state law, required 24-hour supervision.

By the time the ambulance whisked him back to Meridia Euclid on April 6, Bivins was suffering from more than bedsores and dehydration. The cut on the finger, now infected, had become unbeatable, leaving doctors no choice but to amputate the tip of it. "I figure if I came this far, I can keep on," Bivins said after the surgery. "I don't give up."
Banks was charged with "failing to provide for a functionally impaired person," a fourth-degree felony to which he pleaded guilty on Dec. 8, 1998, in an agreement according to which charges against Josette were dropped. Cuyahoga County chief trial counsel Steve Dever called for the maximum penalty of 18 months in jail. "You wouldn't treat a dog in the way that Mr. Bivins was treated," Dever said at the Feb. 12 sentencing hearing.

"I tried my best, but I had other family members I also had to attend to," Banks told the court, "so the only thing I can say...is I'm sorry about it." Judge J.A. Villanueva gave Banks eight months in jail.

Bivins remembers little about his months of isolation and loneliness. "Why didn't you contact us?" asks his sister Maria, with whom he now lives in Shaker Heights, one afternoon before dinner. Bivins grimaces.

"They wouldn't let me go to the phone," he says. Did he feel like a prisoner? "I couldn't do nothin.' " Memories of the experience come and go, flitting ghosts of the past. "Sometimes I get flashes, and I see myself lyin' up there," he says. "Sometimes I dream about it, too."

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Thread Stealer · Feb 26, 2010

http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/vault/article/magazine/MAG1016550/5/index.htm

Bivins's world today bears no resemblance to what it was just 18 months ago. Last time he checked, in early July, he weighed over 200 pounds, prompting friends to tease him that he had finally become a true heavyweight. Horvath, now his legal guardian, chauffeurs him on errands around town, takes him to physical therapy and regularly escorts him to Cleveland's old Papke Gym, now called the Jimmy Bivins Hall of Fame Boxing Club. There the elderly gent offers counsel to aspiring sweet scientists. One evening in June he watched a young ruffian who was learning how to jab. "You're pushin' it out," explained the man once known as Jabbin' Jimmy. "Put your weight in front.... Do it slow. You're doin' it too fast."

Wherever he goes, Bivins draws a crowd when he flashes his new gold-and-diamond ring, which commemorates his inclusion in the International Boxing Hall of Fame, in Canastota, N.Y. At the induction ceremony on June 13, the crowd of 5,000 gave Bivins a minutelong standing O. "Thank you for cheering like that for me," Bivins said. "I never figured I would get a chance to be in front of so many people who liked me." He tried to relate his favorite Joe Louis story, the one about Joe calling that knockout in four, but his voice broke, and Horvath stepped forward to thank the crowd again. The whole place purred through another long, embracing ovation. For all that Bivins had been through, over the months and years of surviving, you just knew what he was thinking.

I'm still here, Big Red.
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Mind Reader · Feb 26, 2010

Good read Thread Stealer! Thanks for posting.

Babality · Feb 26, 2010

Taylor easily.

Flexb · Feb 26, 2010

Probably Roy. Dude just keeps making himself look worse and worse. Makes it almost hard to remember he was so damn good at one time

Thread Stealer · Feb 26, 2010

Of the listed fighters it'd be Louis.

I'd not sure I necessarily feel all that sorry for Ali. It's sad that he's brain-damaged, but he's still mentally sharp, or at least he was when I met him at an autograph signing a few years ago. It's the physical part that's slow. Some fighters, like Wilfred Benitez, can barely remember anything. Ali's also hailed as a hero wherever he goes.

Hagler, well, he retired after a close loss. He's financially secure, has his health, and is given his credit as one of the greatest MWs of all-time. Don't know why I'd feel sorry for him.

Roy? I don't really feel sympathy for him. He used to be great and now he's not. Might as well feel sorry for almost all the terrific fighters who laced them up.

Flexb · Feb 26, 2010

Thread Stealer said: ↑

Of the listed fighters it'd be Louis.

I'd not sure I necessarily feel all that sorry for Ali. It's sad that he's brain-damaged, but he's still mentally sharp, or at least he was when I met him at an autograph signing a few years ago. It's the physical part that's slow. Some fighters, like Wilfred Benitez, can barely remember anything. Ali's also hailed as a hero wherever he goes.

Hagler, well, he retired after a close loss. He's financially secure, has his health, and is given his credit as one of the greatest MWs of all-time. Don't know why I'd feel sorry for him.

Roy? I don't really feel sympathy for him. He used to be great and now he's not. Might as well feel sorry for almost all the terrific fighters who laced them up.
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How can you not feel sorry for a guy that's basically allowed boxing and the fame to become an addiction that's just not healthy for him now. I guess if you just write him off as stupid I can understand

Thread Stealer · Feb 26, 2010

Flexb said: ↑

How can you not feel sorry for a guy that's basically allowed boxing and the fame to become an addiction that's just not healthy for him now. I guess if you just write him off as stupid I can understand
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I'm more or less just used to fighters doing that by now.

I mean if he ended up broke or with health problems I'd probably feel sympathetic.

Right now I just sort of shake my head and hope he decides to hang them up but it's not really sympathy I feel, at least not right now. He's already done more and made more money than 99.9% of fighters can dream of.

red cobra · Feb 26, 2010

Joe Louis..for being screwed over and nearly driven insane by the very government that he so gallantly and patriotically donated a few of his entire purses to during the WW2 years when he was champion.

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