OUR GREATEST DESERVES BETTER Hartford Courant - Hartford, Conn. Author: JEFF JACOBS Date: Nov 29, 2006 The Rev. Thomas B. Campion said his father -- his biological one, not the heavenly one -- was a huge Willie Pep fan. "He was an avid boxing enthusiast," the co-pastor at Corpus Christi Church said Tuesday morning. "He loved Willie Pep." After Campion had finished celebrating a funeral mass for arguably the greatest pound-for-pound boxer in history, he couldn't resist looking up and telling the 100 mourners about his own dad. Campion is only five years younger than Pep, who died Thanksgiving morning at 84, but his eyes lit up like a little boy's when he retold the story of his dad taking him to Braves Field in Boston. The date was June 8, 1943. Pep's featherweight crown was on the line against Sal Bartolo of Boston. More than 14,000 fans, many from Hartford, arrived for an all- New England title bout. "I'll never forget it," said Campion, whose own calling took him to the seminary rather than a minor league contract with the Brooklyn Dodgers. "Willie won that one in 15 rounds, as he won all his fights in those days." Father Campion was on a roll now. He talked about how he used to go to fights at Capitol Park at the end of the trolley line on Wethersfield Avenue. He grew up in West Hartford, but he went to school at St. Joe's Cathedral in Hartford and, even as a kid, he'd go to the gym on Main Street just to watch Pep work out. "He was so graceful, a master boxer," Campion said. "There was nobody like him. He could go 15 rounds and barely get touched. He was that deft. He was that artistic." They laid Willie Pep to rest Tuesday in Rose Hill Memorial Park in Rocky Hill and decades before they did, those who knew boxing best had used many of the same words Campion did on Tuesday. Red Smith called Pep the artful dodger. With a 134-1-1 record after 136 fights, he was nicknamed Will o' the Wisp. Catching Willie, it was said, was like catching moonbeams in a jar. Pep hung with the big names in those days. They knew him at Toots Shor's place in New York. He knew DiMaggio. He knew Sinatra and Sammy Davis Jr. He knew all the big stars, back when Manhattan was Hollywood, back when boxing was second only to baseball in importance to a sports nation. There were only eight weight divisions in those days and no alphabet-soup divisions among sanctioning bodies. Eight world champs and everyone knew their names. Sugar Ray. The Brown Bomber. Will o' the Wisp. Willie Pep was named the fifth greatest fighter of the 20th century by an elite Associated Press panel. For some perspective, do you know who No. 5 was in baseball? Ty Cobb. He was sandwiched by Ted Williams and Joe DiMaggio. If the plane crash that nearly killed Willie in a 1947 snowstorm really did kill him, Corpus Christi Church would have been overrun by hundreds and hundreds of mourners ... celebrities, sports icons - - heck, given some of the accusations, maybe even the FBI. Those were the days when Hartford was Willie's town and anybody with a road map to greatness knew he was from here. He was UConn basketball in a pair of leather gloves. "Willie didn't just do something great for Connecticut, he did something great for the world," said former welterweight champion Marlon Starling, hobbling from Corpus Christi on a crutch. "This is a sad day, but it's a day that Willie can go home. He won't hurt anymore. He'll be there with a lot of his friends." It's a shame more of them couldn't be there for the wake and the funeral. Willie used to joke that first your legs go, then your reflexes go and then your friends go. Only that joke didn't seem so funny Tuesday morning. We live in a what-have-you-done-for-me- lately world and Willie hadn't won a fight in more than 40 years. Looking back in The Courant archives on his immortal victory over Sandy Saddler in 1949, you see a big, unsettling headline that Pep beat the "Harlem Negro" and you realize how long ago this was. There are probably 100 reasons why only 100 people attended his funeral. Some had gone to the wake the previous night, generously estimated at 300 visitors. The hardest truth, of course, is that Willie outlived most of his contemporaries. Of those living, many are infirmed and called with their condolences. Willie, too, had been sick for years, Alzheimer's hammering away at his precious memories. But what about boxing? John Scully, a young man with a noble sense of the sport's history, was a pallbearer. He cornered Pep's attorney Michael Georgetti to tell him how touched he was by the honor. Starling, who said he had hurt his ankle running to do his laundry, hobbled into church on a crutch. It is improper and careless to wildly start pointing at individuals who didn't show. But there are so many big-name promoters, big-name boxers, big-time announcers, officials from international sanctioning bodies. Where were they? "I couldn't tell you," Starling said. "But I can tell you one thing: I'm here. I'm here out of respect for Willie Pep. And I'm here out of respect for boxing." A cruel, disorganized sport, boxing is dying on the vine and on days such as this you begin to understand how it is poisoning itself. "I am stunned by the number of ordinary people who didn't know him, new and old fans, who did feel compelled to show their respects and bid him farewell," said Georgetti, also a pallbearer. "There were so many familiar faces, too, simple and gentle people from his era. "He was an amazing boxer. Connecticut was his home. Typically when a person is famous, politicians are out in droves. Where was the city of Hartford? Where was the state of Connecticut and the state legislature? The thing that I find so sad is that there was no real political presence at all. I don't know ... maybe he was just out of circulation for too long." Maybe there's no political gain in showing up for an old pug's funeral. Maybe there's no political gain climbing into the same church pew as boxing anymore. Because the absence of the top state and city leaders is stupefying. There was a blessing in Willie's death, however, a blessing no public shower of emotion could ever provide. The Papaleo family has been locked in some pretty fierce squabbles over the years and the last few days could have gone badly. "The family came together and they embraced to pay tribute to Willie," Georgetti said. "They put aside their feelings and their anger. There's something wonderful in that. There is something beautiful in that." It's a shame more people couldn't find the time to bid farewell to the greatest athlete Hartford has ever known.
