Tommy Harrison

Resurrecting the Real Champ

By Michael A. Moodian

In the 2007 film “Resurrecting the Champ,” Samuel L. Jackson plays former heavyweight contender Bob Satterfield (a.k.a. “Champ”), a homeless man who is discovered by a Denver Times reporter and is forever changed by the experience. While audiences were immersed in the feel-good emotions of the movie, what many do not know is that the real story behind “Resurrecting the Champ” is actually that of Tommy Harrison, a former heavyweight contender who is homeless and living on the streets of Santa Ana, California.

The story behind the movie emerged in 1997, when J.R. Moehringer wrote a Los Angeles Times story based on his encounters with a man he believed to be Bob Satterfield. As the Times story would reveal, Moehringer was actually interviewing Tommy Harrison claiming to be Satterfield. Harrison fought from 1951 to 1958, compiling a record of 22-13-2 (8). He fought and lost to legends Floyd Patterson, Ezzard Charles and Bobo Olson. He did score two decision victories over top contender Jimmy Bivins. In his heyday he was driving a Cadillac and fighting on world stages. “Every time Marciano would fight, I would fight the semifinal bout of his cards and I would make me around $1500, $2500,” Harrison told Boxing Digest. “It was only for six or eight-round bouts, and that was good money then.” Like too many others, the prosperity he enjoyed while fighting pro soon ended, and eventually Harrison became a down-on-his-luck ex-fighter, broke and forced to live on the street. Today, he wanders within a Southern California barrio community.

Even though he is a homeless man on the streets, Harrison is loved by the locals in this primarily Hispanic neighborhood. Harrison is a warm man, friendly and eager to talk about his career as a heavyweight contender, and can be found telling stories of his fights. Often, people drive by, yelling, “Hi, Champ!” as they pass. Kurt Goss, a street maintenance supervisor for the city who has known Harrison for nearly 20 years, told Boxing Digest how popular Harrison is with locals. “He is a very nice guy,” stated Goss. “When the movie came out, people were bringing their kids over to get his autograph.”

The 78-year-old Harrison claims that he served as a sparring partner for Rocky Marciano but was dismissed after breaking his nose, leading to the postponement of Marciano’s second fight with Jersey Joe Walcott in 1953. “That’s what kind of got me started on my way,” Harrison said. “When I busted Marciano’s nose, instead of me taking it easy on The Rock, I wanted to make a showing to show that I should be [a champion] instead of him. So anyway, I opened up and began to throw left hooks, right hands, and that’s when I busted him on the nose.” But, said Harrison, instead of the sparring performance elevating his status, he was avoided by managers and promoters, since a lot of money was lost as a result of the Walcott postponement. “They gave Rocky Marciano time for his nose to heal and he went on to fight Jersey Joe Walcott,” Harrison recalled. “Marciano, he was strong, a good puncher, but he didn’t have no boxing finesse and no boxing skills. He just walked in there and started swinging punches.”
When speaking of his fight with Patterson, Harrison maintained his superiority. “They were trying to build Floyd Patterson up but I was thinking they should be trying to build me because I’m a better fighter than Patterson. If things would have been right, I think I could have beat Patterson that night. He hit me on the chin once and I went down, but I could have got up. But when I did get up, the referee counted to 10 and stopped the fight. [It was in] Brooklyn, New York. That was Floyd Patterson’s hometown. But if we would have fought in any other stadium, I think I would have beat Patterson that night.”

In discussing his fight with Charles, Harrison said, “I was training with Marciano and at the same time I was getting in shape, but I didn’t know that I was going to fight Ezzard Charles then. But finally, about six weeks or two months before the fight, [Hall of Fame promoter] George Parnassus came to me and said we got the fight with Ezzard Charles in Detroit, Michigan, at Olympia Stadium.
“I wanted to fight Muhammad Ali,” Harrison added, “but for some reason I never did get a chance to fight him.”
Harrison doesn’t regret never getting the opportunity to fight for the coveted heavyweight title. “They never really did give me any chance to really fight [the champions] in a [legitimate] contest. They just said ‘you can spar with them and [work] in the gym.’
“During those years—I’m not bragging about myself—I never did hardly get hit. In time, those fighters would get tired before I would get tired and they would stop the sparring sessions.”

Harrison claims that he would sometimes fight under the name of Bob Satterfield, to help increase attendance in places like New York, Chicago and Sioux City. “In order to draw more people to the fights, they just switched my name; it wasn’t my idea, it was George Parnassus’ idea. If he (Parnassus) was still living, I would have eventually gotten a shot at the title.”

His boxing career over, Harrison moved north from San Diego to the Orange County city of Santa Ana with his now deceased ex-wife. Hard times followed and Harrison would be forced to live on the streets. He claims that an individual who was “looking after him” was receiving his social security checks and only giving him a portion of the money. The issue is now purportedly being investigated by local police.
Although “Resurrecting the Champ” was released in the summer of 2007, Harrison claims he received no compensation from the filmmakers. He hasn’t even seen the film, but, said Harrison, “That’s a picture that I want to see.” When Boxing Digest asked the movie’s director, Rod Lurie, to respond to Harrison’s allegation, he said, “The answer to this question is Tommy is simply wrong. It was about a decade ago that he was paid for the rights by Phoenix Pictures. You can be certain that not one frame of film would have gone through the camera had the chain of title to this movie not been fully worked out. I’m not certain of the details of our contract with Tommy because I was not on the project at the time. However, we changed many of the elements of his story to make him a much more sympathetic character than was portrayed in the [L.A. Times] article.”
Whether he was paid or not, Harrison continues to live in dangerous conditions. His friend Kurt Goss worries about him and told Boxing Digest that something must be done to help place Harrison into some sort of semi-permanent home. But there is, to date, no formal fund to help get Harrison back on his feet.

 

Mayweather Halts Hatton

By Sean Sullivan

Just when his critics tabbed him as a safety-first, non-confrontational technician, Floyd Mayweather Jr. scored his most dramatic victory in years over fan favorite Ricky “Hit Man” Hatton. While it certainly felt like a “Hatton wonderland” inside the MGM Grand in Las Vegas, with the majority of the sold-out crowd of 16,459 drowning out any Mayweather cheers with their pulsating chants, it was the champion’s dominance inside the ropes that made the difference.
Most of the fight followed the same pattern: Hatton clutched and mauled, while Mayweather potshotted from the outside. Hatton pressured for the entire fight, but for the most part, it was not effective aggression. He often closed the distance, so much so that he smothered his own shots. But no matter how much Hatton crowded the WBC champion, Mayweather remained poised and calm throughout. Mayweather impressed by allowing Hatton to dictate the pace, but still dominated the action.

“I knew I had to be versatile in the ring tonight,” said Mayweather. “This guy is a rough and tough fighter. I took my time. You saw me fight a little bit on the inside, a little bit on the outside.”
All three judges gave Hatton the fifth round, in which Floyd focused more on defense. Only judge Burt Clements saw fit to award another round to Hatton—that being the third. After a series of warnings for fouls, Hatton lost a point in the sixth for shoving Mayweather through the ropes. The Englishman later said that because of the point deduction, and a cut sustained above his right eye, he got overanxious and fought a bit more carelessly than he should have.
“I thought I was doing well in the fight until he hit me with the shot that cut me,” Hatton said. “I didn’t feel the body shots until the cut.”

Mayweather really started to heat up in round eight, when he threw punches in bunches, a rarity these days, hurting Hatton to the body to set up snapping shots upstairs. But Hatton gathered himself and retaliated as best he could.
In round ten, as Hatton lunged forward, wide open, Mayweather sidestepped and pinpointed a left hook on the challenger’s chin—a maneuver he later described as a “check hook.” Hatton bounced off a corner post head first before falling to the canvas, briefly silencing the raucous crowd. He arose wearily and Mayweather only needed a few more finishing blows before Hatton fell again and the fight was stopped at the 1:35 mark. In the end, Mayweather landed more than double the number of punches that Hatton did, 129 to 63.
Mayweather remains unbeaten, rising to 39-0 (25), while Hatton tasted defeat for the first time to see his ledger drop to 43-1 (31).

Showing good spirits, Hatton quipped, “I was doing alright, till I f***ing slipped. “It was a bit of a rough-and-tumble at times. I felt really strong but I left myself open and he’s better on the inside that I thought he was.”
Mayweather complimented Hatton by saying, “Ricky Hatton is one of the toughest competitors I have ever faced. I hit him with some body shots and he kept coming. I can see why they call him the Hit Man.”

While some predicted Hatton’s style would overwhelm Mayweather, the champion maintained he knew exactly what to expect: “I knew he would try to rough me up, so I didn’t halfway train for this fight. I prepared 100 percent for this fight.

“I showed that I can still punch with power. I still have those exciting fights left in me.”
However, Mayweather’s tune soon changed when asked about future competition. “Now it is time for me to become a promoter,” he said. “I am not going to let the sport of boxing retire me. I am going to retire from boxing. I am a six-time world champion. I fought the best in the world. I have nothing else to prove.”

Talk of retirement is nothing new for 30-year-old Floyd; he claimed he would retire after the Oscar De La Hoya bout last May. Following his knockout of Jose Luis Castillo, Hatton called out Mayweather, alleging he was not an exciting fighter. Floyd said that was motivation for him to return, but, more accurately, it was the amount of money offered that drew him back into the ring, hence his new nickname, “Money.” And it’s a safe bet that we will see Mayweather in the ring once again—if the price is right.

COTTO AWAITS…

Miguel Cotto, 31-0 (25), was in attendance and even held a press conference on the day of the fight, attempting to coerce Team Mayweather into facing him next. After winning a spirited battle in November over his toughest and most noteworthy opponent to date, “Sugar” Shane Mosley at Madison Square Garden in front of 17,135 fans, Cotto is aggressively seeking a shot at today’s pound-for-pound best. Yet he remains skeptical that Mayweather will ever step into the ring against him.

“Floyd has the biggest name,” insisted Cotto, “so I’m going after him. He always has an excuse not to fight me. He says I don’t represent enough money for him, but he knows I have a lot of fans. He won’t fight me because he knows what I can do.”

While defending his WBA title for the third time, Cotto, 27, showed added dimensions to his repertoire, impressively employing a very accurate jab, outlanding Mosley in that department 98 to 71. “My jab made the difference in the fight,” acknowledged Cotto.

In a fast-paced affair with many ebbs and flows, the two combatants traded crisp, powerful shots on even terms early on, both trying to assert their will, with Mosley digging to Cotto’s body. “When I did get him in the body, he backed away a little bit,” Mosley said after the bout. “He felt my power. I knew I had him in trouble a couple of times.” But Cotto’s pressure forced Mosley on his toes in the middle frames.

Surprisingly, Mosley, 36, became the aggressor in round nine, pressing forward with Cotto backing up, briefly rattling the Puerto Rican with overhand rights in round ten. Questioned about this sudden shift in momentum, Cotto explained that he backpedaled in the later rounds because he felt he had a comfortable lead on points. Ahead or not on the scorecards, the move was a bit out of character for the champion, though he still did box well. As Mayweather said after the Hatton fight, “A real champion can adapt to anything.”

Ultimately, both fighters landed equal leather at 248 punches apiece, but Cotto was awarded the UD12 (116-113, 115-113 twice).

Defeating such a high caliber opponent, Cotto’s confidence has skyrocketed. “2007 was by far my best year,” he said. “The Mosley fight was my best performance ever. I’m ready to fight any big-named opponent that’s willing to fight me, and I mean it when I say it really doesn’t matter. I’ve never said no to any opponent.”
Should Mayweather eventually choose to face Cotto, he would be wise to heed Mosley’s advice. “[Cotto’s] deceptive,” noted Mosley, “as far as his boxing ability.”

MAYWEATHER-COTTO ON COURSE?

Cotto has met every challenge. He’s proven that he’s not just a brawler with a weak chin, but a fighter who can adjust his style and game plan as necessary.

Mayweather’s knockout of Hatton rekindled the spark that had recently faded. He went the extra mile to put an exclamation point on his victory, rather than just coast to an easy win.

Mayweather and Cotto’s paths must cross for bragging rights to be considered the best welterweight of their generation. It’s the one welterweight fight out there that really matters.

 

The Gate Keeper: Hank Kaplan

By Charles Jay

The first person I ever met in the sport of boxing was Hank Kaplan. I was a youngster, attending my very first fight. A mutual friend of ours approached Hank, motioned to me, and told him, “Do me a favor and look out for this kid.”
Hank never forgot that. Neither did I.

Over the years, whenever I needed an educated opinion, a lively talk about boxing and its people, or any point of historical reference, I would just call or visit Hank, who always had the time, and usually had the answer.
What am I going to do now without my dear friend?

What are ALL of us going to do without a man who supplied the kind of integrity and nobility that was rare, not just for this era, but for any era?

Kaplan, who was widely known as the world’s preeminent boxing historian, died of cancer in December at age 87. He had spent over six decades in the sport, doing a lot of different things. More than a quarter of a century ago, Hank was the editor and publisher of a boxing magazine that bore the same name as this one. He was a confidant and consultant for both Chris and Angelo Dundee, and did press releases for Angelo’s fighters for years. He was technical director for an event that was much ballyhooed at the time—the “computerized” boxing match between Rocky Marciano and Muhammad Ali in 1970. Truth be known, it was much less a case of computers determining the outcome than Hank typing up all possible scenarios and laying them out on his living room floor.

He was part of a management group that handled the careers of many fighters, among them former middleweight contender Vinnie Curto. And along with banker Ramiro Ortiz (now a part of the Florida commission) he promoted dozens of sellout shows in Fort Lauderdale, not an easy thing to do.

Along the way he paid his dues and learned to improvise a bit. His November 6, 1982 show was supposed to be a highlight, as NBC came to televise a ten-round bout between middleweights Alex Ramos vs. Ted Sanders, with the highly-touted Ramos trying to avenge his first pro loss. But as the fight show commenced, no one could find Sanders. In fact, no one ever did. Hank was suddenly minus his main event, so he and NBC had to make do with a double bill of prelim fighters, but he plowed ahead nonetheless.

Hank was instrumental in establishing the International Boxing Hall of Fame in Canastota, NY, served as the chairman of its induction committee, and in 2006 was finally inducted into the IBHOF himself.
Some pedestrian members of the media questioned what merited that honor.

In fact, there were more than a few folks around boxing who didn’t quite understand or appreciate Hank’s value, probably because even though a lot of the people who work in this business love to trot out the word “legacy” when referring to any fighter who comes along to win an alphabet soup title, they don’t really have much historical perspective. So someone like Hank might have been off some radar screens.

But in reality, Hank was one of the most important people in boxing, because he was a fountain of information for untold numbers of people who worked toward advancing the recorded history of the game. At one point in time, Sports Illustrated had him on retainer as a boxing research consultant. I can’t even begin to tell you how many documentary filmmakers, news crews, reporters, authors, researchers and collectors turned to Hank for expert assistance. He was always busy trying to help someone. And he didn’t make it a habit to turn anyone away; Hank was available as a pipeline to the past, more often than not without regard for monetary compensation. I sensed that it was compensation enough for Hank to serve as sort of an unofficial gatekeeper of historical record. He saw a sense of duty in it, as if it were his obligation to educate one generation in order to pass it on to the next. In boxing, where tradition is such a vital element, and documentation isn’t “neat,” his presence, not to mention his diligence, was critical.

Hank’s archives may have been the most extensive private research collection in the world devoted to any one sport, containing millions of documents, photographs and artifacts, reflective of everything from the celebrated to the obscure. I’ve used those archives to research such topics as giant boxers, midget boxers, even boxing on trains! I don’t know if J. Edgar Hoover had a comprehensive file on me, but Hank certainly did (Tip: It’s better if Hank has it). The estimable Mr. Kaplan spent his entire life meticulously compiling and organizing his files, virtually up until the day he died. “Who else would do something like this?” he once asked me.

Good question. Who else would care as much? Who else associated with boxing would be selfless enough to spend day after day, year after year, combing through this maze of material, for the sake of preserving it for the sport?
An era most definitely ended with his passing, and boxing is poorer for it.

I’ve heard many describe Hank as a “trooper.” I can personally attest to the truth of that. Back when we were involved in an online TV venture, we traveled to Philadelphia to interview some of the great fighters from the City of Brotherly Love. Hank, believe it or not, had never done anything like this before, but we stuck a microphone in his hand, turned on the camera, and he was off and running. You should have seen the excitement coming over him about his Q&A session with former light heavyweight champ Harold Johnson, which Hank knew was a rare ‘get’ for us. “This is historically important,” he explained to me.

Afterward, we went to Hank’s house in Miami to do some short segments with him, in the way of adding some retrospective on those Philly fighters, as well as some Hall of Famers we interviewed in Canastota. In all, we had to do 32 segments of 5-10 minutes in length with Hank. I was hoping to get this done in a hurry, but figured it was going to take at least two days, so I budgeted my time accordingly.

Well, Hank blew that budget out of the water. We got into a rhythm and didn’t stop, save for a quick dinner break. I was about to keel over, but he wasn’t. Hank, who was 86 years old, was tired, but he was ready, willing and able to do it because he thought this kind of material would be important for posterity.
That’s the kind of guy he was.

It was my honor and pleasure to be Hank Kaplan’s editor-in-chief for a brief period with one particular boxing website (where, incidentally, we worked with Boxing Digest executive editor Robert Ecksel).
It was much more of an honor to be his friend.
Everyone who knew him will miss him dearly.

Me more than most, I can assure you.

 

Ten Count for Norman Mailer

By Robert Ecksel

“They are men’s men. Rocky Marciano was one of them. Oscar Bonavena and Jerry Quarry and George Chuvalo and Gene Fullmer and Carmen Basilio, to name a few, have faces which would give a Marine sergeant pause in a bar fight. They look like they could take you out with the knob of bone they have left for a nose.” — Norman Mailer

When boxing was a writer’s sport, Norman Mailer, who passed away on November 10 at the age of 84, gave writing about boxing a good name. He was never a boxing guy, per se, but his contributions to the canon, although infrequent, challenge that of his illustrious peers. Mailer didn’t only write about boxing. His interests were too wide, his writing too eclectic, for easy categorization. Still, he understood the fights, and his writing bolstered the premise that boxing is, among other things, a thinking man’s art.

As a public figure for a half-century, Mailer made more missteps than most men in his position would have dared. There was, for example, his alarmingly hit or miss oeuvre; his quixotic campaign for mayor of New York City; his six marriages, the second of which ended when he stabbed his wife; his literary spats with the good, bad and ugly writers of his generation; and his Jack Abbott episode, where Mailer finagled the release of a felon with literary gifts from prison, who after six weeks as a free man killed a waiter in a dispute over a restroom.

In addition to those faux pas, Mailer tended, with all the consciousness he could muster, toward the abrasive. He was egotistical, arrogant, pigheaded, pugnacious, a born provocateur, but he fought the power, tried to rouse the sleepy from their slumber, and he wrote like a dream.

Although Mailer’s greatest works—“Armies of the Night” (1968), “Of a Fire on the Moon” (1970), “The Executioner’s Song” (1979)—are not about boxing, it’s his writing about the fight game that concerns us here. An early boxing essay is included in a collection called “The Presidential Papers of Norman Mailer” (1963). It first appeared in Esquire titled “Ten Thousand Words a Minute,” and while it’s a wild and wooly ride through the dense underbrush of Mailer’s erudition, the essay focuses in large part on boxing; the 1962 heavyweight title fight between Sonny Liston and Floyd Patterson; and the ring death of Benny (Kid) Paret at the hands of Emile Griffith at Madison Square Garden in 1964.
Mailer wrote of Floyd Patterson, “I had an affection for Patterson which started early. When he was bad he unbelievably bad, he was Chaplinesque, simple, sheepish, eloquent in his clumsiness, sad like a clown, his knees looked literally to droop. He would seem precisely the sort of shy, stunned, somewhat dreamy Negro kid who never knew the answer in class. But when he was good, he seemed as fast as a jungle cat.”

About Sonny Liston Mailer wrote, “Liston now emerged from the depths of the clubhouse and walked slowly toward us. He was wearing a dark-blue sweat suit, and he moved with the languid pleasure of somebody who is getting the taste out of every step. First his heel went down, then his toe. He could not have enjoyed it more if he had been walking barefoot through a field. One could watch him picking the mood out of his fingertips and toes. His handlers separated before him. He was a Presence.”

The fatal rubber match between Griffith and Paret was broadcast live on national TV. It was terrible on the tube. Norman Mailer was ringside:

“Some part of his death reached out to us. One felt it hover in the air. He was still standing in the ropes, trapped as he had been before, he gave some little half smile of regret, as if he were saying, ‘I didn’t know I was going to die just yet,’ and then, his head leaning back but still erect, his death came to breathe about him, and he sank slowly to the floor. He went down more slowly than any fighter had ever gone down, he went down like a large ship which turns on end and slides second by second into its grave. As he went down, the sound of Griffith’s punches echoed in the mind like a heavy ax in the distance chopping into a wet log.”

Mailer’s “King of the Hill,” his treatise on the Fight of the Century between Ali and Joe Frazier in 1971, is exemplary writing about two great fighters and the first of their three classic bouts.

“The closer a heavyweight comes to the championship,” Mailer wrote, “the more natural it is for him to be a little insane, secretly insane, for the heavyweight champion of the world is either the toughest man in the world or he is not, but there is a real possibility he is. It is like being the big toe of God. You have nothing to measure yourself by.”
Mailer’s greatest accomplishment in the boxing genre, and by consensus one of his finest books, is “The Fight” (1975), his first-person account of the Ali-Foreman Rumble in the Jungle. “The Fight” is a romp of a read from the first page to the last, but if you like your boxing straight no chaser, you might want to drown your sorrows in another tome.

Mailer on Don King: “How he could talk… Once when one of his lesser-known fighters hinted that a contract was unsatisfactory and King could get hurt, Don leaned forward—fond was he of telling this story—and said, ‘Let us not bullshit each other. You can leave here, make a call, and have me killed in half an hour. I can pick up the phone as you leave and have you offed in five minutes.’”

Mailer on Ali: “His master’s assortment leaped forth, jabs with a closed glove, jabs with an open fist, jabs with a twist of the glove to the right, jabs with a turn to the left, then a series of right-hand leads offered like jabs, then uppercuts and easy hooks from a stand-up position, full of speed off both hands. With each punch, the glove did something different, as if the fist and wrist within the glove were also speaking.”

Unlike King and Ali, George Foreman “lived in silence. Flanked by bodyguards to keep…handshakers away, he could stand among a hundred people in the lobby and be in touch with no one. His head was alone. Other champions had a presence larger than themselves. They offered charisma. Foreman had silence.”

Mailer once said about himself, “I seemed to have turned into a slightly punch-drunk and ugly club fighter who can fight clean and fight dirty, but likes to fight.”

Norman Mailer died as he lived, writing and fighting the good fight until the final bell.

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