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 2012-Feb-04, 10:35 AM
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Life With Dundee in My Corner
By Gordon Marino
Boxing lost an immortal this week. Angelo Dundee, the trainer of 15 world champions, died on Wednesday in Clearwater, Fla. The maestro of Miami Beach’s Fifth Street Gym, Dundee worked with Muhammad Ali for all but two of his 61 bouts. He also trained Carmen Basilio and Sugar Ray Leonard. When George Foreman fought for and regained the heavyweight title at 45, he made sure that he had Dundee in his corner.
Born in Philadelphia in 1921, Angelo Dundee was a master strategist and perhaps the best in the bruising business for making split second decisions in the middle of the fray. In 1964, Ali, then Cassius Clay, challenged Sonny Liston for the heavyweight title. For the first four frames, the ominous Liston did all he could to lay a glove on the brash 22-year-old known as the Louisville Lip. As no other heavyweight since Gene Tunney, the 6-foot-3 Ali circled and like a picador speared his fearsome opponent at will.
A major underdog, the challenger was building a commanding lead when suddenly, during Round 4, a mysterious foreign substance made its way into his eyes, rendering him virtually blind. At the bell, Ali came back to the corner howling and insisting that Dundee cut the gloves and go to the commission. But Dundee had been around boxing long enough to know where whining to the commission would take them.
Refusing to stop the fight, Dundee hollered, “This is the big one daddy!” At the bell, he shoved Ali center ring, yelling, “Run, kid, run!” And run he did. In a few minutes, Ali’s vision returned and he quickly pummeled Liston into submission to become heavyweight champion.
There was no one cooler than Angelo Dundee in the heat of battle and there was no one warmer and more generous than Dundee anywhere else. I should know. I was one of many recipients of his kindness.
In 2000, I interviewed Dundee for an article focusing on boxing tips from elite pugilists and cornermen. Most celebrities are so self-absorbed that it is hard for them to relate to other people, and especially reporters as anything more than implements for their career advancement. Dundee was the equivalent of the anti-celebrity. He made contact with you and kept it. Of course, this was a man who was of the now rare conviction that boxing writers create the interest that drives professional boxing. But Dundee’s amiability was much more than a ploy. Like Ali, his most his famous charge, he had the rare blessing of an abundant capacity to enjoy people and take an authentic interest in their lives.
Then in his 80s, Dundee exhibited some tricks of his trade. With the air of a master, he instructed, “When you are jabbing, keep that front knee bent.” Then he demonstrated the uppercut that he learned from his first champion, the rugged Carmen Basilio. “Instead of turning your hand over, palm up, just bring the right straight up and hit him with the top of your hand – right by the thumb. Like this – bing!” He bopped me lightly on the whiskers.
Dundee discoursed on psychology: “Everyone is an individual. There is no mold for people. With Muhammad [as he almost always called him] you couldn’t really tell him anything. He was so much fun but he had a very big ego and you wouldn’t just say, ‘Do this or do that.’ If I wanted him to bend his knees I would wait to the end of the workout, pat him on the back and say, ‘Way to bend today. You looked great.’”
After I left South Florida with a suitcase of boxing knowledge in my noggin, I began pestering Angelo regularly for my continuing fistic education, but also just to bask in the man’s warmth. Again, like Ali (they were perfectly matched) Dundee had the gift of gab and a love of words. Indeed, as a kid growing up in South Philly, Angelo’s mom would never send him to the store because he would talk with everyone and never get back home. After a while, Angelo and I were chatting on an almost daily basis and whenever possible, I would visit with him in Clearwater or on one of his forays to the Hall of Fame or a fight.
Just two days before he died, Angelo was telling me how important it was to get your fighters to slide six inches to the right after they punch, so that they could get the best angle for their next shot. He was also promising to show me the move in the gym. Then he joked, “I’m going to ask the commission to put an escalator instead of stairs next to the ring, so that I can get back in the corner.”
To be sure, I was only one of many people in his orbit of friends, but one of Angelo’s special qualities was that he made everyone feel terrific. He proved that you could spread love around without thinning it out. When one of my boxers was in some relatively small-time bout in Minnesota, he would insist that I put the kid on the phone with him before the fight and then call him after, even though by then Angelo was close to 90 and it was almost midnight.
Sometimes when we were together, I would look at him and just ponder the thousands of fights that he worked in perfecting his strange craft. One day Angelo matter-of-factly recalled, “Oh, back in the day, we used to drive up from New York to North Adams, Mass. for fights. Maybe get out of there at 12 or later and then drive back to the city. There were many times when I was working someone’s corner six nights a week.”
What we do affects how we think, how we construct our experience. Angelo saw much of life as though from the corner of a ring. Hours after his beloved wife Helen passed away in 2010, I called and, in a tone that I never heard from him before or after, he sighed, “It’s a knockout . . . It’s over.”
Marginalized a sport as it may be, boxing provides rich metaphors for the ups and downs of life. Those who train people for the ring get close to the nerve and bone of humanity on a regular basis, and the best of them, like Angelo Dundee, distill some deep wisdom about the hurly burly of human existence. They learn how to size up people, how to pace themselves, how to endure and get up from the thunderous blows that everyone is bound to absorb.
As a philosophy professor as well as a boxing trainer, I often bothered the poor man with lame questions: What has boxing taught you about life? Ang would pull a face and peer at me as though I were what he sometimes called me – an extra-terrestrial (when he meant existential) philosopher. If you pressed him, the most philosophical he might get was his famous, “It doesn’t cost anything to be nice.” I was never satisfied with that explanation but in the way Angelo treated people, he showed you that this was not just some memorized, throw-away line.
At the next big fight, the crowd will stand in silence as the ring bell tolls 10 times for Angelo Dundee. Those of us who, in one way or another, were fortunate enough to have had Angelo in our corners, can only hope that we learned something more than boxing from this remarkable trainer of men.
Gordon Marino writes on boxing for the Jounrnal. He is also a professor of philosophy at St. Olaf College and a boxing trainer in Minnesota.
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