Comparing Pacquiao to Henry Armstrong ? Part Two

By Thomas Hauser

Special to TopRank.com

As Henry Armstrong moved up in weight, he accomplished things in boxing that were thought to be impossible before he accomplished them. Manny Pacquiao comes from a similar mold. Part One of Thomas Hauser’s three-part series on Armstrong is available HERE. Part Two is below.

There hadn’t been many African-American champions in boxing before Henry Armstrong. Joe Gans, Jack Johnson, Tiger Flowers, and Joe Louis (who preceded Armstrong by four months) were the most notable. Major League Baseball and the National Football League were still all-white institutions. “Boxing,” W.C. Heinz later noted, “gave the black man a better break than he received in any other sport because it needed him.  But it only gave him what it had to.”

That said; Henry Armstrong fought in a manner that demanded attention.

“I look at films of the oldtime fighters a lot,” says Emanuel Steward. “Henry Armstrong is the first boxer I ever saw who was like a machine. It wasn’t combinations as much as it was punches coming all the time. Nobody could throw that many punches, but he did. He had incredible stamina and was absolutely non-stop. He was a perpetual-motion punching machine. When the bell rang, he got in your face and started throwing punches from every angle. He was like a machine gun. It wasn’t bang!  It was bang-bang-bang-bang-bang-bang!  Nothing stopped him. He just kept coming and coming and punching like a windmill in a hurricane. He was born with natural gifts that allowed him to fight the way he did. There was no way to get away from him and no way to tie him up. When you fought Henry Armstrong, you were fighting for your life every second of the fight. A lot of his defense was in his offense. He never slowed down. But if you look at the films closely, you see all the subtle things he did. He could take a punch, but he also kept his chin close to his chest, so you couldn’t hit him cleanly. He had a way of getting his elbows back against his body so, when he got inside, the opponent couldn’t tie him up. His arms never got out to where you could clinch with him. That’s what enabled him to be perpetual motion and grind people down with that relentless suffocating attack of his for fifteen rounds.”

“There had never been a fighter like him before,” adds Don Turner. “In the ring, he was pressure pressure pressure. Perpetual motion, throwing punches all the time from all angles; bobbing and weaving so the other guy couldn’t land a good shot. He never took a step back. You had to fight his fight because he gave you no choice. And you had to punch with him because he never stopped punching. He just wanted to fight. He overwhelmed his opponents. In boxing, very often, the mind carries the body. Henry Armstrong made every sacrifice that a fighter has to make to be great. His will to win superceded everything.”

Armstrong fought seven times in the twelve weeks after he defeated Sarron; all of them knockout victories in non-title fights. Then, in late-January 1938 while driving home to California, he suffered what he referred to in his autobiography as “a nervous breakdown.” He was taken to a “ranch” in Fontana, California, where he recuperated for a week.

Two days after his release, Armstrong was back in the ring. He fought four times in February 1938 and three times in March; each time as a lightweight, winning all seven fights. The seven men he defeated (Chalky Wright and Baby Arizmendi among them) had 445 victories at the time he fought them. He’d now won 37 consecutive fights, 35 of them by knockout, and was referred to in the nation’s press as “Hammering Hank . . . Homicide Hank . . . Hurricane Hank . . . The Human Buzz-Saw . . . The Human Dynamo.”

Then Armstrong attempted the unthinkable.

“Joe Louis had just won the heavyweight championship,” Armstrong later recalled. “He was going to take all the popularity, everything, away from all the [black] fighters because everyone was saving their money to see Joe Louis. I had three managers; George Raft, Al Jolson, and Eddie Mead.  They came up with the idea that I had to get super-popular, colossal. They said, ‘We want you to win three championships. We worked this out because we were trying to make more money. They said, ‘If you can win three championships, you’ll have the flamboyance of a heavyweight. These guys were the thinkers. I said, ‘It sounds pretty good to me. Okay; get ’em together.'”

Only one man prior to Armstrong (Bob Fitzsimmons) had won championships in three weight divisions. And Fitzsimmons accomplished the feat over the course of twelve years. Armstrong had something far more audacious in mind. He hoped to hold the featherweight, lightweight, and welterweight titles at the same time.

Armstrong’s management team wanted him to fight lightweight champion Lew Ambers after beating Sarron and then go after welterweight champion Barney Ross. But Al Weill (who managed Ambers) was resistant to the idea, so Armstrong challenged Ross first.

Ross (named Beryl David Rosofsky at birth) was from New York and was known as “The Pride of the Ghetto.” He’d won the lightweight title by beating Tony Canzoneri in 1933 and seized the welterweight crown from Jimmy McLarnin two years later.

Ross-Armstrong was scheduled for May 26, 1938, at the outdoor Madison Square Garden Bowl in Long Island City. It would be the first time in boxing history that a reigning featherweight champion had challenged for the welterweight crown.

Rain caused a five-day postponement.

Despite the 147-pound division limit, Ross weighed in at 142 pounds; Armstrong, at 133-1/2.

Ross was a 2-to-1 favorite. But he was well past his prime. He won the first few rounds by outboxing Armstrong and controlling the fight with his jab. Then he faltered. Cornerman Art Winch (also Ross’s co-manager) asked his fighter, “You started so nice. What’s wrong, Barney?” Soon, everything was wrong.

Ross, in his own autobiography, later described the pivotal middle rounds as follows.

Round six: “Something happened to my legs. I couldn’t seem to move on them. My arms felt as if they had lead weights on them. It was all I could do to get them up to protect my face, let alone fight back.”

Round seven: “I was puffing badly, starting to wheeze. I fought for breath. I was lucky to get out of the round alive.”

Round eight: “He rained left hooks on my mouth and blood gushed out. He hit me in the eye and it closed tight. Another punch cut my lip open. Another crashed into my nose, starting another flow of blood. Blood was dribbling into my good eye, so I was practically blind. I was taking such a beating to the stomach, I wanted to throw up right in the middle of the ring.”

Writing for the New York Times, James P. Dawson called the fight “fifteen rounds of vicious savage fighting that was so onesided as to render the result a foregone conclusion midway in the battle.”

“Like a human tornado,” Dawson recounted, “Armstrong cut down Ross. There was no resisting force. Henry just pounded the gallant Ross tirelessly, pitilessly, through every one of the fifteen rounds. Armstrong demonstrated almost from the opening bell that his style, his strength, his inexhaustible supply of stamina, perseverance, his grim determimnation, in short, his singular fighting stock in trade were too much for Ross.”

Ross never went down. He made it to the final bell, barely, on courage alone. His eyes were slits. He was bleeding from the nose and mouth. He was beaten to a pulp but refused to quit, begging his corner and referee Arthur Donovan for the right to continue until the very end.

“A champ’s got the right to choose the way he goes out,” Ross said when the carnage was done.

Armstrong later claimed that he carried Ross the final three rounds out of respect for the champion. Maybe he did; maybe he didn’t. There’s no corroborating evidence to support or rebut that claim. Either way; he won a lopsided unanimous decision.

“This is your night,” Ross told his conqueror at the final bell. “I’ve had mine.”

In his dressing room after the fight, the beaten champion told reporters, “He’s a great fighter, who never rests and never gives you a chance to rest. I can’t say he’s a hard one-punch hitter, but he certainly can wear you down. I wish I could have fought him five years ago. I was at my peak then. There was something missing in me tonight.” Then Ross said wistfully, “That was my last fight. I wasn’t going to go out lying down.”

Unlike many beaten fighters, Ross was true to his word. He never fought again.

Twenty-two days after Armstrong beat Barney Ross, Joe Louis fought Max Schmeling at Yankee Stadium and annihilated his German foe in one round. The Brown Bomber was now America’s hero. Nothing that Armstrong did could match the exploits of his fellow champion. But there was still a third championship to pursue.

On August 17, 1938, Armstrong challenged Lew Ambers at Madison Square Garden for the lightweight crown. It was one of the bloodiest, most brutal slugfests of modern times. James P. Dawson called the action “fifteen rounds of fighting as fast, furious, and savage as has ever been seen.”

In round three, Ambers opened a cut on the inside of Armstrong’s lower lip that bled profusely for twelve rounds. Then Ambers was knocked down and badly hurt in the fifth and sixth rounds.

As the fight progressed, Armstrong took control on a primitive level. But another factor was at work.

Armstrong wasn’t a dirty fighter, but he was a physical fighter. With his perpetual motion style, he threw punches from all angles and some of them went low. Coming straight forward, he also led with his head from time to time.

Referee Bill Cavanagh took four rounds away from Armstrong for low blows.

By the late rounds, Armstrong was severely cut around both eyes and blood was streaming from his mouth. Cavanagh warned that the blood was making the canvas slippery and that he was on the verge of stopping the fight.

“Don’t stop it, Mr. Cavanagh,” Armstrong begged. “I’m leading on points.”

“The ring is full of blood,” the referee countered. “And it’s your blood.”

“Then I’ll stop bleeding.”

After the twelfth round, Armstrong told his corner, “Don’t give me no mouthpiece. Just let me go.”

He fought the last three rounds swallowing his own blood so Cavanaugh wouldn’t stop the bout. Twelve stitches were needed to close the cut on the inside of his mouth.

Factoring the four penalized rounds into the scoring, one judge scored the bout eight rounds to seven in favor of Ambers. The other two scorecards read 8-6-1 and 7-6-2 for the new lightweight champion and first-ever simultaneous triple champion of the world.

After Armstrong beat Ambers, he relinquished his featherweight crown. He knew that he would be unable to make 126 pounds again. Over the next nine months, he successfully defended the welterweight title six times and had one non-title bout. On August 22, 1939, he put his lightweight championship on the line in a rematch against Ambers at Yankee Stadium.

Again, it was a thrilling fight. Armstrong suffered a terrible cut above his right eye that obscured his vision. And again, he was severely penalized for low blows.

Afterward, James P. Dawson wrote, “Applying the law more severely than ever before and certainly more painfully than it ever has been applied in a championship bout, referee Arthur Donovan penalized Armstrong five rounds [two, five, seven, nine, and eleven] for low blows.”

Ambers won a unanimous 8-7, 8-7, 11-3-1 decision.

“The title,” Dawson noted, “was not won on competition alone, but on fighting rules and ethics. Four of these [penalized] rounds, Armstrong won on competition without a doubt. On this observer’s scoresheet, Armstrong was the victim of an injustice.”

The loss broke a string of forty-six consecutive victories for Armstrong.

In October 1939, two months after his loss to Ambers, Armstrong defended his welterweight championship five times in twenty-one days. That’s not a typographical error. Three more successful defenses followed.

Then, on March 1, 1940, weighing 142 pounds, he moved up in weight yet again and challenged Ceferino Garcia for the middleweight title. The consensus at ringside was that Armstrong deserved the decision. The bout was declared a draw.

Returning to welterweight, Armstrong scored knockouts in five more title defenses over a five-month period. On October 4, 1940, he put his championship on the line against Fritzie Zivic at Madison Square Garden.

Zivic was a dirty fighter, adept at thumbing opponents in the eye and doing whatever else he could get away with outside the rules. “I’d give ’em the head, choke ’em, hit ’em in the balls.” he said when his career was over. “You’re fighting. You’re not playing the piano.”

It’s now believed that Armstrong was virtually blind in his left eye before he fought Zivic. By the middle rounds, his right eye was swollen to the point where he could hardly see at all. The bout was even on two of three scorecards going into the fifteenth round. Zivic dominated the final stanza.

Joseph Nichols wrote in the New York Times, “Fritzie Zivic did what the rank and file of boxing followers deemed impossible at Madison Square Garden last night. He crushed the heretofore invincible Henry Armstrong into decisive defeat in a savage fifteen-round struggle. Pacing himself splendidly and standing up under Armstrong’s hardest punches, the durable Zivic made his way to the championship by exhibiting a willingness to trade with his foe when expedient and to stay away and stab effectively with a long left hand when that course appeared the better one to pursue . The steady impact of the clever Zivic’s sharp left to the face gradually caused a swelling about Armstrong’s eyes. The tenth round was the one in which every spectator in the house went delirious. The boxers stood toe to toe and each fired his heaviest artillery. In the eleventh round, the defending titleholder was blind to all intents and purposes. Zivic, aware of his foe’s plight, kept the battle at long range and ripped both hands to the head at every opportunity. The pitifully handicapped Armstrong had trouble even locating his tormentor. As he returned to his corner at the end of each round, he would murmur prayerfully, ”If I could only see.’ In going down to defeat, Armstrong exhibited a brand of courage that will cause him to be long remembered even if he had not in the past held the featherweight, lightweight, and welterweight championships of the world simultaneously.”

The last of Henry Armstrong’s three championships was gone.

Thomas Hauser can be reached by email at [email protected]. His most recent book (“Winks and Daggers: An Inside Look at Another Year in Boxing”) was published recently by the University of Arkansas Press and can be purchased at http://www.amazon.com.