Willie Pep

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KSTAT124
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Willie Pep

Post by KSTAT124 »

Willie Pep (1922-2006)

230 wins, 11 losses, 1 draw; 65 wins by knockout

Famous quote from Willie Pep: "I've got it made. I've got a wife and a TV set- and they're both working."

Year-by-year breakdown (including highlights):

1940- 11-0
1941- 22-0.....beat Jimmy Gilligan
1942- 24-0.....beat former world featherweight champion Joey Archibald; beat Abe Denner for the New England featherweight title; beat Pedro Hernandez; beat Archibald again; won the NYSAC world featherweight title from Chalky Wright
1943- 11-1.....beat Allie Stolz in non-title bout; lost to former and future world lightweight champion Sammy Angott; beat future NBA world featherweight champion Sal Bartolo and former NBA world featherweight champion Jackie Wilson in non-title bouts; beat Bartolo in defense of the NYSAC world featherweight title; career interrupted- served in military in World War II
1944- 16-0.....resumed career in April; beat Willie Joyce, world bantamweight champion Manuel Ortiz, and Lulu Costanino in non-totle bouts; beat Wright in defense of NYSAC world featherweight title; beat Hernandez and Wright in non-title bouts
1945- 7-0-1...beat former NBA world featherweight champion Phil Terranova in defense of the NYSAC world featherweight title in February; again served in the military; returned to ring in October; fought non-title draw with Jimmy McAllister (had beaten McAllister in McAllister's debut in 1940)
1946- 18-0.....beat McAllister and Wilson in non-title bouts; unified world featherweight title by beating NBA champion Bartolo; beat Jackie Graves, Lefty LaChance, and Wright in non-title bouts
1947- 11-0.....returned to ring in June after recovering from injuries suffered in plane crash; beat Jock Leslie in defense of the world featherweight title; beat Humberto Sierra and LaChance in non-title bouts
1948- 16-1.....beat McAllister in non-title bout; beat Sierra in defense of the world featherweight title; beat Teddy 'Redtop' Davis (twice) and future world lightweight champion Paddy DeMarco in non-title bouts; lost world featherweight title to Sandy Saddler; beat Hermie Freeman
1949- 8-0.....beat Davis; regained world featherweight title from Saddler in Ring Magazine's Fight of the Year; beat Eddie Compo in defense of the world featherweight title; beat former world bantamweight champion Harold Dade in non-title bout
1950- 9-1.....beat Charley Riley and Ray Famechon in successful defenses of the world featherweight title; beat Terry Young in non-title bout; lost world featherweight title to Saddler
1951- 8-1.....beat Carlos Chavez, Pat Iacobucci, Eddie Chavez, and Corky Gonzales; lost to Saddler in unsuccessful attempt to regain the world featherweight title
1952- 11-1....lost to Tommy Collins; beat Bobby Woods, Armand Savoie, and Fabela Chavez
1953- 11-0....beat Jackie Blair and Pat Marcune
1954- 4-1....lost to Lulu Perez
1955- 12-1....split two fights with Gil Cadilli, winning the 2nd; beat Joey Cam; beat Pappy Gault twice
1956- 6-0....beat Blair and Russell Tague
1957- 5-0....beat Tague and Jimmy Connors
1958- 11-2....lost to Tommy Tibbs, beat Jimmy Kelly; lost to world featherweight champion Hogan 'Kid' Bassey in non-title bout
1959- 0-1....lost to Victor 'Sonny' Leon
1965- 9-0
1966- 0-1....lost to Calvin Woodland
KSTAT124
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Post by KSTAT124 »

Willie Pep fought 11 fighters who held world titles during their careers and compiled a 16-5 record against them:

Joey Archibald.....2-0
Chalky Wright.....4-0
Sammy Angott.....0-1
Sal Bartolo.....3-0
Jackie Wilson.....2-0
Manuel Ortiz.....1-0
Phil Terranova.....1-0
Paddy DeMarco.....1-0
Sandy Saddler.....1-3
Harold Dade.....1-0
Hogan 'Kid' Bassey.....0-1

He fought 4 fellow inductees to the IBHOF and was 6-4 against them:

Chalky Wright.....4-0
Sammy Angott.....0-1
Manuel Ortiz.....1-0
Sandy Saddler....1-3

He fought 11 fellow inductees to the WBHOF and was 14-5 against them:

Chalky Wright.....4-0
Sammy Angott.....0-1
Jackie Wilson.....2-0
Manuel Ortiz.....1-0
Phil Terranova.....1-0
Jackie Graves.....1-0
Sandy Saddler.....1-3
Harold Dade.....1-0
Carlos Chavez.....1-0
Fabela Chavez.....1-0
Gil Cadilli.....1-1

(note: Graves and Cadilli were inducted posthumously in 2006.)
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Post by Underweartaker »

A great line from WC Heinz said "Robinson was like a great prose writer: His sentences were even and his bridges were just right. And Willie Pep on the other hand, was the greatest creative artist I ever saw. To me - he was like a poet, because poetry impplies aswell as states. And Willie with his fainting would imply a punch. And to watch Pep box was almost like listening to music playing."

Willie Pep p4p profile

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oA00dfx9Wmw
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Once upon a time

Post by fsteddi »

Once Upon a Time: Sugar Ray once fought Willie Pep in Norwich
Copyright 1998 Norwich Bulletin
By BILL STANLEY
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Once upon a time, one of boxing’s most historic chapters was written in Norwich.

Image

BILL STANLEY PHOTO
The Rev. George Donahue
with his two boys as he called them;
Willie Pep, left, and Frank Sinatra.


It happened in 1938 and pitted two future world championship boxers against each other in the greatest mismatch in boxing history. I intended to write the story last year, because of the 70th anniversary of that event, so I thought, as the first story in 2009, I would recount the boxing history made in Norwich so many years ago.


In those years, the names I recall associated with the Du-Well were Lou Pinalore, Jimmy, Dominic and Bill Pedace, the Lacois, Pineaults, Woodmansees and Casentinos.


The old car barn, as it was and still is known, is on North Main Street and once served as a repair shop for locomotives and railroad cars. During the 1930s and 1940s, it was the site of Norwich’s first trade school. At the south end of the building was the Checkerboard Feed Co.

Upstairs over the Checkerboard was a big hall, unheated, with bleachers on four sides of a prize-fighting ring. It was in that ring in 1938 that two of America’s all-time greats met in the most unlikely contest in boxing history.


Fake name
Willie Pep weighed 105 pounds and was ranked a flyweight. The fighter he went up against was then a welterweight fighting under the fictitious name of Ray Roberts. Willie Pep was at least 42 pounds lighter than his opponent. This single fight would cost Willie Pep his perfect, no-loss, amateur record. It would be next to impossible for Pep to win, even if the welterweight was only an average boxer. His opponent that night, however, was no run-of-the mill amateur. Willie Pep was fighting Sugar Ray Robinson — perhaps the greatest middleweight champion the sport has known.


When I first wrote this story back in 1991, it was said to be the most outrageous, untold story in boxing history. Several local boxing enthusiasts had told me of the fight — Bob Woodmansee and John Quigley, among others. But it was so unbelievable that I hesitated to write the story.

My secretary, Fran Rondeau, who writes these stories for me every week, checked the Hartford phone book for Willie Pep’s true name (which is Papaleo). There was only one with that spelling, and so I called.

The voice that answered said, “Hello,” and I said, “Hello. Is this Willie Pep?”


“Yes.”


“The boxer? The champion?”


“Yes. How many Willie Peps are there?”


“Only one,” I said and asked if he remembered fighting in Norwich years ago.


Willie said, “I fought in Norwich half a dozen times as an amateur. It was a great boxing town. I had a lot of friends there.”


We talked for awhile. I was afraid he would laugh at me if I asked him if he fought Sugar Ray Robinson. Finally I said, “Willie, there’s a rumor in town that you once fought Sugar Ray in Norwich.”


Without hesitation he said, “That’s true. I fought him for the Du-Well A.C. It was 1938, and that fight was upstairs in a downtown building. Sugar Ray fought under the name of Ray Roberts. Ray always used that name when he fought in the amateurs.”


Willie continued, “Ray’s real name was Walker Smith. He wiped me out that night, and it was my only amateur loss. I was a flyweight at 105 pounds, and Sugar Ray, a welterweight.”


So, there you have it. The fight remembered by the champion himself, for Willie Pep was truly the greatest featherweight champion of all time.


As Willie Pep said, years ago, Norwich was a good boxing town and the boxing capital of Eastern Connecticut. The Du-Well A.C., which operated from its location on the East Side, and the Elks were the big sponsors of boxing. Names such as Ray Lord, Jimmy Quinn, Ralph Bargnesi, Julius Sisco (The Sisco Kid), Walter Bartnicki, Benny Dempsky, Walter Macon (the “Plow Boy”), “Big Boy Burlap,” “Kid Chappe,” Pepper Martin and Vic Darr were some of the locals, and more recently, Kenny Adams.


Future champs
Boxing was big in Norwich, especially in the 1930s and 1940s. In the 1930s, it was the Elks who sponsored many fights at the old fairgrounds, and some future world champions fought in Norwich on their way to the top.


Willie Pep and Sugar Ray Robinson often fought in Norwich, and when they were champions, they would referee locally.


The Rev. George Donahue was the State Boxing Commissioner, and The Norwich Bulletin played a major part in the success of local boxing. The sports page promoted the fights, and in the winter months they were held at the Armory on McKinley Avenue — often to full houses.


The Du-Well Club, earlier in the 1930s and 1940s, had fights every other Friday night upstairs over the old Checkerboard Feed Store in the car barn. Old-timers recall boxers were paid $9 if they lost and $20 if they won.


As a boy, my dad used to take me to the fights. He liked to go to the dressing room and listen to the fighters talk. So, of course, that’s where I went. The dressing room had sheets hung over ropes (like backyard clotheslines) to separate the fighters from the crowd. There were no showers. They were all three-round fights in those days. Some of the fights were held in the vacant, old St. Mary’s Church.


The Pedaces were civic leaders on the East Side (where they lived) and in boxing. Active in the Du-Well A.C. and the Elks, the Pedaces played a major role. Jimmy Pedace not only covered the city desk for The Bulletin, he also was the local boxing commissioner. Dominic Pedace and Archie Spaulding took care of the box office. Bill Pedace managed Pepper Martin and also was the ring announcer.


Ray Lord was one of several local hands-on managers. Ray was a fighter himself, and he took great pride in managing young fighters. One of his most promising was Kenny Adams, who was later a local contractor and died in an auto accident.


Gave his time
Ray Lord was a beautiful manager. He was concerned for his fighters and was one of the most wonderful men I have ever known.


His whole life was dedicated to other people. When boxing faded from the Norwich scene, Ray Lord gave his time and talent to veterans’ affairs.


Willie Pep fought often in Norwich before he was a champion, and he gave exhibition fights in Norwich when he was a champion.


He also refereed after he left boxing, and if Willie Pep was the best the world had ever seen, Norwich’s boxing history records the champion fought some of the most memorable fights at the Old Elks Fairground and the Norwich Armory.


The most historic of all was the fight in 1938 at the old car barn with Sugar Ray Robinson.


Another little known fact, but absolutely true: Sugar Ray Robinson, the legendary middleweight champion, fought his very first amateur fight in Norwich, once upon a time.
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Primetyme199
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Post by Primetyme199 »

By Springs Toledo


“He was the best boxer I ever saw.”
~ Sugar Ray Robinson

Stillman’s gym was founded in 1920, the same year that the New York State Legislature passed James J. Walker's landmark bill legalizing boxing. Legend has it that Benny Leonard and a troupe of Jewish fighters left Grupp’s gym after Billy Grupp got drunk and blamed Jews for everything from the war to the weather. According to trainer Ray Arcel, Stillman’s gym originally wasn’t a boxing gym, but it became one for two reasons. First, a throng of admirers followed Benny Leonard into the gym to watch him train, and second, because manager Lou Ingber was no fool –he charged admission.

By the 1940s, Lou Ingber became Lou Stillman for simplicity’s sake. Jack Curley sat at the front door collecting fifty cents a head. The “modest entrance”, A.J. Liebling recounted, “is the kind of hallway you would duck into if you wanted to buy marijuana in a strange neighborhood.” The gym was open from 12 to 4pm every day including Christmas. Fight fans of all sizes and shapes came in – shifty-eyed characters chewing toothpicks, high school students playing hookey, and old ex-pugs with nowhere to go. Every day a hundred pairs of feet would walk up a wide wooden stairway to the main floor where two rings loomed, where bass lines reverberated on light bags like precursors to hip hop records, and sweat, liniment, and cigarette smoke filled the air. Fifteen rows were set up for spectators to watch the greatest array of champions ever assembled in one place: Ike Williams, Sugar Ray Robinson, Billy Conn, and Joe Louis were only a few who trained at this gym.

Lou Stillman was no sweetheart. “Big or small, champ or bum,” he said, “I treated ‘em all the same way –bad.” Charles Dickens described Ebenezer Scrooge as “a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous old sinner.” Stillman didn’t need no stinkin’ scribbler to describe him. He described himself –as “a grouch, a crab, a cranky guy who never smiled.” And he did better than Scrooge, he justified it with a .38 caliber pistol he carried in plain sight. No one was spared his bad disposition –not the connected managers or even the wise guys they were connected to.

Almost no one…

One of the fighters was a wisp of an Italian who smiled often, razzed anyone for a laugh, and had more trouble at home with his wife than he had in almost any of his 241 career bouts. History would crown him as the greatest defensive boxer who ever lived.

“Stillman loved me,” this fighter recalled years later.

On November 20th 1942, Madison Square Garden was filled to the rafters. Chalky Wright, 30, was the veteran of 177 professional bouts when he stepped into the ring for the third defense of his featherweight crown. Bouncing on his toes across the ring was the Italian, a 20-year old kid from Hartford, Connecticut. Due to age restrictions, the kid had to lie to boxing officials to get the title shot. He told them he was 21. A loud and raucous Italian contingent from the kid’s neighborhood filled half the arena, shouting and hurling curses Chalky’s way. When the first bell clanged, the challenger sprinted out of his corner to center ring, put his dukes up ...and disappeared. By the second round it was clear that his paisans in the crowd were doing Chalky a favor by confirming for his ears what defied his eyes and escaped his fists. The kid fought like a figment of Wright’s imagination, offering only mirages in lieu of mayhem like a laughing ghost.

This was the artistry of “Will o’ the Wisp”, the nom de guerre of Willie Pep.

A "Will o’ the Wisp" is a mysterious light or a mischievous spirit that was believed to lead travelers onto false paths. It is of British origin. Pep preferred “Will o’ the Wop.”

According to the New York Times, Wright was forced to “hold his fire through most of the battle to avoid appearing ludicrous as Pep stuck and stabbed and broke and ran.” Wright, a puncher, became Wright the plodder, coming in to greet stinging lefts and rights while his own courtesies sailed windily over a head or shoulders, beside an ear or past an arm. For the first four rounds it seemed that the only peril for Pep was catching a cold from the draft.

In the fifth, sixth, and seventh rounds, Wright caught up and pummeled him on the ropes. In the ninth round, Wright launched a right cross and Pep ducked and caught it on the top of his head. “This guy punched so hard that he could hit you on top of your head and daze you,” remembered Pep, “and I’ve got a pretty hard head.” Pep surprised everyone when he took over again before the end of the round, at times interrupting his evasive artistry to turn and outslug the champion. Both judges and the referee saw Chalky Wright win only four of the fifteen rounds.

Willie Pep became the new featherweight champion of the whole wide woild –at least in New York.

Four years and forty-seven fights later, Pep stopped Sal Bartolo in the twelfth round to take the National Boxing Association world featherweight title. Then the champion shattered any illusions that the legendary Manuel Ortiz had about standing taller than a bantamweight, and defeated Chalky Wright three more times. The last time he faced a badly faded Wright, he ended his misery in three rounds. “Willie,” Chalky said afterwards, “I had enough of you. I give up.”

In January 1947 he climbed a set of stairs that almost turned out to be a stairway to heaven. Pep was a passenger on a tin can flight from Miami to Hartford during a snowstorm. The plane crashed near Millville, New Jersey and three passengers were killed. The featherweight champion, his left leg snapped like a twig and his back broken in two places, woke up in a hospital bed with three quarters of his frame in cast. Willie was lucky to be alive and few had any illusions that he’d fight again. But Willie was the master of the illusion, and wasn’t about to let this one master him: “I’m through,” he said, “—I’m through flying at night!”

In June, he was back in the ring. In July he fought five times. On October 29th 1948, he stepped through the ropes with a record that shined like no boxer's record ever will again. Willie Pep was 134-1-1. But on that night the deadly serious Sandy Saddler loomed over Pep like a telephone poll over a hydrant. Pep’s dazzling record didn’t even constrict his pupils. He proceeded to ignore Willie’s feints, spins, and set-ups, and waded right in and hit him hard with power coming up in bolts from the balls of his feet. Pep was shockingly knocked out in four rounds. “Out” –said Saddler. It was Archie Moore who was the architect behind Saddler’s defeat of Willie Pep. And he did it at Stillman’s gym. “He wanted me to stay on top of him and give him no leverage,” Sandy told Peter Heller, author of “In This Corner.” Sandy would punch whenever Pep tried to relax. He’d set his sights on every fleeting glimpse and fading shadow in that ring that wasn’t wearing a bow tie –then fire.

Pep’s trainer was Bill Gore of Providence, RI. This was the man who took not only the natural athleticism –the timing, the speed, but also the nervous energy of a teenage Guglielmo Papaleo and built a foundation of skill underneath it. Pep was a savant. Gore was the strategist behind him, watching films, analyzing the nightmare style of Sandy Sandler, devising a battle plan to win the rematch.

That rematch between Saddler and Pep is considered one of the greatest fights of the 20th century. Pep, only three years away from a ghost ride in the sky, and four months removed from a devastating knockout, followed orders. The New York Times reported that Saddler was a 5 to 7 favorite on the books, but ate thirty-seven consecutive jabs in the first round. He was a “baffled and bewildered” slugger shadow boxing in Madison Square Garden. But then, Sandy’s long arms were like whips and whips can take a cigarette out of a mouth at twelve feet if handled by an expert. Sandy managed to cut Willie below his left eye and above and below his right eye. In the fourth round he landed a straight left, in the ninth, a straight right, in the tenth round a right to the jaw that saw Pep teetering like a drunk. In the fourteenth it was a left hook, then another right. Pep somehow shook it off and “gave no quarter… pelting Saddler with every blow known to boxing.” In the last round, it was Pep who was “fighting Saddler all over the ring.”

It was the greatest triumph of his career. It remains one of the greatest triumphs in the history of the ring.


Thanksgiving Day 2006, Rocky Hill, Connecticut. In a room at the West Hill Convalescent Home, Willie Pep finally kept still long enough for mortality to land a shot. His mischievous spirit emerged from a body stooped with age …and climbed a stairway.

The stairway was not the familiar four steps leading into a boxing ring, nor did it lead into a plane like the one he boarded sixty years earlier. It was a golden one, as brilliant as the belt he wore for so long, so long ago. It was a wide one, wider than that wooden stairway headed up to a certain gym in the New York City of his dreams.

It was a stairway lined with many who departed before him –more than a few ex-wives, two great featherweight rivals he never forgot, and the curmudgeon who loved him, Lou Stillman.
The fighters he's beaten aren't even household names in their own household.

"Never shall innocent blood be shed. Yet the blood of the wicked shall flow like a river. The three shall spread their blackened wings and be the vengeful striking hammer of god."
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a closer lok at Willie Pep

Post by fsteddi »

Here is a short video of Willie in action

This was the artistry of Willie Pep.

“Will o’ the Wisp”,

http://onlychamps.com/videogallery/boxi ... p-tactics/

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