Honoring Angelo Dundee
“I did a fight once in Chicago when Angelo was working the corner of a heavyweight named James ‘Quick’ Tillis,” Barry Tompkins writes for CSNBayArea.com. “Tillis had a tendency to be a bit lazy in the ring and gave some fights away that he could have won with relative ease. On that night, Tillis was being – well, Tillis – and at one point Angelo took the fighter’s head in his hands and turned it toward the crowd. ‘You see that woman right there?’ Angelo said. ‘That’s your mother, and you’re embarrassing her.'”
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“Angelo Dundee died Wednesday in a Florida rehabilitation center, where he was being treated for a blood clot found after a flight back from visiting Muhammad Ali in Louisville for the fighter’s 70th birthday, son James Dundee said,” the Los Angeles Times reports. He was 90.
“In recent weeks, Dundee had paid visits to Ali for his birthday, treked to the International Boxing Hall of Fame in New York and mingled with friends at the National Italian American Sports Hall of Fame he helped start in Chicago by first inducting boxers.”
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“I first met Ali when he was an amateur in 1959,” Dundee once told Boxing Insider. “I used to go to Louisville with my fighters – Jimmy Beecham, Luis Rodriguez, Willie Pastrano. In fact, the biggest draw in Louisville was Willie Pastrano. And Willie fought Alonzo Johnson. That’s when I met Muhammad. Muhammad called me from the hotel lobby . . . ‘This is Cassius Marcellus Clay. I’m the Golden Gloves champ of Louisville. I won the Gloves in Chicago, I won the Gloves in Seattle. And I want to talk with you.'”
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“It was here [in Las Vegas] the famed entourage lived together like frat boys: Gene Kilroy, the personal business manager and camp facilitator, keeper of the checkbook, restorer of order, fierce guardian of Ali’s integrity; Pat Patterson, the Chicago cop turned security chief; Angelo Dundee, the trainer who usually arrived the last week before they broke camp for fight; Drew Bundini Brown, the witch doctor/cheerleader who coined the phrase ‘Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee,’ and Wali Muhammad, the bucket man and timekeeper,” Jerry Izenberg wrote for NJ.com.
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Comments welcome.
Posted on February 3, 2012