Tony Galento

Tony Galento
Dominick Anthony Galento (March 12, 1910 – July 22, 1979) was an American heavyweight boxer. He is best remembered for scoring a third-round knockdown against Joe Louis in a world title stoppage loss in June 1939. Active from the late 1920s to the early 1940s, he compiled a record of 79 wins, 26 losses, and 6 draws. Besides Louis, Galento fought against several other prominent heavyweights of his era—including Al Ettore, Arturo Godoy, Lou Nova, and Max and Buddy Baer. Though assumed by some sportswriters to have been a reference to his "pulchritude" or physical appearance, Galento's nickname, "Two Ton", was apparently derived from his work as an iceman: a job he pursued in tandem with his pugilistic career. On one occasion, as a result of his ice-lugging commitments, Galento was reportedly upbraided by his cornerman for being late for a bout. "Take it easy", the New Jersey-born slugger reputedly replied to his colleague's complaint, "I had two tons of ice to deliver on my way here. I'll be right up." In addition to "Two Ton", Galento was also known as the "Jersey Nightstick", the "TNT Kid", the "One-Man Riot", the "Orange Orangutan", and the "beer barrel that walks like a man". The boxing historian Bert Sugar called him a "human butcher block".
Galento is widely regarded as having been one of boxing’s most colorful characters. According to Chris Mead, a biographer of Joe Louis, he "was a press agent's dream." Anecdotes, some of which may be apocryphal, pertaining to his outlandish behavior and unschooled wit are common. On learning about Gene Tunney's predilection for reading George Bernard Shaw, Samuel Butler, and William Shakespeare while in training camp, Galento is said to have remarked, in characteristic fashion, "Shakespeare? I ain't never hearda him. He must be one of dem European bums[.] Sure as hell I'll moider dat bum." An alternative rendering of Galento's commentary on Shakespeare runs as follows: "Never hoid of him... What's he, one of those foreign heavyweights? I'll moida da bum." To Galento, all his potential opponents and competitors, even Joe Louis and the Bard of Avon, were "bums". In fact, to Galento, nearly everyone was a "bum".
Early life
Galento's parents hailed from near Naples in southern Italy. His father was a quarry worker. After immigrating to the United States, Galento's father got a job in the Edison factory in West Orange, New Jersey. Galento was born in Orange, New Jersey on March 12, 1910. He grew up in an Irish neighborhood and attended the Park Avenue school in Orange until the fifth or sixth grade. At school, he was involved in various violent incidents. "The kids used to call me to lick other kids", Galento reminisced, "and if I couldn't beat 'em I'd use a club. The kids would bring me apples and oranges." On one occasion, in revenge for a kick to the stomach, Galento assaulted an older youth with a homemade pick handle: busting their head and their shoulder. On another occasion, Galento broke the ribs of a "guy named Moe" with a "house brick". Robert F. Fernandez Sr., a "highly recognized" collector of boxing memorabilia, states that Galento "quit school early for the simple reason that he hated it."
After leaving school, Galento worked for Mike Cirrillo, a local iceman. He also shined shoes on Sunday mornings. When he was fifteen, Galento had his own ice wagon and horse. At age sixteen, encouraged by his friend and future trainer Jimmy Frain, Galento started boxing at the Orange YMCA. When he was twenty, during prohibition and the Great Depression, Galento was involved in the running of a speakeasy. Later on, from the mid-1930s onwards, Galento owned and ran a saloon on Day Street in Orange.
Discussing his early years in 1969, Galento elaborated on the role of violence in his childhood and adolescence:
I was rotten when I was 12 and I was drinking when I was 15... The foist time I fought pro was in the schoolyard in Joisey. See, I come from a big family and all I ever got to eat at home was eggs and onions. So I started selling protection. S'pose some kid swiped your marbles, or kicked ya kid sister. Ya come to me and we make a deal. For a piece of pie, I beat the guy up. For a nickle, I bust him up. I was pretty mean then, at 12. If I couldn't beat a guy up one day, I'd come back the next day with a baseball bat. When I was 15, I chased a guy named Eddie Ryan for four months. I finally caught him in a diner at 4 a.m. and knocked him through a window. Took 'em an hour an' a half to bring him around.
Style
Galento was a "slow and undisciplined fighter" with a short reach. Time magazine described him as a "throwback to Stone-Age man" and disparaged his defence, which, it declared, took "care of itself." According to the boxing writer Bob Mee, he had "all the finesse of a charging rhino". The journalist Lew Freedman has written that if boxing as practiced by Joe Louis was indeed the "Sweet Science", as "practiced by Galento it might as well have been a different sport." Despite his reputation for stylistic crudity, Galento had several quality attributes. He could fight out of a crouch and had a formidable, and unpredictable, leaping left hook. He was also physically strong, durable, and fearless. The licensed boxing judge and combat sports commentator David L. Hudson Jr. writes that Galento "had two characteristics that made him a tough opponent: He could absorb massive amounts of punishment, and he could punch." In a preview of his fight with Max Baer, the sportswriter Grantland Rice wrote that Galento "expects to take his share of punches as part of the game. He absorbs them like open buds absorb the dew." In 1933, the promoter James J. Johnston and the matchmaker Sam McQuade named Galento, alongside Salvatore Ruggirello and Otto von Porat, as one of the hardest "one-punch hitters" in heavyweight boxing.
Regarding his allegedly unsportsmanlike conduct in the ring, Galento is reported to have said: "Y’know, they usta call me a dirty fighter. Heck, I trained hard, maybe drank a little beer, took three showers a day and dose newspaper bums said I was a dirty fighter, da bums." Lou Nova, whom Galento defeated in a poorly officiated and bloody encounter in September 1939, called him a "worm" and intimated that the "New Jersey jellyroll" made illicit use of his thumbs. "Baer may get rough, but he doesn't deliberately try to maim a guy", Nova declared. "I don't mind saying that there is one fighter I don't like. That's Galento. He is... a worm!"
In the first of a series of four articles written for The People, "a populist Sunday paper" with a wide circulation, the journalist A. W. Helliwell argued that, "despite his lack of skill and ringcraft", Galento’s “tremendous strength and crushing punch" made "his rough-house tactics dangerous." Introducing Galento to a British audience prior to his title clash with Louis, Helliwell portrayed Galento as a pugilistic anachronism, a fighter out of time:
‘Two-Ton’ Tony was born more than a century too late. He and his antics belong to the roystering bare-knuckle era, to the picturesque days of Bold Bendigo, Deaf Burke and the Game Chicken. His eccentricities, queer methods of training and grotesque physique would have made him a worthy challenger to those colourful hammer-fisted champions of the past.
Training
Physique
Sources differ regarding Galento's height. He may have been 5'8" or he may have been 5'9". One early news feature, in which Galento is described as a "fistic curio" and a "low-chassised New Jersey youth", claims that he was only 5'6". Surveying his bodily dimensions, the Hall of Fame boxing referee Arthur Mercante Sr. drolly remarked that "Galento stood maybe five foot eight inches tall; but he seemed five foot eight whichever way you looked at him." Whatever Galento would have measured, what seems certain is that he was on the shorter side for a heavyweight. As to weight, however, he was on the heavier side. Contrasting his physique with that of Joe Louis, who was a "trim six-footer at 200 pounds", Joseph Monninger records that Galento "stood a mere 5'8" and weighed a flabby 240 pounds." A contemporary news item concerning their title fight states that Galento weighed in at 2331⁄4 lb versus Louis's 2001⁄4 lb. Fernandez attributes Galento's weight to "his love of pasta and beer." According to Fernandez, the teenage Galento, at the start of his professional career in 1928, weighed in at around 165 lb—under the limit of the modern super middleweight division. By 1929, however, he tipped the scales at 200 lb. During his stint as a wrestler, Galento weighed as much as 275 lb.
Prior to his scheduled bout with John Henry Lewis in 1938 (which was cancelled), sportswriter John Lardner gave the following comic description of Galento's physical shape:
The training grind has put Tony into a new kind of shape, unknown to science. Mathematicians are thinking of calling it the Galentoid. It is somewhere between a sphere and an ellipsis [sic], with overtones of parabola. It is covered with hair, and holds two gallons of Budweiser. The difference between Tony standing up and Tony lying on his right side is hard to detect with the naked eye, but, when he has a cigar in his mouth, you can tell which is north, and the rest is easy.
Preparation
Various accounts of Galento's approach to training and preparation suggest that it was anything but orthodox. Monninger relates that Galento once wagered ten dollars that he could eat fifty hot dogs before taking part in a bout. Though he apparently consumed two hot dogs in excess of his bet (for a total of fifty-two), and consequently was so bloated as to be unable to fit comfortably into his trunks, Galento dispatched his "hapless" nemesis, the 6'4" "country puncher" Arthur De Kuh, in the third or fourth round: bloodying his nose and sending him crashing to the canvas. As told by Mee, Galento's conception of exercise was highly unusual: "his idea of roadwork was to sit in a car smoking a fat cigar while his sparring partners got themselves in shape by plodding alongside." Mead concurs. Galento, he avows, "did no roadwork and let his considerable appetite run free." In 1937, Eddie Brietz, a sportswriter with the Associated Press, noted that "[u]sually reliable sources" swore that the night before he "kayoed Al Ettore in Philly" Galento "made away with 24 hot dogs, six shots of booze and... a dozen beers". A Sunday Star photograph of Galento in the run-up to his April 1941 "10-round tiff" with Buddy Baer portrays him scoffing a hot dog beside a plate of dozens more. "Beer makes a guy strong", Helliwell quoted Galento as saying.
The legendary boxing trainer Ray Arcel, whose charges over a long and distinguished career included Roberto Durán and Larry Holmes, was not a fan of Galento. Tasked with training him by Jack Dempsey in 1933, Arcel believed that "[t]rying to get Galento fit was a farce", that he "was just bone lazy", and that working with him was a "waste of time and money". Dempsey himself, though he had seen great potential in the young Galento—potential enough to become his manager—came to agree. As Donald Dewey relays in his 2012 biography of Arcel (drawing on a "floridly ghosted" column that appeared under Arcel's byline in the New York Journal-American in 1948), Dempsey's disillusionment with Galento culminated in the 'Manassa Mauler' humiliating the "New Jersey Fat Boy" in the ring at Stillman's Gym in New York City:
Dempsey strolled quietly into the gymnasium and walked up to the balcony while Galento was going through the motions of 'working out.' He was fatter than ever, hopelessly out of condition, and quite obviously doing nothing about it... He didn't see Dempsey and continued waddling around the ring, clowning and wisecracking as he fooled with his sparring partners. After watching a couple of rounds, Dempsey came down to ringside. He was wearing a beautifully cut light gray suit, tan and white shoes, and white silk shirt. When Tony caught sight of him, he gave him a big hello. 'You look like a million bucks dis afternoon,' he says to him. 'Never mind how I look, you big bum,' Dempsey answers. 'Let's see you do some work.'
...
He [Dempsey] took off his coat and stripped right down to his white silk monogrammed underpants and vaulted into the ring: 'Now, Tony,' he told him. 'It's you and me. I'll show you how we used to do it.' He began humming a little tune—an old Dempsey mannerism—and then, as Galento backed away, he flashed into action. Jack was turned forty but his body was as lean and hard and tanned as ever, and for three memorable minutes we saw the old Dempsey, the murderous, tear-away Manassa Mauler... What he did to Galento in those three minutes was nobody's business. He ripped punches into the pudgy torso from all angles, split his lips with a terrific left, and sent the blood squirting from his nose with a right.
...
[Dempsey chased after Galento], throwing punches until I [Arcel] called time. Still breathing easily, Dempsey ducked under the ropes and began to dress while Galento stood shaking his head in a semi-daze and trying to wipe the blood from his face with the backs of his gloves. When he [Dempsey] was dressed, he threw Galento a contemptuous look. 'That's how we used to fight, Galento,' he said. 'Now I'm through with you. You can find yourself another manager.' Then he turned to me and said, 'You were right, Ray. It's a waste of time trying to make a champ out of that chump.'
Comparing Galento to Joe Louis in terms of their professionalism, the sportswriter Henry McLemore wrote that whereas Louis "shuns alcohol, tobacco, [and] late hours", "Galento drinks, smokes, and stays up later than an owl with insomnia." "Louis believes in the outdoor life and healthful exercises", McLemore continued, but "Galento likes to train in a nice dark, smoke-filled poolhall, where the terrific racket made by songbirds, bees and rippling brooks doesn't interfere with his concentration."
Retrospect
In an interview with Hubert 'Hu' Blonk of the Wenatchee World in 1969, the aging Galento cast a retrospectively critical eye on the nature of his training. Galento told Blonk that he "used to work out two or three hours every day for a fight and run six miles", and then, after his exercise, decamp "across the street" and drink ten or so bottles of beer. "You can't", Galento informed Blonk, "be an athlete and drink."
Insult
On account of his relative corpulence, Galento's name, inclusive of "Two Ton", was at times used as a childish insult or taunt. The prominent American literary critic Henry Louis Gates Jr. recounts in his memoir Colored People that during his childhood his father and brother would call him "Two-Ton Tony Galento" due to his being overweight.
Heavyweight championship fight
Build-up and event
On June 28, 1939 in Yankee Stadium in the Bronx in New York City, Galento fought for the heavyweight championship of the world against the 'Brown Bomber' Joe Louis. Louis was a heavy favorite and "1 to 8 in the betting". In a prefight poll conducted by the Associated Press, only three sportswriters picked Galento to win. 34,852 attended and the gate amounted to $333,308. Famous and otherwise notable attendees included Tyrone Power, Gene Tunney, Jack Benny, Mary Livingstone, Andy Devine, New York Governor Herbert H. Lehman, and "head G-Man" John Edgar Hoover. NBC broadcast the bout and crowds gathered around radios all across the United States. Galento secured his title shot via a run of good form—a string of eleven straight victories—and the promotional skills of his manager Joe Jacobs: a "ballyhoo wizard." Fernandez writes that Galento "looked and sounded like a Damon Runyon character", and Jacobs—who had Galento pose for the press "smoking cigars while punching the bag", "downing full pitchers of beer", and "carrying kegs of beer to 'enhance his training'", all the while repeating "I'll moider da bum" in his "thick New Joicey accent"—"made him even more so." With his "carefully built picture of a fat, lazy man who never trained except on endless cigars and gallons of beer", the Derry Journal'''s "Roundabout in Sport" recollected in 1963, "Galento climbed the contenders' ladder more because he was the best publicity man in the business than because he was the best fighter." In light of Galento's well-publicized antics, the Woman's Christian Temperance Union, though it regarded prize fighting as "anti-social", indicated its preference for the "clean-living Louis creed as opposed to the self indulgence of Galento and his beer kegs."
In the weeks leading up to the fight, in order to gain a competitive advantage and arouse still further interest, Galento and Jacobs attempted to unsettle and "psych" Louis. Jacobs accused Louis of having "held a metal bar inside his right glove the night he knocked out Max Schmeling", and Galento, without warning or invitation, took to "call[ing] the champion on the phone, insult[ing] him, and predict[ing] a knockout victory." Donald Dewey alleges that Galento, during his "late night calls" to Louis, would "whisper threats and shriek racial epithets". Monninger writes that Galento "embraced the racist stereotypes of his day", and, in his telephone calls to Louis, "questioned his manhood, talked about his race, [and] made sexual references about Marva, Louis's wife." Looking back on his fight with Galento on the PBS sports nostalgia show The Way It Was on January 29, 1976, an episode on which Galento was also a guest, Louis alluded to Galento's prefight behavior. In response to a question from the veteran broadcaster Don Dunphy about whether he was ever "really mad" at an opponent, Louis curtly dismissed the suggestion of Schmeling, laughed, and said:
That's not so. I wasn't mad at Schmeling. That was all newspaper stuff. Schmeling and I were good friends... But that little fellow [Galento]... he really got me mad. All those mean things he said about me while training for our fight. He got me mad, all right. So I decided to carry him for a while in the fight and punish him for those nasty things. But when he knocked me down in the third round, I decided I better not fool around. He hit too hard. So I knocked him out as quickly as I could.In later years, Galento apologized for his conduct. Louis entertained no hard feelings. He concluded that Galento, despite his gruff exterior and exuberant—even sometimes bigoted—braggadocio, had "no harm in him" and was "just full of wind, like the barber's cat."
In the first round, Galento—"his body crouched, his hands at the sides of his head as if prepared to lock his thumbs in his ears like a pretend bull"—started brightly. He opened with his left: twice swatting at Louis, who, stepping to the side, evaded his attack. Galento persisted and swatted again: stunning Louis with a "full-bore left hook" that drove the champion to the ropes. Galento tried to capitalize on Louis's discomfort with a "hacking" right cross. Louis, however, calmly took it on his gloves. Louis returned to the center of the ring, fended off Galento's "galumphing" advances, and started to land his jab almost at will: "jar[ring] Galento's head back onto his shoulders". Expert opinion granted Galento the first round. He had landed the biggest blow.
In the second round, Louis began to settle into his rhythm. He worked off of his jab and hit Galento with multiple combinations. Galento's face reddened and blood started to flow from his nose and his brow. Lacking other options, given his lackadaisical training and "inattention to technique", Galento continued to trundle forward, looking to land his left. With seconds to go in the round, Louis, following up a successful straight right, caught Galento with a "crisp left on the point of the chin" that put 'Two Ton' down on the seat of his pants. Galento quickly jumped to his feet. He had never been dropped before in his professional career.
In the third round, Louis circled and angled, while Galento, "frog-hopping", followed. Louis landed jabs and crosses. Still in a crouch, "Galento bobbed and moved and took Louis's fists." In the middle of the round, Galento beat Louis to the punch: sending the champion to the canvas with a sharp left hook. Galento's moment of glory, the highpoint of his career, didn't last long. "Louis stayed down only a moment" and Galento failed to press his advantage. Louis closed the round on the front foot. "In the last seconds of round three, Louis connected with a right, a left to the body, another right. Galento waded through the punches, trying to ignore them, trying to find the punch that had lifted Louis, but the cumulative weight of the Bomber's blows began to sag him." Louis's clouts had an enervating effect.
In the fourth round, Louis went on as he had finished the third: "pelting Galento, hitting him with solid punches while Galento's hooks scraped air." Galento was running out of gas. A minute, "or thirty punches", into the round, a round in which the 'Nightstick' landed little of significance, Louis knocked Galento sideways with a "perfect right to the chin". "Louis followed up smoothly" and encountered no resistance. Galento's defence, such as it was, was absent without leave. Louis continued to attack: Galento slumped towards the ropes and fell to his knees. At 2 minutes, 29 seconds of the fourth round, referee Arthur Donovan stopped the fight. Louis retained his heavyweight crown. By the lights of the sports columnist John A. Cluney, the fourth round, on account of its one-sidedness, "was nothing short of modified murder."
Post-fight opinions
In the wake of the fight, sportswriters expressed a variety of opinions. In his "Win, Lose or Draw" column, Francis E. Stan averred that Galento "did more damage and produced more thrills than more illustrious opponents of Louis such as Primo Carnera, King Levinsky, Max Baer, Paulino Uzcudun, Jack Sharkey and Nathan Mann." John Lardner surmised that "Tony had the chance to consummate the weirdest and wildest upset of this generation of cauliflowers. But he couldn't." The Washingtonian Elliott Metcalf was singularly unimpressed with the bout and offhandedly referred to it as a "disgusting heavyweight thing". Grantland Rice praised Galento as a "game, stout-hearted opponent", but was under no illusions as to the doughty and vociferous Jerseyan's fistic inferiority. Riffing on a quote from Lord Byron, Rice wrote that "[a]ll that happened to brave Tony in the Yankee Stadium last night was a violent and bloody mixture of lashing, laceration, mayhem, face-lifting assault with two dangerous weapons and a touch of TNT." Alongside depreciating Louis's ability to take a punch and Galento's ability to give one, the New York Daily Mirror's Dan Parker approvingly characterized the fight as a "glorious throwback to Stone Age brawling" and a "spine-tingling brawl". Holding forth on what provided his "greatest thrill in sports", United Press newsman Jack Cuddy wrote in 1943 that "[a]mid the electrifying incidents and heroic performances that have stood out like sharply-etched mountain peaks through the years, the Louis-Galento fight to me was the most prominent of all."
Though in the end he was soundly beaten, Galento maintained that victory could have been his if those around him had allowed him to fight his own fight: that is, if they had allowed him to foul and roughhouse Louis. "If I had the right manager", Galento divulged to the journalist W. C. Heinz, "he woulda said: 'Go out and hit him low.' I woulda butted and thumbed him. I coulda been champion of the world." The celebrated Whitey Bimstein, Galento's cutman for the fight, distinctly disagreed. If Galento had simply kept to his instructions, Bimstein believed, he could very well have won:
I still think Tony Galento would have licked him if he obeyed orders. We had Tony bobbing and weaving in the first two rounds, and he had Louis dizzy. He even knocked Louis down. Then he thought he was John L. Sullivan and came up straight to slug, and you can't just do that with Louis. If Tony had fought the way he was told, he might have got in another shot that would have kept Louis down for keeps—and I don't think Tony was the greatest fighter in the world, either.As for the champion's evaluation of the fight, Louis purportedly described it as one of the toughest he ever had. "Dat white boy hits like hell", he supposedly exclaimed. "Joe said he had to hit him [Galento] a dozen times as hard as he ever hit a man", the Associated Press sportswriter Gayle Talbot informed his readers, "before Tony finally fell into the referee's arms, groping for the ropes in a desperate effort to keep his feet." Asked by Bob Cahn of the Tacoma Times if Galento could hit hard, Louis replied: "Hard enough to knock me down." In 1948, 59 fights into his professional career, Louis ranked Galento as his tenth toughest foe: behind Conn, Braddock, Baer, Farr, Schmeling, Walcott, Godoy, Pastor, and Sharkey.
Commenting on the fight in a letter to his son, Patrick, Ernest Hemingway amusedly mused that "Galento certainly came very close to knocking Louis out and if he can do that on beer I wonder what he could do on Frozen Daiquiris?"
Other fights
Lou Nova
Among Galento's other notable fights were his contests with the former champion Max Baer and the contender Lou Nova. The Nova fight—held in Philadelphia on September 15, 1939—enjoys a reputation as one of the dirtiest and bloodiest ever fought: earning its "venue the name of Filthydelphia among sportswriters". Galento "used his head as a battering ram, his thumbs to gouge Nova's eyes, and the laces of his gloves to rake Nova's face." "Rabbit punches, kidney punches, and low blows were followed by verbal abuse." The clean-cut Nova, albeit with limited success, attempted to respond in kind. "The only thing that 'Two-Ton' Tony didn't do to Nova, when he had him temporarily on his heels", the Connecticut journalist Jim Morcaldi alleged, "was... bite him." Lewis Atchison, a staff correspondent at the Washington Evening Star, wrote that "Tony used everything but a blunt instrument on his dazed and bloody opponent". The newspaperman and author Sid Feder reckoned the fight to have been as "gory and bloody a spectacle as any slaughterhouse ever witnessed"—Galento and Nova "slugged and mauled, rushed in and clinched, but mostly they just fired left hands and watched the blood spurt." Referee George Blake stopped the bout at 2 minutes, 44 seconds of the 14th round. Nova suffered four knockdowns and Galento won by technical knockout. Gayle Talbot, who characterized Galento's performance as a "surprising and amazing exhibition of hard punching and endurance", proclaimed that "[b]oth fighters appeared as if they had been hit by trucks at the finish". After the fight, Nova said that if Galento wanted to win dirty "it's all right, but he won't go to heaven." Galento, for his part, paid tribute to Nova's toughness, but claimed to have been unbothered by the Californian's power: "Naw, he didn't hurt me. Here, gimme my pants, I wanna go home." Both men were hospitalized and sustained detached retinas. Nova received eleven stitches: five above and six below his right eye. In a retrospective account of Galento versus Nova published in 1951, the Australian boxing writer John Murphy christened the bout the "grisliest knock-em-down and drag-em-out since the days of the last century bully boys."
Max Baer
Derisively referred to by some newsmen as the "Battle of the Bums", Galento's fight with Max Baer was hosted in Jersey City on July 2, 1940. The bout was originally scheduled for May 28, but was postponed following the death of Joe Jacobs, Galento's manager, on April 24. Though he ended up the bookies' favorite, Fernandez writes that Galento "wanted no part of Max" as he knew Baer "could really bang and could box well if he so desired." Odds on Galento to best Baer shortened further when it came to light that Galento had "thought up an eleventh-hour epithet"—a "mystery adjective"—which he intended to hurl at Baer, and thereby presumably discomfit him, just prior to the fight's commencement. During the build-up to the match various choice words were swapped between the opposing camps. Galento "scornfully" called Baer "Peanut Heart" and Baer called Galento "pig eye". According to Ray Arcel, Galento was perhaps the only fighter whom Baer "couldn't stomach". The attendance was 22,711 and Baer won by technical knockout. Galento failed to answer the bell for the start of the eighth round. Reflecting on the nature of Galento's defeat, Henry McLemore likened the 'Jersey Nightstick' to the ill-fated 'Little Caesar': "Watching Galento grope towards his helpers at the close of the seventh round I could not help but remember the finish of the book Little Caesar, in which the gangster, after years of high rolling, found himself in the gutter, dying of bullets. 'Is this the end?' he cried. 'Is this the end of Little Caesar?.' Tony must have felt like crying 'Is this the end of the Great Galento?.'" Much more so than 'Madcap Maxie', Galento shipped a lot of punishment over the course of their encounter. Bill Fitzgerald, a Transradio sportswriter, opined that Baer had given Galento "one of the most merciless beatings in the history of boxing". "For seven rounds Baer made faces at Galento", Fitzgerald quipped, "and made Galento's face look like a comic strip version of the man from Mars." Gayle Talbot shared similar thoughts. Baer "took his time, dodged Galento's mighty lunges, and steadily punched the fat man into a state bordering on helplessness." Though the effect it had on the bout's outcome may not have been decisive, Galento's preparation for the fight was far from ideal. As Whitey Bimstein recalled:
What a guy... The first time I was called upon to take charge of him [Galento], I watched him work out, then we went back to his tavern for dinner. And what do you think he ate? A big platter of meatballs and spaghetti! Two days before he fought Max Baer. And two days before the fight they called me and told me he had a fight with his brother and that his brother shoved a broken glass in Tony's face and split his lip. We fixed that up and the day of the fight, at three o'clock in the afternoon, he ate more meatballs and spaghetti and drank a dozen bottles of beer. Baer walked right out, smacked him with a right in the mouth and dug a left hook into his stomach. After that was repeated a few times, Tony was through.
Ernie Schaaf
A lesser known Galento contest—his June 7, 1932 battle with Ernie Schaaf in Newark—may have been a particularly consequential one. As recorded by Joseph G. Donovan in his 1939 Galento the Great, a terse and laudatory biographical tome that was published to coincide with Galento's shot at fame and fortune (his world title fight with Joe Louis), certain Newark "fight writers" attributed Schaaf's death following his fight with Primo Carnera in 1933 to damage inflicted in his tussle with Galento. Whatever truth, if any, there may be to the idea, at least one contemporary press account pronounced that Schaaf had "won an easy ten round decision". Though Galento very occasionally managed to land a hard right to Schaaf's head, and, in the second and third rounds, shook Schaaf with "left hooks to the jaw", Schaaf was apparently the superior infighter and "administered a terrific battering to Galento in the fifth round, opening cuts on his cheek, mouth and left eyebrow." "The fair-haired Boston boxer had an easy time with his opponent", it was reported, "but was unable to knock out the rugged ice man."
Following a post-mortem examination, performed in the aftermath of his fight with Carnera, Dr Charles Norris, the chief medical examiner of New York City, determined that "[i]nflammation of the brain, probably due to an attack of influenza, was the primary cause" of Schaaf's death. Nevertheless, the possibility that Galento was in part responsible for Schaaf's demise was again rehearsed in Ring magazine in 1972.
Life after boxing
Wrestling and acting
After retiring as a boxer, Galento turned his hand to professional wrestling. He squared off against fellow ex-heavyweight contender Primo Carnera, grappled an octopus in a giant fish tank in Seattle, fought a 550 lb bear in a cage in Newark, and boxed a kangaroo in Atlantic City. Among Galento's human adversaries in the wrestling ring, other than Carnera, were Man Mountain Dean, Kola Kwariani, and "Nature Boy" Buddy Rogers. The boxing and wrestling promoter Babe Culnan told W. C. Heinz that Kwariani—who had shared a ring with such wrestling luminaries as Strangler Lewis, Gus Sonnenberg, and Stanislaus Zbyszko—called Galento the "strongest man I've ever been in with." As well as tangling in the squared circle himself, Galento refereed numerous matches. In 1963, for example, he officiated a meeting between Bobo Brazil and Gorilla Monsoon at an "all-star" show in the Washington Coliseum that was promoted by Vince McMahon.
In retirement, Galento also took to acting. On the silver screen, he appeared in On the Waterfront (1954), Guys and Dolls (1955), The Best Things in Life Are Free (1956), and Wind Across the Everglades (1958). On the boards, he played the role of 'Big Jule'—a part most associated with the nightclub comedian B. S. Pully—in a 1955 production of Guys and Dolls that was staged in a tent near Valley Forge, Pennsylvania. Regarding his transition from sportsperson to thespian, Galento said that, in light of his wrestling experience, acting wasn't really new to him as he had been "hammin' all over the joint for the last 12 years."
In a conversation with the academic William Baer, the screenwriter and producer Budd Schulberg said of Galento that he was a "natural actor, and I think he was terrific, except he couldn't remember his lines."
Legal difficulties
Post-boxing, Galento experienced various legal difficulties. In 1943, following an altercation with a motorcycle patrolman named James Meehan, he faced charges of "assault and battery, disorderly conduct and refusal to put a nickel in a parking meter." "Police Judge Philip Singer found Galento [guilty] on assault and battery charges and fined him $65." In 1946, Galento was arrested on a gambling charge. In 1954, James J. Venere of Newark, a former tenant in an apartment owned by Galento, brought a suit against the "rotund former prize fighter" that alleged that Galento had illegally impounded "$1,400 worth" of his possessions in lieu of the payment of rent. In court, Galento grimaced and affected incredulity: "I'm no lawyer... All I know is this guy owes me $200 rent and HE'S suing ME!" In 1959, Galento and his wife, Mary, were convicted of gambling offences. Galento was fined $25, and Mary, for "maintaining a gambling house", was fined $125.
In 1957, it was reported in certain African American newspapers that "Mr. and Mrs. Joe Louis filed a $250,000 slander suit" against Galento, "charging defamation of character." The suit resulted from remarks Galento allegedly made about Louis on an episode of Mike Wallace's Night Beat television program. Galento reportedly claimed that Louis was a "pushover" whom he would have handily "licked" if he, Galento, who had a battle with pneumonia in the summer of 1938, hadn't been pressured into taking the fight earlier than scheduled. Galento was reported to have impugned Louis's integrity by asserting that he "wouldn't be surprised if Louis himself didn't have something to do with arranging that premature fight." In the African American news and entertainment magazine Jet, it was reported that Louis's second wife, the businesswoman and beautician Rose Morgan, had initiated legal proceedings against Galento, Mike Wallace, and the American Broadcasting Company. Jet didn't indicate whether Louis himself was involved in the action. Writing in Newsweek, John Lardner assured "Mrs. Louis" that she needn't be worried about the "kind of history dispensed by Tony Galento". Young people, if they cared, need only look at the record book to see that, whatever Galento had to say, Joe Louis was no 'bum'.
Later heavyweights
Commenting on the heavyweight scene of the 1970s, a decade that some fight fans remember as a 'golden age', Galento sounded a disapproving note. "They're all a bunch of bums", he unsurprisingly declared. George Foreman, he said, was a "strong fella, but if he don't hit'cha, he's lost". Muhammad Ali, Galento believed, "should have a clothes-pin on his mouth." "I'da knocked the bum out in three", Galento later said of Ali. "Rope-a-dope with me? If I hit him on the arms he'd have his arms in splints". In 1972, the sixty-two-year-old Galento offered advice to the heavyweight contender Ron Stander, the 'Bluffs Butcher', on how to beat Joe Frazier. "When Joe sticks a thumb in your eye, stick two thumbs in his eye", Galento suggested. "When Joe comes in with his head low, get your head lower and then suddenly bring your head to an upright position. Of course, with his head in the way, you knock out a few teeth. Step back politely and say, 'I'm sorry'." Despite Galento's instruction in the dark arts of rule bending and rule breaking, Frazier stopped Stander in the fifth round of their heavyweight title contest on May 25. A few years prior to Frazier's victory over Stander, Galento stated that 'Smokin' Joe', of the "current crop of heavyweights", was the "best of 'em". Incidentally, Frazier later recalled Stander as a "beer-guzzling knockabout character—a kind of midwestern Tony Galento."
The Canadian heavyweight George Chuvalo, who twice went the distance against Muhammad Ali, details in his autobiography that Galento taught him "how to follow a [head]butt with a short right hand, making it look like the punch caused the damage."
Galento reportedly offered to coach his fellow Jerseyan Chuck Wepner in the run-up to the latter's 1975 fight against Ali.
Charitable causes
In his later years, Galento was a representative of the Max Baer Heart Fund, the Eagle Cancer Fund, and the Jimmy Durante Children's Fund. All three funds were ran by the Fraternal Order of Eagles, a fraternal organization of which Galento was a member and a "travelling ambassador". In honor of Galento, the Eagles started a Tony Galento Diabetes Fund.
Encounters
A wall in Galento's home was reportedly decorated with blown-up photographs depicting his knockdown of Joe Louis. According to the New York Post'' gossip columnist and anecdotalist Leonard Lyons, the Manhattan restauranteur Toots Shor on seeing the wall inquired: "Where's the real picture—the one showing Joe Louis standing over you after the knockout?" "That picture's on Joe Louis'[s] wall", a shrugging Galento supposedly replied. In his unofficial role as a go-between between celebrities, Lyons introduced Galento to the playwright Noël Coward.
Galento, when an "old man", was once encountered by the palaeontologist Stephen Jay Gould in a bar in upstate New York. For Gould, Galento was not a figure of fun, but of pity—the perfect picture of an also-ran: "still cadging drinks in exchange for the true story of his moment of glory: when he knocked Joe Louis down before losing their fight for the heavyweight championship."
Death
Following complications caused by diabetes, Galento died of a heart attack in July 1979. In the period immediately prior to his death, he underwent two significant surgeries. The week before he died, his right leg was amputated. Two years earlier, in 1977, his left leg was "amputated at mid-calf at Beth Israel Hospital." Galento was buried from the Roman Catholic Our Lady of Mount Carmel Church in Orange, New Jersey—the church in which he was married in 1935. Galento's funeral mass was attended by Jersey Joe Walcott and Tippy Larkin. Though he had become friends with Galento, Joe Louis, owing to his "ailing" state, was unable to attend his funeral. Louis did, however, attend a "Galento testimonial" in Newark in 1978.
Galento's death was adverted to by the Democratic Party politician Joseph Minish in the United States House of Representatives.
Professional boxing record
Filmography
References
External links
1910 births
1979 deaths
American professional wrestlers of Italian descent
American people of Italian descent
Heavyweight boxers
Sportspeople from Orange, New Jersey
American male professional wrestlers
Burials in New Jersey
20th-century American male actors
American male boxers
Boxers from New Jersey