L
incoln Park Drive in the West End was rechristened Ezzard Charles Drive nearly 40 years ago, yet when one asks a typical Cincinnatian whether they are familiar with the man after which the street is named, a quizzical look almost certainly comes across their face before answering, “Uh, not really.”
It seems even Ezzard Charles’ hometown knows very little about one of the greatest prizefighters in boxing history. There are numerous reasons why the “Cincinnati Cobra” isn’t better known in the Queen City and beyond — even among fight fans, his reputation is not what is should be — but two recent developments could alter his profile: The first-ever biography of Charles, William Dettloff’s A Boxing Life: Ezzard Charles, was published last month, and ArtWorks is planning to unveil a large mural of the one-time heavyweight champion on a building at Republic and West Liberty streets in Over-the-Rhine (see sidebar on page 17).
Dettloff, who was a senior writer at The Ring magazine for 15 years, set out to fix a missing link in boxing history.
“There was a huge hole in the literature that an Ezzard Charles biography should have filled a long time ago,” Dettloff says by phone from his home in Pennsylvania. “There are biographies of nearly all of his contemporaries, several of whom he beat and was much more accomplished than. There are good biographies, and more than one, of Rocky Marciano, Joe Louis and Archie Moore. And there are biographies of Jersey Joe Walcott and Jimmy Bivins and Charley Burley, and he was as good as or better, arguably, than all those guys.”
Deftly researched and evocatively relayed, Dettloff’s book reveals a wealth of information about a man who, like many a boxer before and since, began his life as a dirt-poor kid from a broken home. At age 9 in 1930, Charles moved from his birthplace in rural Georgia to live with his grandmother in Cincinnati’s West End. He resided in the neighborhood — where, as Dettloff writes, “all the black folks lived” — for the next 36 years, a period that spans his entire boxing career, including during what should have been his crowning achievement: defeating the great Joe Louis at Yankee Stadium in New York City to capture the heavyweight championship in 1950. (Charles died from ALS at the age of 53 in 1975.)
A Boxing Life examines the reasons that Charles was anything but respected for beating Louis, who at the time had not lost a match in 14 years.
“I was surprised at the depth of the hatred for Charles after he beat Joe Louis,” Dettloff says. “I figured he just wasn’t a very popular champion, kind of like Larry Holmes was after he beat (Muhammad) Ali. Whenever you follow a revered champion, you’re never loved, but it wasn’t like people hated Holmes, and I think people really hated Ezzard. He got booed everywhere he went. Against virtually everyone he faced, the crowd was always with the opponent. And even the sports writers couldn’t stand him because essentially he wasn’t Joe Louis, and that shows how much Louis was loved — that the guy that followed him and beat him was hated just about as much as Louis was loved.”
Much more than today — an era in which nearly every sporting event is available on television and debated endlessly on social media — sports writers had the power to make or break an athlete. Their power was even more pronounced in boxing, a sport ruled as much by those outside the ring than those within in it.
“The writers were tremendously important because this was before the Internet, where a guy fights and 20 minutes later you can look it up on YouTube,” Dettloff says. “This was an era when half of these fights weren’t even on the radio — only the big fights were on radio — so the only way for fight fans to get any kind of understanding of how a fight went was from newspaper writers. The sad truth is that half of them were on the take. The managers had to pay off the writers just to get a fair description of how their fighter did in his respective fight the night before. The writers were the only means for the sporting public finding out how a fight went.”
It also didn’t help that Charles was a different kind of guy, both in the ring and out. Low-key and something of an introvert, Charles was a Jazz buff who played upright bass, read psychology books and was known to dabble in painting.
“Most people, even the boxing heads, only remember him as a good but not great heavyweight champion, and there is not much interest in the story of a guy who was a good but not great heavyweight champion — even one who beat Joe Louis,” Dettloff says. “And then there’s the fact Charles wasn’t considered a really exciting fighter in the ring, nor an exciting personality out of it.”
Enter Jake Mintz, Charles’ manager, a Pittsburgh native who, as Detloff writes, “liked to brag that he could out-holler and out-lie anyone in the game. By the time he was making a decent living putting together matches in Pittsburgh, the fight press had more or less fallen for him on account of his weakness for malapropisms.” Every boxer needs a good promoter, and, in Mintz, Charles had one of the most colorful.
“I think there is some suspicion out there for Ezzard Charles fans that Mintz did him wrong somehow and really wasn’t a good guy to Ezzard, especially when he more or less abandoned him toward the end of his career,” Dettloff says. “But my thinking is that he was perfect for Ezzard, because Ezzard’s personality was such that he wasn’t going to make headlines by himself — other than just by being a good fighter. Personality sells, and what Ezzard was lacking in personality, Jake Mintz had. He sold Ezzard Charles better than he could have sold himself, and I think a guy who was less of a ham than Jake Mintz wouldn’t have been as successful at selling Charles as Mintz was.”
A Boxing Life also delves into the many Cincinnatians who helped — or clung to — Charles on his way up the ranks from green middleweight to highly skilled, if undersized, heavyweight, the latter of which became a necessary jump when boxing politics kept him from getting a title shot at light heavyweight, his most natural weight class. The list of locals includes mentors Theodore M. Berry, Cincinnati’s first African-American mayor, and Bert Williams, Charles’ first trainer, a Welshman long known as an important figure in the Queen City boxing scene. Williams was the first person to believe in Charles, whom he initially described as a “skinny, undernourished kid who can barely stand, let alone box.” According to Williams, Charles was eager to learn and desperate to escape his impoverished surroundings — a potent combo that was essential for a boxer who would later become one of the most skilled technicians the fight game would ever see.
“It seems to me Cincinnati is a good boxing town for the same reason that the poorest, most desperate countries produce the best boxers: There are parts of Cincinnati that are really poverty stricken, and it’s in those places that the best boxers are born,” Dettloff says. “All the great fighters in history, with just a couple exceptions — Muhammad Ali being one of them — came from the poorest places in America or around the world. Cincinnati, especially during Ezzard Charles’ era — we don’t use the word slums anymore, but he came from a slum, as did Aaron Pryor, as did probably Larry Donald, another Cincinnati heavyweight that did fairly well, as did probably Adrien Broner, a current Cincinnati fighter who is doing fairly well. Towns with the most desperate poverty in pockets produce the best fighters. It’s as simple as that.”
Dettloff argues that Charles’ reputation suffered because he was forced to fight in the heavyweight division at the height of his career. Even Rocky Marciano — a small heavyweight by today’s standards and against whom Charles’ suffered two memorable, hard-fought losses — was bigger.
“When you look back at what he did as a middleweight and a light heavyweight, that’s when he becomes interesting,” Detloff says. “I think a lot of people just never bothered to really look at what he did at those lighter weights when he beat all those really great guys who were future Hall of Fame fighters like Charley Burley, Jimmy Bivins and Archie Moore. To have beaten Archie Moore three times, when Archie Moore is considered by a lot of guys as the greatest light heavyweight ever, is really significant.”
Charles was also criticized for not being more aggressive — not having a “killer instinct.” Many blamed his lack of aggression on the fact that one of his opponents, Sam Baroudi, died from injuries he suffered during a fight with Charles in 1948. But Dettloff believes the true reason behind Charles’ increasingly cautious approach was that he started fighting bigger, more dangerous guys in the heavyweight division. Often outweighed by at least 20 pounds, he had to rely more on his skills and smarts.
“There are so many things he did in the ring that, unless you really know boxing and have been around it for a long time, you would never pick up,” Detloff says. “The way he moved his head, the combinations he threw, the way he positioned himself at just the right range in most cases to be able to hit his opponent and not get hit in return. He’s really revered by the old heads in boxing — really old heads at this point — as being one of the greatest tacticians ever. Unfortunately for him, fans don’t generally pay to see great tacticians, Floyd Mayweather notwithstanding. They want to see guys like Marciano and Louis who can just pulverize guys.”
The underappreciated nature of Charles’ career is a theme A Boxing Life incisively rectifies throughout its 221 pages. But Dettloff most pointedly argues for the greatness of a Cincinnati icon who never received his proper due at the end of the book’s introduction: “They looked and looked for another Louis, while Ezzard Charles was right there under their noses. How could they not see he was a genius?” ©
