Tony Galento
Dominick Anthony Galento 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 his head and 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, 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 , 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, 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 "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 "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, 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 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.
...
, throwing punches until I 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 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, 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."