New Book Strikes a Knockout Punch with Cincinnati Boxing Fans

Did You Know –

• The first heavyweight boxing championship with gloves was held in Cincinnati?
• Cincinnati’s first home-grown boxer took the Featherweight Championship?
• Music Hall was one of the city’s main venues to showcase the big fights?
• UC once had fabulous fighting engineers? UC’s former boxing team evolved from the university’s co-op program.

And of course, there’s Cincinnati’s favorite son in boxing, Ezzard Charles. Sports researcher Kevin Grace – UC head of Archives & Rare Books and adjunct assistant professor for the College of Education, Criminal Justice, and Human Services – and his son, UC alum Joshua Grace, are the authors of

Cincinnati Boxing

, Arcadia Publishing’s latest edition in its

Images of Sports

series. The foreword of the book is written by Cincinnati icon Buddy LaRosa (son of boxer Tony LaRosa), who has supported Cincinnati boxing as a manager, promoter and philanthropist. Photographs for the book, a pictorial history of Cincinnati through the sport of boxing, came from the Graces’ personal collection as well as that of Buddy LaRosa.

Grace says whether one is or is not a boxing fan, it’s hard to justify the sport because of its violence. “What we wanted to do was get beyond the controversy of it and look at the place that boxing had in terms of American heritage – with ethnicity and race and urban growth. We wanted to use boxing as another way of viewing history, not just in and of itself,” says Grace.

The history shows how the boxing style changed after the first heavyweight boxing match with gloves was held in Cincinnati on Aug. 29, 1885. “Before that, boxing was a bare-knuckle event,” Grace explains. “Boxers would soak their hands in brine to toughen the skin.” Grace adds that before gloves, the boxing strategy was to go for the neck and body – otherwise, an attempt at a knockout punch to the head would lead to a broken hand. “Gloves changed all of that. And, another reason why gloves were a significant development in boxing’s history is that there have always been the social and legal hills and valleys of boxing being acceptable to American society. With the advent of gloves, boxing was made to look more like a middle-class gentleman’s sport.”

The book traces Cincinnati’s history from an amateur boxing town to its first world champion, Freddie Miller, the son of German immigrants and a southpaw from Over-the-Rhine, who claimed the featherweight championship in 1933.

Cincinnati’s Golden Age (1934-1960) in boxing celebrated its championship in what Grace calls the glamour division of the sport, with Ezzard Charles crowned king of the heavyweights from 1949-1952. “His life would make a great movie,” Grace says. “He didn’t even start going to school until he was nine years old. He had been living in the rural south when his parents got divorced, and he was sent to the West End to live with his great-grandmother and grandmother, and they started sending him to school.”

Grace says Woodward High schoolmates Harry Andreadis (a former star football player at UC) and his brother, Paul, recalled that Ezzard Charles wore a suit each day to school, and would bob and weave around younger schoolchildren who would try to box at him. “He’d keep his hands in his pockets and they could never lay a hand on him,” says Grace. “Then, he’d just take his hands out of his pockets, pat them on the head, and walk away.”

Grace, who’s currently at work on a biography of Ezzard Charles, says his story is unique because he never fit the stereotype of the typical boxer. “He was not just some galoot that went out and pounded people. He was a well-spoken, gentle man who had to be told by the photographer to scowl for the camera.”

Grace says Charles was deeply affected by the tragedy of his 1948 knockout win over Sam Baroudi that led to Baroudi’s death, and Charles later died tragically himself of Lou Gehrig’s disease.

The book also traces the careers of Aaron Pryor, “Cincinnati Kid” Tim Austin, who won the Olympic Bronze Medal in 1992 and won the International Boxing Federation Bantamweight title in 1997, and the status of amateur boxing in Cincinnati to this day.

Meanwhile, UC’s own boxing history began in 1921, a creation of the founder of cooperative education, Herman Schneider. The book explains that the dean of the College of Engineering wanted his students to become “well-rounded individuals,” leading to the creation of “Hobby Hour,” in which students were encouraged to do anything but engineering. One of the activities was a UC boxing team, no longer in existence.

Cincinnati Boxing

has a retail price of $19.99 and is on sale in most of Cincinnati’s major book stores, as well as the UC Bookstore.