In my heyday, I was driving on South Street in Philly and saw Zack Stalberg, who was editor of the Daily News there. We knew each other in passing, so I called out, “Zack! If Bernard ever leaves, I want that job!”
He laughed and nodded. Bernard Fernandez was the boxing writer at the Daily News. He came from people in the fight game in New Orleans, and was the real deal. To me, it was a dream job: getting paid to go to the fights and hang out in the gyms with boxing people and write about it.
Now, late in life, I’ve had the good fortune to become friends with Nigel Collins, the legendary boxing writer who was, fittingly, twice editor of the legendary The Ring magazine, the so-called “Bible of boxing,” the pugilistic paper of record. Nigel got to spend fifty years going to the fights and become, actually, part of the fabric of the boxing world, both as a chronicler and as a person. He’s in the International Boxing Hall of Fame in Canastota, New York.
He’s just come out with a book called Hooking Off the Jab, subtitled “Nigel Collins on Boxing,” which is a collection of 43 of his best pieces from The Ring and elsewhere. He presented me with a signed copy at my 85th birthday dinner back in December.
Funny thing: he’d asked me before publication what I thought would be a good title. I thought about it and then told him Hooking Off the Jab.
“Yeah,” he said, “That’s what I came up with, too, but the publisher doesn’t like it.” Evidently Nigel prevailed. I think it’s a cool title because that’s what Nigel does as a writer. Just as it takes a polished pro to master hooking off the jab, so does Nigel show us his mastery of both the English language and the true ethos of the so-called Squared Circle in these stories.
This book is so rich in inside stuff that I read it slowly to make it last. I never knew that Carmen Basilio, the indomitable middleweight and welterweight champion, was also an accomplished pickpocket – just for fun, of course. It’s right there in “Lunch With Carmen Basilio,” which appeared on ESPN.com on November 7, 2012. During that lunch with Nigel and some other writers, Basilio the dip managed to snare “almost all of our wallets, one by one, totally undetected.” Then he’d flash the wallet on the owner and ask if it looked familiar.
At one point, Nigel asked me if I’d read the story about his trip to the Philippines to present Manny Pacquiao with The Ring magazine featherweight championship belt. It’s called “Belting Pacman in the Philippines” and is subtitled “From Boxing and Politics to Cockfights and Zombies” and was originally in The Ring in September 2004. From the way he asked the question, I could tell it was one of his favorites in the book – as well it should be.
“Everything is so exagerated in the Philippines going there is like stepping into the pages of a comic book,” he writes. This is a vivid, stirring account of eight days in a boxing-mad country where Nigel was actually followed the whole time by a video crew and was on the front page of every newspaper like he was Nat Fleisher, the founder of The Ring, he says. The president of the country, Gloria Arroyo, actually came to the belting ceremony.
Nigel Collins is also a hell of a travel writer in the manner of the late Bruce Chatwin, as he shows in this story and in his prior book, Travels With Mary Jane, subtitled “Confessions of a 70-Year-Old Stoner.” While Chatwin had an eye honed at Sotheby’s, Nigel’s intense and open curiosity about the Philippines and Manila in particular allows him and the reader to see the deep interaction between people and their environment.
I even make an appearance in Hooking Off the Jab. In the story called “Tarnished Idol” and subtitled “The Murder of Tyrone Everett,” first published in his 1990 book Boxing Babylon, subtitled “Beyond the Shadowy World of the Prize Ring,” he examines the killing by his girlfriend of South Philadelphia boxing hero Tyrone Everett, a cat-quick southpaw who six months before had been jobbed out of the WBC super featherweight title against Alfredo Escalera by a crooked Philly ringside judge named Lou Tress.
I come briefly onto the stage when Nigel uses a quote of mine from a PhillySport mag story I wrote on Everett. Entre nous, Nigel’s story buried mine, although I had a few good moments. Ty Everett was known as “Butterfly” in the neighborhood and the little girls would skip rope to the chant of “Ty, Ty, Butterfly.” I called my story “Poor Butterfly.”
Nigel includes an epilogue with each story. The Everett story’s concerns in part the rumored fix with the Philly judge of the Everett-Escalera fight. “A confirmation of sorts confirming the Escalera-Everett fix can also be revealed now that Blinky Palermo is dead (Palermo was the mob guy who ran Philly boxing for the notorious and shadowy “Mr. Gray,” Frankie Carbo, a charter member of Murder, Inc. ) Shortly after the fight, when Peltz (promoter J Russell Peltz) spoke to him about what happened, Blinky told him that Lou Tress could be “bought for a cup of coffee.”
Hooking Off the Jab has eight sections: “Muhammad Ali,” which leads off with three stories; “Modern Superstars,” which includes Floyd Mayweather, Roy Jones, and Terence Crawford, among others; “A Walk on the Dark Side,” where he deals with sucker punches, boxing riots, and other less than pleasant boxing issues; “Extraordinary Characters,” such as Philly’s Stanley “Kitten” Hayward, Fritzie Zivic and Harry Greb; “Behind the Scenes,” about Nigel’s short and hilarious career as a manager and cannabis in boxing; “The Happy Warrior,” two stories about Pacquiao; “Legends of the Ring,” including Philly’s Bennie Briscoe and Jeff Chandler, as well as legends like Jake LaMotta and Dick Tiger; and “Iron Mike,” five stories about Tyson.
Perhaps no story encapsulates Nigel Collins as both a writer and a person like “I Hate Everybody,” which was published in The Ring in the winter of 1994 and is subtitled “Mike Tyson’s Jailhouse Interview.” Tyson was sentenced to six years in 1992 for the rape of an 18-year-old beauty contestant and did three years in the Indiana Youth Center before being paroled.
That’s where Nigel interviewed him, no holds barred. It’s all that and more, but the story behind the story is told like this:
Though Tyson frequently insisted he trusts no one, he paused before leaving the interview room, hand on the doorknob, and looked back over his shoulder.
“Write a good story,” he said. “I trusted you.”
That scene brought to mind an interview between Sonny Liston and perhaps the greatest boxing writer ever, A.J. Leibling. Liston, like Tyson, had no reason to trust anyone, but Joe Leibling, as he was known to intimates, won him over by a record of integrity and an open and honest approach.
In the long form that The New Yorker allowed Leibling, his elegance as a writer coupled with a deep and abiding respect for boxing produced what in my estimation was the best writing about boxing ever. W.C. “Bill” Heinz was right behind him. (I think Heinz’ novel, The Professional, is the best boxing novel ever.)
Nigel Collins’ boxing stories – he’s still writing – albeit limited in length compared to Leibling’s, nonetheless partake of their own grace and respect for the game and put him among the best boxing writers of today.
And that ain’t a bad place to be.