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Max Baer
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Max
had the makings of a great fighter but he could
never take the sport seriously. A curly-haired,
likable fellow, Max infuriated his various managers
by the way he clowned through life. He hated to
train and despised hard work in any form, anything
that kept him away from his companions.
The "Magnificent Screwball," as sports writers dubbed him,
was brought up on a ranch near Livermore,
California, where his father owned a butcher shop.
Max quite school early. In his teens he was swinging
a sledge hammer and an axe in his father's shop,
killing and butchering cattle. In this way he
developed the long, supple arm and shoulder muscles
that latter gave him his terrific hitting power.
Good-natured Max was 19 when he threw his first punch in
anger -- at a big cowboy in a Livermore dance hall.
To his utter surprise the cowboy went down as if a
train had hit him, and stayed down. This gave Max
ideas. He bought boxing gloves and a punching bag
and began to work out with them with a ring career
in mind. Within a year he was fighting
professionally along the Pacific Coast. From the
start he was a hit as a knockout artist.
Max was always poor at figures. Whenever he was in need of
money, which was often, he would sell a piece of
himself to anyone who would buy a share. Soon he
found out that he had sold 113% of himself to
several managers. This was a mathematic
impossibility but that did not bother Maxie. He was
having too much fun. In the press he was described
as "the man with the million-dollar body and the
10-cent brain."
"Madcap Maxie" -- another one of his many names -- never took
the trouble to learn how to box, how to defend
himself. He was perfectly willing to take a wallop
in order to land his deadly right-hand punch.
The word "deadly" used here is no exaggeration. Max killed a
fighter named Frank Campbell in a San Francisco
ring. The terrible beating he gave Ernie Schaaf
caused a brain hemorrhage and his eventual death
from Carnera's light tap. |
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John Durant-The Heavyweight
Champions
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