Harry Kabakoff’s dead? Well, they’d heard that before

This article was originally on a blog post platform and may be missing photos, graphics or links. See About archive blog posts.

When friends and former colleagues heard of the death of Harry Kabakoff, they couldn’t help but joke that perhaps the news was just another one of Kabakoff’s schemes.

Kabakoff -- by all accounts one of boxing’s more colorful manager-trainers -- died Nov. 17 at 82.

“Harry owed everyone money, and I mean everyone,” said Bill Caplan, a boxing publicist. “He had been threatening to die for 40 years and would use it as a ploy to get money.”

“Perhaps he’s died and perhaps he hasn’t,” Caplan remembered he and his friends saying as they talked about staging a memorial and joked about its unlikely ending: “We’ll tell all of these crazy Harry Kabakoff stories, and then he’ll walk in and get his money.”

-- Valerie J. Nelson