He Doesn’t Look Very Tough Now

You might not know the name, but you’d place the face if you ever saw Jack O’Halloran in a movie. He’d be a guy guarding the hide-out for the mob and saying, “You want I should pinch his head off for you, boss?”

He’d be taking an ax to Superman, or he’d be the guy riding shotgun for the outlaw gang that mistook Clint Eastwood for a sissy.

I mean, Jack O’Halloran was born to play the bad guys. Just standing there, he looked like five miles of big trouble.

First of all, he was big, all right--6 foot 6 and 230 pounds. Then there was that face. You could plow snow with the jaw. The massive nose was mashed flat to the face. The bones over the eyes had an overhang like the cornices on a Dolomite Alp.

The teeth were snaggled and didn’t meet. The voice rumbled like an active volcano. The fists looked like two fillets of beef. Put a bolt in his forehead and you had a Frankenstein creation. Put him on a slope in the Himalayas and you had the Abominable Snowman. He could play Mr. Hyde without makeup.

He died on screen more than Camille--or John Wayne’s Indians. He not only didn’t get the girl, he didn’t get to the second reel.

Looking like that made people assume that he wanted to be a football player, a prizefighter, a dance hall bouncer or a collector for loan sharks. Jack O’Halloran was all four. In fact, he likes to think that the character in “Rocky” was based on his background and experience.

Raised in Philadelphia, Jack had been a good enough football player to get a scholarship to Western Kentucky and to be stashed away in the semipros by Weeb Ewbank, the New York Jet coach, until his college class graduated.

But around the gyms of Philadelphia, the fight mob hated to see all that menace wasted in a football uniform. They figured O’Halloran could scare half the heavyweights in training just by showing up, and the rest of it they could teach him. Jack was agreeable. “I was fighting on the streets of Philadelphia for nothing anyway.”

Jack’s ferocity was not entirely physiognomy. He was quick for a big man and, of all things, something of a stylist. His dream was to fight Muhammad Ali.

He never quite made it, but he did fight most of the rest of the registered assassins of the divisions--George Foreman, Ken Norton, Cleveland Williams, Manuel Ramos, Joe Bugner. He beat Williams, lost a split decision to Norton, knocked out Ramos and even won the California state heavyweight championship. Foreman knocked him out.

O’Halloran didn’t know it at the time but, actually, his forbidding exterior had not been put there by generations of inbreeding with the kind of guys who went to sea on pirate ships but by a little known but lethal disease known as acromegaly.

This malfunction of the pituitary gland causes an enlarging of the features and a hardening and swelling of the bone structure that tends to make the victim look like something out of the Cro-Magnon era.

But that, Jack says, is only the external damage. The distress it brings to the psyche is even more calamitous. “It affects certain hormones that produce extreme depression, feelings of worthlessness,” he said.

“There were days when I shouldn’t have been anywhere--years really. One time when I was a kid in school, I woke up two years later and didn’t know where I had been.”

The disease wasn’t diagnosed for O’Halloran until he was in training for the Norton fight in San Diego.

Says O’Halloran: “The doctor saw a publicity picture of me that was three years old, but he could see the traumatic changes--the jaw started to come out, the pads over my eyes, the head bones protruded. Acromegaly is a progressive disease that starts in adulthood and gets worse.

“The doc says to me ‘You got acromegaly.’ ”

“I said ‘Fine, can I get a license?’ and he said ‘You better look into it, you could die from it.’ ”

Adds Jack: “I went to a workup at Scripps Hospital, and they said it was in an acute stage. I went to Massachusetts General, where they removed a tumor from my pituitary. I was one in a thousand who are eligible for this kind of treatment.

“They bolt you to a machine and hit you with a laser. They drill four holes in your head. I had the operation and a week after I got out of the hospital, I fought Larry Middleton in Landover, Md., which shows you how whacked up I was.

“It takes three or four years for your system to straighten out, and now I’ve had an operation on my jaw to move it back one and one-half inches. You know, I fought all those years when I couldn’t close my mouth. You know how they say ‘He’s tired, look, his mouth is open’? Well, my mouth was open in the introductions.”

So, now that he doesn’t look like a part for Lon Chaney anymore, what is Jack going to do? Go after some old Ronald Colman roles? Play good guys?

No. He’s going back in the ring. At 43, he’s going to launch a comeback.

“I figure if I could fight all those good fighters when I was a sick man, this crop they have now should be a piece of cake,” he said.

The bad news is, he’s not going to scare anybody any more. He no longer looks like a cross between Quasimodo and the phantom of the opera.

What now? Pretty Boy O’Halloran?

He laughs. “Who knows? I might be the best-looking heavyweight champion since Muhammad Ali or that guy Errol Flynn played in the movie. Gentleman Jack.”