After All Those Fights, Giambra Still Unmarked and Uncrowned

A couple of times a day, a rider in Joey Giambra’s cab here will stare at his cabby’s license on the dashboard and say something like: “Hey, are you the same Giambra who used to box on TV?”

Until recently, Giambra shamelessly used such occasions to sell his autobiography, “The Uncrowned Champion.”

“I used to keep a stack of books beside me, in the cab,” he said the other day. “I sold a lot of books like that. In fact, I sold them all. I’m having some more printed.”

Thirty years ago, they called him the Buffalo Adonis.

Today, longtime boxing followers have no trouble remembering his name, and some might even recognize him. A 1950s middleweight--particularly one who fought Joey Giardello three times--should have a face like a relief map of Colorado, right?

Surprise. The face is unwrinkled and unscarred. And the stomach is flat.

And those who watched him so often on those “Gillette Cavalcade of Sports” boxing shows in the 1950s might be surprised at how good he looks.

But then, Joey Giambra always looked good. Even Marilyn Monroe thought so.

“The thing I remember most about Joey was that he had a face that belonged on movie screens,” said Don Dunphy, the announcer for many of Giambra’s televised bouts.

“Women loved the guy. He was a good fighter, too--not a rugged fighter like, say, Joey Giardello, but a wonderful boxer. Tough guy to hit. But I never figured out why he was a fighter instead of a movie actor.”

No one calls him the Buffalo Adonis anymore but at 58, he could pass for 40.

“I’ve taken care of myself,” he said. “I weigh about 174 pounds right now, which is close to what I weighed between fights in the 1950s. I work out every day. I never smoked or drank. I feel good.”

Giambra, who spends his non-driving time on his fledgling anti-drug foundation, called Knock Out Drugs, belonged to boxing’s postwar period, when the sport was making the transition from radio to television. Giambra was a headliner more often than most.

“I fought 33 times on TV, and the only guys who were on more often than me were Ralph (Tiger) Jones and Chuck Davey,” Giambra said.

The title of Giambra’s book tells it all. He fought two men who were middleweight champions and two others who fought for the championship, and beat three of them. Yet he never was granted a middleweight title fight.

Near the end of his career, in 1962, he lost a decision to Denny Moyer for the junior-middleweight title.

He lost and won 10-round decisions against Giardello, a future champion, in 1952, then beat him again in 1958. He fought Bobo Olson when Olson was the champion, in 1955, and lost a nontitle decision.

“I was in the Army at the time, and not in great shape,” Giambra said. “I took the fight on three weeks’ notice. Olson wanted me as a tuneup for his Sugar Ray Robinson fight later that year.

“His manager promised me a title shot after the Robinson fight, but Robinson knocked him out.

“The Olson fight was my biggest payday in boxing, $18,000.”

Giambra beat Rocky Castellani twice on decisions. And he knocked out another 1950s headliner, Florentino Fernandez, when Fernandez was the top-ranked contender.

“Fernandez was a big hitter, maybe the hardest puncher I ever fought,” Giambra said. “The other two hardest hitters I fought were Rory Calhoun and Tuzo Portuguez.

“Fernandez was a big Cuban, with long arms, and very strong. He boxed out of the same stable as Willie Pastrano (a light-heavyweight champion of the era), and Willie hated him. So he helped me get ready--he showed me how Fernandez, who was a converted left-hander, would convert back to being a left-hander if you hurt him.

“Well, I stung him in the first round, he converted over, and I broke his nose with a right hand. It was downhill after that. I beat him up so bad in the fifth round, he couldn’t find his corner after the bell. I knocked him out in the eighth.

“I made $9,000 for that fight.”

Giambra was a pro from 1949 to 1964, and finished up with a record of 85-10-2.

As a kid on the streets of Buffalo, trying to survive, he learned to run first, then to climb phone poles, then to fight.

“My folks had 14 kids, I was No. 13,” he said.

“Six of the kids died during the Depression, from illness and accidents. My dad was a chef before the Depression hit, but wound up being a WPA (Works Progress Administration) laborer. He dug ditches.

“It was tough. We lived in an Italian ghetto in Buffalo.

“As a little kid, I was afraid to leave the front door. I got beat up every day. One day I went to the Goodwill store and bought a pair of used sneakers for a quarter so I could run away from the gangs.

“When they’d still catch me and beat me up, I got pretty good at climbing phone poles to get away.

“When I was 10, I had to earn money for the family. I shined shoes, sang songs and sold papers. On St. Patrick’s Day, I’d go into neighborhood bars and earn $10 or $15 singing Irish and Italian songs, for tips.

“I’d buy 50 copies of the Buffalo Evening News for two cents each and sell them for three cents.”

Giambra injured his back in a fall from a tree--”I had my Batman cape on, and I was trying to fly,” he said--and was sent to a gym by a doctor for exercise.

“I was 12 then, and the first time I had gloves on, they put me in against one of the guys, a 15-year-old, who’d been beating me up on the streets,” Giambra said.

“I knocked him down with one punch. I turned pro when I was 13. Well, they were called amateur fights--but they paid us five bucks if we won.

“A trainer took a bunch of us to Canada in 1944, when I was 13. I wound up in the ring facing a 26-year-old, a guy with scars over both eyes, and hair on his chest. I weighed 119 and he was the amateur featherweight champion of Canada.

“After I beat him, I got pretty excited about boxing. I figured I was on my way to being a world champion.”

Giambra spent the next few years winning New York Golden Gloves championships, then turned pro in 1949, at 18.

“In those days, it was a long haul to be a main-event fighter,” Giambra said.

“For a young East Coast fighter in those days, getting on a Madison Square Garden card was the name of the game. That was where the money and fame was. You could get $1,500 for being in an undercard bout.

“The problem was, the mob controlled everything. If you got a $1,500 payday at the Garden, you had to pay the matchmaker under the table. The matchmaker was Al Weill (who later became heavyweight champion Rocky Marciano’s manager).

“I had 30 fights before I got a Garden fight,” Giambra said. “I made $1,500 for my first bout there, and had to kick back $300 to Weill. It’s just the way it was done.

“Jim Norris, who ran the Garden then, liked me but wanted me to get rid of my manager, Mike Scanlon, and give me one of his guys as my manager. I said I wouldn’t do it.

“Norris looked at me and said, ‘You’re a nice kid, Joey, but you’re naive.’ I didn’t say anything, because I didn’t know what naive meant.”

Lou Duva, one of boxing’s elder statesmen and once Giardello’s manager, remembers Giambra as a slick but unconnected boxer.

“You had to have the right connections in those days to get breaks, like title fights, and Giambra just wasn’t connected,” Duva said.

“Yeah, he deserved a title shot. He was a good, slick boxer. He was a tough defensive boxer. To beat him, you really needed a big effort.”

As a developing pro in New York in the early 1950s, Giambra’s pals were Marciano and Willie Pep, the dominant featherweight of the late 1940s.

Giambra maintains that Marciano was killed by penuriousness, not an airplane crash. Marciano died in 1969 in a small plane crash at Newton, Iowa.

“Rocky would be alive today if he hadn’t been so cheap,” Giambra said.

“He was always trying to avoid spending money. He used to drive Willie and I crazy when we’d be driving someplace and we’d come to a toll bridge. He’d go through his pockets and tell us he didn’t have any change, when we knew he did.

“That’s why he died in that little plane. Some guy offered to fly him for free.”

At roughly the same time Norris was trying to uncouple Giambra from his manager, Marciano was also encountering managerial problems.

“He and Weill never got along,” Giambra said. “Rocky was always complaining about Weill making money on the side and not telling him about it.

“One time, they went someplace in Massachusetts for a store opening. Al told Rocky the store owner would pay him $2,500 to cut the ribbon. What he didn’t tell him was the guy actually paid $5,000, and that Al put the other $2,500 in his pocket. Rocky found out about it later, and was really hot about it. But by then he couldn’t get rid of Weill.”

Marciano and Pep got their championships.

Giambra never got his chance.

“I wouldn’t play ball with the bad guys, that’s basically it,” he said.

“The thing with Norris and my manager was just one thing. Some guys wanted me to take a dive in the third Giardello fight, in 1958. I wouldn’t do it. The winner of that fight was supposed to get (Gene) Fullmer, for the title.

“I beat Giardello, and he got the title shot.

“Hey, I’m not complaining. I had a great career . . . and still have all my marbles.

“Actually, I was supposed to get a title shot against Robinson, in Canada, but he got stripped of the title.”

And Giambra wound up in the movies, after all.

“One of my last fights was in Reno, in 1960,” he said. “I knocked out a guy named Pat Lowry. Clark Gable, Montgomery Clift and Marilyn Monroe came to the fight. They were in Reno filming ‘The Misfits.’

“I was in a clinch with this guy on the ropes, I looked down at ringside and Marilyn smiled and waved at me. How many guys can claim they got a smile from Marilyn Monroe?

“Anyhow, Gable has a guy find me the next day. Turns out he wanted me in the movie. So they pay me $1,000 to say ‘Hey, you.’ Next time you watch that movie, look for the cowboy who says, ‘Hey, you.’ That’s me.

“I talked to Gable quite a bit on the set. He told me he was a boxer himself, that he’d had 10 or 12 fights.

“Three months later I’m in New York. I look up at that Times Square headlines-in-lights sign and it’s saying, ‘THE KING IS DEAD . . . ‘

“I couldn’t believe it. It was right after he’d finished that film. I ran into a church, lit a candle and said a prayer for him.”

Giambra’s anti-drug foundation, he said, will target elementary school kids.

“Las Vegas has a terrible drug problem, and for some of the high school kids with problems, it’s too late to reach them,” he said.

“I want to bring people into elementary schools, to reach kids at that level, before they get any older, before they make contact with the people who’re selling that garbage.”