He’s Still Dedicating His Life to Fight Game

I know Babe Ruth once promised a sick kid in a hospital he’d go out and hit a home run for him. And then did it.

I know Notre Dame won, by last count, at least 43 games for the old Gipper.

But I believe I’m the only guy in the history of sports who ever had a two-round knockout dedicated to him.

It happened a very long time ago. I wasn’t on my deathbed. I didn’t even have heartburn. I was having a beer and a hot dog at the time, as I remember it.

My benefactor was a pugilist whom fate tried to conceal by naming him John Smith.

You probably don’t remember Johnny but I do. Johnny was, as it happened, a very good fighter. He was too good for his own good, if you know what I mean. None of the registered heroes of the day wanted to fight him. He hit too hard. He moved too fast. He couldn’t get a fight with a leopard.

In fact, he couldn’t get a fight with a Tiger--Dick Tiger, that is, who was middleweight champion at the time.

But Johnny could handle anything that didn’t bite first. The night he dedicated the fight to me, they put him in with someone or something I think they found in a tree in South America. I’ve forgotten the guy’s name but I remember that, without his tattoos, you’d swear he escaped from the circus or the zoo. You looked at him and you wanted to ask who left the cage door open.

He just looked like a sucker for the left hook to Johnny, who stepped to the center of the ring and announced he was going to knock this guy out for me. I was embarrassed. I tried to talk Johnny out of it. I told him I didn’t have a spot in my trophy case for an unconscious fighter but Johnny knocked him out in two rounds anyway. It was up to me to get him mounted.

I hadn’t seen much of Johnny Smith till the other day, when I ran into him at a Mike Tyson press conference.

The years have treated Johnny kindly. In fact, if you were to look at the two of us, you’d be hard put to tell who was the fighter and who was the writer. Johnny has all his eyes, teeth, ears--and most of his hair.

Which is kind of ironic because Johnny and I met as adversaries.

“You’re trying to get boxing outlawed,” he accused the first time we met.

“No, Johnny,” I told him, “all I do is count the dead. Boxing will outlaw itself.”

“Over my dead body,” he growled.

“I hope not, Johnny,” I told him.

Well, Johnny is alive and well and promoting fights. His first card will be held May 23, featuring Larry Musgrove and Roberto Rosiles in a middleweight elimination bout at the Hyatt Airport hotel.

Johnny hasn’t had a career so much as a chase. When he won the California middleweight championship--by knocking out Tiger Al Williams--he thought he was on his way to money and title.

But the big names wanted no part of him. Johnny had to take the act to Tasmania, Mexico, Italy, Japan and parts of North Africa to get fights. Johnny had to go where they not only had never heard of him but, more important, had never seen him. Johnny lost more bookings by just showing up in a local gym.

Scheduled opponents suddenly came down with what Johnny remembers as “a rare form of yellow jaundice” when their handlers got a load of Johnny’s right cross in a workout.

Johnny got so he would take fights on an hour’s notice. A middleweight, he fought heavyweights in Italy, light-heavyweights in New Zealand and once a guy who later became a first minister of Ghana.

“He didn’t have a mark on him so I thought he must be a good fighter and I took no chances with him,” Johnny recalls. “I knocked him out right away.”

Johnny later found out that the reason the guy was unmarked was because he was unfought.

“The crowd (in Italy) looked at me as if I pulled wings out of a butterfly.”

Johnny became probably the only fighter in history to be the promoter and main eventer on the same card. That was in Guadalajara.

He spent so much time flying back and forth between Mexico and L.A. that the only heavy bags he got around were under his eyes. The ringside doctors almost didn’t OK him to fight and, after they did, Johnny had more trouble staying awake than beating his opponent.

Johnny decided a nickname might help. But the one the fight mob picked out for him, “Killer,” didn’t help much. No one wanted to find out exactly how he came by it.

Johnny ended up fighting--and kayoing--only fighters no one else wanted to fight--Hank Casey, Neal Rivers, after Rivers fought a draw with Gene Fullmer. When he wanted to fight the champions his record merited, they told him, “Get a reputation,” and Johnny asked “How?” That was really his trouble, his reputation.

He broke his hand in a fight in Sacramento once, but when he went to his corner and told his trainer, Duke Holloway, the Duke was unimpressed.

“Well, you got another one, knock him out with the left,” Holloway said.

So Johnny did.

Johnny thinks fighting is in danger of dying out, not from violence but from indifference.

“Television doesn’t make fighters, it gets in on it,” he said. “It’s up to promoters and managers. The fighters today have it too easy. They’re giving money away and the fighters are too lazy to pick it up. They disappear from the gym for months at a time after a fight.

“I drove a gravel truck out here from Louisiana for 50 cents a day and I had to sit in the truck at restaurants while they went in and got food for me. So when I got to the ring, I was hungry and mad.”

The fighters today don’t dedicate knockouts the way they used to. They don’t even dedicate split decisions. It’s a lost art, like the hook off the jab. Johnny retired it with him.