Doyle’s Boxing Death Still Haunts a Friend

Even today, 53 years later, the memory still burns Joey Barnum.

Barnum and his friend, Jimmy Doyle, were close friends and rising welterweight boxers who worked out of Los Angeles’ Main Street Gym.

Doyle’s career was a fast-rising one, reaching 50 victories before his 22nd birthday. Then he encountered Artie Levine in a 1946 Cleveland match and came out of it with a concussion.

Doctors told him to give up boxing, but he stayed away only 14 months. Friends worried about a sudden onset of slurred speech and what appeared to be a paralyzed eyelid.

“I didn’t want him to fight, I asked him to train me,” Barnum said.

“But you couldn’t convince him. He wanted to fight. He was a terrific fighter, a great defensive fighter. Very quick hands. He was one of the few fighters I ever saw who could knock the other guy’s punches out of the air.”

On the night of June 24, 1947, in Cleveland, Doyle missed one, and it cost him his life.

It was a lethal left hook by welterweight champion Sugar Ray Robinson and Doyle crashed hard onto the canvas, on his back.

“I knew immediately when he went down he’d never get up,” recalled Barnum, who worked Doyle’s corner that night.

“There was a time, earlier, when Jimmy belonged in there with the greatest welterweights in the world, but not after the Levine fight.”

Doyle died 17 hours after Robinson knocked him out. In late-night surgery, a doctor found evidence of previous brain injury.

Doyle is buried in East Los Angeles’ Calvary Cemetery.

Also on this date: In 1906, the Lurline won the first Transpacific Yacht Race, sailing from San Pedro to Honolulu Harbor in 13 days 6 hours. The two other entrants, La Paloma and Anemone, were nowhere in sight at the finish. . . . In 1936, rookie Joe DiMaggio hit two- and three-run home runs in a 10-run Yankee fifth inning at Chicago. DiMaggio also had two doubles in the game, won by New York, 18-11.