05.20.09 – By Adeyinka Makinde: I had been in Jersey City for a couple of days in April of 2007 researching into the life and death of the Jersey boxer Frankie DePaula. My iterinery included long anticipated tours around the sites DePaula lived, worked and played as well as the site of his shooting and his grave. But I was also looking forward to meeting Ron Lipton, the noted boxing referee and three-time New Jersey Golden Gloves champion. Ron of course was a most valuable contributor to the biography that I wrote on Dick Tiger. He penned a heartfelt introduction and had given so much in terms of his reminiscences of the fights he witnessed at the Garden such as Tiger’s knockout of Jose ‘Monon’ Gonzalez, his trouncing of Rubin ‘Hurricane’ Carter and his heartbreaking loss to Bob Foster, that I felt it would be a good idea to put his recollections on film..
Ron made the arrangements with the media department at Marist College where he teaches boxing. The plan was to catch Ron giving his class and afterwards to navigate our way to the studio. I caught a train from Central Manhattan headed for Poughkeepsie with the lovely backdrop of the Hudson River a constant companion for most of the journey.
Alas, I got the times mixed up so that I arrived a good ten minutes or more after his boxing class had finished. We made our way to the studio and quickly settled into our roles of interviewer and interviewee. Ron has packed so much into his life that it would have been futile to get it all into the hour’s time period we were allocated. You have a boy overcoming a severe childhood ailment and transforming himself into a judo black belt and Golden Gloves champion. You have the sparring engagements at the camps of middleweight luminaries: Giardello, Carter and Tiger. Then there was the friendship with Rubin Carter lasting through Carter’s murder trial, incarceration and appeals. Ron was instrumental in getting his friend Ali to campaign for Carter’s release. Later of course, after his distinguished period of service as a police officer, was his stint as an international referee and the political intrigues that led to his banishment by politically-minded sports administrators.
I decided to leave out the battles with cross-burning, home-invading racists and a court battle in which Muhammad Ali travelled all the way to New York state to bear witness for his friend and spar. The focus would be on him recapitulating on the conversations we have had over the years via trans-Atlantic phone on the two subjects at the heart of my research; two subjects I might add, who Ron knew very well.
This is a segment of the interview which is now available on youtube.com. I hope you enjoy watching them as I did conducting them.
Adeyinka Makinde is the author of Dick Tiger: The Life and Times of a Boxing Immortal. He is completing his next biography Jersey Boy: The Life and Mob Slaying of Frankie DePaula.