By Matt McGrain: Legendary boxing man Charley Rose ranked Stanley Ketchel as the greatest fighter of his weight in history. So did Nat Fleischer. Joe Gan’s termed him a “past master” without equal amongst his contemporaries. James J Corbett and Battling Nelson labelled him the greatest fighter of his time, Abe Attell labelled him the greatest ever. The respect Ketchel generated amongst his peers has been equaled but never bettered and in mid-1908 with the destruction of Sullivan and quelling of Papke behind him, Ketchel had reached a rare peak. What was to follow was as singular an example of concentrated violence as has ever been seen in the sport. It took place against two different opponents, nineteen days apart.
Ketchel found himself on top of the world. Offers poured in. The enormous sum of $15,000 was reportedly available for a second match with Papke – twice this was mentioned as the amount available should a match be made with heavyweight champion Tommy Burns. But no shadow loomed large, no one figure disturbed Ketchel’s fistic serenity. He had demonstrated himself as a man apart. Ketchel was free to pick and chose.
Hugo Kelly, meanwhile, remained the only member of Tommy Ryan’s golden four middleweights that remained unbeaten by Ketchel. Kelly had been mixing it in the highest class since 1903, but he really hit his stride in 1905 with a ten round victory over Philadelphia Jack O’Brien. Thereafter he remained unbeaten against men like Jack Twin Sullivan, Tommy Burns, Tony Caponi and Billy Papke himself, who finally ended his 17 fight unbeaten streak at the end of 1907 in the bloody ten round battle discussed in part two of this series.
As Ryan discussed only days before that fight, Kelly was superb fighter with great ability and heart but one who lacked killing aggression, perhaps explaining why so many of these fights ended in draws rather than wins. He dropped Mike Sullivan with a left hand to the point of the jaw in their final 1907 meeting, for example, but Sullivan is said to have finished that 14th round “without trouble.” Hitting as well with one hand as with the other, he had the physical attributes to press, hurt and out-box top class opponents but was not a finisher.
He proved his worth again in his first fight with Papke in September of the same year. Again Kelly dropped his man, this time in the first but the second saw Papke forcing his way back into the contest and the third saw Kelly bleeding. In the fourth, it was Kelly’s turn to visit the canvas, hurt by a huge body shot. Kelly showed great wherewithal and skill to battle back with counter-uppercuts, but ringside reports have Papke in a handy lead going into the final round. It was heart that allowed Kelly a split of the decision, digging deep in the tenth and finding from somewhere the stamina to take the fight to his savage opponent in those three desperate minutes. The draw was well received in some quarters whilst Papke was thought the winner in others.
Papke would right what he perceived as a wrong, taking a ten round decision from a bloody, injured but unbowed Kelly in December. Kelly had boxed six rounds against a furious Papke with a broken arm.
Forced to take an unprecedented four months off with this and various other Papke-inflicted injuries, Kelly was completely rested for his July fight with Ketchel. Kelly was respected and taken seriously as a fighter; but Ketchel was seen as unbeatable and by fight time he would be a prohibitive ten to three favourite. Kelly remained unconcerned. He had a plan. The San Francisco Call:
“The claim is made that it will be a man with a good straight left who will beat Ketchel, but it is a question of whether Kelly has the strength?”
The jab was an old punch even then, but it was the uppercut which was the traditional blow of choice for fending off the pressure-fighter of the day whilst “fencing” with the jab was left to “fancy dans” and “scientists.” However, the step inside would be terribly risky against Ketchel, a new breed of swarmer, a shifting seething mass of power-punches. Kelly was evolution in action. His claims that the left would be key were sincere, he worked on it incessantly during training. “Kelly’s left is particularly good,” continued the writer, present at one of Kelly’s frequent open workouts. “Though he is a clever boxer, and uses both hands well.”
Secondly, Kelly trained specifically to gain speed. Ketchel had been seen to out-do Papke in every department but one, footspeed. The Kelly plan was to box behind the left whilst moving in and out of the Ketchel reach, and he was shaping up beautifully. The Call again: “He is very shifty for a big fellow and can step in and out whilst using both hands very nicely.”
Kelly had also dropped the wrestling which typified his training for his fights with Papke. In short, he was training to stay out of Ketchel’s furnace. Professional gamblers and the wider public remained unimpressed, but Kelly was convinced he had struck upon the perfect plan. On paper, he likely had. Ketchel, however, was involved with his own evolution. The Call observed that Ketchel
“…seems to have improved noticeably since he fought Sullivan here. He is using straight blows instead of the swings that were his favourite method of attack in the past…his ruggedness is still his greatest asset and is expected to carry him through however fast his opponent.”
On the 23rd, eight days before the fight, Kelly scored a hit with fans boxing a lively exhibition with the local featherweight Joe Reilly before gently winding his training down. Ketchel struggled a little more with the weight, but was still relaxed enough to restrict himself to a game of handball the day before the fight. Kelly also trained lightly. Both men hit their mark at six the following day. Ketchel’s expected dominance resulted in an underwhelming crowd and the money changing hands ringside tended to be concerned only with Kelly’s ability to make the distance. The opening round would beggar belief.
Kelly began with the perfect execution of his plan. He launched “wicked lefts” to the face and supplemented these with “body punches that made Ketchel audibly groan” according to the ringside reporter for the Daily Arizona. Ketchel enjoyed no success until the middle of the round when finally the two came to close quarters and traded blows, but Kelly emerged with the best of it according to The Evening World. Out of the clinch, Kelly deployed his right for the first time and landed a peach of a punch upon Ketchel’s upturned jaw which left the Michigan man dazed. The first round had gone to Kelly by a clear margin, but as he returned to his corner, a disaster revealed itself. One of the few punches Ketchel landed in the round had begun the closing of Kelly’s right eye. If Kelly were to win the fight on points he would likely be half blind by the 20th.
In the second, Ketchel was able to close more quickly, but Kelly uncorked the uppercut that he had used to counter-punch is way out of trouble against Papke and they separated. Returning to his trusted left hand Kelly landed a left jab and then a disguised left hook which “staggered Ketchel.” Cautious, Kelly allowed Ketchel to re-take the advantage, and he came hurtling in once more, bloodying Kelly’s nose. Even beating Ketchel was slowly breaking Kelly down and he was the more heavily marked man in the middle of the tumultuous second which Kelly continued to dominate. Ketchel missed repeatedly and Kelly punished him each time in the mouth with what the LA Herald called a “trip hammer left,” shifting away as Ketchel tried to re-set as a southpaw before switching out again to orthodox. Kelly’s tactics were working beautifully, Ketchel was off-balance and being out-boxed, his shift for the moment neutralized.
“It looked bad for the champion as he strode to his seat after the second round,” said The Daily Arizona. Ketchel’s predicament was as bad as it had been in any fight. For a puncher, being out-boxed can come with the territory. Ketchel’s strengths were ruggedness and workrate with which to impose himself upon his opponent and a knockout punch that could seemingly get him out of trouble at a moments notice. Here, though, his strengths seemed nullified. Kelly, was firmly in control. The San Francisco Call:
“From the outset [Kelly] proved what his admirers have claimed for him – a classy boxer, a hard puncher and a ring general who can take care of himself in the tight spaces…as clever a man as has been seen in the ring since Fitzsimmons.”
Worse, Kelly seemed unknockoutable. Stopped in his second recorded fight in 1901, Kelly had since then boxed more than fifty rounds with Jack Sullivan, twenty rounds with Billy Papke and thirty rounds with the murderous punching Tommy Burns, in addition to an assortments of heavyweights and toughs and he always heard the final bell. Ketchel was faced with a distinct and pertinent problem. He had to bull his way into a fight in which he had been almost exclusively on the receiving end, or knock out a fighter who had already mixed with some of the best punchers of his era without ill affect.
When Joe Louis famously said of Billy Conn before their second fight, “he can run but he can’t hide” he was speaking for every pressure fighter who ever boxed a clever mover. Conn, as Louis well knew, no more ran in their first fight than Kelly ran here, rather both men were trying to stay out of the opponent’s furnace with movement and boxing. Can the mover get to the finish line before the swarmer can lock him inside? This is another way of faming Louis’s famous words.
The ring genius Dumb Dan Morgan had a similar quote specific to Stanley Ketchel: “You might as well try to outrun a tornado.”
At the beginning of the third Ketchel sent out his own jab and Kelly immediately countered with the stiffer left. According to The San Francisco Call Ketchel uncharacteristically “Flinched back” from this punch. Here, sources disagree, but Kelly was either baited forwards into a rare right hand lead or feinted with the right with a view to bringing across the left. Either way, Ketchel had laid his trap and now sprung it.
“Like a flash of lightning the left of the champion shot out. It landed flush on the jaw of Kelly and he went to the mat in a twinkling. So hard was the hit that his head rebounded twice before he took the count. He could not have risen for a million dollars.”
The Daily Arizona described a “shift left” after “just 35 seconds of the third round.”
The LA Herald described a fighter who looked like “he had been hit by a sledgehammer.”
The Evening World said that Kelly had “dropped as though shot.”
The knockout was devastating to Kelly in more ways than one. “I will leave it to those that witnessed if I had not a big margin in the first two rounds. All I ask is that I get another chance at Ketchel. I feel confident it was a lucky punch.”
Ketchel’s take was different: “I was waiting for a chance to put one over, and it came in the third round. I saw the opportunity when Kelly left himself open and shot in a left…I figured all I needed was one punch. I am willing to give Kelly another chance. He is looked on by the public as a formidable opponent…but I am matched to box Joe Thomas next month.”
Joe Thomas was, in many ways, where it all began for Ketchel. Labelled a “bush fighter” in the run up to his first 1907 contest with Thomas, Ketchel got the better of a tough draw against a fighter then seen amongst the best middles in the world. A rematch followed and the two turned in perhaps one of the greatest fights in history, Ketchel climbing from the canvas to finally lay his huge-hearted opponent low in the 32nd round. Another twenty round points win followed and that was supposed to be that. But Thomas had arguably made a better showing against Ketchel than Sullivan and Papke and certainly he had done better than the hugely respected Kelly. Problematically, Thomas had outgrown the division and was now weighing closer to 170 than 158. Ketchel decided to fight him anyway, though he would be at a disadvantage in terms of weight.
It was this fact, more than any other that made people more optimistic about Thomas’s chances. The Palestine Daily Herald summed up well when it printed that “it is the general opinion that he will make a better showing against Ketchel than did Hugo Kelly.” The Call went one step further printing that “many good judges concede him a good chance [of winning] owing to the fact that he will not have trouble making a stipulated weight.” In fact, the articles stipulated that Thomas would weigh no more than 175lbs, but the overall perception was of a bigger man cut loose from a difficult middleweight limit.
Ketchel: “I’ll win inside of a round.”
Thomas “looked like a formidable heavyweight” upon entry to the ring “a man who looked like he could withstand a world of punishment” according to the Call. Ketchel prowled “nervously” whilst Thomas applied his ring attire, holding proceedings up by some minutes as the tension built.
Thomas had implied he would box conservatively before that fight, but that was either a bluff or a plan gone awry. The Seattle Star:
“The fight was a hurricane affair…Joe landed a few punches at the opening bell and these gave him confidence, for he started to force the fighting. Ketchel met him half way.”
Thomas was doing what Ketchel had needed to trick Kelly into doing, leading aggressively. Possibly Thomas had been dissuaded from a more careful approach by Ketchel’s easy win over Kelly. Regardless, he had moved right into the heat Kelly had played to stay away from.
Ketchel was scoring with jabs, but missing with is heavier punches, the men repeatedly collided and clinched. Inside, Ketchel dominated and Kelly appeared at a loss. An upstairs-downstairs left hook startled the challenger as they separated and he gave Ketchel the same “queer look” Papke had when he had first felt Ketchel’s power in earnest. Suddenly in reverse, Thomas found himself in a neutral corner with Ketchel moving in. The LA Herald: “Ketchel then feinted Thomas wide open and sent in a fierce right-hander to the stomach.”
The San Francisco Call:
“Before the game boy even had a chance to figure in his mind what was coming, Ketchel…shifted in a flash and brought that peculiar left hook into play. The blow landed flush on Thomas’s eye and he dropped like a log. Thomas was a beaten man…however he slowly rose at seven.”
Once again, Ketchel honed his savagery with technique and smarts to devastating affect. After the fight Thomas would describe the near paralysis the right-hand body blow inflicted and that “he remembered very little” after the left hook. A desperate fight for survival now began.. The Evening World describes Ketchel wading in the moment Thomas stood. Ketchel “rained in rights and lefts” his left hand in particular, “like a piston-rod,” every time it landed “Thomas shuddered.” Another devastating body blow landed at the end of the round, this time a left, Thomas was down again. The bell saved him and he wandered dejectedly back to his corner. Even in these harder times, the decision to let Thomas come up to scratch for the second was a criminal one. The Call again:
“When Thomas wobbled across the ring, Ketchel was right on the job…Ketchel whipped in an awful right to the stomach…rushing him to the ropes…hammering him with both hands…rushing him into the open again…”
The Herald takes up the story:
“After another moment’s sparring, [Ketchel] sent him to the canvas for eight. Thomas’s head rested on the floor whilst he was on his knees. By a game effort he drew himself together and faced Ketchel once more.”
Ketchel never allowed such bravery to go unpunished. Moving in behind his left jab he followed up with what the Call labelled a “sledgehammer uppercut.” The crowd that had up until this point had been calling for blood was now momentarily hushed. Thomas seemed killed. In fact, he was just completely unconscious. The Evening World reported that it was a “full twenty minutes” before Thomas was “sufficiently revived to discuss the defeat.”
“The first blow he hit me with had me virtually beat,” said Thomas. “I never knew where I was after that punch…I weathered through the first round though I did not know where I was at…look at me. I am in perfect condition. Ketchel deserves a lot of credit. It will take a great fighter to beat him.”
For Ketchel, the sky was the limit. Tommy Burns was on the verge of agreeing to fight him for the heavyweight title. Thomas was not alone in seeing Ketchel as favourite. Next, however, would be the rematch with Billy Papke. Ketchel seemed relaxed about this matter, and left on a short driving holiday with his manager and mentor Joe O’Connor. Ketchel had been in training for some months and considered that he had earned his break.
On the other side of the country, Papke had been in action the same night. A man who rarely spoke, he was in fine spirits, jerking his thumb towards his opponent, Sailor Burke and announcing him “the best looking fellow in the world.”
“This is Papke’s little joke,” explained The Evening World. “He was intimating that Burke’s appearance might soon be slightly altered.”
And he was right.
He was in fine spirits too when he immediately began his training for his rematch with Ketchel. For the newspaper men in attendance he stood happily grinning beside his heavy bag, a crude likeness of Ketchel’s face painted upon it. “Billy went after the effigy of his opponent with vim,” reported the LA Herald. “All afternoon he made pleasant remarks every time he swung one to “Ketch’s” point.”
“I plan on giving Ketchel serious trouble,” he said.
And he was right about that too.
Part 1
http://www.boxingnews24.com/2011/05/welcome-to-hell-stanley-ketchel-in-1908-part-1-the-twin/
Part 2
http://www.boxing247.com/news.php?p=28002&more=1