Editor's Note: The following is a special holiday spoof.

By Mike Casey

On Christmas Eve, 1988, the incredible Chester (Shifty) Walnuts had his 798th and final professional fight after an astonishing career that spanned just five years of frenetic activity.

In the sweaty and intimidating cauldron of the Bricklayers and Plasterers Ballroom in Brooklyn, the incredible Walnuts survived the only knockdown of his career to last the distance with local middleweight prospect, Demetrius (Dunkin’) Donuts.

The small crowd gave Walnuts a thunderous ovation at the final bell as a golden era in boxing drew to a close. It was a dramatic finale to Shifty’s whirlwind career, in which he averaged just over 159 fights a year and often fought three or four times week.

Raising his arms, Walnuts milked the cheers by giving his fans one last burst of the famous Shifty Shuffle, the tricky manoeuvre that would take him directly into the firing line of his opponent and enable him to demonstrate his astonishing capacity for taking punishment.

The Shifty Shuffle was a funky hybrid of running on the spot, doing the Charleston and somersaulting several times, fuelling the opponent’s desire to knock the irritating Walnuts through the floor.

“Hell, man, ol’ Shifty is something else,” said Demetrius Donuts, after working hard for a shut-out unanimous decision. “You just can’t knock him out. I hit him with my best shots tonight and I thought I’d cracked him when I decked him in the first round. But I tell you, the more you hit this guy, the more he seems to enjoy it. It’s kinda boring to keep hitting on a man when you’re not getting nowhere. And he was really confusing me in the clinches with all that TS Eliot jive.”

All through his career, Chester (Shifty) Walnuts had the same, wise old trainer in Angelo Futch-Roach. It was Futch-Roach who decided to revise Shifty’s game plan before the seventh round against Donuts. “Shifty needed a new angle, ‘cos Donuts was really bangin’ on him in the sixth. So I told my man to lay TS Eliot’s The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock on him.”

As the fighters fell into a clinch midway through the seventh, Shifty said to Donuts: “Let us go then, you and I, when the evening is spread out against the sky, like a patient etherised upon a table.”

“Huh?” said Donuts.

Shifty broke away quickly and went into a high-octane version of the Shifty Shuffle. “It was a real shame that Shifty got his legs crossed during the Charleston segment and fell out of the ring,” said Futch-Roach. “You gotta remember he ain’t got the speed and reflexes no more after 798 fights. But it was a good ploy. It broke up Donuts’ concentration and bought us some valuable time.”

Throughout his career, Shifty Walnuts cleverly confused many an opponent with such distractions as poetry recitals, intellectual conversation, mathematical equations and detailed descriptions of the New York subway system.

He always credited his four victories and two draws to these cunning mind games. “You gotta understand that my record is misleading,” Shifty insisted. “Four victories and two draws in 798 fights? Yeah, tell me about it. Those other 792 fights were all decision losses, and about 780 of ‘em were hometown decisions. And let’s be candid about it, being a black guy never helped me. The brothers have come a long way, but we still take plenty of shit. I mean, I know I’m a white guy really, but…. no, OK, forget that last bit.”

Angelo Futch-Roach chuckles affectionately whenever the usual suspects bring up the subjects of Shifty’s illogical comments, slurred speech and his occasional habit of charging down the subway platform at Nevins Street in Brooklyn going ‘Whoosh!” and telling passengers that he is the next train to Flatbush.

“Man, I get sick of all that stuff,” says Futch-Roach. “Those pansy, goody-goody types always want to lay everything on boxing. Shifty’s just eccentric. He has been in all the time I’ve known him. That’s the simple truth of it. But do those media guys want the truth? Nah, they blame it on Shifty taking too many punches in the ring or me hitting him upside the head with a brick as part of his conditioning routine. And before you get around to it, he only claimed he was General Ulysses Grant once, when he was still dizzy after the Crusher Cobblers fight in Reno.”

Dream

As the 1980s dawned, Chester (Shifty) Walnuts had a dream. He wanted to bring back the glory days to professional boxing. Shifty always saw himself as a man out of time. He wanted to turn the clock back to the Roaring Twenties and thirties when fighters were really fighters.

Tired of his job as a short order cook, Shifty saw his future on a manic day when tempers in the kitchen were running high. His boss had been on his back since day one and Shifty could take the abuse no more.

Two simple words – “Shove it” – changed the destiny of Chester (Shifty) Walnuts. That was his blunt rejoinder after the boss had questioned the firmness and texture of Shifty’s patiently prepared French fries. “So I let him have it,” Shifty recalled. “I told him to shove his lousy job and that’s when he cracked me over the head with a soup ladle.”

Walnuts made a startling discovery. The mighty blow left him with no pain and didn’t even make him blink. Nor did a follow-up belt to the face with a hot griddle. “I knew then that I had something special that would make me a man to be feared. Nobody could hurt me. I figured it all out in my mind that day as the boss kicked me around the kitchen and tried to break my skull with assorted utensils of various shapes and weights.

“Out in the alley, he ran his car over me twice, but I kept getting up. When he broke down and cried, I knew I had him. So I applied the coup de grace by cracking his tire iron over my noggin. That’s when I made the decision to be a fighter, because I knew I’d outlast all those other modern day fairies over the long haul.”

Former Mob enforcer Vito Silvani is one man who can attest to Shifty’s amazing toughness. It was after a run-in with Shifty that Silvani made the monumental decision to renounce his past and enter the FBI’s witness protection programme. Agents changed his name to Bill Silvani and moved him two blocks from his home on Mulberry Street. “Speaking frankly, I think the feds could have put a little more effort into it,” says Silvani, who has suffered nineteen attempts on his life since making the switch and publishing his acclaimed book, Everything You Always Wanted To Know About The Mafia And Why They Are All Nasty Short-Tempered Bastards.

“It was a time of cut-backs for the FBI,” says Silvani philosophically, “so I guess I shouldn’t complain. They gave me a fake moustache and a long coat and said I’d be OK. Hey, let me tell ya, I’m glad to be out of the old life, even though the new life ain’t any different. It was Shifty who made my mind up.

“The guys upstairs wanted to make some money by bribing Shifty to win. He was going in against Saccharin Roy Rubinstein, who was 28-0 and being hailed as the new Ray Robinson. This kid Rubinstein was generating terrific box office and had all the credentials. He was big, big money.

“So I got the word to offer Shifty a hundred grand to beat him. Now, what a great many people don’t know is that Shifty has always suffered from god-awful halitosis. He coulda won every fight just by breathing on guys up close. But he was a sportsman and he wouldn’t do that – and of course he got genuine pleasure from getting the crap kicked out of him.

“So I offered him a hundred grand to gas Rubinstein on a late KO – we had to take it into the late rounds and make it look good. Well, Shifty was never too great at bartering and told me he wouldn’t even think about it unless I came down to fifty.

“So we get into a big argument about it and I go to my trunk to get a baseball bat. My preferred weapon was always a shotgun, but I had the presence of mind to realise that Shifty might not be OK for the fight if I shot him. So I’m reaching into the trunk when I feel the car being lifted up and dropped. Then I hear Shifty screaming like hell.

“I ask him what the hell’s going on and he tells me it’s OK, he’s just bouncing the car off his feet to toughen up his toes. Man, I couldn’t believe it. You gotta be in my business to appreciate the emotion of a moment like that. What a guy Shifty was. He could take it like no other man I ever met. I was standing there, you know, holding the baseball bat, realising what an inferior weapon it was in the presence of a man like him, and I’m crying tears of admiration.

“That’s how we became friends. Shifty told me I could hit him with the bat anyway, but it would have been bush league stuff after that crunching toe job.”

Lew Stilton’s Gym

Vito Silvani knew that he was in the presence of greatness. He also knew the man who would polish and perfect Shifty’s incredible talent and take him all the way to 357th in the middleweight rankings.

Shifty didn’t know it, but he had a spiritual brother in the tough and uncompromising Lew Stilton, the greatest boxing manager in New York City. Lew shared Shifty’s desire to return boxing to the old school ways. Fighters in general, Lew reasoned, had gone soft. The living was too easy and it had made them lazy. They didn’t learn the basics anymore. They didn’t follow the correct training regimens or stick to the right diet. Tough fighters had gone out of the window along with the tough and knowledgeable trainers.

Stilton opened his boxing academy on a stretch of South Bronx waste ground with the aim of bucking that trend. Just getting into the Stilton Academy was a brutally difficult assignment. Stilton mined the surrounding land for two hundred square yards to teach his students the importance of careful and evasive footwork.

Those who overcame that obstacle then had to reach the Academy’s third floor gymnasium by climbing a rung-less ladder.

Vito Silvani knew that introducing Stilton to Shifty Walnuts would create one of the great boxing unions of forward thinking visionaries.

Stilton took a shine to Shifty from the first time they met, admiring the youngster’s spunky perseverance after he had twice been blown up and savagely mauled by the Academy’s guardian Bengal Tiger, Harold.

“Shifty was a marvel,” Stilton recalls now, with a hint of a tear in his eye. “He was in a body cast for weeks but I still couldn’t keep him out of the ring. Every day he would hobble in here to spar with Refrigerator Rollins and take his daily hammering. The other guys in the gym grew to idolise Shifty. They would always stop what they were doing to watch Refrigerator work him over. You’ve got to know boxing to understand that.”

Shifty immediately felt at home in the hot and claustrophobic gym that scared away so many lesser men. The windows were painted shut and barred and the atmosphere was thick with the smells of sweat, liniment and cigar smoke. Carbon monoxide was pumped through the air conditioning vents, while the Academy’s special teams unit – a vagrant called Harry – stood on a chair at ringside exposing his armpits.

Lew Stilton had employed a cunning method in the ring to teach his fighters alertness and discipline. He had electrified the ropes with the aid of his technically inclined nephew, Benny, who knew quite a bit about things with wires.

Lew was a great fan of George Foreman and had wept for three days after Big George’s loss to Muhammad Ali in Zaire. “No smart-ass son of a bitch is ever going to use that Rope-A-Dope crap in my gym,” Stilton had vowed.

“The electrified ropes teach fighters to command the center of the ring and stand their ground,” Lew reasoned. “Shifty knew that before his two-week stint on a life support machine, but it was typical of the kid that he never complained or filed a lawsuit. That’s when I knew he was special.

“You know, I think he could have won the middleweight championship, I really do. But if Shifty had one minor flaw to his game, it was giving the other guy a nine round lead and trying to KO him late. Shifty never quite got that part of it right like Jake La Motta did. I don’t know, maybe it had something to do with concussion. Maybe he took a little too much before launching his big charge.

“Shifty saw himself as the marathon man of the ring, you know? Wait the other guy out and then go for it. He certainly would have nailed Pretty Boy Fairweather down in Miami in ’86 if Pretty Boy hadn’t closed his eyes and busted his nose.

“But technique – hey, forget about it. Shifty had all the moves and then some. I never saw another fighter who was as good as he was at feinting the other guy into hitting him flush in the mouth.

“Shifty pioneered the wide jab that left him open to the right cross and the sneakily tilted chin that invited a crushing uppercut. You don’t see guys learning that kind of stuff anymore.

“The Shifty Shuffle? Out of this world. Nothing Ali did ever came close to that. But Shifty was unlucky, man. He never got the luck. I don’t have to remind you of the pain he was laying on Marco Antonio Sombrero down in Tijuana. Sombrero was out, trust me. But then Shifty somersaulted a little too high when he came out of the Charleston segment of the Shuffle and hit the ring lights. We lost it on a technical knockout, but even the Mexicans said it was a freaky thing.”

Refrigerator Rollins

Shifty Walnuts had many ways of toughening his body and mind. He constantly sparred with bigger men, and his chief sparring partner and good friend was the 6’ 10”, 540lb Refrigerator Rollins, a one-time roadblock for the Manhattan South police precinct who went on to compile a 3-106-2 record against the worst heavyweights of the seventies and eighties.

“Shifty was always looking for new angles and slants,” Rollins recalls. “On the way to the gym each morning he would test his speed and reflexes by throwing himself at buses and taxi cabs. The traffic cops were always giving him gentle reprimands like “You fuckin’ nutbar,” or something like that.

“Shifty never drove a car, can you believe that? Something to do with blurred vision, I think. He went everywhere on his bicycle. Angelo Futch-Roach, his trainer, would often follow him during their training sessions, bopping Shifty on the head at periodic intervals with a brick attached to a long pole.

“Shifty took the attitude he could always learn. We called him the Einstein of the Stilton Academy. It’s funny, you know, ‘cos he had a remarkable resemblance to Einstein by the end of his career when he was going a little ga-ga. No, don’t say that. Say ‘eccentric’.

“Shifty studied all the great fighters and learned from them. He found out that guys like Bob Fitzsimmons and Kid McCoy studied the movements of animals. So Shifty went out and bought a whole stack of wildlife films and studied them for hours.

“I remember he came in here very excited one morning. He was kinda wrecked after stepping on one of Lew’s mines, but he was raving about this documentary he’d seen about lions hunting down zebras.

“He’d stayed up all night long studying the speed and the grace of those animals, their killer instinct, their angles of attack, the whole works. And by the time he was through, Shifty was able to perfectly imitate the zebra in the way it fell to the ground and got pummelled.

“That’s lateral thinking, you see. That’s genius, man. How many other blind suckers out there would have imitated the lion?”

Old School

Shifty Walnuts hated most things modern. Despite the constant urging of promoters, doctors and commission officials, he eschewed cars and public transport and travelled to all his fights on his trusty bicycle.

His journeys from fight to fight became legendary in boxing circles. In 1987, after losing a decision to Henry Tedious in Boston, Shifty cycled the 1,486 miles to Miami for his next bout, pausing only to start a pointless fight with a convenience store salesman in North Carolina.

“And they ask why he had such strong and powerful legs,” says trainer Angelo Futch-Roach admiringly. “He’d shadow box at the same time, you know. His balance on the bicycle was incredible – apart from that one time he hit the Greyhound bus and got hospitalised.

“He was a smart cookie. He paced himself. He’d stop off to eat at his favourite little places or toughen up his knuckles by hitting fire hydrants and utility poles.

“He once dropped a split decision to a fire hydrant in Atlanta, but it was unofficial and didn’t go on his record.

“It’s some record, you know. 798 fights. I don’t think any pro had that many fights before and I don’t ever see it being matched. It’s too bad some of the boxing databases refuse to carry his record because their researchers get stressed out around the four hundred mark. I mean, I can appreciate it must be tedious, you know, having to type ‘L10’ over and over, but you’d think they’d show some respect.

“Yeah, the people loved Shifty when he was on the road. It was touching, you know? They’d wave and cheer and hang out signs saying, ‘Here comes Wacko Walnuts’.

“Only in boxing, man. Only in America.”

Wonderful

Chester (Shifty) Walnuts knew he had reached the end of the line with the final loss to Demetrius (Dunkin’) Donuts. But Shifty also knew that he would miss the fame and adulation of a glittering career.

He tried his hand at various jobs after hanging up his gloves but could never find contentment, not even as a live bait lure for shark fishermen in Florida. How he thought back to that Christmas Eve farewell against Demetrius Donuts and regretted the hasty decision to retire. The cheers of the crowd! The smiling faces! The gratitude! The mass relief!

Shifty knew that if he reversed his decision and made a comeback, boxing fans everywhere would bury their heads in their hands and groan, “Oh, Christ, no….”

But he needed to stay active and playing to the crowd was in his blood. It was then that entertainment promoter Honest John Shill stepped into Shifty’s life and suggested a brave new concept: the Wonderful World of Walnuts.

Shifty loved what he heard. Shill’s master plan was to stage a series of vaudeville-style roadshows across America in which Shifty would demonstrate his formidable strength and endurance.

What neither man realised, sadly, was that Shifty’s tough old body was finally deteriorating and breaking down.

“I shoulda seen the signs,” Honest John Shill admits. “He did start falling over a lot, but I figured maybe he was one of those guys who enjoyed a shot or two of Jim Beam with his Cheerios.

“But I had a ball with Shifty in the short time it lasted. We aimed high right from the start and drew huge crowds. They still play his jump off the Space Needle on You Tube. Could any other guy have survived that? No safety net, no parachute. But yeah, maybe it contributed to his decline.”

Shill knew for sure that the alarm bells were ringing following Shifty’s failed attempt to eat the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum. “I think he kind of underestimated the hardness of the outer walls. When his teeth fell out, we had to call it off. Maybe it would have been a different story if he had started in the lobby and sort of munched outwards.

“That’s when I told him to call off the New York challenge. But you couldn’t tell Shifty to do anything. That was the problem. He was stubborn. A proud warrior, you know?”

Surgeons worked around the clock to sew Shifty’s body back together after his unsuccessful effort to pole-vault the Statue of Liberty. After a long period of recuperation and manic depression, during which time he was rendered homeless after strong winds blew away his cardboard condominium on Coney Island, Shifty was back on his feet and slowly piecing his life together.

“It’s times like that when a fellow needs his friends,” says Honest John Shill. “So I sent him a get well card. I get ‘em discount from a guy in Queens.”

It took Shifty’s real friends to come to the rescue Trainer Angelo Futch-Roach became his permanent guardian, while manager Lew Stilton took Shifty back under his wing at the Stilton Academy.

“It was just dreadful the way people forgot about him after the Statue of Liberty thing,” Stilton says disgustedly, “even though he was a demented turkey for doing it. After the career Shifty had, a roof over his head is the very least he should be able to expect. I rented him accommodation in the trunk of my car and took him on as an official employee of the academy.

“We were short on punching bags after a contractual dispute with our supplier, so Shifty offered to chain himself from the ceiling and fill in. We’ve got him back to doing what he loves and he’s also doing a lot of coaching. He’s doing a great job with my big Russian hope, Vitalis Switchko.”

Asked if it’s true that Shifty knocked Switcko out in a sparring session with a right uppercut delivered in mid-somersault, Lew Stilton blinks and says, “Where’d you hear that? Nah, that’s not true. That’s total bullshit. Forget about it.”

True or not, the great Chester (Shifty) Walnuts continues to make his indelible mark on boxing and still has all the time in the world for his many fans. He answers all letter personally and asks that they be mailed to him at Planet Jupiter, Milky Way, c/o Lew Stilton’s Car Trunk, South Bronx NY.

Mike Casey is a boxing journalist and historian and a staff writer with Boxing Scene. He is a member of the International Boxing Research Organization (IBRO) and founder and editor of the Grand Slam Premium Boxing Service for historians and fans (www.grandslampage.net).