The youngster was talking so fast and was so full of energy that the man on the other end of the phone could barely keep up. Bemused and amused by him, however, he let him speak.
“'Hello, my name is Cassius Marcellus Clay. I'm the Golden Gloves champion of Louisville. I won the Atlanta Golden Gloves. I’m gonna be the Olympic champion and the champion of the whole world,' and on and on, the number and the names of the titles he had and would win flying by so fast I could barely keep track,” the man on the phone would later recall.
The date was February 1957, the place was Louisville, Kentucky, and Angelo Dundee had just encountered Muhammad Ali for the first time.
Ali – then Cassius Clay – would indeed go on to win gold at the 1960 Rome Olympics and would become arguably the greatest heavyweight champion of all time. And alongside him for most of his two-decade professional career, training and nurturing the brash, voluble, hypertalented Southerner, was the quiet, diminutive Italian-American he had called in his hotel room that February day.
***
One hundred and four years ago this weekend, on August 30, 1921, Dundee was born Angelo Mirena in Philadelphia, the eighth of nine children to recent Italian immigrants Angelo and Filomena Merenda. An inattentive immigration officer mis-transcribed the elder Angelo’s surname, but that didn’t matter much to the younger Angelo, who wouldn’t keep the name for long, anyway.
His eldest brother, Joe, 21 years his senior, had wanted to become a pro boxer. But in an attempt to keep his career choice a secret from his father, he had adopted the name “Dundee,” after a pair of boxing brothers out of Baltimore – Joe and Vince, whose real name was Lazzaro and who in turn had selected their moniker after an early 20th-century featherweight champion known as Johnny Dundee. (The original Dundee was himself actually named Carrora).
When Angelo and brother Chris followed Joe into the boxing business, they also called themselves Dundee, and that is how they would be widely known for the rest of their lives.
Angelo Dundee hadn’t necessarily anticipated a career in and around the sweet science. That he wound up with one was to some extent happenstance and down to the influence of Chris.
After high school, Angelo joined the United States Air Force and was stationed in England during World War II. (“We won,” he later wrote, “but not because of anything I did.”)
Among the ways bored servicemen passed the time was amateur boxing tournaments, and as Chris was by this time a well-known manager, Angelo and his brother Jimmy were considered “fight men,” who could work the boxers’ corners. They had, he later admitted, little to no idea about what they were doing; nor did Angelo reflect with much pride on his own brief stint inside the ropes. (He “won a few fights,” he would write, but was “not sure how.”)
After the war, he moved to New York City to help big brother Chris manage his growing roster of fighters. Chris, though, couldn’t afford to pay him, and so young Angelo was forced to hustle. Spending time with his brother meant being immersed in the Big Apple big fight scene, and Dundee did all he could to ingratiate himself with anyone who could show him the ropes and provide him some cash.
He found what he was looking for in the form of trainer Chickie Ferrera, who hired him to carry a spit bucket and eventually upgraded him to hand-wrapper. As time went on, Dundee became increasingly adept in the corner, and when Chris upped stakes and relocated to Miami Beach to open what would become the 5th St. Gym, Angelo went with him.
Between them, they built up an increasingly impressive collection of champions, and it was while Angelo was in Louisville for a fight with one of them – future light heavyweight kingpin Willie Pastrano – that he received the phone call that would ultimately change his life.
***
“A lot of guys didn't think he would make it,” Dundee said of Ali when the two of us sat down in Las Vegas for a conversation a little less than 20 years ago, “because he was doing so much jumping around, kept his hands down, jerked around.”
A lot of trainers might have tried to change Ali and make him do things the “right” way. Dundee, however, “left him alone," he told me. “I just smoothed out a lot of stuff.”
Indeed, he soon determined that the psychology of Ali was such that telling him what to do was not the way to go.
“I made him feel like he innovated it,” he told me. “If I was the guy that gave him directions, he'd say, 'Hey, who's this midget to tell me what to do?' No, I never gave him a direct order. The only time I told him what to do was in the ring."
One of those times came when Ali challenged Sonny Liston for the heavyweight championship of the world in February 1964. At the end of the fourth round, Ali came back to the corner, blinking and squinting, screaming that he couldn't see and pleading with Dundee to cut off his gloves and stop the fight. Instead, Dundee sent him back out for the fifth and told him to keep moving until he regained his vision.
“‘Take off the gloves, there's dirty work afoot,’” Dundee recalled his fighter crying. “He couldn't see. He was frantic, the poor kid.”
Dundee believed that liniment on Liston’s shoulder was the cause of the trouble. But in the heat of the moment, he couldn’t worry about that; instead, he had to find a way to get his man back in the contest.
“I cleaned out his eyes,” he told me. “I wiped them clean, threw away the sponge, threw away the towel, and when the referee was coming toward me, I made him stand up. I didn't pick him up. I said, 'Get up,' and the referee turned back to the neutral corner. That's what trainers are for. You've got to be there for that kind of situation. You've got to do everything to help the fighters."
Dundee had famously also been on alert to help Ali between rounds during his previous outing, when he had fought Henry Cooper.
After dominating Cooper for four rounds during their bout at London's Wembley Stadium, Ali was hit with a thunderous Cooper left hook that, he said later, "made me feel as if I had gone back and visited all my ancestors in Africa."
Slumped on the canvas, his arm draped over the second rope, Ali was saved by the bell. Dundee leaped into the ring and dragged him to the corner, where, according to urban legend, the trainer cut Ali's glove, called the referee's attention to the fact that the glove was split, and caused a delay during which a new glove was placed on Ali's fist as he recovered his senses.
That wasn’t what happened, Dundee told me.
“That was something they gave me credit I don't deserve. I didn't cut the glove,” he said.
Rather, he had noticed in the early going that the glove was split slightly along the seam, the leather sticking up. As he wrote in his autobiography, “My View from the Corner”: "Well, who knows when something like that might come in handy?
“So he kicked the hell out of Cooper in the first round, he got back, and I made sure the referee wasn't looking my way,” he recalled during our conversation. “I said, 'Keep your hand closed,’ because if he'd have kept it open, the crack would have shown. And then when I saw an opportune moment [after the knockdown], I called the referee over and said, ‘The glove's split.’ I put my finger underneath the leather and lifted it up.
“The idea was, I went to the referee, and he went to the commissioner. The commissioner went to the back room looking for gloves. He came back, the referee told me, ‘Angelo, we don't have any new gloves.’ I said, 'That's OK, we'll use these.’ I never took them off.”
Another Dundee myth he dispelled: the notion that he had loosened the ropes in the ring in Kinshasa, Zaire, when Ali rope-a-doped his way to victory over George Foreman in 1974.
“Nothing could be further from the truth,” he insisted in his book. “In fact, I tightened them, not loosened them.” The ring, when first assembled, was in a sorry state, he wrote, assembled by workers who “had never seen a boxing ring before.” The floor was slanted and the ropes hung limply from the corners; Dundee was the one who sorted both issues and ensured there was a usable ring in place for what would become arguably Ali’s final hour.
Dundee had been there for both Ali’s fights with Liston, had stuck by him during his suspension and was with him again when he lost to Joe Frazier, defeated Foreman, overcame Frazier in the stifling heat of Manila and remained until Ali shuffled belatedly off the stage following the damaging defeats to Larry Holmes and Trevor Berbick.
But as one great left the spotlight, another sauntered into it, and having been in the corner of one of the very greatest ever to lace them up, he repeated the trick with another Olympic gold medalist, Sugar Ray Leonard. Helming the careers of two all-time greats might have been more than enough for most trainers, but Dundee wasn’t done yet. For his third great act, he took over the training of former victim Foreman, and he was there when the big Texan became the oldest heavyweight champion in history by felling Michael Moorer in 1994 – 30 years after Ali had upset Liston to claim his crown.
Through it all, Dundee was recognized throughout the sport, not just for his ability to train and motivate fighters at the time they needed him most – his exhortation to Leonard that “You’re blowing it, son” presaged his man’s knockout victory over Thomas Hearns – but also for his innate goodness. Never a grandstander, he was happy to live in the light that reflected off his charges as he helped them tap into their talents.
“I know that whatever help I can give my fighters ends when the bell rings to start the next round,” he wrote in his book. “Then he’s on his own, out there in the loneliest spot in the world, the center of the ring …
“When the bell rings ending the round, that’s when the trainer takes over. … That’s when something like ‘You’re blowing it, son,’ to a Sugar Ray Leonard can turn around a fight. Or when a push in the back or fiddling with a torn glove of a fighter named Cassius Clay can avert defeat.”
Few used that minute between rounds as well as he did. Few were as celebrated for their success in doing so. As Howard Cosell famously observed: “If I had a son who wanted to be a fighter and I couldn't talk him out of it, the only man I would let train him is Angelo Dundee.”
Kieran Mulvaney has written, broadcast and podcast about boxing for HBO, Showtime, ESPN and Reuters, among other outlets. He presently co-hosts the “Fighter Health Podcast” with Dr. Margaret Goodman. He also writes regularly for National Geographic, has written several books on the Arctic and Antarctic, including most recently Arctic Passages: Ice, Exploration, and the Battle for Power at the Top of the World, and is at his happiest hanging out with wild polar bears. His website is www.kieranmulvaney.com.