Duva heads list of Boxing Hall of Fame inductees
Posted: Saturday June 13, 1998 04:35 PM
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Duva, 76, will be honored for six decades of working in nearly every facet of boxing (Ken Levine/Allsport) |
CANASTOTA, New York (AP) -- As a Depression-era teen-ager growing up in Paterson, New Jersey, Lou Duva was a gym rat.
He would rush home from whatever job he had at the time, pack his older brother's boxing gear, quickly devour his supper and be ready when his brother headed off to train. It wasn't the aspiring fighters, though, that so galvanized the attention of the young Duva.
"When I went to the gyms and the training camps ... I would watch the managers, the promoters, the trainers," Duva said. "I would watch the way they operated and how they handled things. After it was over, I would go to the cafeteria with them and listen to their war stories. So I started hanging out with old-time managers like Jack Kearns, Bill Daly, learning what the business is all about."
Duva learned well.
On Sunday, he will be inducted into the International Boxing Hall of Fame, along with 12 other past greats and ring personalities, including light heavyweight champion Matthew Saad Muhammad, flyweight champion Miguel Canto of Mexico and welterweight champion Antonio Cervantes of Colombia.
Duva will be enshrined in the non-participant category -- an almost laughable irony because Duva could not have participated more fully. His career has covered it all: Fighter, trainer, manager, promoter.
"If there is a facet of boxing, I did it," said the 76-year-old Duva, who has devoted nearly six decades to boxing. "I've done everything in this business whether it was a cut-man or trainer, setting up the rings and chairs, making up posters, fixing matches up. I opened my own gym and trained guys. Anything in boxing, I've done. It became my life. It was what I wanted to be, what I wanted to do. I was enthused about everything about boxing, from every angle, every perspective."
That Duva excelled on the business side of boxing should not be surprising. His mentors were the masters. Kearns was best known as heavyweight champion Jack Dempsey's manager and is credited for the first million-dollar gate in boxing history when Dempsey fought Georges Carpentier in the early 1920s. The colorful Daly, another jack-of-all-trades ringman whose career spanned six decades, masterminded the rise of Carlos Ortiz, the world lightweight champion from 1962-1968.
Duva's string of champions has exceeded both men and has included Evander Holyfield, Pernell Whitaker, Meldrick Taylor, Vinny Pazienza, Bobby Czyz and Mark Breland.
"I think of Lou as a fighter for the fighters," said Joey Giardello, a 1993 Hall of Fame inductee who became Duva's first champion when he won the world middleweight title from Dick Tiger in December 1963. "He was always there when you needed him. He always worked hard, even when the fights were going nowhere. He started as a small time promoter, but he turned out to be something."
Duva began as a boxer and fought in 22 professional matches before quitting.
"I was the worst ..." said Duva, who remains fiery and fervently devoted to his fighters, and has gotten into a few altercations on their behalf over the years. "I would pour water all over my head, then lie to my brother that I was out running. So no fighter today can deceive me about his conditioning. I capitalized on everything I did wrong to make sure I did it right with my fighters."
But Duva's heart never was into throwing punches. Industrious even as a boy, he would get up early to work so he could spend the day hitchhiking and bumming rides from Joe Louis' training camp in Pompton Lakes to Rocky Marciano's training site, then to Sugar Ray Robinson's.
"By the time I got home, it would be eight, nine o'clock at night," he said. "That's how I got my indoctrination in boxing. I was learning and learning and learning."
After he quit boxing, Duva enlisted in the Army during World War II and became the boxing instructor at Camp Hood in Texas.
By the mid-1960s, Duva was promoting amateur fights regularly at the Ice World Arena in Totowa, New Jersey. Over time, he began bringing national boxing teams from overseas -- Ireland, Italy, Poland -- to meet in international bouts against U.S. fighters. Eventually, the monthly series was televised and featured Pazienza, Czyz, Livingstone Bramble, Rocky Lockridge, Johnny Bumphus, Tony Tucker and Mike McCallum. All became champions.
As his five children grew, Duva brought them into the family-operated business and his empire expanded into Main Events, today one of the sport's top promotional companies. In the 1970s, his oldest son Dan joined him and went on to become one of boxing's dominant promoters before dying of brain cancer in January 1996.
Main Events has promoted more than 100 world championship bouts. After the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles, Lou and Dan Duva began signing the country's medal-winning boxers, helping entrench Main Events as a premier promoter.
"I was smart enough to know where the future of boxing was going to come from," Duva said. "Guys don't just walk in off the streets any more."
Duva and the other 1998 inductees were selected by a 153-member panel consisting of members of the Boxing Writer's Association and boxing historians from a dozen countries. Fighters must be retired five years before they are eligible for election.
Copyright 2003 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
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