The Croatian Candidate

On the road to this presumed fate is the meeting with Patterson in Madison Square Garden. Chuvalo is now the World Boxing Association's third-ranked heavyweight contender; Patterson is rated No. 2. The winner here is supposed to fight the winner of the Ernie Terrell (No. 1)- Eddie Machen (No. 4) match in Chicago on March 5. The WBA has foreordained this winner of winners the new world champion, having expunged the rightful titleholder, Cassius Clay, for agreeing to a forbidden rematch with Sonny Liston, who was previously unrecognized because he had been picked up on a traffic violation. This rematch, of course, is still theoretical, because of Clay's convalescence following a hernia operation and Liston's persistent erratic driving. Chuvalo apparently attained the No. 3 ranking by beating Doug Jones in October, for Chuvalo's only other notable opponent last year was Zora Folley, to whom he lost. However, Trainer McWhorter says "we" had boils in both ears that night. Zora, coincidentally, is also the name of Chuvalo's sister. Machen, who was No. 5, rose by virtue of inertia; Cleveland Williams, who was No. 4, was shot in the groin by a policeman after he was picked up on a traffic violation. Machen evidently reached No. 5 on the strength of his loss to Patterson last July. Somebody has got to set this to music.

Although Chuvalo weighed 198 by the time he was 15, which took a load off his abdominal muscles and fulfilled the "heavyweight" portion of his destiny, the "championship" seemed wholly unattainable until he upset Jones. "Boxing hasn't been worth it up to now," Chuvalo said the other day, reflecting on a largely undistinguished professional career which has spanned eight years and included 39 fights, 29 of which he has won. "I often look back on my life and review it. The way I figure, I would have made just as much driving a truck. I see it in dollars and cents. Otherwise, it's ridiculous. I'm excited by the prospect of making a lot of money. I enjoy boxing to an extent. At least I haven't had an ordinary 9-to-5 job. But it's not the same as when I was a kid and fought for nothing."

Chuvalo—-the name was originally spelled Cuvalo and pronounced choovalo, but shoevalo is now the proper articulation—grew up in The Junction, a harsh, dingy section of Toronto. His father had come to Canada from Croatia, a part of Yugoslavia, in 1926 and worked on the roads in Nova Scotia and in the bush. (If Chuvalo ultimately wins the title, he will not be the first champion of Croatian descent; that distinction belongs to Fritzie Zivic.) It was not until 1936 that he had enough money to send for his wife, who went to work plucking chickens. George was born the following year. He started fighting amateur at the East York Arena when he was 15 and, all told, won 18 of 19 fights. "Fighting kept me out of trouble," Chuvalo says.

Chuvalo's professional debut could hardly have been more auspicious. On the night of April 23, 1956, competing in a heavyweight novice tournament, he knocked out all four of his opponents in a total of 12 minutes and 36 seconds. Two months later, and without the customary benefit of preliminary bouts, Chuvalo fought one Johnny Arthur, who was the South African champion and a veteran of 34 fights, and beat him over eight rounds. When, however, in his third fight Chuvalo took on Howard King, who had 45 fights, he suffered his first defeat. Campaigning almost exclusively in Toronto, Chuvalo then won six in a row before losing to his next "name" fighter, Bob Baker, in September of 1957. In 1958 he beat Julio Mederos, knocked King out in two, drew with sixth-rated Alex Miteff, which earned Chuvalo the No. 10 ranking, knocked out James J. Parker in a round for the Canadian heavyweight title and, in his first televised bout, was sorely beaten by Pat McMurtry in Madison Square Garden. Humiliated and downcast, Chuvalo did not fight again for nearly a year; he apparently spent most of the interval morosely lifting weights. He had two fights at the end of 1959, knocking out Frankie Daniels and Yvon Durelle. In 1960 he was defeated by Pete Rademacher ("I find that very embarrassing," Chuvalo said recently), then lost and regained his Canadian title in a pair of fights with Bob Cleroux. He beat Miteff and Willi Besmanoff in 1961 before losing once more to Cleroux and finally to Joe Erskine, being disqualified for repeated butting, whereupon he quit the ring and went into the used car business, which he found equally unrewarding.

"I was discouraged," Chuvalo says. "I was wasting my time." He attributes his futile record to his manager, the late Jack (Deacon) Allen, and his trainer, Tommy McBeigh. "They tried to make a boxer out of me," he says. "I jabbed, I moved around a lot. My right hand, I might as well have left it at home. For my build, it was unnatural. My build should be a slugger." Chuvalo is 6 feet 1 and weighs about 210 when he is in shape. He has exceptionally thick legs and a rather large head; these make him appear a good deal shorter than he is. He is unusually strong; when he was fooling around with weights he was able to press 240 pounds. "They only had me boxing three rounds in the gym," Chuvalo says, "so I figure, how can I go 10 fast rounds? I'd only get aggressive in the last round."

When Chuvalo found, as he says, that a used-car lot "wasn't my kind of a business," he decided to return to boxing. He raised the money to buy up his contract from Allen and set forth on his own for Detroit. "I wanted to be transformed into a more aggressive fighter," he says. "I heard there was a man in Detroit who was the best trainer for aggressive fighters there was."

"He come to Detroit seeking someone to help him," says Theodore McWhorter, a slender, soulful and temporarily toothless man who handled Chuck Davey, Chuck Spieser and Johnny Summerlin. "He had all the qualifications. He just needed someone to bring them out. What he did he did as well as he know how. For a kid to come through the fights he come through, they had to teach him something, but he had no confidence in his handlers. They had him moving around like a lightweight. Didn't seem right, big guy like him moving around. He has too much weight on him to run around. Big guy can do it just so long. Big guy like him run away, look bad. He'll come to you. He'll come to you now. He's willing to go forward, that's the thing. They hadn't put too much on him, so it wasn't too hard to change him around. I closed him up. Before, he would open up to throw a punch, telegraph it. I taught him to bob and weave, slip, throw a lot of combinations. He can counter-punch now, he can do a lot of things. I saw he was getting hit too much with jabs. I see his pictures in The Ring magazine. He looked like a bloody horse right around the nose. I figure a jab doing the damage. I only lost me one fight with him, and we were sick that night. We had all but Folley down. We've been knocking them out a lot. He's definitely not the fighter he was. He's got a lot more confidence. He's got peace of mind. If you don't have no peace of mind, you can't do a thing.

"He's a gentleman," McWhorter says. "That's why I like him. He's strictly a gentleman. What a wonderful thing to be heavyweight champion of the world. He could wear it. He's the type of man that makes a good man. He could definitely wear it. You see a lot of Presidents, but not all of them can wear it. Roosevelt could wear it. Kennedy could wear it. Eisenhower.... Truman could wear it a little better."

With McWhorter as his trainer and acting as his own manager, Chuvalo started his comeback by quickly knocking out four nonentities, three of whom literally do not appear in The Ring Record Book; the fourth had lost nine of his previous 11 fights. This buildup almost went for naught, however; although Chuvalo could approve his opponents, he had no say about the referees. In his next appearance, a televised match with Mike DeJohn in Louisville, Chuvalo knocked DeJohn down in the second round. Referee Don Asbury stopped the fight, and Chuvalo's second, thinking DeJohn had been knocked out, removed Chuvalo's gloves. Asbury, however, decided DeJohn had been fouled and ordered the fighters to continue. In the sixth round Chuvalo knocked DeJohn out of the ring. Asbury pulled him back in, wiped his gloves and finally began to count. While Chuvalo was waiting for the decision to be announced, he says Asbury said to him, "What do you look so glum for, George? You won by a country mile." A moment later, Chuvalo heard that Asbury had scored the fight a draw. Fortunately, the judges voted for Chuvalo.

Six weeks later Chuvalo fought another televised bout, this time against Tony Alongi in Miami Beach. Alongi won a split decision. The following day, the Miami Beach Boxing Commission declared that Referee Cy Gottfried's card had been "incorrectly scored" and changed the decision to a draw.