Chancey Games In Ohio

"Whatever Chance tells you, you better check carefully. Listen, Duke Sims asked me, 'What kind of a guy is Chance?' I told him, 'Duke, I always been an Indians rooter, but now that Chance is pitching, I hope that when you're catching him you have six passed balls.' "—Don Elbaum, fight promoter.

"I won't call Elbaum names. I'll be around long after he's out of the state of Ohio. Is it going to do me any good to call him names? I refuse to badmouth that no-good SOB."—Dean Chance.

Can this really be Wilmer Dean Chance who is party to so rancorous an exchange and, if so, why? Can Elbaum be shouting about the Dean Chance I have known and loved since he first came into the big leagues nine years ago? I had never heard Chance's veracity called into question; on the contrary, his teammates occasionally threw him dark looks for being excessively frank. For example, when he won 20 games and the Cy Young Award in 1964 his Los Angeles Angels colleagues saw no particular need of his declaring, "I should have won 30 games and had 15 shutouts, but I got no hitting behind me. I don't know if it will get better but it sure can't get worse."

Reared to a height of 6'3" in the cornfields of Ohio, Chance possessed angelic features; he neither drank nor smoked, nor does he now at 28. But if one is determined to find fault with him, then it is true that he drove his car along the Los Angeles freeways as though they were the Utah salt flats and that he wore outrageous colors long before anyone declared them to be mod. Granted, there were numerous signs of an eccentric aspect to his personality.

He made good money pitching, developed a prosperous farm near Wooster, Ohio and acquired a Smucker's franchise that does a brisk business in gift-wrapped foods, all of which was necessary to pay his phone bill. Among his excesses, significantly, was an affinity for placing long-distance calls, starting from the time he awakened and continuing into the dead of night until he phoned himself to sleep. The difficulty, however, was that through the first seven years of his major league existence Chance's phone calls, piercing time zones and destroying the slumber of legions of acquaintances, made little sense, owing to the fact that as a rule he had no reason for calling. His modus operandi was to put through the call on the assumption that by the time it was answered he would think of something to say. No real harm in that, except that Chance's feverish telephonitis was symptomatic of the fact that his life was about to take a perilous turn.

Before long, circumstances would introduce Chance to the haggling and scheming world of boxing, which lives by the telephone. And because he would be unable to resist entering this paradise of telephone action he would in turn run afoul of Don Elbaum, a feisty little man of 34, a young Edward G. Robinson, widely regarded as boxing's No. 1 scratcher and hustler. "I have feuds with quite a few people," says Elbaum pointedly, "but I respect some of them."

It was 14 months ago, in January 1969, that Chance and Elbaum first recognized one another as natural opponents. Prior to that time Chance had had no interest in the fight game, but an Ohio manager named Ed Mears knew him to be a friend of California heavyweight contender Jerry Quarry and suggested that he sign Quarry to fight a tuneup at the 7,000-seat Canton Memorial Auditorium and back the show. "Why not!" thought Chance, inasmuch as promoting the fight would give him an immediate reason for telephoning Quarry. He experienced no resistance in persuading Quarry to accept $5,000 and expenses but, being a stranger to boxing, Chance required a matchmaker to put together his preliminary bouts. Enter Elbaum—with a friendly smile that Chance would now describe as that of a Times Square wristwatch peddler.

On the basis of appearance, if nothing else, the prospective antagonists shaped up as a brutal mismatch. In one corner, the fair-skinned eager farmer. In the other, starting from the feet and working up: pointy-toed shoes, an open collar under a sportcoat, a 5 o'clock shadow, dark glasses the size of saucers, and thick black hair covering a brain that has established its owner as probably the only boxing operator between New York and California who is able to earn a living without resorting to wrestling promotions or side jobs selling home improvements. Elbaum has been a fight promoter since the age of 19 when he served as an Army private in Korea. "I made $10,000 in three shows there," he says. "Then my C.O. called me in." Emerging from the Army, he made promoting and managing his life's work, doggedly plumbing tank towns and sometimes fighting on his own cards when preliminary boys failed to show up. His father Max begged him to become a part of the family hearing-aid business in Erie, Pa., but to Max's repeated pleas he turned, well, a deaf ear.

He loved the sounds and the odors of gyms and the conniving that was carried out over endless cups of coffee in motel coffee shops. He graduated to Pittsburgh, Buffalo, Detroit and Akron, and in recent months reached new heights by effecting a leasing agreement with the Cleveland Arena, where in January he did $45,000 matching Emile Griffith with his own middleweight, Doyle Baird. "If a show goes good," says Elbaum, "I live good." He did not live good as a result of putting together Chance's Canton preliminaries, he points out, because Chance neglected to pay him for his services.

"That's ridiculous!" shrieks Chance, declaring that he agreed to pay Elbaum $250 for arranging the preliminaries and that he indeed paid him the two-fifty even though Elbaum unabashedly milked the show for a personal bonus. "He takes a kid who's banned everywhere—a kid named Skip Jackson, a lousy bucket carrier out of a gym in Akron—and tells people this kid is the West Virginia middleweight champ," Chance bellows. Elbaum matched the so-called bucket carrier with his Doyle Baird, who found it necessary to put in less than one round's work. "I give Baird $700," Chance goes on, "and the other guy never threw a punch. But I don't owe Elbaum a cent. He says all these things for one reason—publicity. Don't even put his name in the story. Refer to him as 'some shortstop promoter.' "