'i Don't Really Fight To Win'

Jimmy Young is 6'2" and weighs 211 pounds, which figures. Mrs. Ruth Young has three sons and they're all men of size. Jimmy's older brother William weighs 300 pounds. Little John Young, only 15, has a 36-inch waist and wears a size-14 shoe, and the last time they put him on a scale he tipped 200 pounds. But if Jimmy Young comes by being a heavyweight naturally, he sure refuses to act like one.

Jimmy Young does not knock people down. This is mostly because he is too busy making sure that they do not knock him down. Young sees himself as an artist operating in a world of assassins, and for this he is often misunderstood. It is said that fans do not attend heavyweight fights to savor balletlike moves: they go to see blood. Well, says Jimmy Young, if they want to see blood, let them slash their wrists.

Young should be seen in an art gallery, not in a ring. As a boxing stylist he is closer to Tintoretto than Galento. Do not ask him to be anything else. He is a rapier among the broadswords, and all he does is win.

"I don't really fight to win, I fight to survive," Young said in Las Vegas last week as he prepared for next Saturday's 15-round fight against Ken Norton at Caesars Palace. "Survival means money. When I survive it means I move up, and when I move up I make more money. If I lose, it's back to the bottom of the pile, back to nothing. I don't ever want to go back. When you have been where I have been, you never want to go back."

To Young, going back is the meanest streets of Philadelphia where, one day when he was 14, three older boys relieved him of his transistor radio. "I worked nights in a laundry to buy that radio," he says. "The next day I went looking for those three guys. I had a butcher knife hidden up one sleeve and a fire hydrant wrench up the other." The memory dissolves in a smile. "Today I'm glad I didn't find them. Either way...," he says, his voice trailing off.

The following day his father, William, a welder, came up with a wiser solution. He took Jimmy to a Police Athletic League gym and started him as an amateur fighter, a light heavyweight. Jimmy needed just 21 fights, 14 of them victories, to convince himself that he wanted to be a professional.

Young became a hungry headhunter. In his first pro heavyweight fight in 1969 he knocked out Jimmy Jones in one round. A sledgehammer had more style. Young thought that this was the only way to fight—until nine bouts later when his manager, who has since been replaced, decided that his young slugger was ready for Earnie Shavers. That was in February of 1973. Shavers came in with 44 victories, 41 of them knockouts. Young hadn't fought since a loss to Randy Neumann a year earlier. Marie Antoinette had more of a chance against Robespierre's blade.

"You'd think I'd have known better," Young says, "but I've never lacked for confidence. I actually wanted that fight; I was eager. I thought I was going to win. I guess I was overmatched. That same night Ernie Terrell was fighting the main event against some stiff. I can't remember his name. I should have been fighting Terrell's guy, and he should have been fighting Shavers. His guy went out in one round; Shavers stopped me in three. It wasn't a knockout; they just stopped it. All he did was bloody my nose."

The loss sent Young to the movies. "I realized that standing there and letting the other guy pound me wasn't the answer. I had the brains; I decided to use them. I studied films of all the old stylists: Sugar Ray Robinson, Archie Moore, Jersey Joe Walcott, Billy Conn. I idolized them all, mostly Sugar Ray. I still study the films every day; I'm still learning new tricks from the old masters of the sport."

Young's boxing style became that of a tumbleweed riding a hot summer wind: forever bounding. In his fights now he is usually in full retreat, pausing but briefly to throw sand in some pursuing bully's face before fleeing once more. He punches for points, not for pain. He fought three times in England, once in Venezuela, always a big underdog against hometown favorites. He didn't lose once. Even so, the ranked heavyweights refused to believe Young was for real.