Beau Jack

Meeting for a fourth and final fight (once again in August) on August 12th of the same year, Williams won the third as an exhausted 37-year old Jack was unable to answer the bell at the beginning of the ninth round.

(1960)_ -- Peter Falk won a Best Supporting Actor nomination played Reles -- would eventually cause the case to be dismissed. Carbo was not portrayed in the film, though his bosses, Albert Anastasia and Louis Lepke were.

Williams took their first rematch by a split decision, while the second rematch was a draw on April 9, 1956 in Jack's hometown of Augusta.

(For a vivid description of "battles royal", and the racism that underlied them, see Ralph Ellison's classic 1952 novel about African American alienation, "Invisible Man". ) After fighting a battle royal at the Augusta National Golf Club, Jack got a position as a shoeshine at the club, before graduating to caddie. Working at the club enabled the personable Beau Jack to make the acquaintance of the great golfer `Bobby Jones', who gave him the money so that he could travel north and partake in formal boxing training.

Spent millions and than worked as a shoe-shine man at the famed Fountainbleu Hotel on Miami Beach in the late 1950s and 1960s.

The title bout, held on July 12, 1948, saw Williams K. O. Jack in the sixth round. This was the beginning of a rivalry that saw the two fighters matched three more times over the next ten years, with Jack failing to win on each occasion as his knowledge of the sweet science was clearly on the decline.

(It was Palermo and Carbo who ordered Jake LaMotta's to take a dive against Billy Fox in 1946, an incident that is limned in Martin Scorsese's Raging Bull (1980), widely considered the greatest boxing movie ever made. ) The two were later jailed after a successful prosecution headed by none other than U. S. Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy. Williams, whom "Ring Magazine" later named as one of the "100 greatest punchers of all time", was two years younger than Beau Jack in a sport when a year was quite a very long time.

Patriotism seldom go better than this until V-E and V-J days in 1945.

(Williams, usually ranked in the Top 10 in most lists of the all-time lightweight champions, held the NBA world title from April of 1945, when he beat champ Juan Zurita, until May 1951, when he was beaten by Jimmy Carter. ) This was the last fight of both men's careers. Beau Jack retired with an official pro record of 83 wins (though some credit him with 88), including 40 K. O. 's, 24 losses and five draws. After retiring from the ring, Beau Jack ran a drive-in Bar-B-Q stand, operated a small farm, and then refereed wrestling matches. After his boxing earnings were exhausted, Jack returned to shining shoes, this time at the reportedly Mafia-owned Fountainebleau Hotel in Miami, Florida. Jack became an advocate of a pension scheme for boxers, so that no former pro pug would be reduced to the dire straights he faced. Jack also trained fighters at Miami's Fifth Street Gym. Despite suffering from poverty, Beau Jack did not ask for pity. "I've been to the top of the mountain," he said. "I was champion of the world. I've worked hard all my life, and I'm happy doing what I'm doing. "Beau Jack eventually was affected by pugilistic Parkinson's syndrome (which also claimed Joe Louis and Muhammad Ali). He died from its complications in a Miami nursing home on February.

The two had three more memorable fights, starting with Beau Jack regaining the title from Montgomery before losing it to him once again in March 1944. And it was Montgomery who was the antagonist in the most famous fight of Jack's career.

Meeting lightweight champ Montgomery for a fourth time, their August 4, 1944 bout was proclaimed "The War Bonds Fight" as tickets were only made available to interested parties who purchased war bonds. Jack and Montgomery were enlisted men in the U. S. Army at the time of the contest, and both refused to take purses for the fight. Although it was not a title fight, interest was so great that the gate raked in a record $36 million, with 15,822 war bonds being sold. Many people who purchased war bonds left their tickets at the box office for distribution to U. S. servicemen, who were among the almost 16,000 fans who saw Jack best Montgomery on points after 10 rounds. One memorable moment in the evening was the spotlit appearance of heavyweight champ (and U. S. Army Sergeant) Joe Louis, who stood up from his seat in the front row, to a standing ovation from the crowd.

Beau Jack was named "Ring Magazine" Fighter of the Year for 1944. Beau Jack's next shot at the lightweight title was against another future hall-of-famer, Ike Williams, a protégé of Mafiosi boxing promoter Blinky Palermo. Palermo was partnered with former Murder Inc. button man Frankie Carbo, a Mafiosi and convicted murderer based in Philadelphia who was considered the "Czar of Boxing". Unlicensed to be a fight manager, Carbo operated his stable of fighters, which later included world heavyweight champ Sonny Liston, through a New York bookie operation. Palermo regularly shortchanged Williams on his purses and ordered him to throw fights. The two manipulated odds and then fixed the fights to maximize their returns.

Beau Jack knocked out 3-to-1 favorite Allie Stolz in the ninth round in their November 1942 match to determine the #1 challenger for New York's version of the world lightweight title. He won the crown from NBA champ Tippy Larkin, knocking him out in the third round, but lost it six months later to fellow future International Boxing Hall of Fame member Bob Montgomery, who bested Beau Jack on points in a unanimous decision.

In 1941, he moved to New York City, the major leagues of professional boxing at the time, as the New York Boxing Commission and National Boxing Association (NBA) titles were then considered the equivalent of the world's championship. Major fights had taken place at New York City's Madison Square Garden since John L.

Turning professional as Beau Jack in 1940, he began his pro boxing career fighting in Massachusetts, where he ran up a record of 27 wins, four losses and two draws while establishing a reputation as a relentless and powerful fighter, traits that made him hugely popular among fight fans. He became renowned for a swarming style and for the high volume of his punches.

In the early 1940s, Abe "Kid Twist" Reles and Allie "Tick Tock" Tannenbaum agreed to testify against Carbo, but Reles' apparent suicide by throwing himself through a window of the Half Moon Hotel in Coney Island while under heavy police guard, an incident dramatized in the 1960 movie _Murder Inc.

Beau Jack, considered one of the greatest lightweight boxers who ever laced on the gloves, was born Sidney Walker in Waynesboro, Georgia on April 1, 1921. After the death of his mother, young Sidney was raised in Augusta by his maternal grandmother, Evie Mixom, who called him the nickname "Beau Jack". The young Jack worked as a shoe-shine boy in Augusta at the corner of Broad and Ninth streets. To make extra money, at the age of 15, he began fighting in "battles royal", a sports tradition in the Jim Crow-era South that pitted five to ten African Americans youths against each other in a no-holds-barred fight. The fighters were blindfolded, and the last man standing was the winner, receiving a typically meager purse put up by prosperous white men who put on the brutal spectacle for their own entertainment. Though the young Jack was not big (he was 5'6" tall and weighed 133 pounds), he often emerged victorious in the bouts. This was his introduction to pugilism in the racist South of the inter-war period.

Sullivan, "The Boston Strongboy", won the heavyweight crown in 1882, when the Garden went through its first incarnation as a showplace for the Barnum & Bailey's circus. Beau Jack became one of the most popular fighters in the history of New York fisticuffs, eventually headlining 21 bouts at the third and most famous incarnation of Madison Square Garden, a record that still stands in an era in which Madison Square Garden is in its fourth building. At the time, the sport was heavily controlled by organized crime, though there is no evidence of outright mob control of Jack.