FIGHTER'S EYES

The glory days are a long-ago memory for George Chuvalo, the Canadian
boxer who rattled Ali and inspired Rocky, but inside still beats the
heart of a fighter. Earl McRae takes a trip to the movies - and into
the past - with our greatest pugilist ever, seeing a remarkable moment
in boxing history through a ...

TORONTO -- The movie we're going to starts in 45 minutes and he hasn't
arrived yet. I sit waiting for him in a doughnut shop on Kipling Ave.
not far from his Toronto home where he lives with his wife Joanne who
saved his life after his first wife committed suicide only four days
after death by drug overdose of Stevie, who, like two of his brothers,
ended his own life.

"I'll meet you there in 10 minutes," he told me over my cellphone.
That was half an hour ago. But I'm not surprised. It has always been
this way. It is not inconsideration. There is George Chuvalo time and
everybody else's time. As a prizefighter most of his life, the only
time that mattered was in three-minute segments and signalled by a
bell.

I shouldn't have bought the coffee. I'm sweating profusely. The window
is like a magnifying glass to the sun. Images seem to be melting in
the summer heat that ascends through the empty asphalt parking lot
like fires from the depths of hell.

Suddenly, I see him. Crossing the parking lot. In jeans, sandals, and
a black T-shirt, walking in that quick, light, slightly pigeon-toed,
balls-of-the-feet way of his. His big bare arms held out from his
thick body, his fingers splayed. His hair short on the sides and back
and full on top, combed back, a 1940s look. He doesn't apologize for
being late, nor do I expect him to.

"Good to see you again," he says raspily, sticking out his hand that
is small and surprisingly soft. "You too, George."

He's walked from his home. His T-shirt is wet from the compassionless
heat, his broad, handsome, Croatian face flushed. He wipes the sweat
from his face with a napkin. "Geez, champ, you never age." He grins.
His face doesn't look its 67 years. Maybe 50. That, despite its
misshapen nose, its hills and gullies, its dark eyes in narrow
channels of flesh. That, despite its having stopped the hardest fists
from the hardest punchers over the 21 years he reigned as this
country's greatest pugilist ever, champion for most of them,
consistently world-ranked, as high as No. 1, never once in his 93
bouts knocked off his feet, never once knocked out, 63 of his 73 wins
by kayo, two draws.

Fierce discipline

His face has the smooth skin and good colour of one who has never
tasted alcohol, never tasted cigarettes except for nine months when he
was 15 and then quit in deference to the fierce discipline he knew
he'd need if he was to achieve glory as a professional boxer, the
sport he'd taken up five years earlier in the tough, seedy,
working-class section of Toronto called The Junction, where his fists,
he discovered, were often the only silencer for the taunts thrown at
him in the predominantly Anglo-Saxon neighborhood: Jewboy, bohunk,
honky, foreigner.

Chuvalo lived with his immigrant parents and sister Zora in a small,
rented brick house on dismal Hook Ave. across from the Lancia macaroni
factory, his father a killer on the floor of the Canada Packers
slaughterhouse who'd punish his son and daughter for misbehaviour by
making them kneel bare-legged for hours on kernels of corn on the
cellar floor, or whip George's bare buttocks with a shipka until he
bled.

"George, we've got to go now if we're going to make the
movie."

"Drive me over to the house first, I've got to get
something."

"George, we'll be late."

"Naw, we won't be late."

We get up to leave. A young man at a table shouts, "Hey George, hi
George." Chuvalo stops, squeezes his shoulder, pats him on the back,
asks how he's doing. The man caresses Chuvalo with worshipful eyes. In
the car, I ask Chuvalo if he knows the man. "Yeah, sure. He's there
all the time. Mentally handicapped. Good guy, good guy."

"By the way, champ, congratulations on the Walk Of
Fame."

"Yeah, yeah, thank you."

Three days earlier, Chuvalo had been inducted into Canada's Walk Of
Fame in Toronto. He chuckles. "After the Walk Of Fame, there was a
dinner. Jean Chretien happened to be there. Someone brought him over
to meet me." Chuvalo feigns a French accent. "He said 'Hime a fighter,
too, ya know. Did ya hear about me and dat guy in Hottawa who try to
attack me? I strangle da guy, I gave it to da guy real good.'"

Debilitating despair

The Walk Of Fame was the latest of Chuvalo's many honours that include
the World Boxing Hall Of Fame, The Canadian Boxing Hall Of Fame, The
Canadian Sports Hall Of Fame and the Order Of Canada, the latter not
just for his magnificent contribution to boxing but, more so, his
relentless and successful waging of the biggest and most important
battle of his life that transcends by far those he had in the ring --
his one-man national crusade to steer young people, and adults, away
from drugs in the wake of the deaths of three of his five children and
his wife.

As a father, a husband, he'd lived the debilitating despair and their
deaths were his greatest losses, and his survival from six weeks of
being unable to get out of bed from the emotional devastation after
the deaths of Stevie and four days later, Lynne, in which he was able
to vanquish his own thoughts of suicide through gusts of rationality
that he had to live for the sake of his grandchildren, was his
greatest comeback.

At the house, Chuvalo heads to the bedroom to change into a
short-sleeved shirt. I talk to Joanne, a former nurse, now a private
investigator, the woman to whom he writes love poems, and, as a friend
of the family at the time, the guardian angel who comforted, consoled
and counselled the broken champ, mending him slowly with a love and
respect that grew and deepened.

Joanne administers her husband's anti-drugs program, George Chuvalo
Fights Drugs, that sees him criss-cross the country with his
stunningly powerful and compelling show in which he speaks to youth
groups and school children and young offenders as well as
drug-afflicted adults, accompanied by home videos of his own late
children and as a father who saw, smelled, fought, and lived the
horrendous and heartbreaking daily hell that consumed his essentially
good and decent children, and who is tougher, wiser and street-smarter
than any of those he speaks to his talks are raw and graphic and
gut-connecting emotional.

"George has turned around many children," says Joanne, working at the
computer on the dining room table. Returning from the bedroom, Chuvalo
says: "At a high school in Calgary, during my talk, a student went
over to his teacher and turned in his drug. It was ecstasy. In Ottawa
at a school, a boy ran from the auditorium. He was crying in the
hallway. He was a known dealer. He said he didn't realize until my
talk the awful consequences of his actions. The people destroyed. The
families. He said he'd never do or sell drugs again. I can give you
lots of stories like that."

'Tons of e-mails'

"George," says Joanne, "gets tons of e-mails and letters from kids
thanking him for getting them off drugs. And from parents and teachers."

I look at my watch. "George, the movie, we've got to
go."

He takes a gold-framed black and white photograph from a bookcase. It
shows a pretty young woman in a summer dress sitting coquettishly on a
lawn with her arms around a handsome, muscular young boy in black
pants and a white T-shirt snuggled against her. His hair is dark,
duck-tailed, and devilishly pompadoured. It is George and his mother.
Chuvalo, an only son, was a momma's boy. In the devotion, not sissy,
sense. He adored his overly protective mother, and she, him.

"I'm 14 here. My mother was the sweetest, gentlest, most beautiful
woman in the world. She worked so hard all her life. She was a plucker
in Irv Ungerman's chicken factory. Every day at noon, she'd leave the
factory and walk to my school. I can still see her in her kerchief.
She'd hand me bits of food through the wire fence. Her poor hands were
always scraped and raw from plucking chickens. She didn't like me
boxing. She didn't want me hurt. But she accepted it was what I
wanted. She'd come to some of my fights if they were in Toronto. But
she'd never look up. Her eyes would be down the whole time. Her hands
together in her lap." He places the photograph back in the bookcase.
"She died in 1970 of colon cancer. I think of her all the time."

He shows me another photograph. Chuvalo driving a left hook into the
side of heavyweight champ Muhammad Ali at Maple Leaf Gardens in March
1966, the first of their two bouts. Ali was in his absolute prime,
knocking out all opponents and accurately predicting the rounds. He
said six for Chuvalo who he called The Washerwoman. Some Washerwoman.
Ali hit Chuvalo with every ruinous punch in his arsenal, but the fight
went the distance, 15 rounds. Ali won the unanimous decision. Chuvalo
won the war of the bodies. After the fight, Chuvalo went dancing with
his wife. An exhausted Ali went to St. Mike's hospital overnight,
urinating blood from Chuvalo's body shots, his hands swollen and
hurting. To this day, Ali says George Chuvalo was the toughest man he
ever fought.

'Greatest book ever'

The movie is starting in 15 minutes. Chuvalo is sitting beside me in
the car reading out loud from a book. It is the "something" he said he
had to go home to get. The book is The Prophet by Kahlil Gibrain.

"Have you ever read this?" he asks. "This is the greatest book ever
written. I read it all the time. I've had it for years. Listen to
this. It's about children. 'You may give them your love, but not your
thoughts. For they have their own thoughts. You may house their
bodies, but not their souls, for their souls dwell in the house of
tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams."

He pauses. 'You are the bows from which your children as living arrows
are sent forth. Let your bending in the Archer's hand be for gladness,
for even as He loves the arrow that flies, so He loves also the bow
that is stable.'" He turns the pages. "This one. 'You are good in
countless ways, and you are not evil when you are not good. You are
only loitering and sluggard.' "

We reach the mall with four minutes to spare. I run up to the ticket
window. "Two for Cinderella Man, please." I buy Chuvalo buttered
popcorn and mineral water, buttered popcorn and an orange drink for
myself.

"George, did you ever meet him, Jimmy Braddock?"

"No, but my fight against Julio Mederos at Maple Leaf Gardens in 1958,
he was the referee."

"What do you remember of him?"

"White hair. Tall. That's about it."

In the movie Russell Crowe plays James J. Braddock. The Cinderella
Man. The depression-era heavyweight of no great renown and no money
who had to toil on the New Jersey docks to support his impoverished
family of a wife and three small children in a dingy, decrepit
apartment, finally getting a shot he didn't deserve at the heavyweight
champ Max Baer who'd killed two men in the ring and, against all odds,
winning the crown in a 15-rounds decision, one of the biggest upsets
in boxing history.

"Did you know that Russell Crowe was born the same day and year as my
youngest son Jesse?" says Chuvalo as we walk down the carpet to the
theatre. "April 7, 1964. And when Braddock fought Baer? My mother was
pregnant with me. Interesting, eh?" Chuvalo has always had a thing for
mysticism.

We take our seats in the cool, dark theatre. It's empty but for two
other people. "I spent a day watching them filming," he says. "Maple
Leaf Gardens. I went to the set to see my old friend Angelo Dundee. He
used to be Muhammad's trainer. I met Ron Howard. The director. Good
guy. Have you ever seen a movie being made? Most boring thing in the
world. Film for a few seconds. Stop for half an hour or an hour. Film
for a few seconds. Stop. They had thousands of dummy figures in the
stands mixed with a few real people. Saved paying extras.

"Crowe and the guy playing Baer, they'd choreograph a few punches and
moves. All in very slow motion. Stop. Change the lighting. Crowe would
smoke cigarettes while waiting for them to set up again. Film a few
more seconds in slow motion. On and on this way. It didn't even look
like they were fighting."

Drawing parallels

"Did you meet Crowe?"

"No. He's small, eh? Just a little guy. Braddock was bigger, but they
can shoot to make you look bigger. The angles."

The movie begins. In the faint illumination from the screen, shadows
shunt eerily across the ridges and canyons of Chuvalo's face. It is
soon apparent that George Chuvalo is seeing not Jimmy Braddock on the
screen, but himself, drawing parallels.

When the electricity is cut off in the winter because Braddock can't
pay the bill, his wife and children freezing in the dark, with
Braddock forced to submerge his huge pride and humiliatingly ask for
money from players in the fight game, the napkin in George Chuvalo's
right hand moves to his eyes.

He says: "I know what that's like. Not having any money. Not being
able to pay the bills. Having to ask for money. I like it that they're
showing how the wife is affected, her role, they're not ignoring it.
One time I was driving back to Toronto from Detroit with Lynne. We had
three kids and Lynne was pregnant with Jesse. We had no money. It was
in the winter. The old car we had was falling apart and one of the
back windows wouldn't go up. I jammed a suitcase in it to keep the
freezing air out.

"The gas pedal had broken off. I had to have Lynne crouch down on the
floor and shove her finger through the accelerator hole while I was
steering. I'm going 'Push down, ease up, hold it, hold it.' When we
got near London, I pulled over and found a small tree branch. I held
it in the hole with one hand and steered with the other all the way
back to Toronto."

He watches in silence until the scene where the top contender for
Baer's title pulls out at the last minute and the promoter, more out
of rare sympathy for his financial circumstances, offers the
opportunity to Braddock, unprepared, considered no threat to the champion.

"It was like when I first fought Ali," says Chuvalo. "He was signed to
fight Ernie Terrell. This was when the Black Muslims were controlling
Ali. Terrell's manager went to Herbert Muhammad, Ali's manager, and
told him Terrell had better win the fight or else.

"The next day, Terrell's manager was found beaten to a pulp. They
never found out who did it. He wound up in the nuthouse where he died
from the injuries. Terrell bailed out of the fight on some excuse, I
forget what it was, and I got the call to replace him against Ali. I
only had two weeks notice."

Jubilation and torment

It is now June 13, 1935, 70 years ago tomorrow, and on the screen the
bell rings for round one between James J. Braddock and Max Baer, the
heavyweight championship of the world. For the first time since the
movie started, Chuvalo moves forward in his seat. He places his arms
along the top of the seat in front of him. He stares transfixed, all
of his senses absorbing the ferocity of the action, the roar of the
crowd, the screams from the cornermen in the brutal game that, once
upon a time, was his whole life, and that brought him both jubilation
and torment.

As we leave the theatre he says: "I was getting depressed watching it.
It was too dark and gloomy all the time. Even the daytime scenes on
the dock. Like being in Helsinki. No sun. It was good entertainment,
but watching it through a fighter's eyes, I saw things. Crowe doesn't
have a fighter's build. His neck's too thin. His chin, he was putting
it right out there to be hit. Some of his moves, his balance. A lot of
his punches he was throwing out the window. But, look, it was okay, it
was okay."

It is close to midnight. Chuvalo and I are parked in front of 49 Hook
Ave. The street is silent and dim. The nighttime air is still hot,
humid and malevolent. Chuvalo says: "See that alley beside the house?
I once beat up a kid there. I was eight. He was a lot older than me. I
hit him on the head with a brick." He falls silent. I ask: "George,
your boys and Lynne, do you go to the cemetery often?"

"No."

"No?"

He turns to look at me. His voice softens. His words drawn out,
slowly. "They're not in a cemetery. They're in my home. On a shelf in
my bedroom closet. In boxes. Their ashes. I see them every day. I
don't talk out loud to them, but in my mind I do." He pauses. "I've
never opened the boxes." And then: "I don't have the courage to do
it."

George Chuvalo, this great champion, this great man, this great
national treasure, can be forgiven his one and only forfeiture of
courage in a lifetime of being it's human definition. I drive him back
to his home where, as he does every night before going to sleep, he
will take the book from his bedside table, and read.

For what is it to die, but to stand naked in the wind and to melt into
the sun? And what is it to cease breathing, but to free the breath for
its restless tides, that it may rise and expand and seek God
unencumbered?