There Really Was One: 1955

[SWC75]

People questioned Norm Rothschild setting up a date with tough middleweight Peter Mueller on the eve of a possible championship fight. Rothschild noted that fights against the likes of Al Andrews and Allie Gronik were tough sells and that the people who complained about Carmen risking his reputation against good fighters were the same ones who never showed up for the Andrews and Gronik fights. “Carmen’s a fighter for one reason- money. The only way he can get it is by fighting people who could fill the auditorium. This fight, like the Italo Scortchini and Pierre Langlois fights, is against a middle weight. A loss won’t hurt his welterweight standing…Personally, I think he can beat Mueller. He’s the best welterweight in the world and fighting fellows like Scortchini and Langlois taught him how to combat various styles.”

Mueller had signed a contract to come in weighing no more than 155 pounds but he was two pounds over that limit at the weigh-in. Basilio and his camp decided to go through with the fight anyway but the NYS Athletic Commission suspended Muller for 30 days, not a very meaningful act as Mueller’s next scheduled fight wasn’t until March anyway. Muller had had four fights since coming over from Germany and won three of them, over Tiger Jones, Joe Miceli and Ernie Durando, all as an underdog. His only loss was to an unbeaten young fighter from Utah named Gene Fullmer. Muller predicted he’d add Carmen Basilio to his list of upsets over American fighters. The Tiger Jones upset became more impressive two days before the Basilio-Muller bout because Jones himself upset the great Sugar Ray Robinson, who was making a comeback after his 1952 retirement.

But Robinson may have been a bit rusty and, as Jack Slattery pointed out, Durando had Mueller down and nearly out until the referee let him off the hook. He even said that “Mueller will get his first taste of fistic action against a well-conditioned American opponent”. He noted that one of Carmen’s sparring partners had quit after being knocked out. “This when Carmen was wearing king size training gloves.” Slattery predicted a knockout and a fight against Saxton for the title in the spring but noted that the backers of a Boston fighter named Tony DeMarco had made an offer to Saxton that exceeded the one Norm Rothschild had offered for a bout with Basilio.
Mueller, known as the “Cologne Clown”, blew kisses to the audience and sang “Mambo Italiano” to anyone who wanted to listen during the introductions. But when the fight began, he had no time for any clowning.

Mueller got off to a good start, using wrestling and brawling tactics to try to use his extra heft to push Carmen around. He stopped Carmen in his tracks with “a tremendous left hook to the body” in the first round and seemed to have him in trouble in the second. Carmen went into more of a crouch and Mueller seemed to have trouble landing his punches after that. A left hook at the bell in the third presaged the 5th round knockdown that really turned the fight around. Bill Reddy heard a spectator comment to a friend: “See, I told you this Basilio was overrated”.

Then Carmen lowered the boom in the fifth, nailing Mueller with a right cross and left hook that sent him through the ropes. Mueller never went down but the ref gave him a standing 8 count so it counted as a knockdown. Carmen dominated the remaining rounds, cutting Mueller’s left eye in the 7th and repeatedly rocking him with solid shots. Carmen seemed to get stronger as the fight wore on and “kept hammering with both fists”. The caption to one of several pictures in the paper showing Basilio clobbering Mueller with a punch said, simply “That Hurts”. The German almost stumbled on the way back to his corner after the 8th round, but he never did go down. Basilio said afterwards that the ropes probably saved Mueller from a knockout in the 5th and again in the 10th when he nailed him with still another left hook.

The referee had it 7-2-1 for Basilio. The Judges were 8-1-1 and 6-4. The War Memorial record crowd, (confirming Norm Rothschild’s comments about how he and Carmen could make money off of “name” fighters), cheered the decision “loud and lustily”.

The paper reported that “both fighters got fat checks. Carmen received slightly more than $13,000.00 and Mueller was paid approximately $12,000”. It was speculated that Jim Norris of the IBC would be in Syracuse the following week to finalize the plans for a Basilio-Saxton fight in Syracuse. But he never showed up, citing other business commitments. His plans “did not include a visit to Syracuse at this time”. Rothschild began to campaign for a middleweight title shot vs. Bobo Olson. Slattery felt Olson was too big for Carmen but felt that no middleweight had better credentials. One boxing writer listed the top fighters, pound for pound in the world at that point and Carmen came in 4th, Olson 3rd. And Carmen had now beaten three ranking middleweights in Scortichini, Langlois and Mueller. Al Andrews, after getting beat up by Basilio, Beat #1 ranked middleweight contender Joey Giardello.

U-Tube has this fight, beginning with an interesting but irrelevant interview of Don Ameche by Rocky Marciano that took place after Gary Player won the Masters, which would have been in 1961. Rocky narrates a film of the fight from 6 years prior and makes a good crack about Muller’s phone bill:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MMkCNAUEvcM

The other two parts to this can be seen to the right.

 

[SWC75]

The Boston Bomber

Tony DeMarco was born in 1932 and had begun fighting as a professional at the tender age of 15. His name was actually Leonard Liotta but you had to be 16 to fight and his family needed the money. He had a friend named Tony DeMarco who was 16 so Leonard Liotta became Tony DeMarco, just as Walker Smith had become Sugar Ray Robinson in a similar circumstance years earlier. The real Tony DeMarco decided to become a boxer, too but his name was already taken so he borrowed still another friend’s name and became Michael Temini. Then he watched “Tony DeMarco” become a champion- only it wasn’t him! (Per the Youmans book).

“The Boston Bomber”, only 5’5” tall, had built up an impressive record of 44 wins and 5 losses with 29 knockouts when the IBC decided that he, not Carmen Basilio should get the title shot vs. the newly crowned Johnny Saxton. “Basilio and his manager, John DeJohn, had stepped aside and let the DeMarco-Saxton fight go on in Boston provided that the winner would defend in Syracuse and Tony’s handlers kept their word.

Johnny Saxton, stung by allegations he’d been handed the title, went right at DeMarco. But the stronger Tony wore him down with body shots and knocked him out in the 14th round to win the title. Boston fans hailed him as the new Marciano, this time as a welterweight. Blinky Palermo was disgusted. He’d let his fighter take the fight only because he felt DeMarco, who had never won against any of the top contenders, would be an easy mark. For Saxton, history would repeat itself. He would again win the title on a controversial decision and want to prove himself in his next fight with disastrous results.

Saxton wanted an immediate rematch but Frankie Carbo and the IBC now felt they could make more money by pitting DeMarco against “that onion picker”, Carmen Basilio. Another Carbo lieutenant, Gabe Genovese, a nephew of Mob kingpin Vito Genovese, was the go-between, telling Joe Nitro the match could be arranged at a price of $5000.00. The Youmans book quotes this conversation between Carmen and John DeJohn:
Carmen: “John, I’m not going to give those bastards a dime. They don’t deserve crap. They can’t deny me forever. The public won’t stand for it. Don’t you understand that? Eventually, I’ll get my chance.”
John: “Carmen, if we don’t give them a piece of the purse, there will be no fight.”
Carmen: “Baloney. If they get paid, it comes out of you and Joe’s side…But I don’t want to know anything about it. To hell with those guys. I’ll punch them in the mouth if they come near me. John, it’s not right what they are trying to do.”
The fight came off but Carbo never got Carmen’s money. Instead he got DeJohn’s and Nitro’s. DeJohn later said, with a shrug of his shoulders, that Genovese has “done a service for me and I paid him.”

Jack Slattery predicted Basilio would win by a knock-out. “DeMarco has been sheltered. He has fought nothing but handpicked patsies. Boston writers referred to them as ‘woo dat’ boxers. He has never fought anyone who can punch as hard as Basilio. He has never fought anyone who can take a punch like Carmen….It has never been proved if DeMarco can take a punch. It has been proved that Basilio can and it’s the world’s worst kept secret that he can hit like a mule with his left hand. And in some amazing fashion, he has developed a tremendous wallop with his right.”

Slattery marveled at the contradiction of Basilio being such a gentle man and such an effective fighter. “I’ve seen Basilio spend an hour or more on his knees, with a shiner form the previous night, and sign autographs and play with youngsters at the cerebral palsy clinic. I’ve seen him in a hundred ways at a hundred different times demonstrate himself to be a gentle, kind and extremely thoughtful young man. Does that sound like the kind of fellow to knock out the welterweight champion of the world? Not a little bit. But I have asked him how he can be such a nice, gentle fellow and literally a mean, vicious person in the ring. Did you acquire it or does it come to you naturally?”

“It comes naturally. I see that guy across from me. He’s there for one reason- to beat the hell out of me. So I set out to do it to him before he does it to me.” Slattery asked him, “How about when you see a guy in bad shape. Do you feel sorry for him?” Carmen replied, “No sir. That’s what I’m there for. There’s no room in the ring for two fighters, a referee and pity. It’s him or me. I want it to be him on the canvas.” Slattery wanted to know “Have you ever gone into a fight thinking you can’t win? Carmen said “Never. Not even with Kid Gavilan. Everybody thought I was going to the wolves. It made me mad. I was sure I would beat him. Listen, I was eight or nine years old when Louis beat Braddock. An uncle asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up. I told him a boxing champion of the world. I never have stopped making that my goal in life.”

Slattery went to a bar where the bartender had figured out that Basilio would lose because he hasn’t had a fight in 5 months while DeMarco had had two fights in that time. But Joe Netro responded by saying, “Carmen’s not the type of fighter who can be hurt too much by a layoff. His whole life is one of training. He neither smokes nor drinks. He watches his diet every day of his life as if he were training for a fight. He walks through the woods with his dogs. He pushes a lawnmower around his home. He never gets fat. The kind of fighter who gets hurt by a long layoff is the fellow who eats careless, drinks and smokes. Then there’s the fellow who has to work like the devil to shed excess weight when he resumes training. That is what hurts a fighter. It is a tremendous strain to let yourself blow up and then pare it off in a hurry for a fight.” Netro said that “There were 4-5 fighters more deserving of a title shot than DeMarco” had been when he faced Saxton. He also said it would take “Sugar Ray Robinson when he was at his peak” to defeat Carmen Basilio.

 

[SWC75]

DeMarco I

Two crowds gathered for the big fight. The fight itself was at the War Memorial. A closed circuit TV set up allowed a second crowd at the Fairground Coliseum to see the fight. A local bar set up a large antenna to pick up a Canadian station that was carrying the fight, creating a third crowd. Bert Sugar suggested the fight “could have been held in a phone booth, the two predatory sluggers took turns using each other as punching bags.”

DeMarco thought he had Carmen when a left hook buckled Basilio’s knees in the third round. But Carmen remained on his feet and fought the champ off. Then a cut was opened under Carmen’s right eye, (not the left, for a change), in the sixth and reopened in the seventh but Carmen wouldn’t let that stop him. Carmen later said “He hurt me real bad in the first round with a left that really rocked my teeth. But the blow that appeared to shake me up in the third didn’t hurt at all….He hit me harder than anyone I can remember and he showed he has the guts to keep trying, too”. Dan Florio, DeMarco’s cut man, said that the left hook that shook Basilio in the third was the worst thing that could have happened to DeMarco: “I wish the kid never landed that left hand in the third round. It buckled Basilio’s knees and from then on DeMarco was left hook, one punch kayo crazy. We couldn’t stop him. “

DeMarco was spent by the 10th round, having absorbed so many of Carmen’s body shots. “It was that relentless hammering that finally took it’s toll until a whistling right tossed with a sodden mitten crashed against the DeMarco jawbone and dumped him on the canvas a few feet from the Empire State Governor”, (Averill Harriman). DeMarco went down for a 6 count. “Bang, bang bang and then came that crashing left hook and then a right and then a left and then and the titleholder was back on the canvas for eight”. Tony “fell heavily into the ropes and then slumped to the canvas”. Against all odds, he managed to get up and Carmen tried to knock him back down for the automatic KO but the bell saved the champ.

“I know I really sent him spinning at the end of the tenth but I actually feel the fight was won before that. During the eighth I tagged him often and hard in the midsection and in the ninth he slowed to a walk. That was it, he couldn’t move out of range and I was able to shorten my shots. I never worried about a thing from that point on. I knew that even if we went 15 rounds I was in much better shape than Tony.” Carmen said he feinted with his left hand was able to hit DeMarco with rights “that were as telling as any punch he landed all night.” Angelo Dundee, who worked Carmen’s corner, said that Basilio was never hurt at all. “As a matter of fact, he got mad and pushed the smelling salts away when we tried to push them under his nose. This kid is the strongest welterweight in the world. And what a guy to work with in the corner. He makes us look like brain-trusters. He does every single thing we tell him to do and never hesitates or questions.”

The Champion could see his short-lived reign coming to an end. He managed to survive the 11th round, showing “stout courage as he caught terrific lefts and rights to the head and body”, but was “on queer street” according to the paper, walking “blindly into the television lights to the corner opposite his”. “Old timers could see the end was near”: so could everyone else: “cries of ‘stop it echoed throughout the house’”. DeMarco had to be pushed into the ring for the 12th round by his trainer, Sammy Fuller. “But champions are not supposed to be taken out of conflict unless they are too badly beaten to defend themselves.” That was clearly the case here. He could hardly keep his arms up and the referee finally stopped it at 1:52. Carmen Basilio was the Welterweight Champion of the World.

The front page of the Post Standard showed Basilio raising his hands in triumph and a sportsman-like DeMarco holding one of those arms up to acknowledge the new champion, even though Tony could hardly raise his own. His wife and mother pushed their way into the crowded ring and gave him hugs. IBC officials crowded around him but Carmen insisted on having a picture taken with his father and brothers. Jim Norris sought out Norm Rothschild and told him “This is wonderful. It was a great fight Norm and nobody can ever say that he didn’t earn that title.” Whereas Kid Gavilan had been booed into his dressing room two years before, the beaten DeMarco was cheered loudly in acknowledgement of his courage.

U-Tube has another Rocky Marciano show with this bout. This time the interview is with Sammy Davis Jr.:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SE9u6UYYN0U

The next segment is to the right “Camen Basilio-Tony DeMarco 2/3

 

[SWC75]

Marking Time

Carmen, to keep busy, took on middleweight Italo Scortchini for the third time in two years on August 10th in New York. “Scortchy”, an Italian middleweight had been campaigning in, of all places, Australia and the Philippines, where he had become the Philippine Middleweight Champion. He’d also been a cornerman for a Sandy Saddler featherweight fight with local hero Flash Elorde where Saddler, noted for his dirty tactics, has incensed the Philippine crowd so much they began throwing things. Italo got conked on the noggin by a pop bottle and the cut hadn’t properly healed.

Carmen went right after it in their Madison Square Garden fight and opened the cut up. His opponent was not included to mix it up too much and Carmen wasn’t really that sharp, missing a lot of punches as he chased his man around the ring, drawing what he said were the first boos of his career. But he won the fight easily, winning one card 9-1 and the other two 7-2-1. It was not a title defense as both men fought at the middleweight level.

There were no boos when Carmen fought Gil Turner in the War Memorial less than a month later, (9/7). He and Gil Turner of Philadelphia went at it hammer and tong for 30 minutes. ‘Gillie’, another middleweight who was persuaded to come in at 151 instead of his normal 160, “belted Carmen with lefts and rights to the head and some of them hurt. But Gillie is not too fond of punishment in the appetite section. When Basilio could get inside and dole out some sodden sledge-hammer blows to the midsection, Gilbert showed some signs of torment. There were times too when Sir Gil was somewhat jostled by head shockers.”

A picture showed Turner belting Basilio in the late going, both with their heads down. The caption read “It was a war” and said both fighters were showing signs of wear and tear. One judge had the fight even. One had it 7-2-1 for Basilio. The ref had it 5-3-2 for Carmen and the paper 5-4-1. It was a fight full of close rounds but Carmen won it. This, too, wasn’t a welterweight fight so his title wasn’t on the line.

 

[SWC75]

DeMarco II


DeMarco had had only one fight since losing to Basilio but it was a first round knockout of popular TV fighter Chico Vejar. He told the press: “Now I want Basilio”. He looked very ready for the rematch. Tony underwent an operation for a deviated septum and, according to his handlers, was breathing at 100% for the first time in years. They claimed he had grown an inch in the chest.
Carmen was asked if “he felt any differently about this fight than he did about the title fight that saw the crown shift from the head of Tony DeMarco to Basilio’s brow. ‘No, I don’t feel any differently. I was confident I would win last time and I’m confident I can win again. That time I proved I was a champion. This time I’ll just have to prove I am capable of defending it.”

Basilio was a 9-5 favorite. Many felt this would be “the fight of the year” if it was anything like the first one. (They would be right.) Jack Slattery predicted a Basilio victory if Carmen didn’t get knocked out by Tony’s bombs in the early rounds as DeMarco would become so frustrated he’d conclude, “What’s the use? This guy won’t go down?” He also felt that attempts to keep Basilio under the welterweight limit had weakened Carmen and made it harder for him to finish off DeMarco before the 12th round. This time, Carmen was having no trouble with the weight. He was also totally focused on the fight. Norm Rothschild reported that Basilio had not spoken to him in the week before the fight. “I’ve never seen him so mean in my life”. Slattery said “That’s good enough for me. When Carmen Basilio is razor sharp, I know he can lick Tony DeMarco.”

But at the last moment, rumors started to circulate that there was something wrong with Basilio. All kinds of money- out of town money- was being bet on DeMarco. The odds dropped to 7-5. Slattery smelled a fix coming on. “There’s something brewing that smells of scandal. The newspapers make no bones of the fact that, if the fight is close at all, there’s be a new champion….So it seems that Basilio, who came here thinking that he was to fight Tony DeMarco, has the fight of his life on his hands. He has to fight like hell just to get an even break…Johnny DeJohn thinks the Boston camp is going to play it cute- have DeMarco try and go the 15 round route and rob Basilio by decision.

Nat Fleischer of Ring Magazine was on hand to present each fighter with a welterweight championship belt. It was the first time he’d ever given out two at once- a result of Tony winning and then losing the championship to Carmen so quickly.

DeMarco looked sharp early, as he “boxed and jabbed masterfully” in the first round. Bert Sugar reports he “jolted the champ with two hard left hooks and a tremendous right to Basilio’s well-worn features just before the bell.” Carmen opened a cut over Tony’s left eye in the second and it got him back in the fight. But in doing so, he hurt his left hand, breaking one of the knuckles. “Basilio was determined to put his foe away as quickly as possible. He did a grand job throughout the second and third rounds. He scored repeatedly but Tony weathered both rounds and began a comeback in the fourth. Tony actually had taken charge in the fifth, sixth and seventh rounds in particular. He had New England fans convinced he was taking the title back to the Hub City.” With the broken knuckle, the only thing Carmen could do with his left hand was pound Tony’s body. But even that took its toll.

I have an old VHS tape of an episode of Al Bernstein’s “Big Fights Boxing Hour” on ESPN, that features Carman in this fight and in the first two fights against Johnny Saxton. It shows the first, fifth, eleventh and twelfth rounds of this fight. In the fifth, DeMarco catches Carmen with a left hook that throws him backwards against the ropes and forces him to hold on. This is one of those fights were Carmen is wearing white but, despite facing a brawler like DeMarco, there is no blood on his trunks. DeMarco is one of the few fighters I’ve seen Basilio fighting that is actually shorter than Carmen is so Carmen fights from more of an upright position, with a little more distance between him and his opponent- he’s not trying to borrow in so much. Defensively, this leaves him a little more open then when he fights from a crouch and “bobs and weaves” to avoid punches and he got caught with one here. Unfortunately, the tape doesn’t show the seventh round, which was DeMarco’s best.

In the seventh, “Carmen missed a left hook and ran into a long, hard right that sent the title holder stumbling backwards 4-5 steps into the ropes. Carmen was hurt but not as seriously as the fistic faithful believed. There was no doubt Tony figured he was ready for the kill as he ripped into Basilio for the rest of the stanza. Carmen kept covering up well but he was being hit. In fact the Canastota champ took all of Tony’s Sunday punches for most of the seventh round and all of the eighth.” Angelo Dundee was mad at Carmen for not going down when he was hurt and taking the eight count. Carmen’s reply was “Why should I? I wasn’t hurt!” Donnie Hamilton, a local boxing historian, saw Basilio come out for the 8th round stomping his foot. He thought Carmen was angry that he’d allowed DeMarco to hit him so hard. Hamilton asked him about it after the fight.” My legs were numb. I was trying to get the circulation going.” That’s how hard DeMarco had hit him. (Youmans)

Bert Sugar’s “The Great Fights” has a shot of Basilio “doing a bandy legged impression of Leon Errol”, (an actor known for his “drunk act”). Carmen, looking pretty beat up, is halfway down and leaning backwards while DeMarco seems to tower over him. But he’s looking right at DeMarco. On the Bernstein tape, they have a quote from Carmen about the impact of DeMarco’s punch. “It pulled the jawbone out of it’s socket and to the side, which partially paralyzed the nerves on that side of my jaw.” And you dreamed of being a boxer…

Sugar: “Round 8 was more of the same, with a now-confident DeMarco hammering away at Basilio with savage hooks, overhand rights and jolting right leads. He disdained any subtleties- no left jab, no movement, no anything but bombs, bombs and more bombs…. Suddenly DeMarco looked like he was fighting in slow motion as Basilio continued to work on his body in the tenth. Arm-weary and looking to land the one big blow, he was beaten time and again to the punch as the champion hit him where he lived: the belly.”

“Basilio regained control in the ninth as he was taking the best Tony had to offer….Actually, Tony didn’t land a solid punch in either the 10th or 11th chapters while Carmen was chopping Tony to bits inside and scoring from long range whenever they were far enough apart.” At this point Carmen’s body shots had taken their toll and “Tony had shot his bolt and was fighting on guts alone.” Carmen later said “I knew I would get him in the 10th round because he started to weaken then. But he had me worried before that.” Bill Reddy echoed Slattery’s prediction when he said “Unquestionably, the discouragement at his inability to put away Carmen when he had the champ in trouble played a part in the fading of the challenger. Carmen said: “I could tell he was really groggy then. I didn’t go for any knockouts- just wanted to work his body till then. Then I knew I could get him.” The Bernstein tape shows DeMarco virtually spent and leaning on Basilio several times to stay upright. It seems remarkable he lasted as long as he did. When Tony does get his dukes up after each break, he’s just pushing them out there, with nothing behind them.

Carmen can be seen crossing himself on his stool before coming out for the 12th round. The tape shows DeMarco’s corner on other occasions so I don’t know if he did that before every round but it left the impression that Carmen was on a mission and knew it was about to be accomplished. Bert Sugar: “Basilio, by then a tired puncher himself, landed a tired right, followed by an equally tired left and another right. DeMarco, silly with fatigue, his fire out, fell under the ropes, his head on the apron. At the count of eight he somehow struggled to stand up, and tottered forward to catch more of the same.” DeMarco was given a mandatory eight count but most observers thought it took at least 12 seconds to do so.

Bert Sugar: “As Basilio caught DeMarco with a four-punch fusillade- left, right to the head- referee Mel Manning rushed in to grab the now unconscious DeMarco by his right arm, ending the fight in a grotesque tableau, with DeMarco hanging straight down, arm suspended, in a modern-day crucifixion.” The newspaper: “DeMarco struggled gamely to his still wobbly but willing legs. He tried to clinch but Carmen held him off, set him with a right and then hit him twice again. Tony fell forward on his face and knew nothing more about the affair until later in his dressing room.” The tape shows the ref holding him up by one arm, with the other touching the canvas. Then he left him down gently and Tony turns over and lies, face up for a long period while he’s attended to. Sugar’s “The Great Fights” shows a six picture sequence of the final punch. Carmen lands a right cross. This time it’s DeMarco’s jaw that is out of place. His eyes are forced to the left, then go vacant as his head points toward the ceiling, then the ropes, then the canvas as he goes down, face first, as the ref intervenes.

Carmen really needed to stop his foe because the official cards would have ruined him.” He was behind 3-6-2 on the referee’s card and 4-6-1 and 4-7 on the judge’s cards. The time of the knockout was 1:54 of the 12th round- two seconds later than the first fight.
Both men fell to their knees when the bout was stopped. Carmen did it to “unashamedly give a prayer of thanksgiving”. DeMarco just couldn’t stand up. He was eventually helped to his stool and sat there for at least five minutes. Later he was unable to answer questions in his dressing room, just nodding his head as his manager explained ”Tony just ran out of gas.” Samuel Fuller said “The wrong fight” over and over again. “We told him to box the guy more. But he didn’t follow our instructions- just like the last time. He kept going for the knock out. He was all right when he boxed- but he didn’t do enough of it.” Tony’s handlers thought his right hand might have been broken in two places from hitting Basilio so hard and so often.

“It was a good, eager boy fighting a man. He had given a great account of himself in the early rounds but Carmen took all he had to offer and came back to club the pride of nearby Fleet Street into a beaten mass- probably out of boxing forever as few can take the punishment he took tonight and on June 10th and still keep going.” Actually, Tony kept going until 1962 but had only 17 more fights of which he won 11. Some of those fights were against name fighters but he never got another title shot. The fight was named Ring Magazine’s “Fight of the Year” for 1955, the first of five straight years that honor would go to a Carmen Basilio fight.
Meanwhile Carmen went home with $75,000 as his share of the live gate and TV money. That was a lot of money in 1955. The gate for the fight, $171,800, was the largest in Boston Garden history. His next fight would be against Johnny Saxton. Norm Rothschild wanted it to be in Syracuse but Saxton’s manager, Blinky Palermo, had no license to operate in New York State.

U-tube the original broadcast of Basilio-DeMarco II, the Ring Magazine Fight of the Year in 1955, (first of five straight Carmen was in):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=axY9Mb06BX0

This is rather badly goofed up by the poster. It starts with the tinroduction, then, (at 1:20) skips to round 4, then (at the 20:10 mark), shifts form 30 seconds left in the 9th round back to the introductions and the early rounds, then shifts back to thend of the 9th round at the 34:40 mark.
The only interview here is with Dr, Joyce Brothers, TV’s favorite psychologist, who first made a name for herself on the $64,000 Challenge by memorizing the ring record book. I have an audio tape of the second Basilio-Robinson bout in which she does the color commentary. All she did is quote the Ring Record Book as she actually knew nothing about boxing. She just had a photographic memory.

Sports Illustrated featured an image of the end of this fight in their 11/19/12 issue:
http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/multimedia/photo_gallery/2005/06/03/hy.peskin/content.10.html

It’s correct identified as the end of the second fight in the magazine but incorrectly identified as the moment when Carmen first one the title on the internet page. Carmen was probably just as happy both times.
　
(With all the sporting events this week end to write about, I’m going to take a few days off from this series, (which I wrote 5 years ago but I’m proof-reading it and adding stuff from U-Tube), until next week.)