COMMISSIONER’S CORNER ANIMAL ATTRACTION By Randy Gordon
or something valuable on the seat. I thought it was fun.” Several more years and a few reformatories only made Frank bigger, angrier and tougher. While serving a prison sentence in the late 1970s for one of his many assault charges, he was told he had a visitor. It was his mother. She asked why he was missing two front teeth. “I got in a brawl in here,” Frank told her. “And what happened to your nose?” she asked, pointing to a scar on the left tip of it. “Same thing,” he said. “In here, they call me ‘Animal.’ I love the name.” Lucille told Frank about his younger brothers, Anthony and Troy. They had both started to box, and both were doing very well. “You like to fight, so you might as well get paid for fighting,” his mother told him. It made sense. When Frank was released from prison in mid-1976, he headed straight to a local boxing gym – of which there were plenty in Philadelphia. There, he met boxing trainer Marty Feldman. “From the moment he walked into the gym, he said, ‘I want to be a pro,’” Feldman told me years ago. Initially, Feldman saw a crude, unpolished, unskilled and clumsy southpaw. He also saw a hungry 22-year- old who was eager, aggressive, ultra- tough and didn’t want to spend time in the amateurs learning how to box. “I don’t box. I fight,” Fletcher said. “Some guys box. I fight!” He made his pro debut on October 7, 1976, in the ballroom of a Holiday Inn hotel in Allentown, Pennsylvania, against a 1-8 opponent. Fletcher bulled his way to a four-round unanimous decision. It was the only one of Fletcher’s 25 professional fights I missed. The only reason I saw his second fight – eight months later at the Wagner Ballroom in Philadelphia – was because I was there covering middleweight contender Willie “The Worm” Monroe, who had lost four months earlier to young contender Marvin Hagler in
Boston. On the undercard, Fletcher notched his second win and first by stoppage, halting a debuting Jody White in Round 4 of their scheduled six. Notably, the fight was promoted by future Hall of Famer J. Russell Peltz, who wound up promoting Fletcher for the remainder of his career. “Frank was definitely a fan favorite,” Peltz told The Ring. “You knew when the bell rang, Fletcher would bring the action.” After bringing action that led to him winning his first three fights, Fletcher was outpointed over six rounds by Artie McCloud in Philadelphia’s Blue Horizon. I was on hand, not so much to watch Fletcher, but another young Philadelphia talent, rising bantamweight Jeff Chandler, who won a one-sided decision. Afterward, I spoke to Fletcher, who shrugged and simply said, “I coulda’ done better. Next time I will.” Fletcher’s next time came five months later, again in the Blue Horizon. And he did do better! On a card that featured four outstanding Philadelphia middleweight prospects (Ernie Singletary, Jerome Goodman, Curtis Parker and Fletcher), Frank knocked out John Scott in the second round. It was the best he’d looked so far. However, as Peltz said, “Frank was wild and without discipline.” The $200 he was being paid was nothing compared to what he could earn on the streets from rolling the dice and bare-knuckle brawls in back alleys. He ran afoul of the law and was sent to the notorious Rahway State Penitentiary. A few of his new neighbors were boxers. They included light heavyweight James Scott and junior middleweight Tony Braxton. He wound up fighting Braxton twice in 1979, both times inside the walls of Rahway. The first took place on the undercard of James Scott vs. Jerry Celestine, which was televised by CBS. The Rahway card drew high ratings, with Scott winning a 10-round decision over Celestine and the Fletcher-Braxton fight being scored a split draw.
Scott returned just five weeks later, this time on NBC, to face Yaqui Lopez. Fletcher was rematched with Braxton, who this time outpointed Fletcher over six rounds. Later that year, Fletcher was released from prison. “I’ll see you down the road,” Braxton told Frank when “The Animal” was released. Those words were very true. In April 1980, Top Rank launched a tournament with its new cable partner, ESPN. On the advice of Peltz, Fletcher was included in the tournament. Fletcher fought in April, May, July and September. He won each of the bouts, the first by decision and the next three by TKO to capture the ESPN middleweight championship. “Fletcher was so much fun to watch and to cover,” said longtime boxing journalist Dave Bontempo, who today is among the sport’s premier TV analysts, but then was the chief boxing writer for the Atlantic City Press. “He gave a great account of himself every time he stepped in the ring. What he gave to the fans and to the viewing audience was priceless.” Off that ESPN title-winning performance, Fletcher headed to network television. “Fletcher was made for TV,” New Jersey boxing commissioner Larry Hazzard told The Ring. Hazzard refereed a couple of Fletcher’s bouts, including his first appearance on NBC’s Sportsworld . In that fight, Fletcher’s unrelenting pressure hung the first loss on the 19-0 record of Norberto Sabater. Over the next year and a half, Peltz was guiding Fletcher toward a title shot against Hagler. Fletcher notched victories over Singletary, Braxton (to finish their trilogy), Clint Jackson and James “Hard Rock” Green. In all those fights, Fletcher’s mother, Lucille, sat in a first-row seat, holding onto a white teddy bear and screaming “ANIMAL!” She became almost as famous as her rising middleweight son. Then came veteran Wilford Scypion on February 13, 1983. Although a packed, partisan crowd was on hand in Atlantic
City, Scypion was too much for Fletcher and beat him on a unanimous decision. Peltz brought Fletcher back five months after the loss to Scypion, putting him in with 23-15-5 Curtis Ramsey. Fletcher won by decision and was only 29, but those around him could see the fast, hard life he had been living had caught up to him. A big-money title fight against Hagler loomed, but first Fletcher had to face hard-hitting contender Juan Domingo Roldan. It was a fight Peltz got for Fletcher for six figures. Roldan overpowered Fletcher, stopping him in Round 6. At Fletcher’s urging, Peltz orchestrated a confidence-builder six months later against 13-8-1 Jimmie Sykes. Fletcher won a unanimous decision, but you could see that very little of “The Animal” remained. Four months after that, Fletcher was stopped in four by John Mugabi. Peltz took one more chance. He put together a terrific all-Philly matchup: Fletcher vs. Curtis Parker. Parker pounded Fletcher from the opening bell and through the second before the ringside physician waved it off then and there. Although it seemed as if Fletcher fought dozens of times, he didn’t. He retired at 30 years old with a record of 18-6-1 (12 KOs). With no fights to train for and no skills to carry him into another career, Fletcher returned to the streets and to the only other life he knew. Assault and weapons charges followed, along with parole violations. He headed back to a maximum-security prison shortly after he retired from boxing. He was released in 2017. At the age of 63. He went to live with his mom, who passed away at the age of 88 in 2024. He spent his final years training local youths and volunteering at a Baptist church near his home. “Frank Fletcher was the epitome of a fighter,” said Hazzard. “He had the heart and guts of a champion. I believe he’d be a champion today.”
fans grew up watching their sport in prime time, not in the time slot the streaming services usually ring their main-event opening bell now. Fletcher became the first star of ESPN’s “Top Rank Boxing” series, a staple of the network’s sports programming in the first half of the 1980s. At the time, Bruce Trampler was an understudy to the legendary Hall of Fame matchmaker Teddy Brenner. He looks back fondly at those days when Top Rank was working to build boxing on the network. “Fletcher was the definition of a fan favorite,” recalls Trampler, himself a member of the International Boxing Hall of Fame. “We were looking to rebuild Atlantic City into a boxing powerhouse,” Trampler told The Ring, “and Fletcher was a huge part of that rebuilding.” Fletcher was born in 1954 to a 15-year-old girl named Lucille, who was the sister of 1960s welterweight contender Dick Turner, in a broken-down area of Philadelphia. Lucille gave birth to eight children. Frank was number one when it came to getting into trouble, especially after his father, William, took off for parts unknown when Frank was barely 6. It was about that time Frank became a disciplinary problem. By the time he was 8, Frank was arrested for breaking into a car. “It was the first time I was arrested, but I had been breaking into cars for quite a while,” Frank told this writer during one of the many interviews we did during the early 1980s. “Some of the older guys in the hood showed me how to do it. We’d break in if we saw a wallet, money
I n late September, as news of Frank Fletcher’s death at 72 spread through the boxing world, I asked a neighbor, a casual sports fan in his mid-50s, if he remembered the entertaining former contender. Without thinking, he said, “Oh, wasn’t he called ‘The Animal’?” “Yep, that Frank Fletcher,” I replied. Fletcher became a star, first on a fledgling ESPN, then on NBC. He was a ferocious, in-your-face middleweight straight from the ghettos of Philadelphia. What he lacked in speed, power and boxing skills he made up for in heart. He had an abundance of heart. He also had a gap-toothed smile rivaling that of former heavyweight champ Leon Spinks. Spinks lost his upper two front teeth in a sparring session in the mid-1970s. Fletcher lost his while serving a prison sentence at about the same time. In the 1980s, a whole genre of boxing
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