GONE BUT STILL STANDING
next time he stepped into the ring, he’d already graduated to eight-rounders. Over the next several years, Chuvalo established himself as one of the arena’s “house fighters,” regularly drawing capacity crowds to the same arena that housed the Toronto Maple Leafs. By the early 1960s, he began taking periodical trips across the border to take on top contenders such as Mike DeJohn (whom he said hit him harder than anyone else), Doug Jones, Tony Alongi and Zora Folley. In 1965, he earned immortality from the publication
and given a standing ovation at every event he attended but refusing to take the spotlight away from the active fighters. In particular, Chuvalo would speak to press and fans about the meaning of the Canadian national title, wanting to bring it back to its past glory, when holding a domestic title was a mark of pride rather than resignation to a level beneath the elite. Back to a time when the pursuit of that title was an achievement all on its own, a way to make a decent living, rather than simply a turnstile to pass in search of greater glory.
Smokin’ Joe Frazier stopped but didn’t drop Chuvalo in 1967.
that inspired him in the first place, receiving Fight of the Year honors for his 12-round war against Floyd Patterson, which featured Ali, the newly crowned heavyweight champ, on commentary for the national CBS audience in the United States. One year later, Chuvalo fought Ali in Toronto. To this day, the fight is remembered annually in Canadian media and across the boxing industry at large, as it is also notable for being Bob Arum’s first fight as a promoter. Chuvalo would remain a Ring top 10-rated contender for years. He beat the likes of Jerry Quarry and Cleveland Williams, went the distance with Buster Mathis and Oscar Bonavena, and was stopped – but never dropped – by Joe Frazier and George Foreman. But after retiring as Canadian heavyweight champion in 1978, the hardest fights of his life were still to come.
Because although Chuvalo did get his chances against the greatest ever and at the greatest glory, he was still proudly introduced as a five-time Canadian heavyweight champion. There may have been more accomplished Canadian fighters, but it would be hard to argue for any of them being more important than Chuvalo. He was Canadian boxing’s spokesperson, its lovable mascot and its ethical ideal of how a fighter and person ought to comport themselves. He was a symbol of hope, and not just in the standard way that local athletes often prove that dreams can blossom from the same soil. He was the man who brought The Greatest to Carlton and Jarvis, the Junction boy who headlined Madison Square Garden. It’s one thing to provide hope in the
pursuit of dreams, it’s perhaps something even greater to be a light of lucidity for those in the midst of nightmares. For those who were in the midst of distress, Chuvalo was proof that you could still put one foot in front of the other. For those who suffered loss, he was proof that you were more than the worst things that happened to you. And for those who never achieved their ultimate goal, proof that you still accomplished a heck of a lot. Against all odds, Chuvalo became the muscular man he first admired on these pages in 1944 and went on to see two of his own bouts refereed by none other than Jack Dempsey and Joe Louis. But legacies are not quantified by boxing careers, nor by dollars and cents. If there is a metric to use, perhaps Maya Angelou’s rubric is best: How you made people feel. By that standard, Chuvalo has never left the upper reaches of the heavyweight rankings. “I remember articulating to myself after a few weeks how love made you feel,” Chuvalo recalled of the weeks after Lynne’s passing in 1993. “I said love makes you feel strong, love makes you feel tender, love makes you feel secure, love makes you feel appreciated, love makes you feel important. I think we all ought to feel strong, tender, secure, appreciated and important. We all ought to feel like that.”
“If you added up every punch I ever took,” Chuvalo wrote in his memoir, “it wouldn’t begin to equal the pain of losing three sons and a wife to drugs and suicide.” In 1985, Chuvalo’s youngest son, Jesse, took his own life following a battle with heroin addiction. In 1993, his eldest son, George Lee, died of a heroin overdose, and two days after his funeral, first wife Lynne took her own life by overdosing on prescription pills. Three years after that, his son Steven succumbed to a heroin overdose in his sister’s apartment. In the wake of unthinkable tragedy, Chuvalo did what he was taught to do when hurt: He fought back. He became one of the country’s most prominent speakers on the topic of drug addiction and mental health, speaking at schools across Canada and starring in PSAs that remain engrained in the minds of those who grew up with after-school television in the ’90s. In 2019, the George Chuvalo Neighbourhood Centre officially opened its doors in The Junction, with a special focus on LGBTQ+ youth, low-income children, youth and families, homeless men, vulnerable adults and seniors. Chuvalo was also omnipresent in the Canadian boxing scene, Toronto in particular, until the day his faculties were taken away from him. He was national boxing royalty, feted
be so proud of the fight,’ I say, ‘Proud of what? I lost the fight.’ But in a crazy kind of way, it made Canadians feel good,” Chuvalo said in Stephen Brunt’s 2002 book Facing Ali: The Opposition Weighs In . “When I see people and they talk about the fight, I hear them say it made them feel good. Kind of proud. I made my fellow Canadians feel proud about being Canadian. And that part makes me feel good, made me feel nice. I can feel proud of that part. I can feel happy about it.” Chuvalo’s Croatian parents immigrated to Canada from what is now Bosnia and Herzegovina in the 1930s, settling in The Junction, a neighborhood in the west end of Toronto. Both Mom and Dad set the family precedent for resilience in life and at work – his mother plucked 200 chickens for a dollar, while his father worked for decades with an unfixed
broken left arm skinning cattle in a slaughterhouse. At the age of 7, Chuvalo walked into Morgan’s Cigar at the corner of Keele and Dundas and saw Ring Magazine on the newsstand. “I saw all these guys with muscles on the cover. I opened the pages, more guys with muscles. I said, ‘Man, this is for me.’ I went home and said, ‘Mom, get me a pair of boxing gloves. I want to be a fighter,” Chuvalo would say. Before long, there was an Eaton’s bag with a pair of boxing gloves waiting for him to take hold of his dreams. Chuvalo’s take-on-all-comers career couldn’t have begun more poetically, as he won a one-night tournament hosted by Jack Dempsey at Maple Leaf Gardens in 1956, beating four heavyweights all by knockout in the same night. The
RINGMAGAZINE.COM 71
70 RINGMAGAZINE.COM
Made with FlippingBook - Online magazine maker