THE BOBCAT
but when he’d got in that ring, it was him or you. Bob was a pretty mean guy. Vicious. “I always thought Bob would be a champion,” said Gramby. “When I showed him something, he picked it up in a minute and made it look smooth.” On March 16, 1939, in his eleventh pro fight, Montgomery solidified his reputation as a badass. In the other corner was Frankie Saia, a 78-fight veteran, with 62 of those fights victories. The customers at the Philadelphia Olympic A.C. couldn’t have asked for more. It was a lightweight version of King Kong vs. Tyrannosaurus Rex. “Frankie Saia. Yeah, tough fighter,” said Montgomery, looking like he hadn’t thought about Saia and the humdinger they shared in a long time. “I knocked him out in the fourth round, but he had me down two times in the first round. You know what I got for that fight? Forty dollars!” T he Cambria was a venue known as the “Bucket of Blood,” located in a blue-collar, all-white neighborhood. Montgomery suffered his first pro loss there against Tommy Spiegal, a highly controversial 10-round unanimous verdict. “I won the fight, no doubt about it,” said Montgomery. “But they gave it to him. You know how the Cambria was back then. Matt Adgie was the referee. He was a thief. I know he was a thief, so they took the fight away from me.” Gramby backed that up: “The Cambria was a blood pit. Name-calling and all that. Speigal didn’t really beat Bob, but if he hadn’t got the decision,
a well-schooled, nimble boxer whose punches couldn’t bruise a peach. Montgomery took the series 3-0-1. During those years, in Philadelphia at least, the black media members were situated in a different section than the white press. Obviously, this was racist bullshit, so Montgomery and Gramby went to see Taylor. Who knows what took place behind closed doors, but the important thing was that Taylor agreed. From then on, black writers and photographers worked side by side with their white colleagues. “It was all Bob,” said Gramby W hen asked about the “Sweetwater Swatter,” Bob tilted his head back slightly and rolled his eyes. “Lew Jenkins. Oooooh! He was one of the best punchers I ever fought. Maybe the best puncher I’ve fought,” said Montgomery. Jenkins won their first match by unanimous decision, September 16, 1940, at Shibe Park, at one time the home of the Phillies. “You know, I had him down in the third round. But they gave him the fight. Everybody knew I won except for the two judges and the referee. When we fought again in Madison Square Garden [May 16, 1941], I did such a job on him they couldn’t take that one away from me.” In his biography of Jenkins, From Boxing Ring to Battlefield: The Life of War Hero Lew Jenkins , Gene Pantalone wrote, “Montgomery had beaten Lew so severely, Fred Browning [a wealthy sportsman and gambler] said he needed plastic surgery to repair the damage to
his face. A deep cut across the bridge of his nose would require a skin graft.” It seems Gramby and co-manager Frankie Thomas had a reasonable business relationship with Blinky Palermo. Reasonable enough for Blinky to ask Gramby for a favor. “Bob was fighting Mayon Padlo, and I made a deal with Blinky for Bob to carry Padlo,” said Gramby. “But I also told him if Padlo would not fight and the crowd started booing, Bob would have to knock him out. Blinky said, ‘OK.’ So, when the crowd started to boo, Bob turned on the heat and knocked him out.” One boxer who always gave Montgomery a difficult time was Sammy “The Clutch” Angott. The nickname stemmed from Angott’s infuriating habit of landing a clean punch and immediately grabbing his opponent. Montgomery was all about getting it on, doing damage. He fought Angott three times, once in 1940 and twice in 1942. Angott won all three via decision, one by majority, one split and the other unanimous. On October 6, 1942, Montgomery lost a 10-round majority decision to Maxie Shapiro at the Philadelphia Arena, on a night Bob should not have been in the ring. “Bob had his tonsils taken out about three months before the first Shapiro fight,” said Gramby. “But what we didn’t know was that the doctor had taken out half of them. When Bob began moving around in the dressing room to loosen up, he started to vomit. There was nothing
M ontgomery entered the paid ranks on October 13, 1938, at Waltz Dream Arena in Atlantic City. The promoter was Joe Miller, a local hustler and blackjack dealer at Babbette’s. Montgomery stopped Young Johnny Buff in two rounds. “Know what I got for my first pro fight?” said Bob. “Twenty-five dollars. Know what I got? I got half of twenty- five dollars. Twelve and a half. But I made a big hit, and Miller said, ‘Can you come back next week?’ And I said sure. He gave me five dollars more. Five dollars in 1938 was five dollars. I went back there and fought Pat Patucci. Knocked him out in Round 2.” Montgomery was undefeated in his first 23 pro fights (22-0-1, 14 KOs), 14 of them at Waltz Dream arena. At the time, fighting down the Jersey Shore was like being in an Off-Broadway play, but thanks to his exhilarating fighting style, Montgomery was closing in on the big
Montgomery in training for a 1947 rematch with Ike Williams.
sisters. Everything was segregated then. You could not go certain places. But at worst, people had their own. We played baseball. Went to church. I went to school a little bit, not too much. It was a tiny schoolhouse in the woods.” Growing up on a farm, Montgomery knew all about hard work and would find more of the same in Philly. First as a construction laborer and then a puller at the Apex Laundry. He worked from three o’clock in the morning until five o’clock in the afternoon, earning 25 cents an hour. But a change was gonna come in the form of Johnny Hutchinson, a boxer who lived in the same neighborhood as Montgomery. Hutchinson convinced Bob to come with him to Johnny Madison’s gym, aka the Slaughterhouse. “It was tough down there at the Slaughterhouse,” said Montgomery. “You couldn’t train in a white gym, so all the black boxers were there. Ray Robinson came down there to box.”
time. He even acquired a nickname. “Johnny Webster of the Philadelphia Inquirer was a good friend of mine, and he called me the ‘Bobcat’ because I was a guy who just kept coming forward,” said Montgomery. “I was like a cat. I just kept pawing and pawing at the other guy until I got him. “A lot of people said I fought dirty. People still say it. I know it’s something I’ll carry to my grave. But I didn’t fight dirty unless a guy made me fight dirty. I didn’t cry. I didn’t care what no fighters did to me, because I was going to get him, make him cry, make him sorry for what did to me.” Said Joe Gramby, Montgomery’s trainer who eventually became Philly’s most influential black manager: “Bob was always an all-right guy outside,
we might have been lynched.” There was, however, an upside to the defeat. Promoter Herman Taylor, the most powerful man in Philadelphia boxing and a future inductee to the International Boxing Hall of Fame, took a personal interest in Montgomery. He promoted three of Bob’s four fights against Al Nettlow,
you could do. We didn’t want to stick the promoter, so Bob fought anyway. He was game until the end, but Shapiro boxed him all over the ring that night.” Two months later, back at the Arena, they fought a rematch. Bob had completely recovered from his bungled tonsillectomy and scored a 10-round unanimous decision over Shapiro. The victory over Shapiro was
“Bob was always an all- right guy outside, but when he’d got in that ring, it was him or you.”
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