Straight Writes and Jabs: An Inside Look at Another Year in Boxing

Ray Arcel: Behind the Façade

Books like this one about Ray Arcel keep boxing history alive. Ray Arcel: Behind the Façade The image of Ray Arcel that exists today is that of a sage old trainer who knew the science of boxing and was a gentleman. He preached patience as the foundation of training and never made himself the center of attention. Ray Arcel: A Boxing Biography by Donald Dewey (McFarland and Company) explores Arcel’s life in detail.The author has an appreciation of boxing and boxing history. His writing is a bit ponderous at times, but the book is intelligent and insightful. Arcel was born inTerre Haute, Indiana, in 1899. His family moved to NewYork when he was young so that his dying mother could be near her parents. Dewey questions the veracity of certain stories that Arcel told about himself that were repeated by others so often that they came to be accepted as true. For example,Arcel told people that he graduated from Stuyvesant High School in NewYork (a school for gifted students).The school records don’t support that claim. Stephanie “Steve”Arcel (Ray’s second wife, who was married to him for thirty-nine years) told Dewey that her husband “wasn’t really much of a family man.”The facts appear to support that statement.Arcel’s daughter attempted suicide at age twenty-three by taking an overdose of sleeping pills. He didn’t talk much about that or the death of his first wife from cancer. Indeed, Steve was married to him for more than three decades before she learned that Ray’s father had remarried after Ray’s mother died. Even then, he didn’t tell her about a half-sister and step-brother that he had. One thing that Arcel did talk about, though, was boxing. He often emphasized the following themes: * “A trainer can only work with the talent that’s there. He can’t give some kid a talent for boxing.What he can give him are the moves and STRAIGHT WRITES AND JABS 189 steps that will help him give a good performance in the show when it counts.” * “Just to train your fighters, to have them hit the bag and skip rope and develop stamina; that doesn’t mean anything. Get it out of your head that this is just some blooming gymnasium.” * “Every young man that came to me, I made a complete study of his personal habits, his temperament.There are some people you can scold and some people you have to be careful with. No two people are alike. Unless a kid was obviously not cut out for the ring,I always took my time figuring him out.” * “Never overestimate yourself or underestimate the other guy. See what the other guy has. See what his strengths are. See what his weaknesses are. See how you can overcome anything he has to offer.” * “The name of the game has always been outsmarting the other fighter, not beating him to a pulp. If you can’t outsmart him, if you don’t use your brain, you’re going to be a loser.” * “One thing you see far too often is a fighter coming back to his corner after a round and immediately being manhandled by everybody there.This one has this to say; that one has that to say. I always kept in my mind that the fighter came back to rest.The last thing he needed was all that screaming at him.” During the course of Arcel’s career, he trained champions in each of boxing’s eight classic weight divisions.At various times, he worked with Benny Leonard, Jackie “Kid” Berg, Barney Ross, James Braddock, Max Baer,Tony Zale, Kid Gavilan, and Ezzard Charles.There came a time when he was in the corner for a succession of charter members of Joe Louis’s “Bum of the Month Club.” Johnny Paycheck,Al McCoy, Paulino Uzcudun, Nathan Mann,Abe Simon, Buddy Baer, and Lou Nova were all knocked out with Arcel in their corner. Before one of those bouts, when the fighters met in the center of the ring for the referee’s final pre-fight instructions, Louis looked at Arcel and blurted out,“You here again?” Arcel was most active as a trainer during the years that organized crime was a commanding presence in boxing. Dewey acknowledges that Ray trained fighters who were controlled by mob figures like Owney Madden and Frankie Carbo. In that regard,Arcel once...