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Zora Folley: Portrait of the Pugilist as a Sweet Old Man – Part II

ZFBy Chris “Man of Few Words” Benedict

Zora was thought to have maintained his clean-cut, health-conscious lifestyle the way he did (for the most part) his winning ways in the ring following his disappointment against Henry Cooper. Indeed, Folley knocked a gore-spattered Cooper out in the second round of their 1961 rematch in London. Folley followed up on a third round knockout of Mike DeJohn with unanimous decisions over Doug Jones and a couple of badass Canucks in Bob Cleroux and George Chuvalo. In between, however, came losses to Jones in their rematch (a 7th round KO) and by way of a not-even-close decision to Ernie Terrell. His defeat by Terrell would be Zora’s last for more than three and a half years, with a draw against soon-to-be EBU heavyweight champion Karl Mildenberger in Frankfurt, Germany the only blemish on a twelve-fight undefeated streak, the highlights of which were points wins over the 8-0 Argentinian tough-man Oscar Bonavena and soon-to-be light-heavyweight title-holder Bob Foster. All told, 1967 would find Zora Folley once again ranked as the #1 heavyweight challenger, this time to Muhammad Ali who had reunified the titles by bludgeoning WBA champion Ernie Terrell.

Like Floyd Patterson before him, Terrell showed terrific disrespect to Ali by provocatively insisting on calling him by his “slave name” (ironically bestowed upon him in honor of Kentucky abolitionist Cassius Marcellus Clay), earning himself a prolonged 15-round torture session at Houston’s Astrodome. Befuddled by Folley’s deferential demeanor (including his proper use Ali’s Muslim name), Muhammad’s biggest problem with regards to their championship match at boxing’s mecca, Madison Square Garden, on March 22, 1967 was a lack of kindling to toss onto the fire he would customarily set as pre-fight promotion.

“That Folley’s such a nice, sweet old man,” mockingly bellyached the champion. “Eight little kids, calls me Muhammad Ali, thanks me all the time for giving him a chance. How’m I ever gonna get mad at him and build up this fight?” Ali was, in fact, uncharacteristically subdued during the preliminary interviews. “I’m not a puncher,” Muhammad confessed, revealing to no one’s surprise that his technique consisted of “hitting and not getting hit”. While stating that Folley was not “fast on his feet” he did concede that “he is clever, he is smart” but that he was not predicting, nor necessarily going to try for a knockout. “Some fall and some don’t. Different strokes for different folks.”

Garden ring announcer Johnny Addie introduced to the crowd of 13,780 fight fans the participants in the traditional parade of champions, representative of boxing’s past, present, and future. Among those who would wave to their admirers and cross the ring to shake hands with Zora Folley (Ali, forgoing the bulk of the festivities, made a fashionably late entrance) were George Chuvalo, Ike Williams, Luis Rodriguez, Petey Scalzo, Ernie Terrell (sporting a pair of dark shades, possibly to conceal whatever damage suffered at Ali’s hands six weeks earlier was still evident-and booed phenomenally), Sandy Saddler, Jimmy Ellis, Curtis Cokes, Willie Pep, Rocky Graziano, and James J. Braddock. Ali did arrive in time to rub shoulders with Sugar Ray Robinson, Emile Griffith, and Joe Louis. With the pomp and circumstance behind them, Zora Folley greeted Muhammad Ali at center ring with a straight right hand lead (what legendary radio and television commentator Don Dunphy called Folley’s “Sunday punch”) and tagged the dancing champion with it three additional times before the bell rung to end the first round.

The second saw more of the same, with Ali looking as though he were skipping an invisible rope and Folley sending out soft left hand feelers in an attempt to measure the distance with a radar detector and strike with the right cross when he received a clear signal. Ali began clowning around in earnest seconds into the third round, playing to the crowd and teasing Folley with his hands down around his waistline, then waving them crazily over his head. Zora mimicked this movement, tapping gloves with Ali in mid-air and giving the appearance not of two grown men vying for the heavyweight championship, but of toddlers playing patty-cake.

“They have both had harder sessions in the gymnasium,” remarked Dunphy as Ali began to land with his left jab, but had given away two of the first three rounds to Folley while feeling out his man. It would prove to be academic. The first knockdown of Folley by Ali in the fourth was a strange one in that there seemed a delayed reaction to his face-forward sprawl after eating a hard right. Celebrating prematurely, Ali raised his gloves toward the ceiling lights while it took until the timekeeper reached the count of five for referee Johnny LoBianco to usher Muhammad to a neutral corner. Zora, in a state of apparent confusion, looked away from LoBianco, who had finally picked up the tail end of the count, and toward his corner, popping up from on one knee at nine. Quickly regaining his composure, Folley hit Ali with a right cross and a nice left/right combination seconds later.

Ali re-established the dominant jab over Folley who stood flat-footed and devoid of lateral movement as was his style, in otherwise uneventful fifth and sixth rounds wherein Zora could still not get close enough to land anything of consequence. This would not hold true of Ali in the seventh, when his right hand twice found a home flush on Folley’s left cheekbone, the first setting up the kill shot which detonated just under the eye socket. In a virtual repeat of the previous knockdown, Zora kissed the canvas in a spread-eagle position, this time rising momentarily only to stumble drunkenly back into the ropes and unable to beat LoBianco’s count.

Folley’s son Zora Jr. was 14 years old at the time and present in Madison Square Garden to witness his father’s sad defeat. “I cried after that fight,” he recalled for the Arizona Republic twenty years later. “I think any kid would have. Ali told me to be proud of my father. He said if that fight had been 10 years earlier for my dad, the outcome might have been different.”
What did turn out to be different in the wake of the Ali fight was the first sustained winless streak suffered by Folley, now 36 and unable revert to form following a big loss as he had been able to do in the past. Zora was first able to notch two easy knockouts over no-name opponents Wayne Kindred and Nick Sosa, who claimed to be a 5-year veteran with a 26-1-1 record but was indeed competing in his professional debut against Folley. It took ringside physicians five minutes to revive the impostor after Sosa was knocked out of the ring by Folley in the second round. Folley’s final pugilistic downslide was bookended by dropping decisions to Brian London and Oscar Bonavena, with draws against Roger Russell and Al Jones, destined journeymen both with only one loss to that point.

A nearly one-year ring sabbatical came on the heels of three consecutive but inconsequential wins and, desiring not to overstay his welcome in the fight game by becoming a stepping stone for future contenders when it could not be more plain that he never again would be, Zora retired in 1970 after being knocked down six times, and finally out for good, in the first round by Mac Foster.

Life after boxing, which proves for so many ex-fighters such a solitary journey of crippling self-doubt and financial disaster, could have not have begun less so for Zora Folley. Embraced as warmly in retirement by his municipality of Chandler, Arizona as he was when his city was announced in arenas and stadiums around the world prior to his prizefights, Folley settled into a mutually beneficial position as spokesman for the Rudolph Chevrolet car dealership and was personally selected to fill a vacant seat on the City Council, the first black man to claim that honor.

What transpired on the night of July 8, 1972, then, becomes that much more mired in confusion and controversy. Art Broom, described by those who knew him as a “typical celebrity hanger-on”, had invited Folley to drive out to Tucson (roughly 100 miles from Chandler) for a get together at the Sands Motor Lodge with Broom’s second wife Dorothy and their friend Ann Young. The highly respected Folley and deeply suspect Broom had struck up an unlikely friendship based initially on their mutual careers in the Army, though Art’s (unlike Zora’s decorated service) ended questionably and abruptly within ten months in 1957.

“I remember bumping into him when he was in his fifties and he couldn’t look me in the eye. I didn’t care much for the man,” Folley’s son Robert told writer Marshall Terrell (co-author of boxing memoirs by Ken Norton, Earnie Shavers, and Aaron Pryor) who was investigating Zora’s murder for what began in 2003 as a three-part expose in the Chandler Correction and was recently expanded into an e-book titled Zora Folley: The Distinguished Life and Mysterious Death of a Gentleman Boxer.

The accepted version of events seemed to suggest that innocent horseplay was to blame for a tragic accident. Broom and Folley had allegedly been trying to throw one another in the motel pool fully clothed when Zora either fell in or was pushed by Broom and attempted to correct his awkward equilibrium, smacking his head on the cement dividing wall separating the kiddie section from the deep end. A Sands employee, who later revealed witnessing a large bump on Folley’s forehead and a gaping wound at the back of his head they felt was inconsistent with the story they were told, was made aware of the dire situation and phoned for an ambulance which sped the victim to Pima County Hospital, where Zora Folley was pronounced dead at 1am. There was no one who digested with any ease or acceptance the tall tale they felt they were being spoon-fed, resulting in speculative conspiracy theories, some surrounding Folley having been lured into a trap wherein he was bumped off by one of Tucson’s mob cartels, but mainly featuring the shadowy figure of Art Broom.

As it plays out in most circumstances, however, the simplest and most obvious answer is almost always the correct one. Chandler, meanwhile, buried its favorite son in a memorial service with military honors and swirling rumors abound that Muhammad Ali would attend (he didn’t) and honored Folley by bestowing his name on to the city park and (with more than a touch of morbid irony) the community pool.

While it had long been believed that the autopsy and police reports filed on Folley’s death had been destroyed, whether deliberately or due to standard record-keeping practices and procedures, Marshall Terrell’s persistence paid off 10 years after his piece on Zora had first run in the Chandler newspaper when a pathology transcriptionist responded to Terrell’s query with apparent nonchalance, retrieving the department’s report and emailing him a copy the very next day. The contradictory findings of coroner Edward Brucker, who determined the type of death to be “natural” (the cause being “cerebral concussion”), did shed light on one surprising element, that Folley’s blood-alcohol level was elevated slightly above Arizona’s accepted limit at the time, but nearly twice what it would be today. This related back to Folley’s little-reported 1959 Phoenix arrest for “drunk and reckless driving”, jailed only for as much time as it took to sober up and post bond after hitting another moving vehicle whose driver suffered no serious injury.

The squeaky-clean image of Folley, who publicly promoted temperance and family values, was further smudged out of true amidst speculation (even by his own children) that the mysterious Ann Young, who was present at the Sands pool that fateful night, was likely Zora’s mistress. Indeed, one of the intriguing disclosures of Marshall Terrell’s discussion with Artis Broom’s then-wife Dorothy, as well as details of the police reports he managed to unearth, was that Zora Folley had checked into the Sands Motor Lodge under an assumed name (William Fountain) and a fraudulent address (that of Rudolph Chevrolet rather than his home) for an apparent rendezvous with Ms. Young, who Dorothy thought was his wife, such was their visible level of comfortability.
And, to erase all doubt, the facts bore out the patently anti-climactic truth that his death really was no more than a good time gone bad.

Read: Zora Folley: Portrait of the Pugilist as a Sweet Old Man – Part I

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