Eddie Machen: Former Heavyweight Contender Remembered – Part II
“Born with dead man’s eyes.” That is the unnerving description Nick Tosches uses in his book The Devil and Sonny Liston. Sonny Liston and Eddie Machen, who had meanwhile leap-fogged his rival Zora Folley in the rankings, would partake of an even split of the $50,000 purse for their nationally televised fight at Sicks’ Stadium in Seattle. “I’m not scared,” Machen had said to Liston while staring him in his “dead man’s eyes” at the weigh-in. Sonny’s emotionless response was, “You will be.” True to his word, Machen not only stood his ground but was able to counter well over the top of Liston’s left jab in the first round which ended with Sonny scowling (no surprise) and Eddie smiling (big surprise). Unable to smack the smile off of Machen’s face in the second, Liston was in fact shoved back into (and very nearly through) the ropes, as Eddie perhaps hoped to prove that he could not and would not be intimidated or manhandled.
Machen spent the majority of the next several rounds backpedaling away from Liston’s lunging left hand and was able to easily shake off a clean-landing combination while his handlers and ringside spectators alike shouted for him to “get off the bicycle”, “throw that right hand” and, for Christ sake, “stay out of the corner.” Sonny blew his already naturally short fuse in the fifth when Machen twice hugged him around the waist and performed a sort of do-si-do, spinning Liston into the ring corner, but was not able to capitalize on the resulting anger.
The seventh round would be Machen’s best as he exploded off of his stool and finally worked his fists as feverishly as his feet, throwing and landing several crisp combinations. Whatever momentum he had built, however, could not be maintained and “The Big Bear” shortly afterward re-assumed the role of the hunter and Machen very much the hunted. The scant margin of victory achieved by Liston on all scorecards (official and non) was not so much a reflection of Machen’s performance as owing to the three point deficit Sonny had to overcome by virtue of deductions for low blows. The last one, in the closing minute of the 11th round, would be the only time during the bout that Machen would hit the deck, earning him a one-minute recuperative period and igniting the tempers of both fighters who were still swinging well after the bell.
Machen, who later claimed to have strained the ligaments in his right arm while sparring with Willi Besmanoff during training and leaving him operating at half-capacity, told reporters that “Liston is a good fighter, but he won’t knock down any walls. I want very much to fight him again when I have two hands.” As for a rematch with Machen, which many felt was not unreasonably out of the question, Liston pretty much settled the matter in typically curt fashion by growling, “It takes two to make a fight. Machen wouldn’t.” Ok, then.
Following the Liston fight, unanimous decision wins for Machen over Wayne Bethea and Mike DeJohn, as well as a 9th round TKO over DeJohn five months later, were nullified by a lopsided points loss to light-heavyweight champion Harold Johnson in a non-title contest. A proposed rematch never happened, nor did promoter’s attempts to put him in him against the upwardly mobile Cassius Clay. A sound beating dealt out to Brian London, administered before Brian’s home crowd at Wembley’s Empire Pool, in which the AP reported that “London was little more than a punching bag for the American”, put Machen in line for a fight with Henry Cooper to potentially determine then-champion Floyd Patterson’s next opponent.
“The prospect of a fight with Machen gives me no joy at all,” commented Cooper’s manager Jim Wicks. And no joy would there be. Specifically for Eddie, who instead outpointed previously undefeated Doug Jones, considered by many in the know to be a top prospect, but managed no better than a “cautiously fought 10 round draw” against Cleveland Williams, of whom (mirroring Sonny Liston’s high opinion of Williams) Machen reckoned, “he has the speed the others don’t have. You can’t walk around Cleveland like you can Liston.”
The other obstacle Machen could not circumnavigate was a deepening depression over the state of both his career and his life. After the DeJohn fights, Eddie was forced to supplement his dwindling prizefighting income by working the door in a nightclub. There was something fundamentally wrong with a sport, Eddie felt, wherein its number one contender had to moonlight as a bouncer.
“That’s for when you’re on the way up,” Machen glumly expressed. “And it’s just asking for trouble, all those guys with a few belts in them thinking you don’t look so tough,” he added of the occupational hazard inherent in having to deal with belligerent drunks looking to impress their buddies by taking a swing at a big name boxer turned nobody.
“Mentally Troubled-Eddie Machen Sedated in Hospital” headlined the sports pages of the December 14, 1962 Schenectady Gazette, picking up a nationally-circulated report out of Napa, California. “We are taking care of his acute symptoms first,” said Napa State Hospital superintendent and medical director Dr. Theo K. Miller. “He was very disturbed when brought to the hospital Wednesday and also appeared to be tired.”
Machen’s heavily sedated psychiatric confinement, ordered by Solano County Superior Judge Phil Lynch, resulted from his being discovered by highway patrolman Bill McCluskey parked on the shoulder of the Cummings Skyway near the town of Vallejo. Having evidently “fired three shots into the roadside mud”, the still-loaded pistol sat on the passenger seat while Eddie composed a farewell letter to his wife Charlotte. He despondently told the officer that “he was broke, couldn’t get fights, and everything was all wrong” and put up no struggle when led away, although he became agitated upon admission into the institution, requiring a liberal dose of neuroleptic drugs. Machen’s stay got off to a bad start with two separate instances of violence against hospital staff in the following days and only got worse from there, as it took seven attendants to subdue him with tranquilizers and a straitjacket after one last, particularly abusive outburst. Clinically declared schizophrenic, Eddie’s treatment extended well past the new year of 1963 until he exhibited signs of recovery satisfactory enough to earn a transfer to a private clinic from which he was discharged in a matter of weeks.
Coming a little over a year since his draw with Cleveland Williams, Eddie’s first five “comeback” fights were all knockout wins, but against decidedly unspectacular opposition, so as to ease him back into a familiar routine. It was enough, however, to corner Floyd Patterson at long last.
Sure, Eddie had to travel all the way to Sweden to track him down (where, you will recall, he had been humiliated by Ingemar Johansson in 1958) and, worse still, Patterson hadn’t been world champion for nearly two years. But Machen was in a position to take out his frustrations on the man who had snubbed him when he did wear the belt, and hopefully earn the chance to tear it from the waist of the new title holder, Cassius Clay, in the process.
Machen, however, seemed perpetually and paradoxically intent on reducing what could and should have been career-defining moments on the big stage into dull-witted, no-win scenarios. The Patterson fight before 40,000 fans in Rasunda Stadium was no exception and Eddie, extraordinary only in his infinite capacity at being ordinary, walked out of the ring with bloodstains smeared across his trunks and his left eye completely closed at the end of twelve rounds, of which but a single one was awarded to him.
Nevertheless, a bit of intrigue concerning the man now known as Muhammad Ali would pull Machen one final time back from the brink of prizefighting oblivion and thrust him into title contention. After defeating Sonny Liston, joining the Nation of Islam, and abandoning what he referred to as his “slave name”, Ali took it upon himself to fight Liston again in the infamous “phantom punch” rematch rather than defend his championship against Ernie Terrell.
The 6-foot-6 Terrell, a former Chicago and Intercity Golden Gloves champion as a light-heavyweight, boasted a 36-4 record, including wins over Young Jack Johnson (twice), Cleveland Williams (avenging a prior knockout loss), a youthful Bob Foster (who would later become one of boxing’s greatest light-heavyweight champions), and a familiar face in Zora Folley. The WBA recognized Ernie as their #1 challenger and stripped Ali of their share of the world championship for his refusal to fight him, which would mark the first time in boxing history that the heavyweight title had been splintered into separate portions.
The one-off elimination bout to decide the WBA’s champion would be staged on March 5, 1965 at the International Amphitheatre in Chicago (Terrell’s chosen place of residence), and the association’s committee selected as Ernie’s opponent none other than Eddie Machen.
If hometown edge were not enough, consider that Terrell also had advantages of seven pounds in weight as well as seven inches in height and reach. It couldn’t have hurt, either, that Joe Louis was brought in to work Ernie’s corner, whispering encouraging words in Terrell’s ear while holding an ice pack to his left eye as it puffed up later in the fight (even if Louis would later say that “Terrell looked like an amateur”). Terrell consistently and effectively out-jabbed Machen in the early going of what the Associated Press declared a “lustily booed tug of war”. The initially partisan crowd quickly lost their patience, as did Machen, with Terrell’s roughhouse antics. He would incessantly bear-hug and bend Eddie over double like they were on a third date and Ernie was looking to get lucky. Machen did enjoy sporadic success sneaking under Terrell’s left jab then shooting in short right uppercuts during their frequent embraces. Eddie, however, would not prove as successful as he had been against Sonny Liston in disallowing his bigger foe from tossing and turning him this way and that, instead deploying retaliatory rabbit punches to the back of Terrell’s head when he felt the occasion warranted such tactics. Ernie wrestled Machen into the ropes during the 9th round, spun him backward, and pummeled him from behind. Four times in the 10th,Terrell would shove Eddie toward the ground, hold him in place with one hand as Machen’s body folded downward at an unnatural ninety-degree angle with his head nearly brushing the canvas, and hammer away at his completely exposed kidneys with the other.
The 15th and final round saw Terrell hurl Machen to the mat and move in to clobber Eddie as he struggled to his hands and knees, thwarted only by the interference of referee Bernie Weisman. In a mutual show of good sportsmanship, the two combatants did exchange a hug at center ring prior to Weisman raising Terrell’s arm in victory.
Machen, who felt that the championship should have been handed to him, immediately conjured the prospect of a rematch. “Most everyone shuddered,” concluded the AP report. Eddie Machen, exactly seven months after having lost his WBA title bid against Ernie Terrell, would again get taken into custody by California Highway Patrol for misdemeanor weapon possession. Occurring in nearly the identical location to his previous suicidal episode-on the outskirts of Vallejo, California-this arrest would occur as a result of what began as a routine traffic stop until the officer took note of the revolver on the seat of his pickup. The similarities between the two incidents end there, though, as Machen would be let off by Judge Thomas Healy with a trifling $250 fine and two years’ probation on a six-month suspended sentence.
he would win only three of his last nine fights, though one of these victories would come at the expense of Jerry Quarry’s previously undefeated record. Eddie would have an unexpectedly easy time with his younger, cockier, and far stronger opponent, brazenly laughing at the wasted efforts of Quarry, who graciously accepted the defeat as “a good lesson”.
Another unbeaten foe of Machen’s who would not know the taste of defeat until eating six helpings of canvas courtesy of George Foreman in Kingston, Jamaica was future heavyweight champion Joe Frazier. Machen somehow survived three consecutive left hooks in the first round, the last of which blasted Eddie onto the ring apron, twisted between the middle and bottom ropes, but was denied going the full distance with the 22-year old Olympic champion from Philadelphia when referee Tommy Hart, with only 22 seconds having gone by in the 10th and final round, halted the bout with Frazier battering a clearly defenseless Machen with a succession of pulverizing combinations. Drawing a favorable comparison between Smokin’ Joe and Rocky Marciano, Machen said of Frazier, “He’s a tough kid and should go a long way.”
Unfortunately, Machen was going nowhere fast.
The knockdown suffered at the savage left hand of Joe Frazier, a legend in the making, was only the third of Machen’s eleven year career. When he was knocked out in Seattle by the unremarkable Boone Kirkman (who was preposterously being touted as “the new, young Jack Dempsey”) in the third round, even Eddie Machen afterward seemed resigned to accept what everyone but he seemed to know. It was all over.
Having declared bankruptcy even before retirement, Eddie took short-term work wherever and however he could get it as a bartender, truck driver, and longshoreman. A drunken brawl led to another arrest and a third pullover in 1968 would devolve into a physical altercation with a highway patrolman who was left no choice but to mace the incensed Machen before hauling him away. Her reserves of patience and capacity for enduring misery long-since depleted, Charlotte filed for divorce, and Eddie sought psychiatric assistance in waging the toughest bout of his life, against depression and suicidal despair. But, just as in the maddening could-have and should-have-been’s throughout his fistic career, Machen would come up empty for the last time.
Associated Press reports which ran in daily newspapers across the nation on August 8, 1972 were preceded by headlines like “Once-Leading Heavyweight Contender Eddie Machen Plunges to Death” in Florida’s Palm Beach Post. Despite the fact that “the violent end paralleled his life”, it also left “authorities unable to fit together the pieces.” The antidepressants prescribed to Machen were responsible for alternating fits of insomnia and sleepwalking according to his girlfriend Sherry Tomasini, with whom he shared an apartment in San Francisco’s Mission District, a section of a beautiful city as neglected and dilapidated as the once-famous boxer who anonymously resided there.
Not unlike the appalling, untimely demise of his former ring rival Zora Folley only one month earlier, Machen’s fatal second-story fall was puzzling and problematic. Could it have been the consequence of errant nocturnal wanderings, or perhaps a particularly nasty domestic dispute? Maybe Eddie somehow ran afoul of the local Teamsters who had found him odd jobs and drank with him in neighborhood bars and bowling alleys. Given Eddie’s troubled past, suicide seemed a reasonable explanation, although admittedly the method is most unorthodox.
The coroner’s office attributed his death to a ruptured liver and noted, in conjunction with the police report, that foul play was not suspected.
He struggled to within steps of the mountaintop but succumbed to character flaws which forced him to descend down slippery slopes.
Eddie Machen was only 40 years old. RIP…..
Read: Eddie Machen: Former Heavyweight Contender Remembered – Part I
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