Ringside Report Looks Back at World Champion Rocky Graziano (1919-1990)

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By Donald “Braveheart” Stewart

Rocky Graziano, 67-10-6, 52 KOs. Now there is a name with which to conjure.

You can whip up the joy of seeing him online, on YouTube in his first of three fights with Tony Zale or the time he managed to win the world title at middleweight in his third fight with Zale but this is a name that has legend – truly – stamped all over it. There was simply no quit in his make up. Along with a charisma that attracted many to his personality, there were plenty of fighters trying to avoid his fists. To have 52 knockouts in 67 fights is one of the many reasons why.

Graziano, fought at both middleweight and welterweight with an extraordinary 83 fights that left him with a world title at middleweight to contemplate in his retirement. Active professionally between the years 1942 and 1952 he is in the top 25 of the Ring’s greatest punchers of all time.

Born Thomas Rocco Barbella, just after the First World War’s armistice, he was immortalized in an Oscar winning film, Somebody Up There Likes Me, which was based on his own autobiography. He started life as the son of a boxer, “Fighting Nick Bob” who’s own pugilistic career was brief and unheralded. His early life saw him more often in reform school, Catholic protectories and jail than either in a school or a legitimate boxing ring, though by 18 years of age he took the New York Metropolitan AAU trophy home with him, winning it at welterweight. His triumph was 1939 and a dark period of world history was about to dawn so for Graziano, timing was not on his side, though the $15 he won told him, boxing was a good way to earn, and it told his audience he was good at it.

Not long after his win he ended up in a correctional facility and then the New York City reformatory with a childhood friend, Jake LaMotta, another name to add to the list of supporting characters in a drama that would make such an impressive film.

His professional debut was to come in 1942 in Brooklyn when he took out Curtis Hightower in the second round. From there periods of incarceration and freedom were to be interspersed with trying to gain entry to a boxing ring to continue that career, at which he was pretty good. Military service, given the times, was an activity with which he struggled and periods of going AWOL ended with the military dishonorably discharging him and then allowing him to fight under their banner. It was a pragmatic piece of genius.

Despite not liking the training and discipline part of the sport – as if that sounds surprising – he was eventually signed by a man who seemed to understand him, Irving Cohen. Cohen relieved the pressure and Graziano thrived. His rise during the war years was swift and very hardy.
By 1944, his rise to the top stumbled with not one but two losses to the same man, Harold Green. Both fights, in Madison Square Gardens, went 10 rounds with the first ending with green just escaping a knockout as he was counted to nine in the last fifteen seconds of the tenth and final round. Green won on points. In the second fight, in December of the same year, Green again took a nine count, this time on the eighth round Graziano hit the canvass in the second round. Green won the fight for the second time, this time by majority decision.

The third fight in September of 1945 was an emphatic win for Graziano who knocked out Green in the third round. It was a win that still had controversy all over it as AP reported straight afterwards, “As referee Ruby Goldstein completed the count of ten, Green jumped to his feet, yelling that Rocky had hit him illegally on the break, and tore after Rocky. Goldstein threw his arms around Green and led him to his corner. There, Green eluded Goldstein and tore across the ring to Rocky’s corner. Irving Cohen and Whitey Bimstein, Rocky’s co-manager and trainer saw him coming and threw themselves before Rocky. By this time Sol Gold, Freddie Brown and Charles Duke, Green’s corner, had followed Green across the ring and joined in the shoving and pushing. Graziano threw his robe away and the two struggled to reach each other. It was not until the police entered the ring that order was restored.”

In between the second and third Green fights, Graziano was getting increasingly noticed. Also at Madison Square Gardens, Graziano had beaten Billy Arnold as a 6 to 1 underdog which led to The Ring Magazine going on full appreciation mode suggesting he would be the very next Joe Louis or Sugar Ray Robinson. Arnold had been stopped in the third round after battering Graziano and both ability and heart had now been tested in the iconic venue that had everyone’s attention. His June fight against Freddie Cochrane, also at Madison Square Gardens, had been voted The Ring Magazine fight of the year – there was substance to their hyperbole.

It was time for world honors and Graziano took on Marty Servo in an elimination fight but was no match to the man on the rise; Graziano stopping him in the second round.

Then came not one, or two but three middleweight champion fights against Tony Zale. In their first fight in 1946. The title fight saw a 40,000 crowd at Yankee stadium. It ranked as number 6 in The Ring Magazine fights of the century! Zale won after being on the wrong end of a savage beating by Graziano. Zale had taken one hell of a beating before his heart and determination, unbroken but bruised allowed him to floor Graziano in the 6th round.

The rematch had to be moved due to Graziano losing his New York license but in 1947, in Chicago, Graziano was nearly stopped due to a cut in the third round. With his cutman managing a minor miracle and keeping Graziano in the fight, Graziano took the equivalent beating in reverse that he had given out to Zale in the first fight and then in the 6th round, just as in the first fight, the man being beaten rallied and stopped the man in the driving seat; this time Graziano knocked out Zale and took the title. Zale had been pummeled by over 30 punches whilst stuck in the ropes forcing the referee, Johnny Behr to step in. it became The Ring Magazine fight of the year in 1947 as 20,000 fans piled in to witness it.

Finally, in this trilogy, in 1948, in New Jersey, Zale got his own revenge with a third-round knockout. Graziano was later to remark, “He was the toughest fighter I ever met.”

It was not his last attempt to win a world title. That came in 1952 at the Chicago Stadium, when he went in the ring with the legendary Sugar Ray Robinson – he sent Robinson to his knee in the third just before Robinson knocked him out! Robinson was never to fight at that weight again and gave up the title, retiring later on that year, in December 1952. Of course, for a fighter whose last fight was in 1965, this was not the first time Robinson was to retire.

Retiral for Graziano, came after his next fight and next loss in 10 rounds, also in Chicago to Chuck Davey.

Of course, the drama is not complete without his run ins with authority. Failing to report the offer of a bribe in 1946, saw him suspended by the New York State Athletic Commission (NYSAC) – hence the second fight with Zale being moved. Two years later he was suspended again, this time by the California State Athletic Commission allegedly because he ran out on a fight with Fred Apostoli.

His post fighting career was, however, more positively filled with appearances on TV and being an actor of some repute – you can catch his finest work in the film, Tony Rome starring Frank Sinatra where Rocky played an ex boxer. Packy. He also had a successful pizza business in his native Manhattan which showed he found acumen with his head as well as ability in his fists.

A member, quite rightly of the International Boxing Hall of Fame, Graziano died in 1990 at the ripe old age of 71. His personal life, unlike his professional career, and of his one time friend and compadre, Jake LaMotta, one of serene calm and dedication to his wife, married in 1943, Norma Unger.

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