lobally,
in boxing, Muhammad Ali has been and probably always will be the yardstick for
greatness. Down Under, it’s
Tony Madigan, whose two bouts with Ali continue to fill lovers of the Sweet
Science with awe. What Australians have unfortunately forgotten, however, is
that Madigan also fought Sir Henry Cooper, came back from a devastating car
crash in Germany to train under Cus D’Amato with Floyd Patterson and José
Torres at Stillman’s, was guided by Jack Dempsey and Gene Tunney, inspired a
great Australian novel and was challenged by Rocky Marciano and Archie Moore. And he once challenged Ali to a
professional fight.
However, when Ali and Madigan did meet for a third and last time, in
the Doncaster Hotel in London on December 8, 1980, it was merely to shake hands, exchange compliments and shape up to one another – Ali was 38 and Madigan 50. “Damn! Tony Madigan!”
Ali declared, admiring the Australian for still looking to be in good
enough condition to go another three gruelling rounds.
The death of Ali gave Australians the opportunity to
reflect on the fact that one of their own was one of only 10 men to have faced The
Greatest of All Time, post age 16, in the ring more than once (only two, Joe
Frazier and Ken Norton, fought Ali three times). Indeed, Tony Madigan was
one of only five fighters to have gone, as it were, “the distance” with Ali –
though in Madigan’s case, admittedly, this was in three-round light-heavyweight
amateur bouts, when Ali was still a Louisville teenager. Madigan forced close
decisions - when Ali was known as Cassius Marcellus Clay – in both the Golden
Gloves intercity match between New York and Chicago in Chicago on March 25,
1959, and less than 18 months later in the Rome Olympic Games semi-final on
September 3, 1960 (Ali went on to claim the gold medal).
With Bing Crosby
rooting for Ali in one corner and Sydney sportswriter Ernie Christensen
seconding for Madigan in the other, the judges gave the fight 60-57 to Ali, but
the hooting of the crowd at the announcement of the decision showed that few
others in the Palazzo della Sport agreed with them. And Christensen wasn’t the
only journalist to feel Madigan had been robbed.
utside
the ring, Madigan’s great sporting passion was rugby union. In Sydney he had
played the game at Christian Brothers College, Waverley, for the famous clubs
Randwick (14 first-grade matches, two tries, 1950) and Eastern Suburbs (1951, 1957
and 1963), in London for the Harlequins in 1953 and in New York from 1960-62
for the Westchester club.
He generally played as a breakaway or No 8 but in the
US was also called on to play flyhalf in 1962. It was as a breakaway that he
represented the US’s Eastern Rugby Union against Quebec in Montreal in 1960,
when he won Westchester’s Most Valuable Player Trophy (presented to him by the
New York Giants wide receiver Kyle Rote). After getting five stitches inserted
in his cheek after a bout with Kyogle’s Athol McQueen in 1964, Madigan said,
“I’ve been hurt worse playing rugby.”
Madigan’s life story is far more
involved and interesting than other online sources might have us believe. For one thing, no biography mentions he had a critically acclaimed novel written about
him. In the rich pugilism-meets-art tradition of Rocky Graziano’s 1955 Somebody Up There Likes Me and Jake
LaMotta’s 1970 Raging Bull – if perhaps
less gory – Madigan was the protagonist (as a thinly disguised “handsome
drifter” Charlie Dangerfield) in T.A.G. Hungerford’s Shake the Golden Bough (1963). He was also a TV star, acting with
Peter Graves in the “Australian Western” Whiplash,
screened in the US in 1961.
uite
apart from facing Ali twice, he also fought the great British heavyweight Sir
Henry Cooper (“Our ’Enry”, who also met Ali twice), was challenged to a
professional fight by Archie Moore, trained for three years at Stillman’s in
New York with Floyd Patterson and José Torres under Cus D’Amato, and was
managed by the legendary Eddie Eagan. Madigan lost his father when was just
eight, took up boxing at that age, and fought more than 250 bouts, from
Greymouth, New Zealand, to London and New York, from Helsinki to Chicago and Toledo, Ohio, and from
Mexico City to Rome and Vancouver.
Madigan boxed for both Australia and England, won an Olympic
Games bronze medal, was fifth in two other Olympics, and won two Commonwealth
Games gold medals and a Commonwealth Game silver. It was only in the last two years of his boxing career, which ended in 1964, that his success rate fell
below 95 per cent. He missed a year in the ring after suffering serious injuries in
a car crash which claimed the life of a friend, Helen Stokes-Smith, in Germany
in 1955.
On top of all this, in March 1963, livewire New Zealand-born promoter Harry Maurice Miller returned to the idea of offering
Muhammad Ali $US25,000 and 25 per cent of all film and TV rights to come to
Sydney and fight Madigan at The Stadium (built by Hugh D. McIntosh in 1908 to
stage the Boxing Day showdown between Jack Johnson and Tommy Burns, from which
Johnson emerged as the first African-American world heavyweight champion). Miller
had taken over promoting The Stadium and he offered Madigan £6000 (half what
Ali was to get) to turn professional. It was not the first time this idea had
been floated by Miller – in late 1960, Ali had only just turned pro in the immediate aftermath of the Rome Olympics, and Madigan was still overseas anyway. But the 1963 proposal was the first and only time Madigan was
very seriously tempted to fight for money. Bill Faversham, back then a member of
Ali’s Louisville Sponsorship Group and Ali’s first manager, looked at the offer and just as promptly knocked it back.
ntony
(not Anthony) Morgan Madigan was born in Sydney, on February 4, 1930, but grew
up in Bathurst, where his father, Kendall Morgan Madigan (1908-1938), was the hospitals
oral surgeon and his Kalgoorlie-born mother, Elsie Maud (1911-1983, née
Loydstrom) a dental student. The couple had married in Sydney on July 16, 1929,
and Tony came along seven months later. Maud Madigan moved to live with her
in-laws in Mosman, Sydney, in 1935 while her husband continued his dental studies
at the University of Alberta, Canada. Mrs Madigan later became a dentist herself,
when she and her two sons lived in Ashfield, Sydney in the 1950s and early 60s
(when Tony was a car salesman and younger brother Mark drove taxis). The family
had moved to West Maitland in October 1936, where Kendall Madigan, now in
private practice, became embroiled in a nasty slander court case with the
father of a young patient. Madigan and a government medical officer won the
case, being awarded £100 each (a tenth of what they had claimed) but at a huge cost.
A little more than five weeks after the finding was handed down, a cancer-ridden Kendall Madigan died, aged just 29, in a private hospital at Darlinghurst, on June
3, 1938. Tony was eight. That same year, Tony took up boxing.
Tony Madigan attended his father’s old school, Christian
Brothers College, Waverley, and followed his father’s example by excelling
there in a range of sports, including boxing and rugby. He was the school’s boxing
champion for four years, before leaving in 1948, intending to follow his
parents into dentistry.
In the intermediate amateur boxing ranks, he first
worked out of Ern McQuillan’s gym in 1949 and won the NSW middleweight title at
that level. Madigan made such an early impression that he came under
consideration for the 1950 Auckland Empire Games. He was coached by former Australian
champion Hughie Dwyer, whose son John had been at Waverley College with Madigan.
Hughie Dwyer, seen below right with Madigan, came from Newcastle and was regarded a one of Australia’s finest
defensive boxers and was a champion at lightweight, welterweight and
middleweight. He retired undefeated from the ring in 1927. Sadly, he did not
pass on his defensive skills to Madigan, who in later years regretted not being
able to resist a natural impulse to attack in his two clashes with Ali.
adigan became
Australian middleweight champion in Brisbane in 1951 and was selected to
represent Australia as a middleweight at the 1952 Helsinki Olympic Games.
Madigan was ranked No 5 in the boxing team, however, so was not on the funded list and
had to raise the £750 himself to make the trip. Friends and admirers paid the
money to guarantee Madigan got to Finland, but to pay it all back Madigan went
on barnstorming country tours, holding BBQs and giving exhibitions there, in
gyms, at his old school and in the Sydney railway workshops.
The Australian boxers prepared for the Olympics at the
famous South African Joe Bloom’s West End Cambridge Gymnasium, close to
London’s Piccadilly Circus (Madigan, below, is the overawed young fellow second from right). Given Madigan had only had 15 fights leading into
Helsinki, and was about to face boxers with more than 200 bouts under their
belts, the short time he spent under Bloom was of limited benefit. As well, Madigan
injured his left hand soon after arriving in England, and injured it again when
he got to Finland. Floyd Patterson won the middleweight gold in Helsinki and
Swede Stig Sjölin, who had eliminated Madigan, took one of the bronzes.
Madigan decided to stay on in Europe. He hitch-hiked back
to England, felling trees in Sweden to cover travel expenses. In London, he
toyed with returning to dentistry studies, this time at Cambridge, but elected
to continue dislodging teeth his normal way. He joined the Fulham Boxing Club
while working as a broker for an Australian importing and exporting company in
London (seen in his office below left). On April 24, 1953, Madigan lost to Henry Cooper in the British light-heavyweight
final at the Wembley Pool. Still, he won Irish and London titles and
represented England five times that year, including in a match against Wales in
Cardiff, and also represented London in Amsterdam.
In 1954 Madigan became the
first Australian to win a British title, taking out the light-heavyweight
division at the Royal Albert Hall. The win earned Madigan a nomination for the
British team for the Golden Gloves in Chicago and, along with his English base,
ensured Madigan was on the funded list for the Australian team to compete at
the British Empire and Commonwealth Game in Vancouver in July-August 1954.
Madigan was favoured to take gold, but had lost form even before leaving
London. In Canada, lumbered at 24 with being captain and coach of the
Australian team, in the absence of trainers and seconds, he lost the light-heavyweight
final to Johannesburg’s Piet van Vuuren (1931-2008).
isillusioned
by his Vancouver experience, Madigan took a brief look at the US boxing
scene in September, and promptly announced he was retiring. Madigan returned to
England but at the end of 1954 gave up his London job to work in Germany. He was
out of boxing throughout 1955 after surviving serious injuries in a fatal car
crash in Bavaria on January 17 that year. He was living in Germany at the time,
selling encyclopaedias for a Rhineland publishing company, and was driving a
23-year-old Sydney friend, Helen Stokes-Smith, to the ski fields in the south
of the region. Madigan knew Helen through her father, the retired Sydney
Stadium fight doctor Kenneth Stokes-Smith, of Darlinghurst, a close friend of
the publisher Ezra Norton. Madigan swerved to avoid a truck parked on the icy
road, the car slid out of control and Helen was killed.
In 1956 Madigan went back to England and to the ring in
London, but suffered a cut eye in an elimination bout in the British
light-heavyweight championship. Madigan returned to Sydney to win a place on
the Australian team for the Melbourne Olympic Games. A bout of debilitating
shingles just before the Games didn’t help his cause, and he lost to Lithuanian Romualdas
Murauskas (in action against Madigan above), who went on to take out a bronze medal. Madigan later described the
Eastern Bloc boxers he met in both Helsinki and Melbourne as “crude but
effective”.
In 1957 Madigan regained an Australian title, at light-heavyweight, after a gap of six years. He went on to represent Australia at the
British Empire and Commonwealth Games in Cardiff in July 1958. A lack of
planning and preparation (not to mention competition) had seriously handicapped
Australian boxers at previous Games, but this time they found a place to train
in a dingy gym above a fruitshop in Cardiff’s markets. Madigan went on to beat Dublin-born
Augustine Robert “Ossie” Higgins (1931-2000), an Ipswich Town soccer
professional fighting for Wales, in the light-heavyweight final. Madigan was
presented with his gold medal by the Duke of Edinburgh.
n his way
back from Cardiff, Madigan won the Diamond Belt as the best individual fighter at
an international tournament in Mexico City on August 9, 1958. There he caught
the eye of the noted American sportsman Colonel Edward Patrick Francis Eagan
(1897-1967), author of Fighting for Fun
(1934), a lawyer who had been chairman of the New York State Athletic
Commission, which controlled boxing in New York, from 1945-51. (Eagan, left, is seen above with Jake LaMotta, right). Eagan simply asked
the Australian, “How would you like to be the light-heavyweight champion of the
world?” With that enticing carrot dangled before him, Madigan signed a contract
with Eagan, with the plan for the Australian fighter to almost immediately turn
professional. Eagan himself had never turned pro, but had sparred with the New
Zealand world heavyweight title contender Tom Henney, as well as Jack Dempsey
and Gene Tunney. Through Eagan, Madigan was to get to know and to be advised by
Dempsey and Tunney.
Eagan was familiar with Australia and its boxers. During a
world tour in 1926-27 he had visited New Zealand and Australia with his Oxford
boxing friend, Scottish nobleman Douglas Douglas-Hamilton (1903-1973), the 14th
Duke of Hamilton and 11th Duke of Brandon, a pioneering aviator who styled
himself on tour as the Marquis of Clydesdale (right). Douglas-Hamilton was
a boxing Blue and Scottish amateur champion.
In Sydney on July 29, 1926, Eagan gave
away five stone and still TKOed the giant 1922-23 Australian heavyweight
champion (6ft 11in, 18st), Sydney cheesemaker Julíen Désiré Paul Alexi
Brancourt (?-1959). On the same charity night bill was William John McKell
(1891-1985) then Minister for Justice and later knighted and Premier of New
South Wales and Governor-General of Australia. Eagan met up with McKell again
in Sydney in 1944 (McKell, right, is seen below with Eagan in 1944).
Eagan flattens the Sydney giant Brancourt
Brancourt shows off his size.
Eagan is the only person to win gold medals at both the
Summer and Winter Olympic Games in different events, a summer gold in boxing
(light-heavyweight, Antwerp 1920) and a winter gold (four-man bobsled, Lake
Placid, 1932). Like Madigan, Eddie Eagan was a former British amateur champion
who had boxed at more than one Olympics – he also fought as a heavyweight in
Paris in 1924. Eagan, a Rhodes Scholar, had studied at Yale and the Harvard Law
School before going to Oxford.
Eagan watches the first Ali-Madigan fight in Chicago in 1959
Eagan persuaded Madigan to go to New York instead of home
to Australia. The other incentives Eagan offered were to settle Madigan in his
home town of Rye, Westchester County, New York, and arrange for him to train at
Stillman’s Gymnasium at 919 Eighth Avenue, New York City, under the great Constantine
"Cus" D’Amato and alongside world heavyweight champion Floyd
Patterson. D'Amato (1908-1985) was an important influence on Madigan. Born to
an Italian family in the Bronx, D’Amato, below, had discovered Rocky Graziano and tutored
Patterson to be the first Olympic gold medallist to win a professional
heavyweight title.
uring his
three years of training at Stillman’s, Madigan would also spar with future International
Boxing Hall of Famer José "Chegüi" Torres (1936-2009). Madigan had
got to know the Puerto Rican when he represented the US and won a silver medal
in the light-middleweight division at the 1956 Melbourne Olympics. Torres was
beaten in the final by the legendary Hungarian László Papp, the first boxer to
win three Olympic golds. Torres went on to be world light-heavyweight champion.
Torres’ literary skills appealed to Madigan: Torres, seen below with Ali, wrote a regular column for El Diario La Prensa and for The Village Voice. He later wrote Sting Like a Bee, a biography of Ali,
and Fire and Fear: The Inside Story of
Mike Tyson.
Madigan, black top, spars with Torres at Stillman's in December 1958
Madigan showed a particular interest in writing and
writers. One American sportswriter said Madigan was the first fighter he’d met
since Gene Tunney to “admit to even a nodding acquaintance with the written
word”. Apart from the great A.J. Liebling, author of the wonderful The Sweet Science, Madigan encountered
in New York the West Australian author Thomas Arthur Guy Hungerford
(1915-2011), noted for his World War II novel The Ridge and the River. Hungerford was inspired by his friendship
with Madigan to write his novel Shake the
Golden Bough (1963). Madigan also befriended the brilliant Greek-born
columnist Taki Theodoracopulos (1936). Saying of Madigan “what a gentleman he
was and is”, Taki wrote in “Sign of the Times” in August 2012: “In 1960 in
Rome, I watched my friend Tony Madigan fighting for Australia in the
semi-finals against an American with the charming name of Cassius Clay. After
three furious rounds we thought Tony had it. ‘It’s going our way,’ said his
trainer, ‘at least a split decision.’ But the decision went Clay’s way. Madigan
never complained; he just shook hands with Clay and told me afterwards, ‘That’s
how sport goes.’ Clay went on to win the gold. You know the rest.”
Madigan, right, spars with world title contender Rory Calhoun.
Madigan retained the Diamond Belt in Mexico City on
September 19, 1959, after reaching the quarter-finals of the US national
championships in Toledo, Ohio, in early April. All this followed his win in the
New York division of the Golden Gloves and representing the city against
Chicago. By early March 1959 at least one “deadly serious” New York sportswriter
was tipping Madigan as another “Great White Hope”, and capable of dethroning
Floyd Patterson as world heavyweight champion. He may well have changed his
mind when at the Chicago Stadium on March 25 Madigan met a then 17-year-old
Louisville schoolboy called Cassius Marcellus Clay. The eagerly anticipated
bout was televised nationally and the fighters won a standing ovation from the
crowd of 7261. Madigan, unfortunately, had been suffering from a virus for days
leading into the fight. He never complained about the close call, but he knew
he hadn’t given it his best shot.
n the way
to winning the New York Golden Gloves title, on February 16, 1959, Madigan made a terrible mess of one Sigmund
Leon Wortherly (1938-), later self-styled “The Black Assassin”. Calling himself a “Killing Machine”,
Wortherly was in later life to write a chilling autobiography, in which he said
“very, very few people have the stomach to kill in cold blood. It takes a rare
and special person to kill in cold blood. I, Sigmund L. Wortherly, am that rare
and special person. I have the ability to kill in cold blood.” Wortherly grew
up in a middle-class family in the Sugar Hill section of Harlem and developed a
fearsome reputation as a gym fighter and was a sparring partner for Paul Pender
and Dick Tiger.
However, he was drawn into a life a deadly crime, admitting to more
than 30 contract killings for the Harlem underworld. He did time with such
infamous thugs as Crazy Joe Gallo, John Gotti, Harold KO Konigsberg and Nicky
Barnes. Wortherly, right, dubbed by police Mr Tough, called himself a “one-man crime
spree”. “I never killed anyone who didn’t deserve it … people often ask me how many people I killed, and I
tell them I don’t know. I lost count.” He was none too tough for Madigan,
though, as a photo prominently run on the pages of newspapers across America showed. Madigan has knocked Wortherly's mouth guard right out.
To pay the rent in Rye and later at 630 East 14th
Street, East Village, Lower Manhattan, Madigan worked as a sales representative
for the Australian branch of British cigarette company Rothmans, and found
additional income as a male model, posing for $40 an hour for advertising
photographer Howard Zieff (1927-2009). Madigan appeared in magazine ads and TV
commercials for cigarettes, beer and men’s products. The modelling work was to
lead to problems when Madigan was persuaded in May 1960 to return to Australia
to try out for the Rome Olympic Games.
adigan
was stunned to find that to get the chance of a rematch with Ali in Rome, he
had to face a stern opponent from outside the ring: The Queensland Boxing and
Wrestling Union. The Australian selectors had already chosen a Queenslander, Ken
Marshall, to fight in the light-heavyweight division at the Olympics, based on
the assumption Madigan was not available and would not be returning home to
stake a claim for inclusion in the Rome team. Some Australian boxing officials
had other ideas, however, believing Madigan was a distinct gold medal chance
and should be convinced to return to Australia. Faced with this prospect, the
QBWU took desperate action. As Madigan had been registered as a
Queensland-based fighter when he was last in Australia, in 1957, the QBWU felt
it had the last say on his eligibility. And it declared Madigan was not only
residentially unqualified to represent the country, but that his modelling
career – for which he’d used images of himself in boxing garb - had violated
his amateur status. Even US sports columnists got in on the act, lampooning the
QBWU’s stand as taking the definition of amateurism in sport to a ridiculous
degree. Sanity eventually prevailed. Madigan arrived in Sydney in late May and
nine days later fought Marshall, on June 6 in Sydney, making mincemeat of him.
Afterwards, Madigan expressed his sympathy for Marshall, saying officials had
placed the Queensland boxer in a humiliating position. Yet Madigan’s return
bout with Ali in Rome had come close to being jettisoned by an overzealous,
narrow-minded committee of faceless men.
he reason
Madigan had not initially expressed much interest in the Rome Olympics was
because a professional boxing career was still a distinct possibility, based on
his 1958 legal contract with Eagan. As well, Madigan was concerned about losing his existing
New York income and his “Loco” apartment (four rooms in a row) in East Village. He had managed to
get a six-month extension on his US visa, probably helped by him filing a certificate
of marriage at Arlington, Virginia, on February 9, 1960, to wed Geraldine Catherine
Kelley (1935-2005) of Rye. The marriage apparently never took place. When New
York sportswriter George McGann interviewed Madigan for the March 9, 1960,
edition of Sir Frank Packer’s Australian
Women’s Weekly, he described Madigan as a bachelor.
Madigan did marry a
German psychotherapist, Sybille (1940-), straight after the Rome Games, in November
1960, and had a son, Kendall Morgan Madigan (named after Madigan’s father) born
in August 1961. (In 1969 Kelley married a Clinton Wesley Rhy, but was known
briefly as Geraldine Madigan).
Madigan made a return to the New York Golden Gloves
tournament in 1962, reaching the semi-finals. He was offered a tempting though
lengthy assignment, being photographed in various tourist spots around the globe, but
in mid-year left New York to return to Australia to win selection for the
Commonwealth Games in Perth. He was made the Australian team’s flag bearer at
the opening ceremony at Perry Lakes Stadium and duly retained his Games title,
beating Ghanaian Jojo Miles in the light-heavyweight final (below). In 1964 Miles
fought Ali in an exhibition during Ali’s African tour.
There had been a mooted exhibition with Rocky Marciano at
the Sydney Stadium in August 1962, when Marciano was in Australia managing a
fighter due to appear at the stadium. But Australian official Arthur Tunstall
ruled out the Marciano stoush because it would have cost Madigan his amateur
status. At the end of March 1963, former world light-heavyweight champion
Archie Moore, then 46, announced in San Diego that he would fight Madigan in the
Australian’s professional debut at the Sydney Stadium in June of that year. Moore
had been KOed in the fourth by Ali (Moore’s former protégé) in Los Angeles just
four months previously. Moore, the only man to have faced both Marciano and
Ali, did have one fight in 1963, and then announced his retirement. Where he
had got the idea of a return to Australia (he had fought seven times here in
1940) is not known, but Madigan’s solicitor Jim Comans knocked back Moore’s
offer as insufficiently attractive, without even consulting Madigan (or so
Comans claimed). Instead, on August 14, Madigan fought for Australia in a 6-4
amateur Test loss to New Zealand at the Sydney Stadium.
reymouth’s
Army Drill Hall was the venue of Madigan’s only fight in New Zealand, 10 days after he'd won his bout in the Test in Sydney. In Greymouth he came up against farmer Johnny Logan, who at 13st 7lb outweighed
Madigan by 8lb, in a six-rounder, which Logan won. Even the locals suspected a “home town decision”.
Madigan, in the right corner, in Greymouth.
In 1964 newspaper magnet Sir Frank Packer sponsored yet another Madigan return to Australia, to make a bid for a record fourth Olympic Games
appearance, in Tokyo. Madigan, now a family man concentrating more on his
business career as a property consultant, was not in prime condition. He stepped
up to the heavyweight division and fought in the NSW championships, but at both
this and national level he couldn’t get past first former Canberran Fred Casey
and then Athol McQueen of Kyogle, who went on to briefly floor Joe Frazier at
the Olympics. Casey also went to Tokyo, as a light-heavyweight. He had beaten
Madigan earlier, in the 1962 NSW championships, and became only the second man
after Muhammad Ali to beat Madigan twice. Casey turned pro straight after the
Olympics. Madigan retired one last time, but did help with the fund-raising effort
for the Tokyo team, by sparring on TV.
Where is he now? A week ago his niece said online: “He
resides in France.” And by all reports he finished up being a very rich man,
still with his body and mind in good shape.
