Center for Labor Education & Research, University of Hawaii - West Oahu: Honolulu Record Digitization Project
Honolulu Record, Volume 9 No. 8, Thursday, September 20, 1956 p. 1
Decline of Amateur Boxing Here Seen As By-Product of Military Economy
Professional boxing in Honolulu is almost dead, dependent on the rising or falling fortunes of one or two fighters.
"Amateur boxing is dead, period," comments an official whose life has been boxing, professional and amateur, for a number of years.
Why? A few years ago there were fighters vying to get on professional cards. Today, the same preliminary fighters fight one another in show after show. Less than 10 years ago, amateur tournaments were held before crowds that packed the Civic Auditorium. Today amateur tournaments draw, 200 or 300. Reports from the neighbor islands indicate amateurs fare no better there. Why? Why has a sport popular for many years in Hawaii deteriorated to such a point?
"Basically," says Bobby Lee, secretary of the Territorial Boxing Commission and possibly the man best informed about all phases of boxing in the Territory, "the reasons are the same as on the Mainland. Amateur boxing is dying there, too, you know." The decline of amateur boxing on the Mainland is attributed indirectly to the war economy in which the U.S. has been operating since World War H. Secretary Lee, a copious reader especially of news concerning boxing, reminds that many of the former great champions came from economic and social stations of life from which they could rise only by the battering of their fists. Because life was a constantly grim and rugged struggle for them, they developed into rugged battlers to defeat it.
Alternative To Hard Knocks
But today, poor alternative though it may seem to some, a hitch in the armed forces offers an escape from the lower economic levels not available in former years. Likewise, it offers opportunity to learn a trade which the young potential boxer can follow after he gets out of the service. Pew offered the chance to make an easier living, are .willing to undergo the hard knocks and rigorous grind of learning the boxer's trade. But we're talking: about amateur boxing — what has that to do with the pro game? The answer is — nearly everything. Aspiring: boxers become amateurs, not for any love of amateurism as such, but as a period of preparation for professional boxing. Local and Maui-land followers of the sport agree that few boxers set out on amateur careers who do not hope to graduate into professional ranks. Possible exceptions may be college boxers and some in the armed forces but even in those categories, the boys who develop skill enough usually take a crack at the pro game and some become professional fighters.
Pro, Amateur Linked
Ted Nobriga, AAU president in Hawaii for the past two years, says, "Amateur boxing here is good when pro boxing is good. When pro boxing falls, amateur boxing falls. The boys need some inspiration." Some observers reverse that view, saying that when the amateurs fall, there is no good material for the professional ring; hence the pro game suffers, as well. To get back to the concept that boxing- is a sport in which the underprivileged have excelled, Bobby Lee points to the large number of Negro boxers competing in both amateur and professional ranks today. Despite opportunity of a sort offered by the armed forces, Negroes still have more difficulty getting jobs than others, Lee says, and they have the inspiration of many great Negro fighters who have succeeded in the prize ring, so many become boxers. In past decades, there have been periods when numbers of Irish, Jewish and Italian fighters rose to the top order similar circumstances and with the same motives. And those were days when Negroes could not compete even in the prize ring on an even basis. Great fighters like Sam Langford, Joe Gans, Joe Jeanette and George Godfrey never got more than a fraction of their due in their own time, either in public recognition, or in money. Jack Johnson, the first Negro to win the heavyweight title, became the object of considerable persecution largely because he was a Negro. Locally, Lee of the TBC and Nobriga and Botelho of the AAU all agree that even local fighters who begin developing in amateur tournaments usually join the services before they reach their peak.
Clubs Like Youngsters
“Consequently,” says Jack Botelho, "the clubs like to train the younger, teen-age boxers because they know they can keep them longer." "Two of the outstanding local amateurs, Hokama and Rivera, are in the armed forces today, and another who went to the top in the amateurs nationally, Heiji Shimabukuro, was fighting in army rings at the time. "They go into the services," says Nobriga, "possibly figuring they'll get drafted anyhow pretty soon, and when they come out, a lot of them don't resume boxing." There are other local problems, of perhaps a less basic nature Some critics of the amateur sport as conducted here blame the AAU for enforcing some rules too rigidly, others not rigidly enough. For instance, eight bouts in the last amateur show were cancelled without prior notification early enough for the fans to have heard of it.
"When the fans pay to see a show and then get a deal like that," says one critic, "what do you expect them to do next time?"
Nobriga says such cases are dealt with on individual merits, and the clubs sponsoring fighters who run out on fights are punished.
But he admits that in one of the most publicized and possibly most flagrant of these cases, the persons responsible got off with virtually no punishment at all.
Minn Got Off Easy
That was the occasion, a couple of years ago, when Coach Herbert Minn of the University of Hawaii pulled his star boxer ,Seiji Naya, out of a tournament because he felt Naya did not get the seeding due him. Punishment for Minn, not Naya, was recommended. But it-was the last show of the year and by the next season, the AAU boxing committee had changed membership and nothing happened to Minn at all — except that the University authorities were notified.
Since that case, withdrawals have been more flagrant.
One proposal to stimulate interest in both types of boxing, amateur and professional, has been breached without conspicuous success. That would be a revival to the pattern followed in World War II, when professional and amateur shows were scheduled at the same time and seen by the fans for a single price.
Efforts to stage shows like that in recent years have failed, partly because no one has fulfilled what AAU officials say is necessary to allow amateurs to compete and still retain their amateur standing. "It can be done," says Nobriga, "when a show is being staged for a worthwhile benefit." But there have to be very definite lines drawn between the professional and amateur shows — an announcement being made at the end of one and the beginning of the other.
Impact of Brundage?
One applicant, who says he consulted AAU officials ahead of time as to the form of an application, was rejected after he had submitted a letter drafted in that form. Such timidity on the part of AAU officials could be the local impact of the far-flung edicts of AAU President Brundage, the guiding spirit of American Amateurism.
Today there is little or no friction between the Oahu Amateur Boxing Assn. and the local AAU, Nobriga says, though there might have been in the past. Present financial arrangements allow Oahu generally to use the money made here for her own fighters, while neighbor island clubs do the same. Thus a major bone of contention has been removed, Nobriga say.
Although boxers from the armed forces competing in local tournaments have added much of the color and attraction to the shows, their competition also offers a hazard for local shows, Nobriga says.
"The service tournaments and smokers come first,"' he says. "You never know when .they're going; to pull all their fighters out of a local show or a tournament because some service show is too close to that date."
With the inclusion of so many good boxers in the armed services, the caliber of all-service tournaments is high, but that doesn't help the civilian amateurs. This year, winners from the service, tournaments, like winners from college tournaments, will be able .to enter directly into the Olympic tryout finals.
But if a serviceman loses out in the service tournaments, he may go back and enter a civilian tournament and get another crack at the Olympic team.
It should make for a better Olympic team than ever except for one thing—riot as many boys want to be fighters as used to.
Hotel St. Writer Fires Back at Cobey Black; Answer to Star-Bull Printed
As Bob Krauss and other writers have found in the past, operators of amusement places on Hotel St. are highly sensitive to colorful descriptive writing that they feel casts reflections upon them and their occupations. When Mrs. Cobey Black ventured one of her "Miracle Mile'' Columns about them, we wondered what answering fire she might draw.
The barrage below was first offered to the Star-Bulletin and if that paper had published it, it would not appear in these pages. The RECORD does not agree in some respects with the interpretation the Hotel St. writer gives Mrs. Black's words, but it believes he has a right to be heard. Space limitation, however, makes full publication of the lengthy letter impossible, and it has been cut in parts.
To the Editor, Honolulu Star-Bulletin As the proprietors and operators of long-established amusement centers, barrooms, grilles and other recreational faculties on Hotel Street, we should like to protest as vigorously as possible Mrs. Cobey Black's venomous and unwarranted attack upon Hotel Street. This journalistic curiosity appeared in the Saturday, August 18th, magazine section of the Star-Bulletin, which unfortunately goes to the mainland to give people some ideas of life in the Hawaiian Islands Does she in her weird indictment mean to include, for example, Ciro's or the Alexander Young Hotel, the YMCA, the Library of Hawaii, lolani Palace, or — last but not least — the Star-Bulletin plant? These too, we must remember, are also located on or near Mrs. Black's horror row Before noting m detail any of the specific absurdities into which Mrs. Black allows herself to stumble, let us glance for a moment at the sensibility which is so utterly appalled by our depravity, our superficiality, our hopeless lack of everything that makes life worth living. At Vic Boyd's Pantheon Bar, the oldest bar in Honolulu, she hears the juke box "throbbing in an orgy of fireworks and maudlin melodies." Most strange! The juke box at Vic Boyd's, like every other juke box on or about Hotel Street, plays the same music which is heard daily on the national and local hit parades, on radio and on TV (Why, even at Waikiki they play the latest tunes ) If Mrs. Black, perhaps in consultation with George Barati, would care to submit a list of alternative melodies, We shall be honored to consider the possibility of setting some new standard for the nation Or again, let us note what hap pens when the dauntless reporter takes her courage in both hands and dares to venture out upon "black Pauahi Street." She sees "four skulls bend low to plop the sinister strategy of a mahjong game." Shades of Sax Rohmer and Fu Manchu! Anyone at all who knows—and some of us know them very well—the likable oldsters engaged in this dreadful and sinister vice, can testify that they are no different from any other bunch of elderly duffers, Irish or Jewish or Italian or what-have-you, engaged in whist or pinochle or—well, choose your own harmless amusement. (By the way, don't they play mahjong in the Waikiki hotels any more?)
This reporter, who condemns us from an elevated state of culture to which we can never pray to attain, tells us that the girls on Hotel Street wear "love musk" in their hair. We thought it was simply perfume or cologne; indeed, we have detected the same fragrance in the women of Waikiki. Still, we cannot aspire to the idyllic and high-class existence of Mrs. Black, which is so fetchingly depicted in the current issue of Look magazine. We do, however, take some consolation in the fact that one of our number—the inevitable misfits, the mateless outcasts, the square pegs, as Mrs. Black calls us—one of us is running for the office of Mayor. Or is he one of the "thousands of others" who go to Hotel Street (as Mrs. Black, or an advertising conscious editor, saw fit to add)?
A specific apology is due to a specific person who is heedlessly slandered in Mrs. Black's preposterous article. We do not mean the "spider HASP," who in Mrs. Black's view are so incompetent that in the penny arcades "a penny's as rare as a sober sailor." We do not mean the tattoo artists who "squirt pasty blood"—since when?—into the arms of their clients. (It may surprise the elegant journalist to learn that in London right now, ladies who are every bit as resplendent as herself are deluging the tattoo artists with more orders than we are lucky enough to receive on Hotel Street. Nor have we had the privilege of decorating the distinguished gentleman whose tattoo graces the Marlboro cigarette ads.) We do not mean our employees, the "girls who've forgotten how to smile" (please send us a photographer) and who are so ignorant of fashion that they gawk at the chic apparel of a lady tourist.
No, we mean that Mrs. Black owes a personal apology to a fine woman, known and respected by all of us, whom she has singled out for special embarrassment amid her indiscriminate shotblasts of scandalizement and libel. About the well-known and well-liked weight-guesser on Hotel Street, Mrs. Black comments with feline archness: "She looks like she can guess almost anything but where the next meal's coming from." (Grammar! Grammar! "As if" is what the lady means to say, but she says "like.") The victim here informs us that she usually has her menus well planned a week in advance. But if by chance something more dire than dietetics is intended, she adds, she will be more than glad to match bank books with Mrs. Black. (In addition to their work on Hotel Street, the weight guesser and her husband have concluded a profitable stint at the 49th State Fair.)
If what she says about Hotel Street bears any semblance to the truth, it might seem dubious for any Honolulu newspaper to carry the advertising of such establishments as we apparently represent. We hold up our heads. We are confident that the recreational facilities on Hotel Street will bear highly favorable comparison with those on East Main Street in Norfolk, those on Broadway in San Diego, or those on any other street anywhere given over to the pleasures of service personnel.
We request that you give full space to this communication in order to undo, so far as possible, the damage and embarrassment which has been caused us in the honorable pursuit of cur livelihood, in our homes and among our friends.
It is only common humanity to feed the hungry. If our hospitals are too big, too complex, too impersonal to do these small kindnesses for the sick, something is very wrong.