Archie Moore by Rob Snell

[Mofo2]

Archie Moore was one of a legion of quality black fighter who were exploited, avoided and confined to the club circuits in the 1930’s and 1940’s’s. Unlike most he persisted and was to hold the world light heavy title for almost 10 years.

“I geared my way of living and my boxing style to lastâ€

and

“made a living hustling with my pool queâ€

By the time he met Joey Maxim for the championship he was 39 years of age and a veteran of almost 170 contests – and Maxim’s manager – Jack Kearns - bled the promotion deal so dry that Archie boxed for $800 less expenses – which meant for nothing.

In 1955 he challenged heavyweight champion Rocky Marciano in front of a huge crowd of 61,574 at Yankee Stadium, New York. He dropped the “Rock†with a right uppercut in round two but was to be knocked out in the ninth.

That evening, with his right eye swollen shut he was seen playing with his beloved string bass with a local band.

The following year he was knocked out in five rounds by Floyd Patterson who was half his age – 21 – for the then vacant heavyweight title. However he stayed light heavyweight champion until he was in his late 40’s turning back a total of nine challengers which include one ferocious effort from the Canadian Yvon Durelle in 1958. Durelle put Archie down three times in the first round but Archie fought back and won in the 11th.

His last world class fight was when Cassius Clay knocked him out in the 4th in 1962, he was then 48 years old and then went on to train fighters for many years.

This is taken from an article published in 1968

Shortly after starring in his first movie role, in 1959, Archie then the world's light heavyweight boxing champion, was confronted by a shrill lady reporter in Hollywood. "Mr. Moore," she demanded what gave you the biggest thrill — winning your boxing title or starring in the movie, Huckleberry finn?" Moore didn't hesitate. "Winning the title, of course," he replied, smiling.

"Oh, but Mr. Moore," she persisted, "you're an actor now." Moore shook his head. "I am a fighter," he said, firmly, "I'm a fighter first, last and always."

Today, having retired in 1962 after an incredible 27 years in the ring, Archie Moore is still indeed a fighter. As adroitly as he once used his fists, Moore is now fighting juvenile delinquency and trying to ease racial tensions. "I don't know whether God is a white man or a black man," says Archie, who is a Negro, "but I do know that He truly made us all."

Now gray-thatched, plump and somewhere in his early 50's — ageless Archie always has been slyly vague about his years — Moore's concept is as simple as its name— ABC, meaning Any Boy Can. Any boy can what? "Any boy can improve himself, if he wants to," says Moore. "We teach faith in God, in country and in fellow man. If a bigot can misguide, then surely I can guide."

If this sounds Pollyanna-ish, in Archie's hands, with his gift for reaching Boys it somehow works. A man of dreams and visions, Moore originally conceived the idea in its loose form when he was a teenager, a high school dropout and a self-admitted delinquent. "I was no angel," says Archie. Once, he stole $7 from a streetcar coin box in St. Louis and ended up in a reform school. There, he had a dream one night. "I saw myself in the dream helping other boys who were in trouble," Archie recalls. "It wasn't clear just how. but I knew that some day, if God would use me, I'd figure out a way."

Life is a fight

From the beginning, Archie's own life has never been less than a struggle. Born in Mississippi, the son of a sharecropper, he remembers shoving a white boy in a scuffle. "We'll have to move," his grandmother told Archie. "Around here it's dangerous for Negroes to hit whites." "Right then," says Moore, "I found out that life itself was a fight — and to survive I'd have to be a fighter." As he grew older, a skinny kid hemmed in by poverty in Negro ghetto of St. Louis, Archie saw boxing as his only way out. He turned professional in 1936 but it wasn't until 1952, after years of earning small purses that he finally won the championship, which he held for ten years until his retirement.

Today, astonishingly, he bears no marks of the fighter — no puffy nose, no cauliflower ears, a testimony to his classic skill and the turtle-shell defense that was his trademark. Having poured so much of his hostility into the ring, Moore today is a soft-spoken, gentle man with a mustache, a goatee and an impish smile. "Archie," says his wife, Joan, "believes that a day without a laugh or a song is a day that should go back into the calendar."

In the late summer of 1965— during the week, incidentally, of the riots in Watts — Moore, at home in San Diego, received a phone call that altered the direction of his life. A real estate promoter in the northern California city of Vallejo asked Moore to help him sell homes in a new Negro housing development. Arriving in Vallejo, Moore learned that vandalism had been running rampant at a cost of over $7, 500 a month. Boys threw rocks through windows of the vacant houses, dislodged the plumbing and stoleanything they could pry loose. "I remembered my dream in the reform school," Archie says, "and I began to think— very hard."

Any Boy Can

The result, a blend of ritual and old fashioned virtues and the Archie Moore touch, was ABC, a youth program which would later become affiliated with the Boy Scouts of America. First Archie set up a punching bag in a makeshift outdoor gym. One day a Negro boy of about 8 observed the former champion punching at the bag "I can do that." he said." Maybe you can," Moore said. "Come back with some more kids tomorrow and we'll see." The boy returned the next day

with 30 other kids.

Holding out the punching bag as bait,Archie explained that learning to box is as simple as ABC. "But before the B and C," he said, "you must first learn the A." For the next hour, using parable and wry humor, quoting from his favorite philosopher — a black man named Aesop — Moore related to the eager boys the essence of morals and religion. Perhaps only for a fighter, but a very articulate one, would the slum kids have been so attentive.

In a dramatically brief period, taking up expanded quarters, Archie instilled in the kids a sense of pride, moral and religious responsibility and respect for property. All the houses were subsequently sold and Vallejo marveled at the sharp drop of vandalism.