Willie Pep got locked up a lot, mostly for gambling in the streets and driving too fast, which did nothing to dim the luster of his legendary boxing career. He was the people’s champ, and the people, too, gambled and went over the speed limit and got locked up.
While Mark Allen Baker’s Willie Pep: A Biography of the 20th Century’s Greatest Featherweight is as padded in some parts as Joan Crawford’s shoulders in Mildred Pierce, a discerning journey through the hagiographic tangle of prose brings the man who was Willie Pep into focus almost despite itself. You have to pay attention to what are almost asides in the gush of Baker’s admiration to get an unadorned picture of the fighter.
Willie Pep was born on September 19, 1922 as Guglielmo Papaleo, as Baker reminds us endlessly, and had a professional record of 230-11-1 with 65 knockouts. Pep was as comfortable in the boxing ring as any man who ever climbed through the ropes. His genius resided within that fabled canvas-sheathed squared circle, where he worked his trade and created his art for the boxing world to behold and admire. His father, Salvadore Papaleo, a machine operator, had given his son a pair of boxing gloves when the boy was five, planting the seed that grew into a legend.
As an aside here, there is what I believe to be an apocryphal story that Willie Pep once won a round without throwing a punch after announcing his intentions to his corner men. To my knowledge, there is no proof of this feat, and Mark Allen Baker offers none, but what I think is the understood point to the story is that if anyone could pull off such a pugilistic slight of hands it would have been Willie “Will o’ the Wisp” Pep, master of the feint, whose feet moved to their own music, the ultimate artful dodger.
He was born in Middletown, Connecticut, but the family moved to Hartford by 1930 where his boxing career flourished, going 59-3-3 as an amateur before turning pro on July 25, 1940 with a four-round decision over Joey Marcus. He was 17. By the time Willie Pep was 22 years old, he had boxed professionally 100 times. That is an amazing figure given the boxing world of today where most upper echelon pros might fight two or three times a year. And what is beyond amazing is that Pep won his first 62 fights before a draw stopped that streak. No big deal; he won his next 72. That is an incredible accomplishment that can never be matched, a physical impossibility in today’s fight game.
Mark Allen Baker gives a credible review of the working class background and New England boxing climate that fetched Willie Pep up in his chosen profession. It was a world of deals and counter-deals to fill the smokey New England arenas or outdoor stadiums. It was a hot area for boxing in those days when men wore hats and ties and women wore dresses.
Willie Pep had 242 fights. Appendix B – Boxing Record – at the back of the 250-page book takes up 17 pages, and includes the date, opponent, location, result, and comments for anyone who wants such ring arcana. All well and good certainly, but the backbone of the 187 actual pages of prose and photos is a slogging through what seems to be every one of those fights. On and on – who made the matches, where it was, how Willie won (he calls Pep “Willie” throughout the book “because that was the way fight fans – who felt intimate with him – referred to the elite pugilist,” Baker says in the preface). The book is peppered with phrases like “elite pugilist” which gives it the flavor of the times during which Willie Pep was a household name in boxing households. Still, the seemingly endless review of his fights can leave a reader a tad punch-drunk, to use a phrase of those times. If God is in the details, “Willie Pep” is a very religious book.
Pep was not just a fancy dancer; he was as tough as the ringside bell. He survived a plane crash and four brutal wars with Sandy Saddler, suffering his first kayo at Sandler’s hands in their first featherweight championship fight. Sandler beat him three out of the four – all by kayos – in what were monuments to dirty fighting, so gamey in fact that Pep had his license revoked and Saddler was suspended indefinitely after the final fight.
Not surprisingly, Willie Pep’s best friends in boxing were Jake LaMotta and Rock Graziano. Jake LaMotta was married seven times, and Pep was right behind him with five. Mark Allen Baker seems to think these marriages were cute. For both Pep’s fourth and fifth marriages, he has the same comment: “Cupid struck again.”
After the ring, like his two cut buddies, Pep bounced around, at one point, like LaMotta, owning bustout nightclubs. Like them, too, he became something of a caricature of himself as the pug with a heart of gold. As Baker puts it in his introduction: “Pep’s charm resonated with everyone he met. It was a recipe that began with the genetics of his parents, before stirring in a bit of Henny Youngman, Jake La Motta and Rocky Graziano, then adding a pinch of Gorge Raft and Edward G. Robinson.” Unlike his pals, though, no movies like Somebody Up There Likes Me with Paul Newman as Graziano or Raging Bull with Robert DeNiro in an Oscar-winning role as Jake LaMotta were made about Willie Pep.
And while Graziano and LaMotta were straight-ahead brawlers, Willie Pep was a complete boxing master. Here’s maybe the best line in the book: “To witness Pep training in Stillman’s gym was like watching the Pope conduct Easter Mass.”
If they hadn’t become boxers, these three gents might have spent their lives as “knockaround guys,” street corner hangers, hustling to pick up the mob’s leavings. In a sense, they were boxing’s knockaround guys. Frankie Carbo, charter member of Murder, Inc. and known in ring circles as “Mr. Gray,” ran boxing during most of Pep’s career, and his shadow was inescapable. Indeed, Jake LaMotta admitted going in the tank – taking a dive – against Billy Fox to get a title shot against Marcel Cerdan, who he stopped to win the middleweight crown in 1949.
Willie Pep: A Biography of the 20th Century’s Greatest Featherweight is curiously constructed for a sports biography. In addition to acknowledgments, there are both a preface and an introduction, four appendices, including a scrapbook of photos of Pep at the International Boxing Hall of Fame in Canastota, New York at various times, and a “Skills Overview,” which explains boxing moves like the feint and jab. There are also 15 pages of Chapter Notes, which give the book a dimension usually found in far more scholastic undertakings. After an extensive bibliography, the book ends with a chockablock index in which only the kitchen sink is missing.
This is a dense, overstuffed book. Willie Pep deserved better.
xxx
Originally published in Ringside Seat.