Canadian boxing icon George Chuvalo, famous for his two fights with Ali, dies at 89 | globalnews.ca

George Chuvalo, a stubborn heavyweight who never took to the canvas despite fighting the best boxers in the world, has died.

Sally’s Boxing Gym in Toronto, where Chuvalo trained throughout his career, confirmed his death in a social media post Saturday. The gym reported that Chuvalo died on his 89th birthday.

“Today Sully lost a piece of his history,” the gym said.

Ontario Premier Doug Ford also paid tribute to Chuvalo, calling him “a heavyweight boxing legend, a family friend and a Canadian icon.”

“My thoughts are with all of George’s family and loved ones as we mourn his passing,” Ford said in a social media post.

Chuvalo became the Canadian amateur champion at age 17, held the national professional title for nearly 20 years, and was ranked second in the world.

He has a professional record of 73-18-2 with 64 knockouts in a professional career that spanned from 1956 to 1978.

His career was defined by two mega-fights with Muhammad Ali: in 1966 at Maple Leaf Gardens in Toronto and in 1972 at the Pacific Coliseum in Vancouver, in which Chuvalo earned recognition for standing toe-to-toe with the most gifted and charismatic boxer of the era.

“When people think of me, they think of me fighting Muhammad,” Chuvalo said. “But I had about 100 fights.”

Known for having one of the best chins in boxing, Chuvalo noted that to rack up 73 wins and rank among the top 10 in the world during the era of heavyweight greats like Ali, Joe Frazier and George Foreman requires more than the ability to absorb punches.

Chuvalo proudly noted that he has more knockouts than Joe Louis and Jack Dempsey, and also exceeds the total number of fights held by Ali, Frazier, Rocky Marciano and Mike Tyson.

Before retiring in 1978, Chuvalo wrote in his 2013 autobiography, Chuvalo: A Fighter’s Life: The Story of Boxing’s Last Gladiator: “I will be remembered as the guy who fought the best of his time, beat a lot of them and lost to a few others.”

He was never knocked down as a professional.

“At least not in the ring,” he says. “Outside the ropes it was a different story.”

Chuvalo lost three sons and his first wife, Lynn, to drugs and suicide.

“If you added up all the hits I’ve ever received and then multiplied the sum by 10,000, it would not equal the pain of losing three sons and a wife to drugs and suicide,” he wrote.

As for his fights with Ali, the American legend made most opponents look slow and predictable, but he was unable to beat Chuvalo even though the stocky fighter who liked to get in close and work the body had only 17 days to prepare.

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“There was a bull-bumblebee contest at Maple Leaf Gardens last night,” Toronto Star columnist Milt Dunnell wrote at the time. Dunnell added: “The bull came out of it with a face like a bucket of balls on a golf course.”

Ali went the full 15 rounds for the first time and had to go to hospital due to internal bleeding, and Chuvalo said: “I went dancing with my wife.”

When it came to payday, Chuvalo said he ended up with $12,500 left because manager Irving Ungerman took the lion’s share of the $49,000 purse after expenses.

Six years later, Chuvalo would also lose to Ali in a rematch by a 12-round decision.

Despite the losses, Ali’s fights made Chuvalo a star in Canada and the boxing world as a tough and ruthless underdog.

“An icon is the only way I can describe George Chuvalo,” said Lennox Lewis, a Canadian boxing star of another generation.

“He gave everything he had and more,” says Chuvalo’s biography included in the Canadian Sports Hall of Fame. “George Chuvalo was an outstanding fighter and athlete, both in and out of the boxing ring.”

Chuvalo was the son of Croatian immigrants.

His mother worked in Toronto as a chicken plucker for Royce Poultry Packers, owned by Ungerman’s father, Chuvalo’s future manager. His father was a cattle skinner for Canada Packers.

George said he was drawn to boxing as a child after viewing The Ring magazine, known as the “Bible of Boxing.” He persuaded his mother to buy him boxing gloves, which she eventually bought at Eaton’s department store.

He found a local church that offered boxing instruction and had his first organized fight at age 10, an exhibition fight that was declared a draw. He eventually joined a boxing club and by age 15 was a 198-pound heavyweight.

As an amateur, he fought 19 times, losing only once. In May 1995, he knocked out Peter Piper in Regina to win the Canadian amateur title.

Chuvalo was selected to represent Canada at the 1956 Olympics in Melbourne, but turned professional instead.

He became a five-time Canadian heavyweight champion while the title was still in existence and held it for most of his 20-year professional career.

He lost a World Boxing Association title fight to Ernie Terrell in 1965, a fight he always believed was organized by mobsters.

During this time, he competed frequently at Madison Square Garden, going 3-6 against top boxers such as Frazier, Foreman, Floyd Patterson and Buster Mathis. The Ring named his bloody 1965 bout with Patterson the fight of the year.

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He hoped to challenge for the Commonwealth title, but was unable to convince English champion Henry Cooper to fight him. He felt that the Canadian Boxing Federation had also let him down by not insisting that Cooper meet him.

His last fight was a TKO victory over George Jerome, a logging camp cook from Vancouver who was Canada’s No. 1 contender, in December 1978 at St. Lawrence Market in Toronto to retain the Canadian title. Chuvalo was 41 years old and earned only $7,500 for the fight.

Bloody Jerome lasted two rounds before the ring doctor intervened.

Outside the ring, Chuvalo was a large, friendly man who loved to tell stories and jokes. But his painful moments were almost beyond imagination.

In 1985, his son Jesse, who began taking painkillers after an accident and developed an addiction, committed suicide. In 1993, another son, Georgie Lee, died of a drug overdose. Four days later, his wife was found dead with a suicide note.

Then, in 1996, his son Stephen was found dead in a hotel room with a needle in his arm.

“After Stephen died, I could barely function,” Chuvalo wrote in Toronto Life magazine in 2013. “Every time I went to bed in the dark, I felt like I was suffocating.

“I blamed myself for my sons’ deaths—for letting them drop out of school, for not sending them to rehab sooner.”

He remarried Joan O’Hara and began visiting schools across Canada to spread anti-drug messages. He left behind two children and said he turned to “mush” whenever he saw his grandchildren.

Chuvalo, inducted into the Canadian Sports Hall of Fame in 1990 and the World Boxing Hall of Fame in 1997, was awarded the Order of Canada in 1998.

Canada added him to its Walk of Fame in 2005.

A statue of Chuvalo was installed in his family’s ancestral home in Ljubuski, Bosnia and Herzegovina, in 2011.

Some 24 years after his induction into Canada’s Sports Hall of Fame, Chuvalo took part in a new conference at the Mattamy Athletic Centre, the site of the old Gardens, to honor the 2014 inductees – and the call he answered 15 times against Ali some 48 years ago.

Chuvalo, then 77, rang the bell, gave the crowd a thumbs up and then shadowboxed.

“I’m reminded of it almost every day of the week,” he said of his first fight with Ali. “I’m very, very proud to be Canadian.”

The bell was presented to the Hall of Fame by Michael Shillolo, whose father, Frank Shillolo, was formerly an official messenger for the Ontario Athletics Commission.