From the Prize Ring to the Pulpit

The fight card that Gore thought Dad could possibly fill was not an important fight; it was a curtain-raiser, better known as a four-round preliminary. He simply wanted to see if Dad could actually fight and to size up his physical shape. After motioning for one of the fighters to come over and box with Dad for a few minutes, Gore gave the fighter instructions not to hit very hard. Without knowing that these instructions had been given to his opponent, when the sixteen-ounce gloves were placed on Dad’s hands, he went out and gave it all he had for about three minutes, and then time was called.

To Dad’s advantage, it was enough time for Gore to see that Dad could handle being in the ring. He asked if Dad would like to fight in the curtain-raiser at the Coliseum in Coral Gables on that Thursday evening. Amazingly, Dad had never seen a professional boxing match but was so excited about being asked that he agreed to box in the opening match.

Thursday night arrived. Since this was the curtain-raiser, he went into the match without a clue as to what to expect or how he should conduct himself in the ring. The gymnasium manager, suspecting that Dad knew very little about boxing, advised him to do exactly what his second told him to do—a second is the man in the corner who advises the fighter tactically, gives him a pep talk, and attends to his wounds throughout the fight.

The referee called Dad and his opponent to the center of the ring to give instructions. Too nervous to comprehend what was being said, Dad went back to his corner totally dismayed and not really knowing what to expect. Billy Kelly, an up-and-coming young welterweight in his own ranks and Dad’s second for the fight, told him to keep his hands up high and go out there and fight his best. He intended that Dad should keep his hands a little above his shoulders, but Dad did not know what that meant. Seasoned fighters know that a boxer dropping his hands to his sides and not keeping his hands up is one of the biggest mistakes that can be made in the ring. The good news was that Dad followed Kelly’s instructions—he held up his hands. The bad news was that he held his hands so high he left himself exposed. Excited, nervous, and confused as what to do next, he just kept dancing around with his hands held high.

You can only imagine what took place in that ring. Dad took quite a beating in the first round without landing a single blow on his opponent. By the time he went to his corner to wait for the second bell, the skin was peeled off his nose, his lips and face had begun swelling, and blood poured from his ears. The seconds started talking to one another, “This fighter doesn’t know what to do when you tell him what to do. There’s no use. He’ll never make it through four rounds.” While they were cleaning him up, they told him to just go back out, fight his best, and remember to keep his hands up. It’s still a mystery to me why they never changed his strategy or explained to him what he was doing wrong.

The second round began, and, once again, Dad did as he had been instructed. He started dancing around with his hands held high, leaving him exposed once again. What happened next is something we might expect to see today on a sports channel replay for an unbelievable fight. Totally bewildered, Dad’s opponent stopped dead in his tracks, dropped his hands to his side, stuck out his chin, and spit right in Dad’s face. Later in life, when Dad retold this story, he said, “I didn’t know the right way to hit, but I sure knew the wrong way.” In a flash and totally enraged by the insult, he swung into action and hit his opponent in the chin with, as it was called in his hometown in Carolina, “a cornfield haymaker.”