“Nardo: Memoirs of a Boxing Champion” by Tony DeMarco
Greater Boston has made significant contributions to the annals of the sweet science. John L. Sullivan, the “Boston Strong Boy,’’ was the first modern era heavyweight champion. Rocky Marciano hailed from Brockton, and then there was “The Flame and Fury of Fleet Street,’’ Tony DeMarco.
“Nardo: Memoir of a Boxing Champion’’ recounts DeMarco’s professional career as he battles his way from the streets of a blue-collar Boston immigrant neighborhood to the top of the boxing world and fleshes out a personal life that couples abundant friends, family, and devastating tragedy.
The future champ was born Leonardo Liotta in 1932. As a young boy growing up in the North End, he worked in his father’s thriving shoe repair shop. Playing with his many pals, Leonardo would often hear his mama, Giacomina, bellow from the window of their first floor apartment, “Naaardo. Naaardo.’’ Nardo started boxing at 12 and soon showed signs of being a fistic prodigy. At 15, he was ready to compete but three years too young to procure an amateur license.
Creative and always blessed with a plentitude of buddies, he borrowed a copy of his friend Tony “Lobo’’ DeMarco’s birth certificate, and Tony DeMarco, the future boxing hall of famer, was born. Now in his early 80s, the “Boston Bomber’’ recalls, “Things got a bit more confusing when, several months later, Lobo decided that he wanted to box as an amateur. . . . Lobo spoke with some of the guys at the corner and ended up borrowing the name of his friend, Michael Termine.’’
DeMarco turned pro at 16 and developed a slash-and-burn style that took full advantage of his unquenchable will and pulverizing left hook. Though DeMarco seldom describes how the wheels were turning when the leather was flying, his chronicle is a case study in the way boxing careers are cobbled together in fits and starts, with inevitable episodes of quitting and beginning anew. Here and there, mobsters flit through the text to settle contract disputes and disappear. But the stars aligned on April Fools Day in 1955 when the 2-1 underdog DeMarco derailed the masterful Johnny Saxton and became undisputed welterweight champion of the world.
In contrast to pugilists of the present age, DeMarco entered the ring four to five times a year, beating the likes of Kid Gavilan, Gaspar Ortega, Chico Vejar, and Don Jordan. But like Ali and Frazier, DeMarco’s fame is coupled with another. He is perhaps best known for his hammer and tong battles with Carmen Basilio.
In June of 1955, DeMarco defended his title against number one contender, Basilio, a gritty onion farmer from upstate New York. DeMarco went down in defeat in the 12th round and the two men, who would become lifelong friends, were back trying to decapitate one another in November.
In the second tilt, DeMarco was piling up points and winning, but Basilio’s relentless body punching finally sapped his strength, and DeMarco was again stopped in the 12th stanza. The fury-filled, back-and-forth contest was declared the “fight of the year’’ by the Ring magazine and one of the greatest bouts of the 20th century by the Boxing Hall of Fame. Angelo Dundee, who worked the corner for Basilio (and later for Sugar Ray Leonard and Muhammad Ali), effused, “Tony was a blessing to boxing. A great guy and an extremely exciting fighter. He could just paralyze you with his left hook.’’
DeMarco packed up his boxing gear in 1962 with a record of 58-12-1. With his throng of passionate followers, DeMarco was to boxing at the Boston Garden what the Babe was to Yankee Stadium.
The heaviest blows that DeMarco ever absorbed came after the final bell of his career. He lost his son Vincent when he was hit by a car on Father’s Day in 1975 and years later his daughter Sylvia, to leukemia.
I recently pressed the great Roy Jones as to what lessons he had garnered in the ring. Like most boxers, Jones answered in a flash, “In boxing you have to get up when you are knocked down. It is the same with life. Boxing teaches you how to get up.’’
Staggered by sorrow, there was a period in which DeMarco sought forgetfulness in the bottle but as always, he got off the deck. The champ’s prose does not carry the punch of his vaunted left hook but this honest and humble memoir makes clear that DeMarco has been as resilient in life as he was under the lights of the Garden – which was packed to the rafters whenever “The Flame and Fury of Fleet Street’’ bounced through the ropes.
Try BostonGlobe.com today and get two weeks FREE. A professor at St. Olaf College, Gordon Marino is a boxing trainer and covers the ring beat for the Wall Street Journal. He can be reached at marino@stolaf.edu, and you can follow him on Twitter @GordonMarino.