Livescore
Go to the International Boxing Hall of Fame in Canastota, New York, and you’ll see a cast of the big fella’s fist. There it is, right next to a little notecard identifying it as “one of the largest fists in boxing history,” belonging to Primo Carnera, world heavyweight champion from 1933 to 1934.
Even under the glass it looks huge and menacing, which is of course the point. Carnera is not an inductee in this hall of fame and likely never will be. To the extent he is there at all, it is only as a physical oddity. Maybe that’s fitting, since it is generally how the boxing world treated him when he was alive.
That is to say, it’s how he was treated when he was still fighting and winning. Later he was treated much worse. He was lambasted as a fraud, a shameful mirage, a great big joke that everyone was in on but him.
The sportswriter and novelist Paul Gallico once described him as a “floundering giant” who was never anything more than “a freak and a fourth-rater at prizefighting.”
“There is probably no more scandalous, pitiful, incredible story in all the record of these last mad years than the tale of the living giant, a creature out of the legends of antiquity, who was made into a prizefighter,” Gallico wrote of Carnera in “Farewell To Sport,” his 1937 memoir of his career as a writer for the New York Daily News. “He was taught and trained by a wise, scheming little French boxing manager who had an Oxford University degree, and he was later acquired and developed into the heavyweight champion of the world by a group of American gangsters and mob men; then finally, when his usefulness as a meal ticket was outlived, he was discarded in the most shameful chapter in all boxing.”
On paper, Carnera owns the record for the most knockouts of any heavyweight champ. His 72 wins by KO/TKO put him ahead of George Foreman, Joe Louis and Max Baer. Not that anyone believes that, of course. Not really.
Depending on who you ask, Carnera is either the biggest fraud (literally and figuratively) in boxing history, or a misunderstood man mountain who, because he was too trusting and guileless, was the perfect patsy at a time when boxing was most ripe for underworld plucking.
Looking back now, nearly 100 years after his pro debut, there are some things we may never know about him. Carnera and his handlers are gone. Those who fixed fights or didn’t, those who took dives or just claimed to, they’re all long since dead. But after all the ways boxing used and denigrated Carnera, then hated him for it, maybe the least the sport owes him is some attempt at an honest reckoning.
Birth of ‘The Ambling Alp’
Carnera found his way into the ring via his stomach. That was the way he would explain it years after it was all over. Born in Sequals, Italy, in 1906, the son of a stone-carver, he was always large and always hungry. For both these reasons, he told SPORT magazine in 1948, his childhood was “very miserable.”
He migrated to France as a teenager, working as a bricklayer and a carpenter until he was hired as a strongman for a local carnival. As he later told his children, the only question he asked the carnival-owners was whether, if he accepted their offer of employment, he might finally get enough to eat. When they assured him he would, that it was in fact in their financial interests to see him bulk up, he was sold.
At a time when the average height for an adult man was somewhere around 5-foot-7, Carnera was a towering 6-foot-6, eventually weighing upward of 275 pounds. His carnival act was mostly about flexing his muscles and performing feats of strength, but it also included the occasional wrestling matches and fist-fights. While touring the French coast in 1928, Carnera supposedly knocked out a local tough guy in front of a crowd that included journeyman boxer and trainer Paul Journee, who was impressed enough that he sought out Carnera after the show to suggest that he make a go of it as a boxer.
Right away, from the earliest stages of his foray into prizefighting, Carnera was a commodity exploited by those around him. In his admittedly pro-Carnera biography, “Primo Carnera: The Life and Career of the Heavyweight Boxing Champion,” Joseph S. Page writes that Journee put a veneer of polish on Carnera’s boxing skills and then passed him onto French boxing manager Leon See in exchange for 25% of Carnera’s future earnings.
See brought Carnera up on the European circuit, showing him off all over the continent while also allegedly selling off more chunks of his future earnings to shady underworld figures. By the time See brought Carnera to America, the “Ambling Alp” was already becoming a media sensation. After he arrived in New York in late 1929, the United Press ran a headline that read: “Giant Italian to Tour Country and Take Things Easy For About Six Months.”
Other newspapers included stories about the 8-foot bed that was made just for him in order to accommodate Carnera’s frame during the Atlantic crossing. They told tales about how much he ate during the ocean journey, or about how he supposedly weighed 22 pounds at birth. The stories kept coming, including one possibly apocryphal tale, reprinted in several newspapers, about Carnera pausing during a pleasant walk around New York City to lift a car that had fallen onto its side.
Whether Carnera knew it or not, the mob already had its hooks in him once he touched American soil. This is the part that seems beyond dispute, and also the part that lends itself to further speculation about the legitimacy of his fights.
Owney Madden — often known simply as “Owney the Killer” — was one such figure who became involved in Carnera’s career early on. He had once been called “the clay pigeon of the underworld” due to how many times he’d been shot. After a stint in prison for manslaughter, he’s said to have muscled his way into an ownership share of various clubs and speakeasies in Prohibition-era New York, eventually buying Harlem’s Club Deluxe from former heavyweight champ Jack Johnson.
Another one of Carnera’s handlers was Bill Duffy, a nightclub owner who was sometimes rumored to have been the secret manager of heavyweight champ Jack Dempsey. A fun story about Duffy is that he was once taken in for questioning by New York police who suspected his involvement in the death of Brooklyn nightclub performer. When they got him into the station, the cops noticed a fresh bullet wound in Duffy’s shoulder. Duffy declined to explain how it had gotten there.
Gradually, these figures began to push See out of the picture so they could take full control of Carnera. They installed him at Stillman’s Gym in New York, where he worked with former featherweight champion Abe Attell, who by then was primarily known for his alleged involvement in Arnold Rothstein’s plot to fix the 1919 World Series by bribing members of the so-called Chicago “Black Sox.” (Though a known associate of Rothstein’s, Attell would claim that a different man named Abe Attell was the one involved in the case, and prosecutors eventually dropped the charges against him due to insufficient evidence.)
‘The most costly piece of tapestry ever known’
Whispers of fixed fights had followed Carnera even before a certain criminal element came into his life. A pair of bouts on the other side of the Atlantic against “Young” Stribling — the “schoolboy fighter” who rarely went to school, a fascinating story in his own right — drew suspicion in 1929 after both men took turns winning via disqualification. By the time Carnera debuted in the U.S. at Madison Square Garden in 1930, he’d had almost 20 pro fights and won all but two — both losses via DQ.
Were these fights all fixed? That’s where we get into a thorny conversation about what the term really means.
“There are a number of different ways to fix a fight,” boxing historian Patrick Connor told Uncrowned. “I think a lot of people hear ‘fixed fight’ and think about that scene in Pulp Fiction, like, ‘In the fifth [round], your ass goes down.’ The reality of fight-fixing is more commonly bringing in a fighter who has no chance to win, and putting him against a prospect with a lot of money behind him. That’s an extremely acceptable and routine way of fixing fights that we still accept in boxing to this day.”
Carnera’s career certainly included plenty of that. One early opponent, Feodor Nikolaeff, was on a 10-fight losing streak when he was brought in to face Carnera. He lost via first-round knockout and later claimed he was paid to take a dive. Then again, he also lost his next five fights after fighting Carnera. He was, in boxing terms, purely an “opponent,” always there to add a win to someone else’s record and hardly ever his own.
But the whole point of bringing in a fighter like that is to pad someone else’s record with wins. Why pay him to lose, when lose is all he ever seems to do anyway?
Carnera’s new handlers also weren’t exactly discrete about their plans to build the big man into a money-making attraction. The same United Press story that heralded Carnera’s arrival on American shores quoted his “crafty board of managers” as saying the plan for Carnera was to build him up into “the biggest fistic attraction since Jack Dempsey’s hay-day by touring the country and fighting more or less easy opponents.”
Some of those opponents went down a little too easy. Carnera’s U.S. debut against “Big Boy” Peterson at Madison Square Garden in January 1930 ended just 70 seconds into the first round. The New York Times noted that Peterson “showed no inclination to fight” and went down from a “grazing left hook.” Later that same month Carnera beat Elzear Rioux in Chicago, flooring him six times in just 47 seconds. The Illinois Boxing Commission investigated the fight and cleared Carnera, but revoked Rioux’s license and fined him $1,000. It wasn’t the last time a Carnera win came under regulatory scrutiny.
But, as the boxing historian Connor pointed out, this all came during a transition period for both boxing and American crime, which only contributed to the intrigue and the rumors.
“There was a lot going on socially at the time, with the way that boxing was developing in post-World War I America, in the midst of Prohibition, and with the rise of the mob largely because of Prohibition,” Connor said. “The mob really understood that boxing was this vehicle to make free money basically. And they certainly wouldn’t be the first or last people to view the vacuum of power in the sport, and in the heavyweight division especially, as a financial opportunity. It still is, even now.
“At that time, a lot of big cities, but especially places like New York, were just chock full of licensed fighters. There needed to be a mechanism to control that and it just hadn’t taken form yet. The mob was really able to capitalize on that.”
The whispers continued. Occasionally, investigations by one regulatory body or another even followed. Two months after the Rioux fight, Carnera beat former Chicago Bears offensive lineman George Trafton in Kansas City, in what the Missouri Boxing Commission would later refer to as a “54-second swooning session.”
Then in April, Carnera fought Leon “Bombo” Chevalier in California. The story went that Chevalier was doing too well in the fight, so his cornerman rubbed “red pepper or some other inflammatory substance” into his eyes. When that didn’t stop him, his cornerman threw in the towel, enraging the crowd.
“A bitter demonstration followed,” according to the Associated Press, which reported that fans rushed the ring and attacked the cornerman. Carnera’s purse was withheld by the California commission and only later released due to a lack of evidence, but the bad publicity caused a ripple effect among boxing commissions in other states. Sports writer Grantland Rice speculated that this incident could derail the plan to build Carnera into a top draw, calling that thrown towel “the most costly piece of tapestry ever known.”
Writing after Carnera’s career had finished, Paul Gallico fanned these flames by adding more incendiary stories in his own characteristic style.
“In Newark, New Jersey, a [Black boxer] was visited in his dressing-room before the bout by an unknown party not necessarily connected with Carnera’s management, and was asked to inspect shooting irons, and in Philadelphia another [Black boxer], Ace Clark, was amusing himself readying up Carnera for a knockout — he had already completely closed one of Primo’s eyes — when somebody suggested he look down and see what the stranger beneath his corner was holding under his coat, and what caliber it was.”
Pity for the ‘big, blind ox’
Were these fantastical stories of brazen mobsters overblown, in part because of how fun they might have been to tell, but also because of how they fit neatly into a narrative of a Prohibition-era America overrun by stylish but brutal gangsters with their fingers in every dirty pie? Possibly.
As Connor pointed out, many of these tales of Carnera’s fraudulent career depend on second- or third-hand accounts. Newspaper writers decried fixes, or at least strongly implied something suspicious about a bout seen by only those in attendance, which put pressure on commissions but also solidified a certain narrative in the minds of people who may never have seen Carnera fight in person.
“I think that’s one thing that may have changed now with the proliferation of stuff like YouTube,” Connor said. “Some of the fights that were more popularly decried as fixes, for instance, the (heavyweight title fight against) Jack Sharkey, that’s probably the most famous one — that was one where a lot of people heard it was fixed, or heard Sharkey went down from a punch that never landed. But now you can go watch it for yourself, and that’s not really what you see.”
Born Joseph Paul Zukauskas, the “Boston Gob” Jack Sharkey had come up with his ring name by combing two of his forebears — Jack Dempsey and “Sailor” Tom Sharkey. He won the ABA heavyweight title in 1929, then added the more respected versions of the title with a split-decision over Max Schmeling in 1932.
Sharkey already had one decision victory over Carnera when they met with the heavyweight title on the line in 1933. In the film of the rematch, Carnera towers over Sharkey, who stood just about 6-feet tall. But what you see for the five rounds leading up to the knockout is a mostly competitive fight with bright spots for each man.
Carnera is big and lumbering at times, but doesn’t look like the woefully unskilled fraud he’s often made out to be. He’s a big man who clearly tries to use his reach and size to his advantage, but he also absorbs several strong blows from Sharkey. If the fight was a fix, Sharkey’s repeated right hands to the jaw of Carnera seem like a risky move — especially if you believe there were “shooting irons” at ringside ready to hold him accountable for winning a fight he was paid to lose.
The right uppercut that Carnera finally lands to put Sharkey down was one of several he scored with in the fight. It’s not as if the punch came out of nowhere, thrown by an incompetent phony.
Carnera went on to defend the title twice, including a unanimous decision win over Tommy Loughran in 1934, before dropping the belt to Max Baer via 11th-round knockout later that year. To the extent that his many detractors were ever willing to give him credit for anything, it was for his gutsy performance against Baer — Carnera rose up after being knocked down more than 10 times in the fight, including three knockdowns in the first round. By the end, Carnera was a bloody mess, and Baer was the new heavyweight champ.
“I never liked Carnera before,” a rival fight manager was quoted as telling SPORT magazine’s Jack Scher. “To me, he was nothing but a big, stupid bum. But, by God, I loved and pitied the big, blind ox that night, because I never seen so much guts.”
Baer, of course, is in the International Boxing Hall of Fame. So is Jack Sharkey. So is Tommy Loughran. But Carnera, who owned wins over two of three, is not.
The narrative really solidified against him with the publication of Budd Schulberg’s 1947 novel, “The Harder They Fall.” It was a barely disguised portrait of Carnera’s career, later made into a film starring Humphrey Bogart. It portrays Carnera — named Toro Moreno in the film, hailing from South America rather than Italy — as a giant dope, as much the victim of a con as anyone who ever bought a ticket to see him fight. There’s even a scene where a trainer rubs some foreign substance into the eyes of an opponent who refuses to take a dive, then throws the towel in against his wishes.
The movie also has a role for Baer, who was nearly 50 by the time the film was released. What seems particularly cruel is that the film requires Baer to play a boxer who eagerly takes credit for killing an opponent in the ring, arguing that the Carnera character was mistakenly given “all the glory” for it.
This is a clear reference to the death of Ernie Schaaf, who died of meningitis a few days after suffering a knockout loss to Carnera in 1933. In reality, Baer had put a severe beating on Schaaf before he fought Carnera, but so did several other opponents. Baer had also been involved in another fight that resulted in the death of Frankie Campbell, which haunted Baer for the rest of his life. Baer later wrote that nothing in his life ever affected him more than the death of Campbell. His son recalled how Baer often woke up in the grips of the same nightmare, “muttering, ‘You’re OK! Please be OK!’”
One thing the film got absolutely right about Carnera’s life was the extent to which his many handlers bilked the fighter out of nearly every penny he earned. In his first two and a half years of fighting in North America, it was estimated that Carnera had earned about $900,000 — roughly $19 million in today’s money. Very little of that found its way into his pocket.
When he beat Sharkey in 1933, Carnera’s purse was $17,000 ($363,000 when adjusted for inflation). After his management and trainers made their deductions for “expenses,” Carnera received $360 (about $7,600 in today’s money) for winning the heavyweight title.
The one thing the film certainly did alter for the sake of Hollywood movie magic was the ending. In this fictional version of Carnera’s life, the character played by Bogart takes pity on the poor oaf, eventually taking all the money he’s earned on the fighter and giving it to him before putting him on a plane back to South America and out of reach of the mob figures who wanted to continue squeezing him.
In real life, no one ever helped Carnera nearly this much. The mob kept its hooks in him, kept him fighting, and kept the money flowing to everyone but Carnera. This included a 1935 bout with Joe Louis in Yankee Stadium, where Carnera was badly beaten. Still, he continued to draw crowds, so they continued to make fights for him until 1936, when he was hospitalized after a pair of brutal losses to Leroy Haynes.
“I lay in the hospital bed for five months,” Carnera later told Schaf. “My whole left side was paralyzed. I was in much pain. During all this time, not one of them came to see me. Nobody came to see me. I had no friend in all the world.”
After his boxing days were done, Carnera became a professional wrestler. At the time, this was largely seen as a stain on his legacy, a sad sign of how far he’d fallen. The great irony is that he actually proved to be a great fit for that world — and by all accounts it treated him far better than boxing had.
As a pro wrestler, Carnera later said, he actually got to keep his money. He worked with everyone from Lou Thesz to “Strangler” Lewis. Crowds were still showing up to gawk at his size and strength, but at least now he was in on the ruse. Wrestler turned promoter Joseph “Toots” Mondt traveled with Carnera and often appeared as his manager. He later called Carnera “one of the best friends I’ve ever had in this world,” adding that anyone who couldn’t get along with Carnera “must have a hole in his head.”
But when the film version of “The Harder They Fall” branded Carnera as the biggest fraud in boxing history, it still stung. Carnera filed a $1.5 million lawsuit against Columbia Pictures, alleging that his reputation had suffered irreparable harm as a result of the movie. A judge dismissed the case, using Carnera’s pro wrestling career against him, saying any person “who becomes a celebrity waives the right to privacy and does not regain it by changing his profession from boxer to wrestler.”
Carnera died in 1967, due to complications from liver disease and diabetes. His children recalled that in his later years, Carnera admitted that even he wondered about the legitimacy of many of his fights. He’d thought they were on the level at the time, but the prevalence of people insisting otherwise had made him doubt it.
There was one, however, that he still believed he’d really won. It was the victory over Sharkey, the fight that made him heavyweight champion. That couldn’t have been fixed, according to Carnera.
“It was too important,” he said.
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