Video Courtesy: Jack Slack
May-December romance usually refers to, uh, a mature man involved with a much younger woman. Think 59-year-old Cary Grant wooing and winning 24-year-old Audrey Hepburn in 1963’s “Charade.” But, hey, he was Cary Grant. If any old coot was going to get the girl by the time the final credits rolled, it was the suave guy whose birth name was Archibald Leach.
“In my view he was the greatest light heavyweight in the history of boxing and one of the greatest boxers in any division,” another former light heavyweight champion, Jose Torres, said upon the occasion of Moore’s death on Dec. 9, 1998, in his adopted hometown of San Diego. “What he accomplished after he was 30 years of age was unbelievable. He became greater and greater the older he got.”
So did the stories about “The Old Mongoose,” which must sound like the tallest of tall tales to the uninitiated but, for the most part, are verifiably true. Regardless of when and where infant Archibald Lee Wright arrived on the scene—Moore insisted it was on Dec. 13, 1916, in Collinsville, Ill.; his mother, Lorena Wright, said it was actually Dec. 13, 1913, in Benoit, Miss., an assertion which she apparently could back up with a birth certificate—he led as eventful and colorful a life as any fighter, including his onetime protégé Muhammad Ali. By the time he took the eternal 10-count a few days before his 85th (or 82nd) birthday, Moore had set records for most knockouts in a career (131) and the longest reign of any light heavyweight champion (9 years, 52 days), along the way stamping himself as the kind of character who was more interesting in real life than any screenwriter’s fictional creation. Archie (185-23-10) was a four-decade source of memorable quotes (his final bout was a third-round stoppage of Mike DiBiase on March 15, 1963) as well as of spectacular knockouts, authoring each with an aplomb that would make him a legend not only in his own time but for all time.
Asked about the apparent discrepancy in the two listings of his age, Moore rubbed his chin and remarked, “I have given this a lot of thought and have decided I must have been three years old when I was born.” Of his 27-year boxing journey, he said his longevity owed to the abstinence of his “being like the drunk in the bar who wants just one more for the road.”
One of Moore’s better stories—and this one admittedly sounds a bit dubious—involved his claim that he had a secret weight-reducing formula obtained from Australian aborigines when he was boxing there in 1940, which involved the distilled bark of eucalyptus trees. Always conscious of his appearance, in an out of the ring, he frequently showed up even for weigh-ins dressed to the nines in a tuxedo and black homburg while jauntily carrying a silver-tipped walking stick.
But the path from obscurity to celebrity was long, hard and painful. Moore was obliged to toil for years on what was known as the “Chittlin Circuit” because he refused to take a dive or allow himself to be exploited during a time of blatant racial inequality. He had to fight frequently, most often for short money, to make ends meet for his family (which eventually would include eight children) and along the way he had to overcome any number of ailments – acute appendicitis, organic heart disorder, a severed tendon in his wrist, a perforated ulcer that necessitated surgery – that would have slowed down or even driven out a lesser man.
Finally, after 17 years as a pro, Moore got his shot at the light heavyweight title on Dec. 17, 1952, and he made the most of it by outpointing champion Joey Maxim over 15 rounds in St. Louis. Well … he made the most of it every way except financially; after a conga line of promoters, managers and assorted hangers-on took their cuts of his purse, the new champ came away with all of $800.
As a condition for getting his long-awaited bid for the 175-pound crown, Moore had had to contractually agree to Doc Kearns, who managed Maxim and, before him, Jack Dempsey, becoming his manager, the eighth of his career. To his credit, or maybe not, Kearns put Moore on an insanely busy schedule with 43 fights taking place over the next six years. Archie won all but two of those, with 25 knockout victories, his only two losses coming in failed attempts to win a prize he’d always dreamed of: the heavyweight championship of the world.
His first such bid came against undefeated and hard-hitting champ Rocky Marciano on Sept. 21, 1955, before an audience of 61,574 in Yankee Stadium. Moore floored The Rock with a short right hand in the second round, but referee Harry Kessler apparently forgot that the standing-eight count had been waived. Kessler’s enforcement of a rule that was not in effect gave Marciano six precious seconds to recover against one of boxing’s most accomplished finishers. It is a matter of conjecture whether that momentary reprieve cost Moore—he went to his grave believing he would have won had that not been the case—and Marciano went on to floor Moore five times on the way to scoring a ninth-round knockout.
Following Marciano’s retirement, Moore got a shot at the vacant heavyweight title, but he was knocked out in five rounds by 21-year-old Floyd Patterson on Nov. 30, 1956, in Chicago Stadium. And although it wasn’t for a championship, Archie was in another May-December heavyweight bout with future heavyweight king, 20-year-old Cassius Clay, on Nov. 15, 1962, in the Los Angeles Sports Arena. After pronouncing that “Moore will go in four,” Clay, still 2½ years from changing his name to Muhammad Ali, did just that in stopping the aging icon in the fourth round.
Ironically, Moore had briefly served as Clay’s trainer, an association that was destined not to last because Archie had attempted to get his youthful charge to employ Moore’s signature “peek-a-boo” defense, with his arms crossed in front of him, which Moore much later taught to George Foreman. It also irked Clay, who had his own style and was determined not to change it, that Moore was insisting that he wash dishes and help clean gym floors.
As a light heavyweight, though, Moore was pure gold, by almost every account as good or better than the likes of such legendary 175-pounders as Ezzard Charles, Billy Conn, Gene Tunney, Tommy Loughran, Charley Burley, Sam Langford, Bob Foster, Michael Spinks and Roy Jones Jr. To their credit, Charles (who was 3-0 against Moore), Tunney, Spinks and Jones all were able to win heavyweight titles.
But back to Moore’s special place in the final month of the calendar year. Not only did he arrive in and leave this Earth in December, but he had a 25-bout winning streak snapped by Harold Johnson on Dec. 10, 1951, and, in perhaps his most memorable bout, roared back from the brink of defeat to put a brawling, 29-year-old French-Canadian fisherman named Yvon Durelle down and out in 11 rounds on Dec. 10, 1958, in Montreal.
Before a boisterous, pro-Durelle crowd, Moore was knocked down three times in the first round, and he was battered to the canvas again in the fourth. But The Old Mongoose—somewhere along the line, the “Old” Part had been added—survived Durelle’s early onslaught and took control to such an extent that he even led on all three official scorecards at the time of the knockout. Few rallies in the annals of the fight game have been as thrilling, or as celebrated.
When it came to pulling off the May-December thing on the silver screen, nobody did it better than Cary Grant. In the ring, despite the age-defying success of Foreman and Bernard Hopkins, it can be argued that nobody did it quite like Archie Moore.
Bernard Fernandez, a five-term president of the Boxing Writers Association of America, received the Nat Fleischer Award from the BWAA in April 1999 for lifetime achievement and was inducted into the Pennsylvania Boxing Hall of Fame in 2005, as well as the New Jersey Boxing Hall of Fame in 2013. The New Orleans-born sports writer has worked in the industry since 1969 and pens a weekly column on the Sweet Science for Sherdog.com.