I began doing private autograph signing sessions in the mid-1980s during the advent of the “Baseball Card Shows”. To those of us who remember those shows, along with the various dealers selling cards and memorabilia, there were often at least a few former baseball or football players signing autographs to draw fans who might remember them. Pricing ranged from free to several dollars. The “Big Three” as they were known on the card show circuit in those days were Mickey Mantle, Ted Willams, and Joe DiMaggio. Their signatures usually tipped the scales at a whopping $25 per ticket.
There were usually lines, sometimes long ones. Although card collecting was extremely popular in those days, autograph collecting less so.
I soon began to realize, though, that whoever the signing guest or guests that were at the show, the interest began to eclipse or at least equal the interest in what the vendors were selling on the show floor.
More importantly, the autograph was signed in front of you so questions of authenticity were eliminated and you got to shake hands, have a short conversation and if you were lucky even have your picture taken with one of these icons from your childhood.
There were some former baseball players that due to their age or other limitations or choices were rarely if ever-present at these shows. So the thought occurred to me that if the celebrity could not come to the show I’d bring the show to them. While I probably was not the first person to think of it, I will take credit for likely having done more private signings from the mid-1980s through the following decade and a half than anyone else except maybe Bill Corcoran. I completed over 150 private autograph sessions during that span.
The concept was simple. I’d contact the athlete directly by phone or mail, agree on a price for a specific number of items to be signed, travel to the signing, and most important ALL items would be signed in front of me. I’d then take a photograph to document the encounter and sell the signed items along with a certificate of authenticity from Jim Stinson Sports that included the exact date the item was signed and a photograph from the signing incorporated into the COA. My early signings included Baseball Hall of Fame members Bill Terry, Johnny Mize, and Ray Dandridge and non-hall of Famers but then notorious non-signers like Cesar Cedeno, Paul Casanova, Pedro Ramos Mike Cuellar and more.
In 1988 I was saddened to read of the death of one of the greatest boxers of all time. Henry Armstrong who was so good he once held world championships in three different weight divisions AT THE SAME TIME and nearly won the fourth title when he lost a controversial decision.
In 1989 the boxer that has been called “pound for pound the greatest boxer of all time, Sugar Ray Robinson, passed away. Even the great heavyweight Jack Dempsey had died only a few years prior in 1983. I began to realize that the hobby had virtually forgotten these boxing legends of the past who in the 1930s through the 1960s were every bit as popular and well known as their baseball counterparts and certainly were not being invited by promoters as guests to baseball card shows. I wish I had thought of it sooner and had a chance to meet Henry Armstrong and Robinson or Dempsey. Many boxing legends were still alive, though, and I thought it was worth a try to move my private signings in that direction.
I was living in North Central Florida then. It was 1990 and it began with a phone call to the fabled “5th Street Gym” in Miami, where Beau Jack was rumored to be a trainer. One of the most popular fighters of the 1940s, Jack had held the lightweight championship twice during that span and had headlined Madison Square Garden an amazing 21 times (a record that still stands). He had drifted into obscurity after his fighting career even taking a job shining shoes at the Fontainebleau Hotel in Miami Beach. In addition, I had heard that the great welterweight champion Kid Gavilan, one of the most popular television fighters of the 1950s, was still alive and living in Miami.
It was worth a try.
A gruff, raspy voice answered the phone. “Beau Jack” was all he said. I asked if he was THE Beau Jack. He chuckled a little and modestly asked “is there another one?”
I told him of my intentions and told him I’d be happy to come to the gym to acquire the autographs. He seemed to be a bit confused that someone would actually pay him to sign but we agreed and set a date for our meeting. I then asked him if he knew the whereabouts of Kid Gavilan and he confirmed that Gavilan was a regular visitor to the gym. He confirmed that he would relay the conditions of the signing to Gavilan and not to worry as he said he was sure he’d agree.
I then began preparing for what would become just the first of many “Boxing Legends” signings.
After securing high-quality glossy photos of Beau Jack and Kid Gavilan and a couple of large cases of boxing gloves from Everlast, I placed an ad in Sports Collectors Digest inviting collectors who had items they wanted signed to send them in and offered advance orders for signed items I would (hopefully) soon be selling. I was pleasantly surprised at the advance sales and the amount of mail-in items I received which included rare fight programs, posters and tickets to many of each former fighter’s bouts. I was soon on my way to the 5th Street Gym in Miami.
The gym itself was a boxing institution. First opened in 1950, the original gym was torn down in 1993. A new 5th Street Gym would eventually be rebuilt on the same site.
The world champions and celebrity icons who passed through the doors of the original gym was an amazing who’s who and included Frank Sinatra, Jackie Gleason, Burt Lancaster and even the Beatles. It is probably best remembered however as the gym where a young Muhammad Ali (then Cassius Clay) arrived from Louisville and under the tutelage of Hall of Fame trainer Angelo Dundee would defeat Sonny Liston to become heavyweight champion of the world.
When I first opened the door and ascended the flight of stairs leading to the gym it felt like I was walking into a scene from a 1950’s black and white boxing film. The smell of sweat and age was prevalent. At the top of the stairs, a boxing ring was in the center of the room and rows of old bleacher style chairs faced the ring. No doubt once occupied by cigar-smoking reporters and fans who had come to witness the sparring sessions from long ago, they were empty that day except for a lone man in a suit with a notebook. I was to find out later that he was a United Press reporter there to do an interview with Beau Jack that would soon run nationally.
Beau Jack, whose real name was Sidney Walker, was in a corner of the gym holding the heavy bag as a young boxer was giving it a workout. He nodded in my direction and said he was almost done and would be with me in a few minutes. He then moved to the chin-up bar and as the three of four boxers in the gym and the man in the suit looked on, the 70-year-old former champ showed the young boxers the correct way to do a pull-up.
I watched in amazement as he ever so slowly lifted his body off the floor and then extended his legs horizontally at the same time and held that position as he slowly and effortlessly did chin up after chin up. One of the young boxers nudged me smiled and whispered “We call that the Beau Jack pull up.” I watched in awe as he lifted off at least 20 of them before returning to the ground and told the young men “That’s how you do a pull up.”
Now I’m no Jack LaLanne but that is TOUGH to do. He then waved me in the direction of a small office in the front of the gym where we were to do the signing. After a brief introduction, I told him how impressed I was with his exhibition as I watched the others struggle to duplicate it. “I’m not in the same shape I used to be,” he said with a hint of a smile. “But I can still beat any 70 year old in the world.”
Since the man in the suit was there before I was, waiting to speak to him I asked if he wanted to talk to him first. “You’re paying me he’s not. He can wait,” he said as he ushered me into the office. Kid Gavilan, who I expected to see at the gym was conspicuously absent.
Jack began signing the items I had brought and asked him about Gavilan. “I haven’t seen him in weeks,” he said without looking up. Inside I began to slowly start to panic I had over $1,000 worth of unsigned Kid Gavilan material in my car.
Unlike many signings I had done, Beau never looked up as we conversed about his boxing career, He was proud of the fact that as a lightweight he had headlined Madison Square Garden 21 times, something unheard of for a boxer who was not a heavyweight.
His boxing style was exciting and action-packed. He was a relentless and powerful fighter and a fan favorite. “I always wanted the crowd to see a great fight,” he said “I always gave my best, the boxers today have long rests between fights. When I was boxing we never stopped training because as soon as one fight was over we were training for the next one. I was always in the gym so I was always in shape I never wanted anyone to leave a Beau Jack fight disappointed. I knew that if they paid for a ticket they deserved to see a good fight and I did more than anything to make sure they did.”
We talked about his job as a trainer at the gym. “I try to tell these kids that when they get in the ring, it’s just them and the other guy, so they need to listen to what I tell them and what I show them before the fight and be in the best shape possible. That’s my job. The thing that makes me feel bad is when I’m training a young man that I can see is going to be a good fighter he listens to instructions, he trains hard and I have high hopes, not for me but for him, and then one day he just stops showing up and I see him on the corner somewhere hanging out with his buddies doing nothing. It breaks my heart to see a kid that had a chance to be a champion and just threw it all away for nothing.”
The conversation then turned to how he got his start in boxing. Born Sidney Walker in Waynesboro Georgia he moved to Augusta to live with his grandmother who gave him the nickname “Beau Jack.” During the depression he worked the farm fields in the day time and shined shoes at night.
His big break came when he went to work at “Augusta National Golf Club” as a caddie for famed golfer Bobby Jones and other members. “Bobby Jones was a fine man,” he told me “He was always a gentleman and treated me well. He never talked down to me because I was a caddie.” To make extra money, Jack would engage in what was then called “Battle Royales” which consisted of five to ten young man– usually black and always poor– fighting each other blindfolded until there was only one man standing.
“Fighting one man was tough but it was nothing compared to fighting ten and being blindfolded,” he told me. “But I almost always won. I would fight out of a crouch to avoid the other punches and then fight upright and land some of my own.” His success in these matches prompted Bobby Jones and other club members to fund his career as a professional boxer. The rest, as they say, is history.
After he finished signing the items I had brought, he asked if I wanted to see Muhammad Ali’s dressing room. He gave me a short tour of the gym. “Mike Tyson was just here a few weeks ago.” I knew that Tyson a fan of the old-time boxers would often visit them and discretely and anonymously slip a few hundred dollars into their pockets.
The boxers had left the gym and the writer in the suit was still waiting patiently to interview the former lightweight champ. “Where was Gavilan?” I asked. Beau Jack picked up the phone, had a short conversation, and told me a young man that trained at the gym was on his way and would take me to where he thought Gavilan might be.
This would not be my last meeting with Beau Jack. I would do a second signing with him shortly before he died in 2000 and after he was inducted into the Boxing Hall of Fame. That signing would include Trevor Berbick, a champion heavyweight better remembered as the only boxer to fight both Muhammad Ali and Mike Tyson.
A young man in dreadlocks that Jack had called then showed up and we drove for about 30 minutes finally arriving at another gym in Miami. He told me that was the gym where Roberto Duran trained. He asked me to wait as he ran into the gym and came back with a fighter who jumped into the car and with very little conversation, began to give me driving directions.
The Miami neighborhoods as we drove through began to get more and more sketchy. “You don’t want to drive around here at night,” said the guy with the dreadlocks.
We finally arrived at a graffiti-covered project. About half a dozen residents lingered by the entrance. I was advised it was a good idea to give one of them $20 to watch the car as I gathered up my Kid Gavilan items. We took an elevator which had a strong smell of urine. Arriving at the designated floor, we walked down a long corridor until finally the guy we had picked up at the gym knocked on one of the doors. I heard movement inside and someone stuck their head out of the door. IT WAS HIM!
I was both awed and relieved at the same time. This was the man that I had seen so many times on old black and white film and had read and heard countless stories about. Throughout his long career, Kid Gavilan (born Gerardo Gonzalez in Cuba) had never been knocked out. He had fought everyone that was anyone during his boxing career that spanned two decades from 1943-1958 including former champions and Boxing Hall of Famers Sugar Ray Robinson, Carmen Basilio, Ike Williams, Beau Jack, Johnny Bratton, Bobo Olson and Johnny Saxton. He was welterweight champion of the world from 1951-1954 and would that same year become an inaugural inductee to the Hall of Fame.
He politely let the three of us into his small, sparsely furnished apartment but seemed curious about why we were there. It was clear that Beau Jack had not spoken to him since my initial phone call to the 5th Street Gym. I explained as best I could but he didn’t seem to understand. When he realized I was going to pay him, a broad smile spread across his face. Although he had aged, that face was still instantly recognizable and showed little ring wear as proof that he had punched his way through 15 years in the squared circle. As I laid out the material I had brought for him to sign he expressed genuine interest in the unique items like the fight posters and programs. In addition to my normal glossies, I had about two dozen vintage original one of a kind wire photos.
He looked at them over and over as if he was taking a tour of another life. One photo in particular he looked at over and over. It was a close-up photo of his face that the photographer had caught at the exact moment Sugar Ray Robinson had landed one of his best punches. A hard right that would have knocked any man out at best or ended their boxing career at worst.
His face in the photo was unrecognizable and contorted to gargoyle-like features. He lingered on the photo before signing it I wondered why and thought maybe the photo offended him. His reaction was the opposite. He smiled and held it in the air. “I could take a punch couldn’t I?” I realized that if that punch wasn’t enough to knock him out, none were.
He took great pleasure and pride in describing the action that was depicted in the various wire service photos I had brought. He was cordial, polite, and soft-spoken. From time to time he would stop signing and tell a boxing story or anecdote from what to him upon reflection seemed to have happened hundreds of years ago.
A smile came easy to him but be became somber when we talked about Gil Turner. Turner is one of those boxers that time has forgotten but when he first turned professional he was so impressive that boxing experts were calling him the next Sugar Ray Robinson. He was not just beating everyone he fought, the young Gil Turner was beating them impressively until in an ill-fated match in 1952 against Gavilan for the welterweight championship in Turner’s hometown of Philadelphia. The young boxer was only 21 years old and not yet ready for a fighter of Gavilan’s caliber.
In what would be an action packed match, Turner started well, landing solid punches on the ever-patient veteran champion and piling up an early lead on the ringside judges’ scorecards. Midway through the fight, Gavilan showed his brilliance and it became clear Gil Turner had been overmatched. After a solid pummeling in the later rounds, he was left hanging helpless on the ropes the victim of an 11th round TKO. Gavilan was quoted as saying after the fight, “I knew I had him about the 10th round, but he was tougher than I thought he was. He’s a good boy”.
Gil Turner never fully recovered from the savage beating and was not the same afterward. An otherwise promising career was over and he would eventually vanish into the obscurity of boxing lore.
When the signing was finished Gavilan and I posed for photos. I’ll never forget one in particular. One man who had come to the apartment agreed to take a photo of Gavilan and I, squared off in a boxing post, facing each other. The champ who had been smiling only a moment earlier suddenly squared off with me in a boxing stance and became very, very serious with his fists up and an angry scowl on his face. I knew then how his opponents must have felt when climbing into the ring to face that same angry scowl from a young Kid Gavilan in his prime.
It was getting dark and I remembered the earlier advice I had been given about not hanging around that neighborhood too long at night. When I got downstairs my car was still intact as the same young man I had asked to watch my car earlier had pulled up a chair next to it and was smoking a cigarette. Little was I to know that these signings would be the beginning of a sojourn that would literally take me around the world through several countries and well over one hundred private signings.
It would not be my last meeting with Gavilan either. We remained in touch afterward and he would always ask me when we were going to do another signing. I could never say no to him because he was always cordial and I knew he needed the money and I figured sooner or later all of the photos would sell (they did). The last time I saw him was when an autograph show promoter had asked me if I could contact some famous boxers as signing guests at the shows (yes, the hobby was finally getting around to boxers as guests). I brought in Kid Gavilan and the former lightweight champion Ray “Boom Boom” Mancini.
The highlight of the event to me was seeing the autograph lines for their autographs that I remembered seeing years earlier for baseball players as signing guests.
That evening I had dinner with “The Kid” and Ray and it made me smile to see the younger Mancini, whose father had been a top-rated boxer in the same era as Gavilanengaged in conversation about the highlights of their careers and even exchanging autographs. Kid Gavilan passed away only a few years later in 2003.
In addition to telling some great stories, long-time autograph dealer Jim Stinson offers vintage sports autographs for sale via his email list. You can follow him on Facebook too.
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