From Ali to the Bayonne Bleeder: a brief history of heavyweight boxing’s battle scars

LSuppose you go ahead and get hit in the head. Blood flows from a wound above one of your eyes. You stop what you’re doing and go to the hospital to get stitches, right?

Not if your company is in a fight. If you’re a professional boxer, you’re probably told it’s just blood. And then you keep getting hit.

When a fighter is cut, his cutman has 60 seconds to stop the blood flow and prepare his attack for the next round. The working method is standard. Wipe away the Vaseline that fighters put on their faces; wipe adrenaline into the wound; apply pressure until the adrenaline causes the blood vessels to constrict and small clots to form; Then reapply Vaseline to the affected area. It is a science and an art.

“The ring is the most unlikely operating room I can imagine,” Flip Homansky, former medical director of the Nevada State Athletic Commission, once said. “And a medical degree is no guarantee that the holder knows much about sharp cuts that bleed acutely. I’ve seen I don’t know how many fights stopped because no one in the corner knew how to stop a simple cut from getting worse.”

Adam Pollack has written a series of biographies about boxing’s early heavyweight champions. “First blood was a big gambling point in John L Sullivan’s day,” says Pollack. “A lot of money was changing hands depending on which fighter was cut first. But the fight was not stopped because of the budget cuts at the time. No matter how bad a cut was, it was seen as a wound that the fighter simply had to deal with. Stopping fights over cuts did not become an accepted practice until the Jack Dempsey era.

But long after Dempsey, fighters were (and still are) called upon to fight through gruesome cuts. Rocky Marciano’s September 1954 title defense against former heavyweight champion Ezzard Charles is a classic example.

Marciano dominated the fight. Then, in round six, he came out of a clinch with a cut to his left nostril that split his nose and cut it to the bone. Charles later said the wound was the result of a blow. Marciano claimed it was caused by an elbow. Films of the fight are inconclusive. Whatever the case, blood was spraying everywhere.

“I knew something was wrong because the blood was flowing like from a tap,” Marciano said afterwards.

His cut man, Freddie Brown, couldn’t stop the blood flow. “He looked like he had two noses, both of which were bleeding,” Brown told reporters. “I’ve never seen a cut like that.”

The damage to Marciano’s nose was about to force an end to the fight. Marciano was in greater danger of losing than ever before in his ring career. He ended that threat in round eight, when he knocked out Charles.

Fighters in all weight classes will be eliminated. But heavyweights have traditionally been boxing’s flagship division. And there are plenty of notable cuts in heavyweight boxing.

Sir Henry Cooper is Exhibit A for the statement that some fighters cut easier than others. “If you gave Henry a rough towel,” noted journalist Hugh McIlvanney, “you needed a container to catch the blood.”

On June 18, 1963 Cooper fought a young heavyweight contender named Cassius Clay, who would change his name to Muhammad Ali the following year. Fifty-five thousand fans were in attendance at Wembley Stadium, aware of Ali’s prediction that Cooper would fall in round five. Ali controlled the action from the opening bell. By round three, Cooper was bloodied and injured. But every time Cooper was about to fall, his opponent took a step back. He wanted to fulfill his prediction of a fifth-round knockout. In lap four, Cooper looked defenseless. Blood poured from a cut above his left eye and then…

TREE!!!

With five seconds left in the fourth stanza, Cooper unleashed a left hook that landed flush on his opponent’s jaw. Ali went down, staggered to his feet and was saved by the bell.

But the cuts Cooper made put an end to the matter in round five. Robert Daley described the massacre this way: ‘Clay jumped into the Dream Street 60 seconds earlier center of the ring and laced into Cooper. The first jab knocked Cooper’s head back and opened the eye as a cleaver would have done. There was blood everywhere. It was now pouring from Cooper’s wounds. People were shouting, ‘Stop the fight!’”

Eventually, referee Tommy Little intervened and ended the fight.

Ali sometimes twisted his fist at the moment of impact. As boxing writer Mort Sharnik noted, it had “the effect of a pretty sharp knife.”

Sharnik was ringside for the next fight involving Ali, then known as Clay, when he challenged Sonny Liston for the world heavyweight championship. “On the third lap,” Mort later recalled, “Cassius went after Liston. Until that moment, Sonny Liston seemed indestructible. But Cassius hit Liston with a one-two combination; a jab followed by a straight right. And it was as if the armor plate of a battleship had been pierced. Cassius withdrew his jab and there was a mouse under Sonny’s right eye. Then he withdrew his right hand and there was a cut under the other eye. Liston’s skin seemed so thick that I didn’t think it could crack like that. And I said to myself, ‘My God! Cassius Clay wins this fight. ”

Ali’s ‘knife’ cut again when he fought Jerry Quarry in Atlanta on October 26, 1970, after being banned from boxing for 43 months as a result of refusing induction into the US Army during the Vietnam War. Tony Perez, who refereed Ali-Quarry I, told the story.

“The first round was all Ali,” Perez said. “He came out with punches and landed almost everything he threw. Then, on the second lap, he started to slow down. Quarry hit him with a big hook to the body and I said to myself, ‘Maybe we’re upset.’ In round three Ali was not sharp. Quarry gained confidence in it. And then – it came out of nowhere – Ali made a huge gash in Quarry’s eye. I had never seen a cut like that before. You could see the bone. After the round, there was no doctor in Quarry’s corner. I just had to make a decision. Quarry wanted to continue. He shouted, ‘No, no, Tony. Don’t stop the fight!’ But I had to stop. The eye was so bad, I couldn’t let it continue.”

After the battle, Quarry accepted his defeat with grace. “It wasn’t a butt,” he said of the blow that caused the cut. “And I don’t want anyone to say that’s true. It was a right hand.”

Two years later, in November 1972, it was Ali who bled as he fought light heavyweight champion Bob Foster in Stateline, Nevada. At 41 pounds, Foster was knocked down seven times before being counted out in the eighth round. But on lap five he did something no one had done before. He cut Ali and caused a wound under his left eyebrow, which required five stitches to close.

“Picking him up is what I remember most about the fight,” Foster said years later. “It wasn’t one blow. It was a lot of pricks that left the skin raw and eventually cut him. I like to think I had the hardest punch in boxing then. I’ve stopped a lot of guys with it by ripping them open in three or four rounds.”

Not all fighters fight through cuts. In 1984, James “Bonecrusher” Smith challenged Larry Holmes in Las Vegas for the heavyweight crown. As the fight progressed, Smith suffered a cut and grotesque swelling around his left eye. Midway through round 12 (of a scheduled 15), referee Davey Pearl called time and sent Holmes to a neutral corner. Then ring doctor Donald Romeo examined the cut, told Smith it was bad and asked, “Do you want to stop?” Smith nodded in agreement.

That was a far cry from Vitali Klitschko’s reaction when “Dr Iron Fist” challenged reigning heavyweight king Lennox Lewis at the Staples Center in Los Angeles in 2003. After six rounds, Klitschko was ahead 58-56 on all three judges’ scorecards. But two gruesome cuts around his left eye prompted ring doctor Paul Wallace to stop the fight. Klitschko’s anguished cry of “NO!” resonates to this day. But the cuts required 60 stitches to close, and Klitschko may have permanently lost the use of the eye if the fight had been allowed to continue.

Tyson Fury narrowly escaped Klitschko’s fate when he fought Otto Wallin in Las Vegas in September 2019. In round three, a loop left by Wallin opened a deep gash along Fury’s right eyebrow. The cut gave the fight a lot of drama. There was a real chance that it would worsen to the point where there was no alternative to stopping the fight. Blood flowed from the wound for the rest of the fight. Knowing he was in danger, Fury abandoned what he likes to think of as finesse boxing and started fighting. He won a unanimous decision but needed 47 stitches to close the wound.

“I was happy he got cut,” Wallin said afterwards. “But I wish I could benefit from it a little more.”

Then there’s the matter of Evander Holyfield’s ear, which was bitten open by Mike Tyson in June 1997. But that was a different kind of cut.

Meanwhile, any recitation of cuts in heavyweight boxing history would be incomplete without a word about Chuck Wepner.

Wepner was known as “The Bayonne Bleeder”, referring to his propensity for cutting and his birthplace in New Jersey. Fighting from 1964 to 1978, he compiled a record of 36-14-2 with 17 knockouts and 9 KOs. Almost all “KO’s through” were the result of cutbacks.

Wepner is the only man to have fought Ali (KO by 15), Liston (KO by 9) and George Foreman (KO by 3). An unemployed actor named Sylvester Stallone watched Ali-Wepner on closed-circuit TV and was so moved by the courage of the Bayonne Bleeder that he sat down and wrote a screenplay titled Rocky.

“You’ve come to the right place,” Wepner said when we spoke last month. “I am the world’s foremost authority on austerity. I had 328 stitches around my eyes and 23 more in my mouth. That’s 351 stitches. (Former middleweight champion) Vito Antuofermo once said he had two more stitches than me, so I told Al (manager Al Braverman) that I wanted to retire and have one more fight so I could get the record back. But then it turned out that Vito had counted wrong and I had already beaten him.”

“The fight with Sonny Liston was when I got the most stitches,” Wepner continued. “There are different numbers, but the real number was 72 stitches for that fight. Voorman came second. After that I needed 53 stitches. George caught me just right. The cut went to the bone. Ali was only 23.”

After Liston-Wepner, Sonny was asked if Wepner was the bravest man he had ever fought. “No,” Liston replied, “his manager did.”

“I’ve never had any issues with the cuts during a fight,” Wepner noted. “They bothered the referee and the doctors more than me. They stung when they happened, the moment I was cut. But during a fight you are so excited that you don’t feel it. When I was cooling down in the locker room after a fight, it started to hurt. Then I looked at myself in the mirror and said, ‘Omigod!’”

• Thomas Hauser’s most recent book – The Universal Sport: Two Years Inside Boxing – was published by the University of Arkansas Press. In 2019, he was inducted into the International Boxing Hall of Fame.