A Boxing Memory: Jerry Quarry

A Boxing Memory: Jerry Quarry

By Garry White

What are you gonna do? Kill me? Everybody dies,” shrugs John Garfield in his role as boxer Charlie Davis in the noir classic, Body and Soul. Moments earlier, Davis’s professional honour had ensured that he won the fight and at the same time double-crossed the hoodlums that waited at his dressing room door. He ended the movie with a killer line and his dignity intact, but the viewer can have little doubt that Davis’s life would have been violently extinguished well before the end credits faded to black. Garfield’s character wouldn’t cheat himself or boxing, and by doing so, he got nothing but a fictional early grave.

Like Charlie Davis, Jerry Quarry stuck to his code and wouldn’t cheat boxing either. The Long Island scrapper, Cletus Seldin, who has always seen himself as a modern incarnation of the Jewish fighters of yesteryear, once told me in an interview for Boxing Monthly, “My job is to go forward and through punches.” Quarry, whether he was carrying the sobriquet ‘Irish’ or more gloriously ‘The Bellflower Bomber’ was also convinced of the same fundamentals. But like Davis, boxing had the final word and cruelly silenced him in the end. 

That it wasn’t done quickly in a dimly lit back alley probably makes it worse. Quarry’s demise was not nearly so sudden, yet his descent into the grim, dark world of pugilistica dementia was crueller and more accelerated than most. Perhaps in some ways, it was inevitable, considering he went toe-to-toe with some of the greatest and hardest-punching heavyweights that ever pressed their fists into leather. His insistence on never wearing a head-guard in sparring could hardly have helped either. 

This version of Quarry fought Muhammed Ali and Joe Frazier twice each. He also went in against Ken Norton once. That he didn’t hear the final bell against any of them feels almost immaterial. These fights were full of blood and guts and come-forward honour. Beyond that, he had an impressive win and a draw against former world champion Floyd Patterson and a violent super-charged one-round stoppage of the heavy-handed and hard-headed Earnie Shavers. But even then, those crowds that cheered Quarry back in his late 60s and early 70s heyday must have been able to deduce that he would one day pay an incalculable price for his inability to compromise his integrity. 

Quarry’s ring career straddled a remarkable four decades from his 1965 debut against Gene Hamilton at the Memorial Coliseum in Los Angeles on the undercard of Vincente Saldivar’s defence of his world featherweight titles against Paul Rojas. Prior to Saldivar stopping Rojas in the fifteenth round, Quarry was extended the full four-round distance whilst registering a first professional victory. 

He was to fight 65 more times over the next 27 years. Fifty-three of them resulted in often high-octane victories as the Californian would roar “There ain’t no quit in a Quarry” to the pumped-up faithful. As he upended 32 of these adversaries inside the distance, there was no doubting his ability to entertain. He was primetime. The latest member of ‘The Great White Hope’ lineage at a time when this still absurdly mattered. The nine reverses on his record were all – save the final one recorded against some of the greatest heavyweights of all time and leading contenders of his era. Beyond the sublime talents of Ali, Frazier and Norton he had defeats to Jimmy Ellis (in the final of an eight-man knockout tournament organised by the WBA following Ali being stripped of the title) and against the likes of world title challengers like Eddie Machen and George Chuvalo. 

It would be easy to glance absentmindedly at the career of Quarry and consider it to be a failure. He did after all never capture a world title. Yet many contemporary writers considered Quarry to be one of the best fighters never to own even a piece of the heavyweight crown. Even the snarling and uncompromising Joe Frazier once commented, “[Quarry was] a very tough man. He could have been a world champion, but he cut too easily.”

In any case, it was never meant to be. Perhaps the story played out better that way. Jerry Quarry, in many ways, was the embodiment of a Bruce Springsteen song at a time when ‘The Boss’ was still anonymously strumming his guitar somewhere along the Jersey shore. He was the blue-collar protagonist from a dysfunctional family with nothing going for him but hard work and a dream. Between blitzing nameless bodies on undercards at Los Angeles’ Olympic Auditorium for empty paycheques, he would earn his corn by changing tyres on Greyhound busses at the local depot. He was the living hope of all the guys sipping a Bud in an empty bar at the end of a 12-hour shift in Palookaville. 

That little box on the wall above the Jim Beam and Jack Daniels optics shone like a mirror onto a million anonymous working men. When Quarry performed his familiar tactic of retreating to the ropes, artfully luring his opponent in, and then breaking out with jackhammer left and rights, its imagery spoke directly to them. When he got hit, he kept advancing and hit back harder. He was fully prepared to take two for the chance to land one with double the impact on the other guy. If they dropped him, he got up. Whatever they did to him, he kept going. He may have been the ‘little guy’ in with the bullying 200+ lbs behemoths, but nothing would break him.

And those same people as they drained their final glass of the evening, well they left happy. They felt a rare joy in an unforgiving urban landscape of crap pay and prospects. Jerry was striking back for them. When he bled, as he frequently did, he bled for them. It didn’t matter that they didn’t really know him. As far as they were concerned, they were in this together. And that at the end of it all, he didn’t claim the prize that many thought was rightfully his, seems somehow apt as well. 

It is little wonder that at his peak, Quarry was recognised as the most popular fighter in America by The Ring magazine. It was a platform that aided by his charismatic and affable persona enabled him to make the odd television cameo appearance in popular shows like Batman and The Six Million Dollar Man. If he had been born a decade or two later, it is impossible to believe that Quarry, who typically weighed in at around 190 lbs, would not have been a world champion in some form.

These are the numbers. The bare Wikipedia statistics. The brief window into the first life of Quarry the fighter. The one that once cursed his luck in a post-fight interview with Ali after being pulled out due to a nasty cut after only three rounds. It was ‘The Greatest’s’ first fight back after having his licence reinstated and Quarry pocketed a career-high purse of more than $300,000. To his credit, Quarry was the only one of the top ten contenders willing to face the old champion, but Ali bossed him for the full nine minutes of action. “I think if I could have got one more round, I could’ve taken him out. He can’t punch,” exclaimed a heavily stitched yet defiant Quarry to the assembled flashbulbs as he declared his desire for a rematch. He got his wish 18 months later and got stopped in seven rounds. 

You can find all this on YouTube. The big fights, the wins, the losses; the beautiful/ugly one-round slugfest with Earnie Shavers. Not to forget the seven-round brawl in a phone booth with Joe Frazier that was later named The Ring’s ‘Fight of the Year’ for 1969. The pictures may now look slightly faded, but they are still there waiting to be discovered by each new generation. Quarry coming relentlessly forward with those raw two-fisted attacks, the pulverising left hooks, the chin soaking up endless punishment, and his face inevitably dripping with lacerated crimson. But if you linger there for too long, you will eventually find something disturbing and unwanted. It’s a much later clip from a news report from 1995. In it, Quarry stands in front of the camera with his brother, James, as they prepare for Jerry’s forthcoming induction into the Boxing Hall of Fame. 

Quarry stumbles through his words in a hoarse whisper. At one point, you can make out the word ‘ice cream’ as he comments, “I feel like an old man.” He has only just turned fifty years old but looks at least seventy. Unbelievably, his last fight was only six years earlier – a heartless six-round points defeat against a club fighter with a losing record at an anonymous Holiday Inn. It had been his third comeback, this time after a nine-year absence. They paid him a lousy thousand dollars, but he needed the money and a final, hopeless last shot at reclaiming his former fame. 

James, the only one of the famous Quarry boys not to box professionally, explains to the camera how his brother can no longer look after himself. “He forgets how to eat. He forgets how to put on his shoes. He forgets how to comb his hair,” he confides. “Everything has to be done for him.”

At one point, the interviewer asks Quarry if he remembers what his fans used to call him. “I don’t remember,” he admits. Only to be reminded that he was once known as ‘The Great White Hope’. “Ah, I remember that,” says Quarry, but you know the words will instantly fall away from his grasp. Painfully, the muscle memory still appears to remain tenuously intact despite everything else failing, as Quarry demonstrates a couple of handy left hooks on demand.

In a later segment, Quarry shuffles in as James stands him in front of the mirror and fastens his bow tie for him. “Do you remember what we’re doing tonight?” he asks in his gravelly voice, but his brother just stares vacantly into the distance. At once, Quarry looks like a little boy being dressed for his first day at kindergarten. There is something so childlike and vulnerable about him that it is almost impossible to watch. Later, as Jerry arrives at the venue for his induction, James has to explain to him how to sign a boxing glove for a fan. “You know, you do the circle and then a line through it,” James explains softly as Jerry battles over the first letter of his surname. It is so heartbreakingly moving that I would question the humanity of anyone who can watch this clip without being moved to tears.

Quarry earned two million dollars in his career and was ultimately left with nothing. Three marriages, bad business investments, and a hard-partying lifestyle had taken care of it all. At the final reckoning, he didn’t even have his health. James admits that they now exist on welfare cheques, and he picks up the rest of the cost himself. “When he was a contender, he took care of me in the good times, and now it’s my turn to take care of him,” he says admirably. Before leaving us with a final reminder: “I just wish Jerry could remember some of his career. That he was able to take some pride in it.”

At least his fans still can. At Canastota, they shout out “We love you, Jerry,” as he whispers his way through a two-sentence acceptance speech. “I’ve been in the ring many times, and I enjoyed every one of them,” he says either from rote memory or in defiance of his current condition. Before adding; “There’s no quit in this game for me.” 

The assembled crowd clap and cheer at hearing the old words again. The same mantra that the dictatorial Jack Quarry a man that had ‘Hard’ and ‘Luck’ tattooed onto the knuckles of alternate hands- handed out to all his boys before witnessing them wrecking themselves in the ring and then through unrestrained abandonment to drink and drugs.  

“We love you,” they say again, but he doesn’t appear to hear them. Still, for a nano-second, everyone can close their eyes to the broken husk in front of them. Temporarily, the pale shadow is removed and cast fleetingly back into the sunlight. Everyone’s memories turned back to those early days at the Olympic Auditorium or those bombshell classics with the greats. Everyone that is except Jerry. For him, there is only the ongoing living death of a failing mind that is disconnected from the past, fails to understand the present, and is incapable of comprehending any future.

Jerry Quarry died four years later of a cardiac arrest after being hospitalised for pneumonia. He was fifty-three years old. His brother Mike, a world title challenger at light-heavy, died seven years after his big brother, with the cause being attributed to Pugilistic dementia. He should have called it a day after the brick-handed Bob Foster emphatically retained his belts by knocking him out cold in Vegas on the same card where Jerry was stopped in seven by Ali. Defeat permanently took away Mike’s unblemished record and ended a 35-fight unbeaten streak. Desperate to create an identity for himself and to escape from the shadow cast over him by his brother, he proved unable to walk away. He fought on for another 46 fights, failing to win 19 of them. He later explained his prolonged career as being “a kind of Deathwish.” Even the sainted James, who never set foot in a pro ring, is now gone as well. Only their youngest brother Bobby, who had an unsuccessful career at heavyweight that included a second-round defeat to Tommy Morrison, remains. He has served time in prison for theft and even in his mid-30s was suffering the early tremorous effects of Parkinson’s disease. 

So, bang the drum slowly for the Quarry boys and say a quiet prayer for the health and wealth that faded with their unrequited dreams. They never won the belts they coveted, but like at least one of the Lohman boys in Arthur Miller’s, Death of a Salesman, they never turned their back on their father’s dream, however impossible it became.

It’s just a shame that in the end, it broke them all.