The great motivator has given his last pep talk
Or if he had hunched, plotting, in a baseball dugout, the odd corked bat may have found its way onto home plate. But maybe he’d have drawn the line at a Harlequins bloodbath. Because Dundee wasn’t a cheat. He just, occasionally, got creative.
An undone shoelace here, a ripped glove there. Maybe a loosened rope. Mere splashes of light grey in a world with its own murky morality.
Acclaimed as boxing’s greatest motivator, Dundee’s dabbles with outside factors didn’t amount to a hill of beans next to the mountain of work he did inside his man — teasing, cajoling, bullying the greatness out.
Muhammad Ali — who Dundee still called ‘my kid’, even as the pair passed their 70th and 90th birthdays — twice left his corner to face Joe Frazier again only because Dundee’s words gave him the strength.
But sometimes, with lesser men, the cornerman had to get back to basics.
With Big Johnny Holman, who Dundee recalled had three speeds — “slow, stop and wait-a-minute” — a beating from Ezzard Charles looked inevitable until Dundee remembered the night his man had shared his hopes and dreams — a house with shutters and a TV set.
“What the hell are you going to do in there, Johnny? What’s the matter with you? This guy’s taking your house away from you. He’s taking those shutters away from you. He’s taking that television set away.”
Finding, for once, another gear, Holman didn’t fight Charles at all in the end, he fought for his house. And he won. If your man can’t pick his battles, pick them for him.
“I never trained Muhammad, I just directed him,” Dundee said last year. He sent him, mostly, in the right direction. And then helped get him there. RIP
