Two-Ton Tony Galento: A Boxing Falstaff

When I was a kid, I used to listen to the old men talking about local boxing greats and some that were better known. Joe Louis, Carmen Basilio, Sugar Ray Robinson were just a few of the names they mentioned, fighters both revered and feared. But I also heard them mention a boxer whom they called "Two-Ton Tony Galento, a name with which I was entirely unfamiliar. In spite of being a die-hard boxing fan, I never paid too much attention to "Two Ton Tony" since no one, aside from the old men, had ever mentioned him. Besides, the idea of a fat, overweight prize fighter had little appeal in an era which featured a Muhammad Ali, A Tommy Hearns, a Marvin Hagler, and a Sugar Ray Leonard, and so many others.

But when I recently heard Galento's name mentioned on an HBO TV documentary about Joe Louis, I began perusing the pages of a boxing encyclopedia. Boxing history is, to me, just another way of looking at world history, or at least American history. A great deal may be learned of U.S. history merely by looking into the biographies of the boxers of yesteryear. A look into the sports pages of the New York Times of 1914 will provide some idea of what I mean. The excerpt describes the preliminaries to a boxing match featuring the first great heavyweight to break the color barrier, Jack Johnson, a man as interesting outside the ring as he was in it.