Vic Boff: the Old Game’S Best Friend: Face-To-Face—And by Proxy Al Thomas My Dear Friend, Vic Boff, Wasn’T the Sort of Man Heroes
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THE JOURNAL OF PHYSICAL CULTURE Volume 7 Number 4 April/May 2003 Vic Boff: The Old Game’s Best Friend: Face-to-Face—and by Proxy Al Thomas My dear friend, Vic Boff, wasn’t the sort of man heroes. We’ve had phone conversations, over the years, we associate with rebuke of any sort, public or other- about virtually every aspect of the strength sports, not to wise, yet despite the unlikelihood of the notion, my long mention life generally and its vicissitudes. (How very friendship with this great and kindly legend of our Game special his wife of fifty-nine years, Ann. must be to have had its origin in his heated rebuke of remained his loving other-half after me—in public no less. It was meted decades of phone bills that had to be out about fifty-six years ago at a York utterly staggering.) We talked by the picnic and was the very first time we hour about the almost-fifty ever exchanged words, even though Manhattan, Bronx, and Brooklyn by that time I’d often eavesdropped fight clubs: about “Sailor Tom” on his conversations whenever our Sharkey and “Ruby Robert” contest-going and picnic-going coin- Fitzsimmons—about the incompara- cided. ble Dempsey and Canzoneri and Not an auspicious beginning Ross and Leonard—the “tremen- for a friendship which, over the many dous,” if long forgotten, club fight- decades, deepened and matured, ers of his Brooklyn boyhood (each enriching my life with Vic’s hard- named and lovingly remembered)— earned wisdom about the Game we and, of course, although his enthusi- both loved so much: its heroes and asm always trailed-off a bit. the their own brand of hard-earned wis- “current crew,” not even the best of dom about the body and strength and whom would have “lasted fifteen health. (More about the much- with the ‘Manassa Mauler’ at his deservedness of his rebuke, later.) best.” Vic was one of the consummate oral historians In fact, I found him to be almost as full of sto- of the Game: the mystique and “charm” of its colorful ries about baseball and boxing, the sports of his young Iron Game History Volume 7 Number 4 manhood (especially baseball), as he was about the less enthusiasm, not just to contemporaries from the “Mighty Atom” or Macfadden or Jowett or Atlas or Oldetimers’ Association, but with special enthusiasm, it Hoffman or Grimek or Klein or Bothner or Travis. You seemed, to youthful Iron Game historians (-to-be). name the strongman; he had an anecdote or two, usually Carefully teased-out thoughts about baseball and box- many. And then, needless to say, there were the tales of ing’s future; grand visions of our Game’s future glories—- the legendary characters from his beloved Iceberg Club, its “post-steroid glories” that is—always that all-neces- who plunged into the blizzard-driven surf of Coney sary correction: “post-steroid.” These thoughts and Island, joining him in wintry denial of their human flesh visions informed both the enthusiasms and the worries of and its weakness. All those Iceberg Club myrmidons his conversations throughout the many decades. whom we identify with their “King Achilles,” our hon- The historian in Vic never allowed him to close ored strongman-historian and friend, Vic. All the legions off these gabfests without a sermon about the of strongmen of the Boff canon: All those legends about Oldetimers’ obligation to call attention to, and to learn whom, ever the historian, he preached with such resist- from. our sport’s past. One thinks in this regard of York’s Patron Subscribers Dr. Spencer Maxcy Richard Abbott Don McEachran IRON GAME HISTORY Clifford Ameduri David Mills Gordon Anderson Quinn Morrison THE JOURNAL OF PHYSICAL CULTURE Joe Assirati Rick Perkins VOL. 7 No. 4 APRIL/May 2003 John Balik Piedmont Design Associates Peter Bocko Dr. Grover Porter TABLE OF Contents Chuck Burdick In Memory of Steve Reeves Terry Robinson 1. Vic Boff: The Old Game’s Best Friend. Al Thomas Dean Camenares Bill Clark Dr. Ken “Leo” Rosa 12. Farewell to Vic Boff . Ken “Leo” Rosa Robert Conciatori Jim Sanders 14. Grapevine: Our Readers Remember . Staff Mr. & Mrs. Bruce Conner Frederick Schulz 26. Professor Pat O’Shea. Terry & Jan Todd Bob Delmontique Harry Schwartz 30. Sergei Eliseev . Daniel Dubshin & David Chapman Lucia Doncel In Memory of Chuck Sipes Dave Draper Pudgy & Les Stockton Salvatore Franchino Frank Stranahan Co-Editors . Jan & Terry Todd Rob Gilbert Al Thomas Business Manager . Kim Beckwith Fairfax Hackley Dr. Ted Thompson Editorial Board . John Balik (Santa Monica, CA), Jack Berryman Jack Lano Dr. Stephen Turner (Univ. of Washington, Seattle), David Chapman (Seattle, WA), John Tom Lincir Kevin R. Wade Fair (Georgia College & University, Milledgeville, GA), William Leslie Longshore Joe Weider Goetzmann (Univ. of Texas, Austin), Charles Kupfer (Penn State James Lorimer Zander Institute Harrisburg.), Grover Porter (Univ. of Alabama, Huntsville), Joe Roark Harold Zinkin (St. Joseph, IL), Al Thomas (Ocean City, NJ) and David Webster Walt Marcyan (Irvine, Scotland). In Memory of Leo Fellowship Subscribers Murdock Iron Game History is published by the McLean Sports History Fellowship Jerry Abbott Howard Havener Eric Murray at the University of Texas at Austin, under the auspices of the Department Bob Bacon Dykes Hewett Bill Nicholson of Kinesiology and Health Education. U.S. subscription rate: $25.00 per Richard Baldanzi Charles Hixon Dr. Ben Oldham four issues, $40.00 per eight issues. McLean Fellowship subscriptions Regis Becker Serafin Izquierdo John F. O’Neill $55.00 per eight issues; Patron subscriptions $100.00 per eight issues Alfred C. Berner Daniel Kostka Kevin O’Rourke Canada & overseas subscriptions: $30.00 per four issues and $45.00 per Mike BonDurant Waiter Kroll Dr. Val Pasqua eight issues. U.S. funds only. See page 36 for further details. Vera Christensen Thomas Lee David Pelto Address all correspondence and subscription requests to: Iron Game Dr. William Corcoran Sol Lipsky Barret Pugach History, Anna Hiss Gym #22, 1 University Station, A2000, Austin, Texas Ralph Darr, Jr. George Lock Dr. Ken “Leo” Rosa 78712. Telephone: 512-471-4890. Fax: 512-488-0114. Back issues are avail- Larry Davis Anthony Lukin Barry Roshka able through our website or by writing to the address below. Martha & Roger Deal Patrick H. Luskin John T. Ryan Clyde Doll Richard Marzulli Dr. Joseph Sansolo Email: [email protected] Marvin Eder Stephen Maxwell Serious Strength Website: www.edb.utexas.edu/todd-mclean Alton Eliason Robert McNall Edward Sweeney Iron Game History is a non-profit enterprise. Gary Fajack Louis Mezzanote Lou Tortorelli (ISSN 1069-7276) Biagio Filizola George H. Miller Dr. Patricia Vertinsky Postmaster: Send address corrections to: IGH, Anna Hiss Gym #22, 1 Leo Gagan Tom Minichiello Kevin Vost University Station, A2000, Austin, Texas 78712. Dr. Pete George Tony Moskowitz Reuben Weaver 2 April/May 2003 Iron Game History Weightlifting Hall of Fame, so profound a legacy of phone call: a list that I’d never seen fit to make in Vic’s historic sense and imagination. He spoke endlessly response to any of our earlier phone exchanges: of the Oldetimers’ special obligation to mentor newcom- (1) Anecdotes about his good friend, Leo ers to the Game: to instruct the young people whom he Murdock—our mutual friend—moving from a discus- saw as bereft of even a rudimentary historical sense: sion about their “finding” Katie Sandwina’s boxer son utterly unconscious of the importance, to them, of such Ted—on to our pleasure in Leo’s garrulously rambling an historical sense. Hence, their profound vulnerability, tales: that Murdockian version of our Game which com- their ignorance of the generosity-as-norm that was prised oral history in its most human, its most touching implicit in the Old Game: the generous manliness that and heart-tugging manifestation. (Anticipatory by very informed the relations of star and fan in that Old Game. few weeks, as all this was, to Vic’s joining our much- He despised the narcissism of the “I’m number one”-ness loved buddy.) that, in his deploring estimate, had come to characterize (2) As an habitue of Times Square, Vic correct- st the turn-of-millennium sport. Vic’s worries about the 21 ed two memories about my twelve-year-old self’s (long century Game could be summed-up briefly in its proud- ago and only one-time) visit to Hubert’s, on the occasion ly flaunted contempt for, and ignorance of, its own his- of the flea circus’ presentation of ex-champ, Jack tory. Johnson. The big guy sat upon a “throne” (a big chair) At the heart of his apologia for history’s impor- behind a curtain, the parting of which demanded yet- tance is the notion that a true immersion in history brings more pennies, above and beyond the admission to the its student, not just a deeper historical understanding but “circus” (Hubert’s). (Indelibly imprinted upon my mind a deeper love of the Game that it chronicles and provides because I had to scrounge the difference between the few texture for. If the youths of the current game had pos- pennies I found in my pocket and the number required to sessed a richer and more sacral knowledge of our part the all-concealing curtain.) Vic’s memories of his humane and generous Game—spirit-enlarging as such “audience” with the great one paralleled mine, but then knowledge always is—they would not have succumbed how not? so resistlessly to the impersonality (to the preoccupation- The questions posed by the “faithful” must have with-profit) which comprises an almost insurmountable been predictable and few: the same ones that cropped-up impediment to the modem game’s being loved as uncon- whenever “L’il Arthur” sat down to talk.