Arcel joined forces with another brilliant trainer named Whitey Bimstein in 1925, a partnership which almost lasted a decade. Their base of operations was Stillman’s Gym, aka The University of Eighth Avenue, a hallowed dump just spitting distance from Madison Square Garden. Arcel was at Stillman’s when it first opened in the 1920s and remembered it as though it was yesterday: “There were more thieves in Stillman’s Gym than in the penitentiary.”
When Lou Stillman retired in 1959, he told the New York Times, “There’s no more tough guys around, not enough slums. That’s why I’m getting out of the business. The racket’s dead. These fighters today are all sissies.”
Together with Bimstein or as an independent, Arcel was cornerman to such legendary talents as Henry Armstrong, Jack Kid Berg, Lou Brouillard, Cerefino Garcia, Sixto Escobar, Kid Gavilan, Benny Leonard, Charley Phil Rosenberg, Barney Ross and Tony Zale.
“You didn’t have to be a great trainer to work with a Barney Ross or Benny Leonard,” Arcel said. “I mean, these guys were natural.”
The first heavyweight Arcel trained was James Braddock for his fight with Joe Louis in 1937. Over the years, Arcel trained fifteen members of the Joe Louis Bum-of-the-Month Club, a Who’s Who of horizontal fighters who got bombed by the Brown Bomber.
“As soon as the bell rang, they folded like tulips.”
Ray Arcel could take a great fighter, perform his magic, and make a great fighter even greater. But he also had a mouth that would not quit. Because of his honesty, integrity and contempt for boxing’s underbelly, Arcel made plenty of enemies, both in and out of the sport.
“Boxing had glamour,” he observed. “Oh, sure, we had scoundrels in those days, but they were clever scoundrels.”
In the early 1950s Arcel began arranging fights for ABC-TV. Unfortunately a rival network with close ties to the IBC (International Boxing Club), run by Frankie Carbo and James Norris, felt the pinch and Ray Arcel was a marked man. On September 19, 1953, Arcel was standing outside a Boston hotel, having just returned from Yom Kippur services, when he was struck in the forehead with a lead pipe. He suffered a concussion, spent nineteen days in a hospital, and was lucky he wasn’t killed. Not long after the attack, Arcel retired from boxing for eighteen years.
“Money is the sickness of the boxing business,” he said. “Maybe the sickness of the world.”
Arcel returned to boxing in 1972 and, with another master trainer, Freddie Brown, began a productive eight-year relationship with Roberto Duran. Arcel and Brown first worked with Duran for his fight against lightweight champion Ken Buchanan at the Garden. “Freddie Brown is like my Poppa,” Duran told Jerry Izenberg. “I can’t even go to the bathroom without him peeking. But Ray Arcel, for him I have no words.” Arcel was as taken with Duran as Duran was with him. “Nobody had to teach Duran how to fight. The first day I saw him—not in New York, I saw him in Panama—I told everybody around him, ‘Don’t change his style. Leave him alone. I don’t want anybody to ever tell him what to do. Let him fight.’” Arcel also trained Duran for his victory over Sugar Ray Leonard in their first meeting in 1980, but he gave up on Manos de Piedra after the infamous “No mas” rematch.
Arcel said after the fight: “Nobody quits in my corner.”
There were a million excuses for Duran’s non-performance that night, everything from a tummy ache to heart disease. Arcel wasn’t buying it. “You mean to tell me Duran has a heart condition?” he said. “He doesn’t even have a heart.”
The last fighter Arcel seconded was Larry Holmes in 1982, in his racially-tinged fight with Gerry Cooney.
“You’re only as good as the fighter you work with. I don’t care how much you know. If your fighter can’t fight, you’re another bum in the park.”
Ray Arcel was one of the greatest cornermen in the history of the game. He trained over 2000 boxers, including 20 world champions.
“I never considered myself a trainer,” Arcel said sagely. “I considered myself a teacher.”
Ray Arcel, the man Red Smith described as “the first gentleman of fistfighting,” died on March 7, 1994, an eloquent, compassionate, knowledgeable man lost to boxing and the world.
(By Robert Ecksel)
