Jimmy Doyle

Myspace Layouts - Myspace Editor - Image Hosting

JIMMY DOYLE TRIBUTE PAGE
R.I.P.
AUGUST 1, 1924 - JUNE 25, 1947
Doyle made his debut as a professional boxer in 1941. In 1946 lost to Artie Levine by 9th round TKO. After the bout, Doyle went to the hospital, suffering from a severe head injury. Although Doyle was leading, Referee Jackie Davis stopped the bout after Doyle went down for the third time in the 9th round.
Doyle battled welterweight champion Sugar Ray Robinson in Cleveland in June of 1947, the champ had a dream that he killed his opponent in the ring. He frantically tried to have the promoter call off the fight, but he was persuaded to go on with the bout. Doyle was knocked out in eight rounds, and died the next day. Some say Robinson was never the same as a fighter after that night.
Under a paralyzing blow to the jaw, Jimmy Doyle's body stiffened, and he fell backwards as though his heels were hinged to the floor. With what was left of instinct he fumbled blindly for the ropes, brushed them with clumsy gloves, and lay still. The bell rang and the round ended as the referee's count reached nine. Jimmy Doyle's handlers went to work with cold water and smelling salts. But Boxer Doyle fought no more.
In the ring's center, Sugar Ray Robinson, making his first defense of the welterweight championship, took the victor's bow, but he did no victor's dance: his opponent lay in a coma, and a doctor was examining him. Later, in his dressing room, Robinson asked: "Is the kid up yet? The punch only traveled six inches, I think." Almost as he spoke stretcher-bearers were taking Jimmy Doyle from Cleveland's Arena. A few fans recalled the words that the Cleveland Press's Columnist Franklin Lewis wrote earlier that day about how things would be "after the remains of Jimmy Doyle are toted gently away from the Arena's warm ring this evening."
Twice on a Stretcher. Fifteen months before, Boxer Doyle had been carried from 'the same ring. He woke up in St. Vincent Charity Hospital and his head hurt; he had been hit a terrific wallop by Brooklyn's Artie Levine. The doctors said he had a brain concussion. Although he was only 21, Doyle had never been quite the same after that. Punch-drunk Jimmy wandered back home to Los Angeles, where his friends called him by his real name—James Delaney.
---------------------------------------------------
His family noticed that Jimmy did not go dancing as he once did, and no longer bounced around the house sparring and roughhousing. Instead he sat for hours reading books, and talked as though he would never again enter a ring. But after nearly nine months of retirement, he began to stir again. He told a friend: "I have to prove I wasn't hurt . . . that I'm a man." Manager Paul Doyle lined up a few bouts, and Jimmy breezed through the first five, against second-raters.
One More Fight.
Before he stepped into the ring against Sugar Ray, Jimmy promised his father that it would be his last fight—unless he won. He wanted enough money to go into business in California, managing and training other fighters. 17 hours after Champion Robinson flattened him, 22-year-old Jimmy Doyle died of a cerebral hemorrhage, the first death in a championship fight in modern U.S. boxing history.
Next day at the inquest the Cleveland coroner asked Sugar Ray Robinson if he noticed whether Doyle was in trouble during the fight. Said Sugar Ray, giving him the best answer a professional boxer could: "Getting him in trouble is my business as a boxer and a champion."
--------------------------------------------------
--------------------------------------------------
It was "a good, clean fight", but Robinson had the advantage in every round except the sixth (when Sugar Ray was staggered twice and hurt). A single left hook ended the fight, Doyle not having been in any noticeable difficulty until then. "That punch knocked Jimmy rigid..With heels resting against the canvas as if hinged, Doyle's body went down. It struck the floor with a thud, like a rigid mass falling. His head crashed against the padded canvas, and as the referee started the count. Doyle raised his head and rested on his elbows...The count of nine was reached and the bell sounded to end the round. Art Winch, one of his handlers, leaped into the ring to call a halt..Doyle was taken in an ambulance to St. Vincent's Charity Hospital immediately after the injury, and despite all efforts of the medical attendants, he failed to regain consciousness and passed away a few hours after Dr. Spencer Braden, brain specialist..had operated on him to relieve the pressure on his brain." (Nat Fleischer, in The Ring, September 1947, page 4)
For the rest of his life, Sugar Ray Robinson was haunted by that eighth round in Cleveland from the hard left to the jaw of Jimmy Doyle.
-------------------------------------------------------
Doyle, born James Delaney, of french ancestry was a classy fighter who made his professional debut May 6, 1941, at the Olympic in Los Angeles. “Jimmy first attracted our attention by his old-fashioned stand up stance,” Times sports columnist Al Wolf wrote. “He looked like a throwback to the days of John L. and Gentleman Jim as he stood there stiff-backed and stiff-necked, feet firmly planted, left arm extended in an upward arc. It could have been a picture from the Police Gazette of yesteryear.”
“We liked him from the start—a willing mixer who could take it and dish it out, a graceful fellow, an action fighter. But we soon grew to wince as whistling gloves constantly clipped his young face, gradually giving it that fighter’s look. For Jimmy didn’t seem to have the knack of rolling with those punches or riding the steam out of them. He took them squarely and unflinchingly, his head often whirling from the impact until you feared it’d twist off his neck. But the body remained firm or kept going forward.
“We got to the point where we wished he’d go down or at least stagger backward, to give a little and blunt the force of those thrusts. We wondered how he could soak up such punishment, why his brains didn’t addle. But it didn’t seem to bother Jimmy, so we decided we were getting soft.”
Then an ex-Marine from Brooklyn named Artie Levine landed a hard right in the ninth round, March 11, 1946, in Cleveland. Jimmy went to the canvas while the referee counted eight. Jimmy got up and took another blow that dumped him for a nine-count. At 57 seconds, the referee stopped the fight. Levine earned a TKO and Jimmy got a ride in an ambulance with a concussion and a brain hemorrhage. He was unconscious for 15 minutes and spent three days in the hospital.
By December 1946, he was back in the ring, with a March 1947 win over Danny Kapilow clearing the way for title fight with Robinson. Jimmy wanted to get a bout at the Olympic, but matchmaker Babe McCoy turned him down as being too risky and told him to give up boxing.
Robinson got into the ring with Jimmy on June 24, 1947, in Cleveland, the 3-1 favorite, 146 pounds, 27 years old, with a guarantee of $25,000 ($236,604.65 USD 2005) and 40% of the gate. But what was haunting him was the terrible dream he had the night before.
“I had just gone to sleep and woke up in a cold sweat,” he said. “In my dreams I knocked out Doyle and I saw him dying. I was terrified. The next morning I told everyone I had a premonition something terrible was going to happen. I told the press, the public and the boxing officials. It’s a matter of record.
“And it happened just like that.”
Jimmy died the next day despite the brain surgeons’ attempts to save his life. The coroner absolved Robinson of any guilt in Jimmy’s death, which was ruled accidental. His remains were brought back to Los Angeles and a Requiem was said at Presentation Church, 6406 Parmalee Ave. He was buried at Calvary Cemetery.
Robinson staged several bouts to raise money for Jimmy’s family—his parents, Mr. and Mrs. Edward Delaney, brothers Edward, Francisco and Paul; and sister Dolores—and set up a trust fund so Jimmy’s mother would get $50 a month for 10 years.
In 1962, writing about yet another death in the ring—this time Benny “Kid” Paret,” The Times Jim Murray wrote:
“You bear in your mind Sugar Ray Robinson on the day that Jimmy Doyle, a lyrical boxer whose body was a frail vessel for these cruel seas, was on his way back to California in a casket, put there by Ray’s fists. To the coroner’s insistent question, “Didn’t you see he was hurt?” Ray sullenly answered, “Mister, it’s my business to hurt people.”
Robinson, whom many consider the best prizefighter who ever lived, died in 1989 in Culver City of Alzheimer’s disease and diabetes.
---------------------------------------------------
Jimmy Doyle's final resting place. shared with his mother, Marie E.