Boxing legend Angelo Dundee never forgot his South Philly roots

You never had to ask Angelo Dundee where he was from.

Through all his long life, the countless hours spent in perspiration-scented gyms, the globetrotting glory days with Muhammad Ali, the twilight years as an ambassador for a sport that badly needed one, he never shed South Philly.

He never lost the accent, the street savvy, the playfulness and toughness he'd developed growing up near Eighth and Morris Streets.

Mr. Dundee, who became nearly as great a boxing legend as the fighters he trained, died Wednesday at 90 in Florida.

Jimmy Dundee told the Associated Press that his father was hospitalized for a blood clot last week and was briefly in a rehabilitation facility before returning to his apartment.

"He was coming along good yesterday, and then he started to have breathing problems," Jimmy Dundee told the AP. "My wife was with him at the time, thank God, and called and said, 'He can't breathe.' We all got over there. All the grandkids were there. He didn't want to go slowly."

Mr. Dundee worked fights in London, Manila, and Kinshasa, Zaire. He learned his craft in New York's Stillman Gym. He opened Miami's famed Fifth Street Gym. He spent his last years in Tampa, Fla.

And yet, like those juicy roast pork sandwiches he so enjoyed on his frequent visits home, Mr. Dundee always oozed South Philly.

"I didn't know there was anything beyond Philly," Mr. Dundee said in a 1990 Inquirer interview. "I'd never been nowhere. Didn't have a car. Nobody did. Atlantic City was about as far as I got."

In those days especially, South Philadelphia was a boxing hotbed. Tommy Loughran, from 17th and Ritner, won the light-heavyweight championship in 1927, when Mr. Dundee was 6. That same year, Gene Tunney and Jack Dempsey fought for the heavyweight title at Sesquicentennial Stadium, just down Broad Street.

Born Angelo Mirena and one of seven children, Mr. Dundee and his boxing-crazed brothers admired a boxer named Dundee. So when brother Joe Mirena began a career as a prize fighter, he adopted that last name. Soon brothers Angelo and Chris, both also bitten by the boxing bug, followed suit and became Dundees, too.

While he would always be attracted to the sport's more cerebral aspects, Mr. Dundee admired the grit and guts boxing demanded. And he found plenty of that in the gyms that dotted Philadelphia's boxing landscape.

"Philadelphia is not a town," he once said in what he intended as a compliment. "It's a jungle. They don't have gyms there. They have zoos. They don't have sparring sessions. They have wars."

Mr. Dundee quickly realized that he had a better head for boxing than a chin. He became a cornerman, as adept at mapping out strategy as he was at stemming the blood from a nasty cut.

He traveled to New York, where he took up residence at Stillman's Gym. At that boxing shrine on Eighth Avenue, Mr. Dundee apprenticed with some of the best trainers and cornermen in the sport's history: Ray Arcel, Chickie Ferrera and Charlie Goldman.

After a World War II stint in the Army Air Corps, he was ready to set out on his own. By the 1950s, a flood of young fighters was arriving here from Latin America and the Caribbean. So he and Chris traveled to sunny Miami, where Chris opened the Fifth Street Gym, and the brothers began schooling young fighters.

"I don't know how true they were, but you always used to hear stories about how after Castro took over, these young fighters in Cuba would send Angelo their money and belongings to hold for them until they could defect," said J. Russell Peltz, the veteran Philadelphia boxing promoter.

"And he had some Hispanic great fighters in those days - guys like Luis Rodriguez and Sugar Ramos."

Mr. Dundee's first world champion was Carmen Basilio, a mush-faced, iron-jawed onion farmer from upstate New York who would win both the welterweight and middleweight crowns.

Then, in the fall of 1960, while working a fight in Louisville, Mr. Dundee met Cassius Clay, the brash young boxer who, as a light-heavyweight, had won an Olympic gold medal in Rome that summer. By November, they were working together in Miami.

The two men, so different in personality and outlook, were an enduring team, their professional relationship encompassing all but three fights of the iconic champion's long career, their friendship surviving even longer.

Just last month, an ailing Mr. Dundee traveled to Louisville to help Ali celebrate his 70th birthday.

"He was just a wonderful person," said Peltz. "A great ambassador for boxing."

When, after beating Sonny Liston in 1964 for the heavyweight championship, Clay infuriated many in white America by announcing he had joined the Nation of Islam and adopted the name Muhammad Ali, Mr. Dundee stuck by him. He stayed when Ali refused induction into the Army on religious grounds and was stripped of his heavyweight title.

"Through all those days of controversy, and the many that followed, Angelo never got involved," Ali wrote in the foreword to Mr. Dundee's autobiography, My View From the Corner: A Life in Boxing.

"He let me be exactly who I wanted to be, and he was loyal."

When, after his conversion to Islam, Ali's entourage became almost entirely black, there was always room for Mr. Dundee.

"There were people who tried to push him out, and Ali would never let it happen," longtime Ali aide Gene Kilroy once said. "Ali knew [Dundee] kept everyone in harmony, kept everything in check. More than that, he found good in everybody."

Mr. Dundee also was a master of more practical assistance.

During a 1963 fight with England's Henry Cooper, Ali was dazed by a fourth-round knockdown. After the round, Mr. Dundee summoned the referee to his corner.

Though before the fight he had been aware of and unconcerned by a slight tear in Ai's glove, Mr. Dundee now pointed to the tear and insisted on a new glove. While a futile search was conducted, Ali recuperated and beat Cooper on a TKO.

Ali's moods could be as dark as they more often were sunny, and Mr. Dundee knew how to push the right buttons. A few words between rounds and a lethargic Ali performance could be enlivened.

"Angelo was the greatest motivator of all time," promoter Bob Arum told the Associated Press. "No matter how bad things were, Angelo always put a positive spin on them."

At least twice in Ali's career, when he was partially blinded during that championship fight with Liston and when he'd been battered in the famed "Thrilla in Manila" clash with Joe Frazier, it was Mr. Dundee who persuaded Ali to fight on.

"To train fighters," Mr. Dundee said, "you've got to be part psychologist."

According to Peltz, Mr. Dundee was so upbeat that bad news actually pained him.

"I had him on my old radio show once," Peltz said. "When I started taking about some problems he'd had with Sugar Ray Leonard, Angelo stopped me. 'Let's not dwell on this. Let's talk about better times.' He was so upbeat."

In addition to Ali, Leonard, Ramos, Rodriguez and Basilio, Mr. Dundee trained a host of great boxers, including Willie Pastrano, Jimmy Ellis, Trevor Berbick, Michael Nunn, Oscar De La Hoya and George Foreman.

Mr. Dundee was elected to the International Boxing Hall of Fame in 1992. Chris Dundee died in 1998. Mr. Dundee's wife, Helen, died in 2010. Mr. Dundee spent his last years in Tampa so he could be close to his son and daughter.

He returned to Philadelphia often, visiting relatives who still lived in the old neighborhood.

"I'd go see him, and we'd have hot sausage and pasta and just talk about the old days," recalled Peltz. "Angelo loved to talk about boxing. And he loved to talk to the media. He always wanted to put a good spin on the sport. He was just so good for boxing. He's going to be missed."