GEORGE CHUVALO — POSTER BOY FOR CANADIAN TOUGHNESS — TRAINED IN GRAVENHURST, DRAWING HUGE CROWDS RINGSIDE AT THE GATEWAY HOTEL AND JOE GOWA MOTEL IN 1965
Mark Clairmont | MuskokaTODAY.com
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GRAVENHURST — If ever there was a poster boy for Canada’s toughness, imagine George Chuvalo on a $100 bill.
Mark Carney could use the stand-up guy in his tariff fight.
“He was one tough son of a bitch,” remembers Howie Ungerman, whose dad Irv managed the Canadian champion since the 1960s.
Never knocked down by 93 opponents, the Canadian boxing legend died Sunday on his 89th birthday.
Look up toughness in the Canadian Encyclopedia and you’ll find pictures of Chuvalo in the ring with Muhammad Ali, Joe Frazier and George Foreman … among heavyweight champions.
Ali called him the “toughest guy I ever fought,” after their first match, at Maple Leaf Gardens March 29, 1966, that went 15 rounds with “The Greatest” unable to floor him. They met six years later with the same end result.
Irv Ungerman was a Pine Lake cottager and friend of my dad, Hugh, who ran bouts in the 1950s at the old Gravenhurst arena on Peter Street.
As such were friends of the sweet science.
Chuvalo’s mother worked in the Ungerman family’s Toronto poultry and egg business “plucking chickens” and would bring him around the plant.
Being a bit of a boxer in the air force and around Toronto, Ungerman took a shine to the young pugilist who was struggling in the fight scene in Detroit. And got a group of Kensington business associates together to promote him for a while before Ungerman went it alone for decades, said his son.
They went to the top with Chuvalo’s first title shot with Ali, after ring appearances with champions and contenders including Floyd Patterson and Ernie Terrell.
Ungerman went on to manage Canadian welter-weight champion Clyde Gray who in 1973 was in Toronto again promoting Gray’s fight with Jose Napolese, where I met “The Champ” at centre ice at the Gardens.
But 61 years ago Chuvalo trained at the Ungerman family’s Gateway Hotel on Lake Muskoka and held public sparring sessions in an elevated ring outside the Joe Gowa Motel — today Muskoka Shores retirement home on Bethune Drive — which was owned by John Heswick.
It was two weeks old timers, like I, still talk about decades later. The ring out front the motel that gave permanent and summer residents front-row seats almost a decade after others world champions were in town at the same locations.
Linda Conway, nee Whitehead, was an 18-year-old dining room waitress.
“He’d come for breakfast,” she remembers. “He worked hard and ate hardy.”
She also managed a couple of dates with “Boston,” one of his sparring partners.
Ungerman also brought one-time heavyweight champion Archie Moore to town to “train hard” for three weeks before his lightweight title fight with Canadian James J. Parker at the Gardens July 25, 1956.
That was an event in itself drawing sports and boxing celebrities including Rocky Marciano.
However, said Ungerman’s son, after attempts to convince Chuvalo to hang up the gloves their relationship “soured.” The Canadian “Champ” fell on hard times after his son and his wife died by suicide and two sons succumbed to heroin overdose.
Ungerman died Oct. 27, 2015, at age 92.
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