George Chuvalo, the Toronto heavyweight who went the distance with Muhammad Ali twice and was never knocked down in a professional career that ran more than two decades, died Saturday in Toronto on his 89th birthday.
Sully’s Boxing Gym in Toronto, where Chuvalo trained during his career, confirmed his death in a social media post Saturday, The Canadian Press reported. “Today, Sully’s lost a piece of its history,” the gym said.
Tributes followed through the weekend from Canada and abroad. Ontario Premier Doug Ford called Chuvalo “a heavyweight boxing legend, a family friend and a Canadian icon” in a social media post. The World Boxing Council, based in Mexico, said in a statement Saturday that Chuvalo was widely regarded as “Canada’s greatest warrior,” citing his fights against George Foreman and Joe Frazier. Russ Anber, a Montreal-based trainer recently inducted into the International Boxing Hall of Fame, wrote that Chuvalo “epitomised the grit, toughness, courage and persistence, which future generations tried to emulate.” Lennox Lewis, a Canadian heavyweight of a later era, called him an icon and said that was “the only way I can describe” him.
Chuvalo’s son Mitchell told The Canadian Press on Sunday that his father was “a capital-T tough guy in every way,” in and out of the ring. He said no funeral dates had been set, but that plans were in the works for a public event to make room for personal tributes.
Born in Toronto to Croatian immigrant parents, Chuvalo was a Canadian amateur champion at 17 and was selected to represent Canada at the 1956 Olympics in Melbourne before turning professional instead. He finished 73-18-2 with 64 knockouts across a professional career that stretched from 1956 to 1978, held the Canadian heavyweight title five times and was ranked as high as No. 2 in the world.
He was never knocked down as a professional, a distinction that followed him for the rest of his life and that he was careful not to let define him. “When people think of me, they think of me fighting Muhammad,” Chuvalo said. “But I had close to 100 fights.”
The first of those Ali fights, on March 29, 1966, at Maple Leaf Gardens, is the one that made him. Chuvalo took the bout on 17 days’ notice, went the full 15 rounds and lost a decision to a fighter then at his physical peak. It was the first time Ali had been taken the distance over 15 rounds, and Ali went to hospital afterward with internal bleeding. Toronto Star columnist Milt Dunnell wrote at the time that the Gardens had staged “a contest between a bull and a bumblebee.” Chuvalo’s own account of the night was shorter. “I went dancing with my wife,” he said. Mitchell Chuvalo recalled Ali’s verdict on his father: “He’s the toughest guy I ever fought.”
Chuvalo said he took home $12,500 from a purse of $49,000 after his manager’s share and expenses. He lost a rematch with Ali in 1972 at Vancouver’s Pacific Coliseum on a 12-round decision, and lost a World Boxing Association title bout to Ernie Terrell in 1965. His final fight came in December 1978 at Toronto’s St. Lawrence Market, a technical knockout win over George Jerome that kept the Canadian title. Chuvalo was 41 and was paid $7,500.
His life outside the ring was marked by loss on a scale he said dwarfed anything he absorbed as a fighter. Three of his sons and his first wife, Lynne, died between 1985 and 1996, deaths he attributed to drugs and suicide. “If you added up every punch I ever took and then multiplied the total by 10,000, it wouldn’t begin to equal the pain,” he wrote in his 2013 autobiography. He remarried and spent decades speaking in schools across the country through his Fight Against Drugs campaign, telling the story repeatedly in public even though, as his son put it, recounting it was torturous for him.
Chuvalo was inducted into Canada’s Sports Hall of Fame in 1990 and the World Boxing Hall of Fame in 1997, was named to the Order of Canada in 1998 and was added to Canada’s Walk of Fame in 2005. A statue of him was erected in his family’s ancestral town of Ljubuski, in Bosnia and Herzegovina, in 2011.
Reporting in this article is drawn from The Canadian Press.
