ALTHOUGH his career in the professional boxing ring was neither long nor particularly spectacular, Coley Wallace has a niche in the history of the fight game for having inflicted, as an amateur, what was apparently (the claim is not uncontested) the only defeat sustained by Rocky Marciano. The “Brockton Blockbuster”, aka, the “Rock” for his sheer indestructibility, was to go on to become the only world champion in history to have an undefeated career in the paid ranks, in his case in 49 bouts.
The year was 1948, the occasion the Golden Gloves tournament in New York. Like other “what-it-might-have-led-to” episodes in sport, the moment of satisfaction had to be its own reward for Wallace as the years rolled by. He could not possibly know at that time that he had defeated one of the future greats of the ring.
But there were spin-offs for Wallace in the shape of a modest film career in which, notably, he was chosen to play Joe Louis in the 1953 biopic of the great boxer, The Joe Louis Story. In a film era in which actors tended to ape, rather than enact, boxers in such films, Wallace was hired to give conviction to the ring action, and it was generally acknowledged that he had given that part of the film considerable authenticity. Apart from anything else, Wallace bore a considerable resemblance to the young Joe Louis.
Coley Wallace was born in Jacksonville, Florida, but had moved to New York and was a student at New York State University when he came to the attention of the amateur boxing world. He soon compiled an impressive record of 17 wins — all knockouts — in as many bouts. He encountered Marciano — then still boxing under his Neapolitan family’s name, Marchegiano — in the preliminary rounds of the 1948 all-East Coast Golden Gloves championships in New York in February.
Marciano, who was late to embark on a boxing career, was four years older than Wallace. Recently demobbed from the army he was also completely lacking in sound guidance.
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At that stage, too, he had not attained the legendary fitness that was to enable him to weather the storms of punches from more skilful men and overpower them before the end of a contest. At a “mere” 5ft 10in he was also four inches shorter than Wallace, who had a magnificent physique.
A good counter-puncher, Wallace had to get down to Marciano’s level to keep him out over three torrid rounds. But although Marciano threw most of the leather, Wallace was adjudged the winner with his more accurate work, a verdict the disgruntled crowd saluted with a salvo of bottles flung into the ring. Wallace went on to to win the 1948 Golden Gloves title.
After winning the national amateur heavyweight title in 1950, he turned professional that year, going on to win his first ten fights, nine of them on knockouts. Indeed, until almost the end of 1953, his record was quite creditable, with only two losses in 21 bouts. But when he stepped up in class to face the former world champion Ezzard Charles in San Francisco in December 1953, he was knocked out in ten rounds. Over the next two years the ratio of defeats to wins multiplied exponentially, and he retired after being badly mauled and knocked out by Bob Woodall in April 1956.
In the interim the 1953 Joe Louis film had provided compensation. Indeed from then on, his own ring career went steadily downhill, much like that of the man he had portrayed: “a goodhearted guy with a simple way who can’t turn down a touch, and eventually loses his championship”.
After retiring from the ring, Wallace did some promotional work for a drinks company, and appeared in the film Carib Gold in 1957. There were several other small film roles thereafter, and in 1980 he acted Louis again, this time in Martin Scorsese’s Raging Bull, based on the life of the middleweight boxer Jake LaMotta. His last role was in the teens v drug dealer movie Rooftops (1989).
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Wallace remained a familar figure in ringside at New York, admired and respected by a younger generation of fighters who included Muhammad Ali and Ken Norton.
Coley Wallace, boxer and actor, was born in 1927. He died on January 30, 2005, aged 77.