Archie Moore, Sugar Ray Robinson and Willie Pep have often been cited as the three outstanding world boxing champions between the end of the Second World War and the advent of Muhammad Ali. When it came to evasive skills, it was Pep, nicknamed “the Will o’ the Wisp”, who was the master of them all.
Statistically Pep, who was born near Hartford, Connecticut, had perhaps the most extraordinary of all modern ring records. Between 1940 and 1966 he fought 242 professional bouts, winning 230, of which 165 victories were on points and another 65 inside the distance.
Pep, whose real name was Guglielmo Papaleo, lost only 11 times in 26 years with just six defeats by stoppage, three at the hands of the long-armed, fearsome puncher Sandy Saddler, and also featured in one draw and one no decision. In 1940 Pep turned pro as a teenager who was already a state amateur and bantamweight champion.
He won 53 fights in a row before, at 20, beating Chalky Wright for the world 9st title. He won eight more bouts before being out-wrestled by the bigger Sammy Angott, a former and future lightweight champion and then ran up another string of 73 victories before Saddler beat him mercilessly in the fourth round of their first title fight in 1948.
The sportswriter Bill Heinz said: “We never saw another like him. He was a creative genius with the reflexes of a housefly.”
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If Pep’s boxing skill was very much natural, he was always eager to point out that: “I paid my dues at the highest level.” He recalled that as an amateur flyweight he had once had to give away about 20lb and a three-rounds beating to “a real tall black kid called Ray Roberts who turned out to be someone you would know later as Sugar Ray Robinson. In Connecticut at that time amateurs were allowed to fight for money, and I got $8 for being beat up by Robinson and my manager took seven of them.”
Pep’s father was a construction worker from Syracuse, in Sicily, who could neither read nor write in English. But he appreciated that while he was earning $15 a week his son could bring home double that after an “amateur” fight.
As a teenage pro unable to get action in New York, young Pep drove all the way to California where, broke and hungry, he was paid a dollar a round to spar in the Los Angeles Main Street gym with “that guy over there” who turned out to be the reigning world bantamweight champion Manuel Ortiz. Three years later Pep was to win $20,000 for out-pointing Ortiz.
The 20-year-old Pep was in the right place at the right time — New York, 1942 — when he out-pointed Wright for the world featherweight title. When the two met in a return in September 1944 it was the first time a fight was televised from New York’s famed Madison Square Garden. At a time when few Americans had TV sets Pep and Wright got $400 each for television rights; only a few years later Pep received $15,000 for fighting Saddler. The appeal of televised boxing helped to sell many of the first TV sets but it also ruined the financial future of the small clubs in which talent like that of Pep was developed.
Pep believed that his greatest fight was the second against Saddler, the only one of four he would win against that cannon of a man. But he also took quiet pride in the night in Minneapolis when he was up against Jackie Graves, scorer of 20 knockouts and 17 other wins. Pep told a local sportswriter Don Riley before the fight: “In the third round I’m not going to throw a punch and I’ll still win.” After the fight, he admitted: “Actually I guess I jabbed him a few times, but most of the round I made him miss maybe 100 punches and he looked so bad they gave me the round.”
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Six months after that fight, in January 1947, Pep’s career looked finished when he ended up in hospital, a cast on his back and a leg, after surviving a plane crash in which five passengers were killed. But by June he was fighting again and in September defended his world title against Jock Leslie with an eleventh-round stoppage. Pep ruefully considered later that he recovered so swiftly that a $250,000 suit of the airline was thrown out and he only made $3,000 from the title fight.
When Pep finally gave up boxing, being held to ransom, as he would tell it, by a promoter who made him fight in March 1966 rather than box an exhibition against Calvin Woodland (Pep lost on points) he spent some time as a referee, travelled around the US with his friend Rocky Marciano and worked with the Connecticut State Boxing Commission.
On a visit to London in the 1970s Pep emphasised that he had never fallen out of love with the sport he practised so elegantly. His motto, he said, was: “Hit but don’t be hit.”
Pep, who reckoned that he earned more than $1 million through the ring, went through five divorces, which he believed cost him the best half of all his earnings. “They married me for my name and my money. In the settlement I got the name and they got the money. To me the ideal is when you’ve got a wife and a TV set and they’re both working.”
A warm-hearted man, he would cheerfully greet other former boxers by demanding: “Lay down so I can recognise you.” When a news agency reporter once phoned his home because of a report that the champion had died, Pep perkily replied: “Naw, I didn’t die last night. Matter of fact, I wasn’t even out of the house.”
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He died at a nursing home in Rocky Hill, Connecticut, where he had been treated for Alzheimer’s disease since 2001.
Willie Pep, boxer, was born on September 19, 1922. He died November 23, 2006, aged 84