[8.8] PANAMA AL BROWN 161-129(55)-19-13: Boxing Hall of Fame online - Narratively online -
Tall, thin, and all muscle, Panama Al Brown held the world bantamweight title for six years. He was born in Panama’s Canal Zone and as a young man was employed as a clerk with the United States Shipping Board. He became interested in boxing while watching bouts between US military personnel and, when encouraged by his boss, gave the ring a try.
Brown had surprising punching power and an incredible 76’’ reach. He turned professional at age 20 and won the Isthmus flyweight title in his third fight, with a decision over Sailor Patchett. Brown’s performance caught the attention of fight manager Dave Lumiansky, who took him to New York. Brown was unbeaten in his first seventeen bouts in the US and was ranked as the third-best flyweight in the 1924 annual rankings of The Ring. By 1926 Brown had moved up to the bantamweight level and was ranked sixth by The Ring. He then spent a year in Paris, where he was a great favorite of French fight fans, compiling a 6-2-1 record in nine bouts.
In 1929, Brown challenged Vidal Gregorio for the vacant world bantamweight title. The fight took place in Queensboro Stadium in Long Island City, with 15,000 looking on. Brown dominated the fight and easily won the decision. Over the next six years, Brown, a true world champion, defended his title in New York, Paris, Montreal, Marseilles, Toronto, Milan, London, and Tunis, and fought non-title bouts in many other cities around the world.
The merry-go-round stopped in Valencia, Spain, in 1935, when Baltazar Sangchilli beat Brown in a fifteen-round decision and walked off with the title. Brown kept fighting, mostly in Paris and New York, and finally back home in Panama. He twice retired and twice came back, until he at last quit the ring in 1942. Although the money had poured in during his globe-trotting days, Brown died penniless in New York in 1951, after a bout with tuberculosis. Boxing Hall of Fame online
On October 14, 1928, his last day as president of the National Boxing Association, Tom Donahue sent out a press release listing each of the reigning champions. The following day, before Paul Prehn, the new president, moved in his belongings or placed any personal photos on his desk, he released a statement with the sole purpose of taking away from a fighter what was earned in the ring – his title. Panama Al Brown, a boxer whom the poet and playwright Jean Cocteau described as ‘a poem written in black ink’, was an unwanted champion.
In the years that followed, Brown danced circles around the best boxers, eventually becoming the undeniable king of the bantamweights. Yet boxing officials continued to look for reasons to deny him his status. His title reign was filled with dubious suspensions and blatant refusals by state commissioners to acknowledge that he was the best in his class. Eventually, Brown packed his bags and sailed to Europe. The fans there embraced him at first, but when they too caught wind of the whispers that swirled behind his back, most came to his fights hoping to see him lose. He was jeered, slurred, and spat on during his ring walks. After one fight, the Parisian fans surrounded him as he left the ring and beat him bloody and unconscious amid the ringside seats. The reason for the suspensions, the boos, and the hate on both sides of the Atlantic, was all because Al Brown, boxing champion, loved other men …
On November 11, 1926 at the Salle Wagram, Europe had its first look at Brown. Hours before the doors opened, a sold-out crowd lined up beneath the bright lights of the Salle and waited anxiously. Brown was the latest in a string of performers who became known as ‘Harlem in Montmartre’. While Josephine Baker and Django Reinhardt ruled the stage, Brown was king of the ring. When he made his way down the carpeted aisle of the Troubadour-style hall in a sky-blue, silk kimono with white polka dots, his beige newsboy cap pulled down to side, he had no idea he was about to embark upon perhaps the most intense love-hate relationship any fighter ever had with his fans.
In his Paris debut, Brown boxed like Muhammad Ali and punched like Joe Louis. A right hand thrown like a spear in the third, simultaneously dropped his opponent and the jaws of the ringsiders. After the fight, Brown hit the cobblestone streets and received congratulations everywhere he went. In Paris, despite being darker than his last name, he walked through the front doors of the pubs.
His fights drew crowds the New York Times described as ‘fashionable’ and, dressed in ‘evening clothes, with a brilliant display of jewelry, ermine and sables by the women’. In the audience were Picasso and Hemingway. After the fights, along the Rue de Martyrs or Boulevard de Clichy, the seductive sounds of a saxophone often came from Brown’s hands and lips. Having learned French as a child from his mother, who was of French-Caribbean ancestry, Brown easily got around Paris. The athletic boxer took to dance as easily as he did to boxing and even performed onstage with Josephine Baker’s La Revue Negré. Well-known in many parts of the city, once again, the whispers about his lifestyle spread. The premier attraction of the most macho sport was a regular in places where women dressed as men and same-sex couples held hands. Cheers turned to jeers and ring entrances were met with profanity, slurs and spit.
Brown returned to New York and, under a new and influential manager, continued winning …
There is no definitive record of why he was stripped of the title, whether it was racism or homophobia or merely favoritism for others, but the decision to award it to him was not a popular one, and few protested it being taken away.
Once again relegated to club shows, Brown began to show signs of depression. He returned to Europe. The wins continued, as did the insults. Eventually, Brown beat everyone in his way and, begrudgingly, was acknowledged as champion in most corners. He came back to New York and defeated the reigning sensation, the Spaniard Gregorio Vidal, in 1929, after fifteen rounds and three knockdowns. But once again, those in charge of the NBA preferred to leave the title vacant.
In contrast, fans in Europe flocked to his fights and the pay befitted a champion. Though he would do most of his boxing in Europe the rest of his career, he traveled often between the continents, keeping apartments in Harlem and Montmartre. In Harlem, he drove a 1929 Packard 645 Sport with six wire wheels …
Because of his illness and addiction [opium], some of his fights were cancelled. When he fought Emile Pladner on November 14 1932 he was drunk, high and sick. From about the eighth of November, Brown could not get out of bed. His vision was blurred, his head spun, and his stomach had trouble holding anything down. The day of the fight, he awoke with shivers and cold sweats and a temperature of 102. Still, he fought. That night a Dr Taubmann was called to his dressing room. The doctor prepared a syringe. ‘This will last ten minutes,’ he said of the rush from the mixture of amphetamines. ‘Starting now,’ he added before sticking the champion in his arm. It was clear to ringsiders something was wrong with Brown. He threw few punches and there was no bounce to his steps. In the corner before the second round, his handlers held a fistful of smelling salts under his nose and told him, ‘Take him out now.’
Brown’s legs quivered unsteadily when he rose from his stool. At the center of the ring, an eager Pladner awaited. When Brown reached him, Pladner unleashed a left with fight-ending intentions towards Brown’s diaphragm. The punch traveled in a slight arc, gained maximum leverage, then, suddenly, was pulled down to the canvas with the rest of his body.
A split-second after Pladner planted his left foot for torque, Brown unleashed a right hand. Both punches were airborne at the same time. Brown’s punch was straight. Pladner’s took the scenic route. The straight punch landed first. It detonated on Pladner’s jaw. He dropped like a sack of potatoes. He looked awful when he got up. Brown looked worse.
When Pladner wound up to throw his next punch, Brown released an atomic right hand that carried every bit of energy he had left. It landed on the temple. Pladner was out before he hit the canvas. Before the referee finished the ten-count, Brown started to faint. He collapsed into the arms of his trainer who rushed over in the nick of time to catch him.
Brown was admitted into a hospital, where he stayed for 48 hours. He woke to find a telegram on the desk beside him from his manager instructing him to check himself out and head over immediately to Sheffield for a December 1 match, followed by one in Brussels on December 3, and then another in Paris on December 8 …
He lost his championship in 1935 in a fight during which he spent the last three rounds crying and unable to properly defend himself because, he said, someone in his own corner had slipped some rat poison in his water bottle halfway through the fight. He returned to Paris with no intention of boxing. He found work as a tap dancer and sax player performing in front of crowds who preferred talking amongst themselves rather than watching him. Brown spent his days clutching his opium lamp. Always warm, that lamp – and that drug – did for him what his vaunted straight right used to: it bailed him out.
Then one night the poet, Jean Cocteau, sat in the audience and asked to meet Brown, who he said comported himself in an elegant manner. Cocteau saw a younger version of himself in Brown. The dependency on his drug of choice, the way he clung to and relied on it like medicine, and the countless hook-ups with nameless individuals equally lost were all part of the road he traveled in his own younger days. Cocteau also knew the path out and would soon give Brown the directions.