Famed for his unlimited will, George Chuvalo busted boxing stereotypes

There is a dread known only to writers who commit to print true-but-unflattering anecdotes about innocent subjects of profiles and then happen to bump into them afterwards. There is an additional level of fear for those writers when the aggrieved individuals are capable of doing them bodily, possibly mortal harm. The latter was the case when I bumped into George Chuvalo a few weeks after profiling him back in 1987. This chance meeting prompted immediate introspection — questions about my career choices, medical benefits and life insurance. I had insulted if not defamed a guy who could kill me with a handshake and almost did.

You might presume my luck was all bad when my path crossed with Chuvalo’s. But this toughest of all the tough guys in the toughest of games — boxing — couldn’t have taken it easier on me. Out of the game for nearly 10 years by that point, Chuvalo had faced some of the biggest hitters in a great era for heavyweight boxing, none of whom knocked him down. If Ali, Frazier and Foreman couldn’t drop him to the canvas or even back him up, then I should have guessed that he wouldn’t even feel the sting of what to the objective reader might be read as a cheap shot.

Let me back up: I had written a piece about Chuvalo for a magazine that catered to hipsters who are now the parents of hipsters. While his name was shorthand for toughness to boxing fans, most sports fans and many Torontonians of that era, his history was little known to my intended readership, so I had to lead them through the fact and lore.

To capture the man, I recounted what were the most brutal of moments in his career: the night he stepped into the ring with Joe Frazier, then a star ascendant, already owner of a left hook that stands as the greatest of all time. The fight went only three awful rounds before the ref stepped in and stopped it, raising Frazier’s hand. I remember watching it as a kid and having nightmares that night. In the gruesome and presumably offending passage, I wrote: “You can’t forget how Smokin’ Joe Frazier almost knocked George’s eye out of its socket.”

When Chuvalo walked over to me the night of the dreaded run-in, he probably could have smelled my fear. And he went right to the line about the Frazier fight.

“You wrote that Frazier was knocking my eye out of the socket, but that wasn’t what happened,” he said. “The fact is that he knocked my eye into the back of the socket. Other than that, I liked the story.”

Chuvalo liked it so much that over the next two or three years we spent a fair bit of time together. We grabbed late-night meals at Macedonian Village on Queen St. We watched fights in bars. And once, we wound up at Gold’s Gym, which was open 24 hours back in those days. We showed up in the 24th hour, and Chuvalo prefaced his workout by telling me he hadn’t been in a gym for a couple of years. He then picked up two 125-pound dumbbells, took a seat on an incline bench and machine-gunned a couple of dozen alternating curls, expending what seemed to be no more effort than if he were hoisting cans of apple juice. And that’s what the dumbbells looked like to scale when Chuvalo wrapped his massive hands around the handles.