ANGELO

A cynic might take it as another indictment of boxing that the James S. Farley Award, presented by the Boxing Writers Association of American for “honest and integrity,” hasn’t been presented to anyone since 1996, when the late, great Eddie Futch was honored, and that only six such awards have been distributed since Harry Markson became the inaugural recipient in 1977.

Six Farley awards in 29 years wouldn’t seem to indicate that there is much honesty and integrity in a sport constantly tossing on the oily waves of scandal, controversy and corruption. But virtue is where you find it, and the BWAA will make amends for its decade of silence on May 5, when four Farleys are presented at the organization’s 81st annual awards dinner at the Mandalay Resort and Casino in Las Vegas.

Farley honorees include Dr. Flip Homansky, former chairman of the Nevada State Athletic Commission; Dr. Margaret Goodman, former chairperson of the NSAC medical advisory board; Howie Albert, the New York-based cutman, publicist and manager best known for his long association with welterweight legend Emile Griffith, and Hall of Fame trainer Angelo Dundee, who of course is most identified for his work with Muhammad Ali and Sugar Ray Leonard.

I like and respect all of the Farley winners, but there is a place in my heart reserved for Dundee, the pied piper whose special gift, other than the ability to squeeze the most out of his fighters, has been to spread goodwill as easily as most people breathe. Anyone who has seen the ever-smiling Ange at, say, the annual International Boxing Hall of Fame induction weekend in Canastota, N.Y., where he is a regular attendee, knows that he can chat up a complete stranger for a few seconds and make that person feel like a lifelong friend.

Dundee is enshrined not only in the International Boxing Hall of Fame (1992), but in the World Boxing Hall of Fame, Italian-American Hall of Fame, Chicago Boxing Hall of Fame, Los Angeles Boxing Hall of Fame and a few more that he can’t immediately recall.

So, does it ever get old, receiving another award at still another black-tie affair?

“Oh, no!” says the eternally enthusiastic Dundee, who is 82 only on his birth certificate. “Are you kidding? It’s wonderful to be recognized. And it’s wonderful to be in such good company. I have a lot of respect and admiration for Howie and (Drs. Homansky and Goodman).

“The thing that’s nice is that getting this award is another chance for me to visit with some old friends and maybe make some new ones. What can I say? I like people. Always have.”

Dundee was born Angelo Mirena Jr. in South Philadelphia on Aug. 30, 1913, and, although he has lived in the Miami area since 1952, he has many family members who have stayed close to home and have kept the pipeline between him and me in good repair.

“My sister, Mary, who’s 92, sends me the clips of all your stories,” Dundee, who doesn’t own a computer, says of the boxing articles I author for the Philadelphia Daily News. “When you write something that mentions my name, she goes crazy!”

It’s always a pleasure when, six or seven days one of my stories has appeared in the Daily News, I receive a hand-written note or a phone call from Angelo. “Just want you to know I’m keeping up with you,” he’ll jot down on a sheet of personalized stationary. “Keep up the good work.”

But my high regard for Angelo stems more from one morning we shared in the fall of 1992 than from anything else.

“I really liked your old man. Talking to him brought back a lot of fond memories,” Angelo says of the 1½-hour coffee-shop bull session in London in which I was the mostly silent third party.

My dad, Bernard “Jack” Fernandez Sr., was a former pro welterweight who is in no halls of fame, but he loved boxing and he passed that passion for the sport on to his only son. My proudest possession, which hangs in my home office, is a framed poster of an Aug. 18, 1944, fight card at the Auditorium in San Diego, in which Archie Moore, then a middleweight, was paired against Jimmy Hayden in the main event, and Jack Fernandez went up against Jimmy Hatmaker in an undercard bout.

Someone had begun calling my dad “Jack” many years earlier because, as an amateur boxer in his native New Orleans, his crouching, attacking style was likened to Jack Dempsey’s. The name stuck.

I have no videotapes of my dad in action, only some yellowing newspaper clippings. But one account, in advance of a Moore-headlined bout against Amado Rodriguez in San Diego, noted that “The opener matches Jack Fernandez, a wild-hooking slugger, against a good shock absorber, Mike Pacheco.”

Another was written by Art Burke, a fellow Naval reservist and future sports editor of the New Orleans Item, whose letter to the paper’s then-sports editor, Harry Martinez, was reprinted as part of a Martinez column.

“We had a monthly `smoker’ here at the gymnasium (which opened with the returns of the Joe Louis-Billy Conn fight) and one of our New Orleans Reservists, Jack Fernandez, fought on the eight-bout boxing program and scored the only clean-cut knockout of the night,” Burke wrote. “You may remember this boy since he reached the semifinals of the Sugar Bowl boxing tournament in 1940. His victory was all the more thrilling by the fact that the boy he kayoed in the second round was the Utah state 145-pound boxing champion for three straight years and has not been knocked out in 75 fights.”

I can recall being a fifth-grader and watching “Gillette Cavalcade of Sports” on our fuzzy black-and-white TV, as my father explained the nuances of what Ralph “Tiger” Jones, Florentino Fernandez (no relation, although I kind of fantasized that he was), Carmen Basilio, Gene Fullmer and, of course, the incomparable Sugar Ray Robinson were doing in the ring.

My dad, by then a retired New Orleans police captain, was pleased as punch when I took over the Daily News boxing beat from Elmer Smith in November 1987. He watched every televised fight that I covered, and when he couldn’t, I’d send him tapes to review. Boxing wasn’t the only bond we shared, of course, but it provided a bridge which made it easier for a couple of guys who loved the fight game to cross over into family and personal matters of greater consequence. My older son, Randy, does the same thing with me now, although the conversation tends to run more toward college football before we feel comfortable enough to let our emotional guards down and move on to weightier topics.

How do you repay someone who has meant the world to you? Well, you can’t, not really. But I tried to use boxing as a small token of my affection for my father, just as it had served so often as a metaphor for our intersected lives. Once, when he was visiting Philadelphia, we attended a fight card at the Blue Horizon and I had him introduced by ring announcer Ed Derian. Dad pretended to be embarrassed, but I suspect he was pleased. Another time, I brought him with me to the Mike Tyson-Razor Ruddock fight in Las Vegas on June 28, 1991, so that he could soak in the big-fight atmosphere he hadn’t had a chance to experience when he was boxing.

But the event that really tied everything together was the bout between Ruddock and Lennox Lewis in London on Oct. 31, 1992. Other than his Navy service in the South Pacific during World War II, Dad had never been out of the country. He was getting on in years, and I thought the occasion of his first trip to Europe would be a neat way for us to spend some quality time.

We saw the Tower of London, Westminster Abbey, the changing of the guard at Buckingham Palace. But Dad’s legs weren’t what they used to be, and he frequently had to stop and rest. He was unable to complete some of the tours, and he fretted that he was “spoiling” my chances to fully enjoy my British working vacation.

What Dad didn’t seem to understand is that I didn’t care nearly so much to see the crown jewels or the burial place of Rudyard Kipling and Sir Isaac Newton as I did for the opportunity to just be with him, and for us to enjoy boxing in another setting.

That morning with Angelo in the coffee shop at the White House Hotel in Kensington was the unquestioned highlight of the trip for Dad. He lit up like a Christmas tree. Oh, sure, they talked about Ali and Leonard, but Dad was more interested in Ange’s New Orleans connection, which was in the form of two of his future world champions, Ralph Dupas and Willie Pastrano.

“I met Dupas’ trainer, Whitey Esneault, when I was over there (in February 1952),” Angelo told me for a story I did on him after his election to the International Boxing Hall of Fame was announced. “Whitey said, `Ange, I got these two kids, they’re underage, they can only fight six-rounders here. If I sent them to you, would you work with them?’ I said, `Sure, no problem.’”

Angelo and Dad also reminisced about the Docusen brothers, Bernard and Maxie, who also came up under Esneault in the golden age of New Orleans boxing. Bernard, the more talented of the two, gave Sugar Ray Robinson fits when he extended the seemingly invincible welterweight champion of the world the 15-round distance on June 28, 1948.

My father was 74 when he passed away on March 4, 1994, in a hospital in suburban New Orleans. He’d finally had the heart attack forecast by numerous bouts with angina. I’m convinced the fighter in him enabled him to hold on, despite horrific pain, until I’d arrived from Philadelphia. I got to spend the last hour of his life with him, for which I am eternally grateful.

Whenever I hear from or speak to Angelo, I am forever reminded of the gift that he gave to Dad, the gift of reminiscence that only one old boxing lifer can give to another. To the day he died, my father spoke glowingly of a man he’d met only that one time, but someone who made him feel as if they’d always known and liked each other.

And if that isn’t a reason for Angelo to be recognized for “honesty and integrity in boxing,” I don’t know what is.
Other BWAA award winners for 2005 include:

* Ricky Hatton, the Edward Neil Award as Fighter of the Year.
* Diego Corrales-Jose Luis Castillo I, Harry Markson Award for Fight of the Year.
* Dan Birmingham, Futch-Condon Award for Trainer of the Year
* Al Haymon, Al Buck Award for Manager of the Year
* Jay Larkin and Rich Marotta (tie), Sam Taub Award for Excellence in Broadcast Journalism
* Tim Smith of the New York Daily News, Nat Fleischer Award for Excellence in Boxing Journalism
* Teddy Blackburn, James J. Walker Award for long and meritorious service to boxing
* Harold Lederman and Alex Ramos (tie), Marvin Kohn Good Guy Award
* Kassim Ouma, inaugural Pat Putnam Award for perserverance