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Sunday, March 05, 2000 By Chuck Finder, Post-Gazette Sports Writer
CANASTOTA, N.Y. -- In the humble boxing beginning, there was a gazebo-like enclosure paying homage to a couple of local boys who sprouted from the onion fields of Leatherstocking Country and grew into world champions. The shrine to uncle Carmen Basilio and nephew Billy Backus rose here on New York Route 13 in front of the McDonald's. Folks digested Quarter Pounders and welterweights at the same time.
But it wasn't filling.
Canastotans wanted more.
So in 1984, soon after opening that drive-thru monument, the good people of this burg of 5,000 commenced working on a project that failed in New York, where plans once called for a $1 million structure, and in Las Vegas, where plans once called for a $34 million extravaganza.
They were simply going to build a boxing hall of fame for the world.
"We were just kicking it around one day, and we figured, 'why not?' " recalled Tony Graziano, the manager of two former world champions and the proprietor/cook/bottle-washer of Graziano's Restaurant and Motel across Route 13. "We have the baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown a few miles [75] away, why not the boxing hall of fame here?"
First, it required a couple of state grants, $1,000 donations from 25 residents and fund-raisers such as fight-film nights, golf outings, the annual Banquet of Champions and the Onion Olympics. They held that last event in 1984, celebrating their finest products: onions and boxers. The flag was five interlocking onion rings, the onion-soup torch was borne from Mt. Olymponionus in nearby On(ion)eida, and there were such events as the onion-put and the decathonion. You know, a charity effort with a peel.
Five years later, Canastotans shed tears of happiness. They had conjured $150,000 to buy 10 acres of land directly across from the McDonald's and the shrine to the sons of immigrant onion farmers. They razed the seven-room house on the property and constructed a cedar-sided home to the science so sweet it seemed to grow from their central-state fields. Up went the International Boxing Hall of Fame.
After existing only in boxes and hazy notions inside Ring Magazine offices, the hall had a home. Muhammad Ali and Pittsburgh's Billy Conn came for the first induction ceremony, and the sport's stars continue to shine every June in Canastota. More than 150 boxers, trainers, managers and media types are enshrined. Robes, gloves, trunks, wrist wraps, wrist castings, photographs and memories of all feats fistic line the walls of the 2,000-square-foot hall.
Located at ringside to the New York State Thruway, as Interstate 90 is known here, the place befits the build-it-and-they-will-come mantra. When its doors opened in 1989, it attracted about 5,000 patrons. Nowadays, executive director Ed Brophy said, the June induction ceremonies attract roughly 25,000 -- equal to the hall's yearly gate.
"That's very good for being located in upstate New York," Brophy added. "We do get winter visitors even through the snowstorms. Those are diehard boxing fans.
"But the last 10 years have been successful at a very fast pace, making us one of the fastest growing halls of fame."
For years, Brophy heard television announcers mangle the town's name. These were boxing announcers, too. They mispronounced it as Canestoga. Canstastota. Canasoda. Over the hall's 11-year existence, though, the executive director has noticed how telecasts, such as the ESPN2 "Friday Night Fights" starring McKees Rocks' Paul Spadafora on Friday night, have begun to correctly pronounce Can-uh-STOW-ta.
Take Exit 34 off the Thruway, make a right at Graziano's Restaurant, park at 1 Hall of Fame Drive and walk through the hall's doors, and the first exhibit to the left tries to answer the first and foremost question.
"Why Canastota?" Graziano repeated. Then he launched into the history of Backus, a welterweight titlist in 1970-71 and one of the boxers he managed, and Basilio, Backus' uncle who became both a welterweight and middleweight champ in the 1950s. "In boxing history, as far as we know, it's the first time one family had two champions."
This burg's fertile boxing history goes deeper than that. Erie Canal builders and barge crews brought bare-knuckle fighting to the town in the late 1800s and the locals embraced it. Canastota lays claim to staging the first motion picture in America, on the Biograph. The film, of course, showed sparring.
Syracuse, 20 miles to the west, became home to many prize fights in the mid-1900s, and not all of them highlighting the local boys: Jake LaMotta, Ezzard Charles and Kid Gavilan fought there long ago, and David Reid more recently. Turning Stone Casino, 10 miles to the east, is becoming home to more and more fights -- evidenced by Spadafora's International Boxing Federation title defense Friday.
"I think the success of the Hall of Fame here in Canastota is, everyone pushes boxing first, to make something wonderful happen for the sport of boxing," said Brophy, a former vending-machine salesman who, like everyone else in these parts -- even Basilio and Backus -- once worked in the onion fields. "Sometimes, past projects to support a Hall of Fame [elsewhere] might have been for different business reasons.
"The hall of fame business is a difficult business. It can't survive on just gate receipts and a gift shop."
Fund-raising, volunteers, sponsors and dues-paying members play a role in this one-story testament to professional pugilism. A key part of those roles convenes here on one summer weekend.
It's the lore, the history that attracts fans by the thousands for the induction-ceremony weekend. Tickets are nearly sold out for this June 8-11, when lightweight Ken Buchanan, bantamweight Jeff Chandler and middleweight Carl "Bobo" Olson are among the enshrinees. The four-day fistic frolic also includes a parade, 5K run, a golf outing, lectures, celebrity workouts behind the hall (such as "Sugar" Shane Mosley and Christy Martin), a boxing collectibles show and the Banquet of Champions.
But the sight to see is all the former enshrinees and pugilistic stars. Ali, Conn, LaMotta, Gavilan, Basilio, Jersey Joe Walcott, Archie Moore, Willie Pep, Bob Foster, Ike Williams and Emile Griffith were here for the first class, 1990. Oscar de la Hoya has been here for the banquet and Sugar Ray Leonard just to stop by. Ken Norton, Marvin Hagler and Aaron Pryor are among the celebrity guests expected this June.
"Every champion in the world will be in the restaurant here," Graziano said. "It's quite an event."
No wonder fans travel from Mexico and Japan to come to the hall. No wonder a mate from Australia once sold his car to afford this pilgrimage. No wonder a group from England comes the weekend before the induction and spends a week in corner of the world that author James Fennimore Cooper immortalized as Leatherstocking Country.
Pittsburghers would find a few baubles of local interest here.
Past the Jack Dempsey exhibit, past the five Leonard robes and the below-the-belt protector with "Sugar" garishly painted across it, sits a cabinet of wrist wraps. Two of them came from Fritzie Zivic fights: in 1940 Madison Square Garden fights a month apart.
One back wall contains the enshrinees, of which four former Pittsburghers are members. Harry Greb, "The Pittsburgh Windmill," is part of the Old-Timers (pre-World War II) and another original enshrinee in the class of 1990. Conn, the original "Pittsburgh Kid," holds a special place among the Moderns, his plaque on the top row next to Ali, Henry Armstrong and Basilio -- "among the greats of greats," Brophy called it. Zivic, inducted in 1993, is identified on his plaque as "one of five famous Fighting Zivic Brothers." Sammy Angott, class of 1998, is identified as being born Samuel Engotti.
In a case opposite that exhibit rests The Jacobs Collection. A New York dentist, Walter Jacobs, made fist castings from fighters who crossed his path during the 1920s through the '40s. Angott's right is smaller than Conn's left, which is smaller than Primo Carnera's right. Then again, some infants are smaller than Carnera's right.
Monessen's Michael Moorer is also pictured on a wall, although the large, color photograph shows him getting KO'd by George Foreman in 1994. Ouch.
Beyond Western Pennsylvania connections, the hall holds boxing baubles from across the globe, across the century -- from the Marquis of Queensberry Rules ("No. 12: no shoes or boots with springs allowed") to Mike Tyson's mouthpiece (what, no ear?). There are beautiful belts won by Basilio and Tony Zale. There are battered gloves worn by LaMotta and Joe Louis. There are trunks that adorned Floyd Patterson and Fighting Harada (he was a flyweight, so they're teeny trunks). There are such knicknacks as Bert Sugar's typewriter and Zale's Presidential Citizens Medal and a corner-man's display -- gauze, tape, scissors, three ring-permissible types of coagulants and a device called the Enswell, something that looks like a small travel iron but supposedly reduces a boxer's facial swelling.
The exhibits rotate every few months, what with new mementoes coming in daily -- Thursday brought Vinny Pazienza's first fight robe. The hall's basement, all that remains of the original seven-room house on the site, is crammed with robes and gloves and faux belts and an unparalleled boxing archives.
A $300,000 state grant will go toward the summer construction of an outdoor training site, an amphitheater for ceremonies and a multi-purpose room for more displays. But Brophy the executive director has even more grand dreams for the hall.
"The goal would be to have a library on the same level, or a new facility on the site," Brophy said from his corner office overlooking the open field in the back and the Thruway. "We also could have a larger display gallery, for exhibits that keep growing. And we should have new exhibits to feature fighters from certain cities: Pittsburgh, New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Syracuse. . . . Our gift shop could be larger, too."
This wish list is just another sign that what started as a drive-thru monument has grown into a thriving hall. You can tell from the attendance. You can tell from the proper pronunciation: Canastota.
Why not?
For more information about the International Boxing Hall of Fame, go online at www.ibhof.com, telephone (315) 697-7905, or write to 1 Hall of Fame Drive, Canastota, N.Y., 13032.
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