Flinging a few with a pug in the pub
First of all, let’s get our definitions straight. What is a pug? According to the dictionary, a pug is a breed of small sturdy compact dogs of Asian origin with a smooth, short coat, tightly curled tail, short muzzle, and broad wrinkled face. Being a pug, it will have a “pug nose,” which is a nose having a slightly concave bridge and flattened nostrils. However, according to Definitions.net, which seems to specialize in Olde English, a pug may also be a bargeman, a harlot, an upper servant in a great house, the footprint of an animal, and a nickname for a boxer, or pugilist. Aha! Now we are getting closer to the pug to which I wish to refer.
The definition of pugnacious is “having a quarrelsome or combative nature.” A pugilist may tend to be “disputatious,” inclined to dispute, or even “bellicose,” which is favoring or inclined to start quarrels or wars. This finally brings us to truculent, or aggressively self-assertive. Truculent derives from “truculentus,” a form of the Latin adjective trux, meaning “savage.” Finally, there is “feisty,” chiefly used in common parlance in the southern and midland US, meaning “full of nervous energy.” Either way, consider that you have now received an introduction to a pug named George, whom I met in a seedy bar in Vancouver long ago, a pug nosed brawler who wanted to teach me the art of manly self-defence, mainly by the two of us stepping outside for an initial briefing. George was being feisty and we hadn’t even been properly introduced.
It has been noted that from time to time those who imbibe quantities of alcohol have a tendency to be disputatious. George liked to keep track of his beer intake by keeping the empty glasses on the table. When sober, I can count to ten with the best of them, and I could see George was into double figures. Normally this would allow the waiter to claim that the customer is “over the limit” but apparently this house rule did not apply to George. As he kindly explained to me, he had never been off his feet. As it turned out, this phrase applied to both his beverage intake and his career inside the boxing ring.
George and I had been introduced by a mutual friend, mainly because we were sitting at the next table and George was looking for someone to punch out. I stand 6’2” and weigh around 200 pounds, so I fit the bill, but I also wear glasses which usually gets me off the hook. In this instance, my friend saved my bacon by introducing me as an aspiring sports writer and that maybe I could write a story about George for the newspaper, and why not order some beer while we talk about it? This provided a way to avoid going outside for a chat, and we got free beer out of the deal as well because George was loaded in more ways than one. He’d won his last fight and was still celebrating.
George Jerome, also known as George Robert Joyal (I looked it up in Boxerlist.com) was a Metis, born in St. Boniface, Manitoba, and lived mostly in the Winnipeg area for the first 40 years of his life. He then moved to Vancouver. He travelled the world as a professional heavyweight boxer and fought a long list of fighters between 1968 and 1980, including George Chuvalo, the undisputed Canadian heavyweight champion who is in the Canadian Sports Hall of Fame. According to his obit when he passed away in 2009, George Jerome was never knocked off his feet in any of his fights, including his bout with the massive and brutal Chuvalo who twice fought Muhammad Ali.
We invited George to change tables and sit at ours, mainly because that way there would be more room for more beers. The waiter obligingly brought over half a dozen glasses, one for me and one for my friend and evidently the others for George. The house bouncer even came over, a giant black man with biceps the size of my thigh and he shook hands with George, evidently a friend as well.
“You seem to be good friends with him,” I said, raising a glass. “You seem to be friends with a lot of people here.”
“This my home turf,” said George, downing his glass and reaching for another. “I set up shop here when I am not on the road. Besides, he knows I’d break his nose if he cut me off.”
Personally I had never had my nose broken. It had been whacked more times than I care to remember in hockey fights, but I was lucky to be born with what is known as a “split septum,” which means my nose bends easily. It’s permanently bent a bit to one side but not so much that I look like a pug. George, on the other hand, looked like a cross between a pug and a Rottweiler, with maybe some moose thrown in for ballast. He claimed to be 6’0” and 240 pounds but since I am 6’2” and he stood several inches shorter than me, I guess he was 5’9”. I believed the estimate of 240 pounds though, because he was as wide as he was tall, with some extra avoirdupois in front. He looked like a beer keg.
“So you a writer, eh?” he said, putting another beer in its proper place. “What do you know about boxing?”
“Plenty,” I replied. “For starters, I know never to get into a ring with someone who actually knows how to box. Secondly, getting punched in the head is bad for your health.”
This comment brought the house down and offered the opportunity for George to order another round. “Do you want to learn how to box? I’ll teach you.”
“Never happen,” I replied with a smile. “The last time I had a fight was in the gym at high school. Jim Thompson forced me to do it. I gave him two black eyes. I damned near broke my right hand. I’d already broken my left wrist in a wrestling match. No thanks.”
Long and short, George convinced me there was a good story to be had, and he would tell me about his life but I had to come down to the gym and talk there when he was sober, and I told him I would have to talk to my editor first. I thought a story about a professional journeyman pugilist would make for a good human interest story but maybe my idea (given that no one else had ever heard of George Jerome) wouldn’t sell. This excuse also bought me some time to escape with my head still on my shoulders. It also allowed the conversation to continue further with more free beers involved.
The next week, however, I went back to this seedy bar and there was George again, holding court. Strangely, given his condition from the week before, he remembered who I was and what we had been talking about. George had a head like a block of cement. Not only could he take a punch, he could take his beer as well. The conversation quickly picked up from where it had tapered off the week before.
“So, what did your editor say?” he asked, this time nursing one small glass of beer. “Ya got an OK or not?”
Since I had forgotten all about the discussion and never talked to any editor, since I was only an “aspiring” writer at the time, I was in a bit of a jam. I asked George if I could buy him a beer.
“Nah, no more celebrating. “I got another fight comin’ up in a few months. I gotta get back in shape. I gotta wake up early tomorrow, do a 10 mile run and then go to the gym around noon to hit the bag. I’ll see you there.”
The gym turned out to be in a basement of a shabby commercial building on a noisy street on the scruffy east side. Thankfully it was not George’s personal gym; there were a lot of other people training there. There were a couple of boxing rings, and several heavy bags with boxers slugging them, speed bags, mats on the floor with guys stretching, and a couple of tiny windows that let in a dim light. Most of the boxers were teenagers. It looked just like boxing gyms do in the movies and smelled exactly what you would think a dingy old gym would smell like. In fact, it reeked like a lot like all the hockey dressing rooms I have experienced over the centuries. Well, maybe not that bad.
George was hitting the heavy bag, just like that scene in the first Rocky movie, where Sylvester Stallone is pounding a side of beef in the slaughterhouse and his trainer warns him not to break the ribs. If you have ever seen the boxing movie When We Were Kings, the “rumble in the jungle” between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman in Zaire, there is a scene where Foreman is hitting the heavy bag with enough force to put a hole in it. I don’t know what that heavy bag in Zaire was stuffed with; human skulls? Just the sight of the heavy bag made me want to turn around and leave, but George caught sight of me and came over to say hello, smelling like a camel’s armpit.
“Ya bring your gym clothes?” he said without the hint of a smile. “Go get changed.”
“What?” I replied, aghast. “I’m only here to watch and take notes.”
“Ya can’t learn how to box without equipment,” he frowned.
“But I don’t want to learn how to box,” I said with a frown of my own. “I want to write a story. That’s a totally different thing.”
It’s the honest truth; I don’t like fist fighting. I had watched enough of boxing on TV and the movies to realize what a dangerous activity it is. I was almost going to say “dangerous sport,” but punching people in the head with the intention of hurting them is not what I deem to be sport. I had been in many fights, but they were all on the hockey rink where there are two linesmen ready to jump in and stop the fight if it became dangerous. Besides, being taller than most people, as I quickly learned you don’t stand far away and whale away with your fists. You could hurt your pinkies doing that. You get close as you can and get a good grab on your opponent’s sweater and hang on tight. This keeps the skin on your knuckles and your nose on the front of your face. I did an interview once with famed hockey goon Tiger Williams, who owns the all-time record for penalties in the National Hockey League, a stupefying set of statistics that prove Williams was totally nuts. He confirmed my opinion about the need for getting up close. You ought to see his nose.
As a hockey player growing up I had the dubious honour of playing with two other players who set fighting records of their own. Conley Forey was thrown out of professional hockey after being drafted by the St. Louis Blues, just for beating the hell out of a referee to whom he took an exception. Who can believe? Perhaps the most feared hockey goon of all time was Al “the Globe” Globensky, with whom I played both hockey and football. He was drafted by Quebec City in the World Hockey Association where he proceeded to beat up all the other goons who were turning hockey during that era into a Goon Show. When he played as a teenager for the Montreal Junior Canadiens, attendance rose from 2,500 to 18,000 fans per game. The chant “On veut Globensky” (We want Globensky) became famous. Later, Al admitted he went black during his fights and doesn’t remember them. Eventually he went on a crusade to get bare knuckle fist fighting in hockey banned “before someone gets killed.”
If most people know anything about hockey it is they remember Paul Newman starring in the slap stick movie called Slap Shot. His awful squad of losers picks up three goons from another league who proceed to beat up everyone in sight. So his opponents start to stock goons themselves. You may be surprised to discover that the Slap Shot mythical maniac Ogie Oglethorpe, the craziest and toughest goon in the history of professional hockey at that time, was actually a real person. Real name is Bill Goldthorp, and he went to jail many times during his hockey career. Ogie (“Goldie,” as he is known) was often bailed out of jail to play a game and then went back behind bars. Once he leapt out of the penalty box and bit a linesman. Another time, according to a 2002 Globe and Mail article that described him as an “impossibly Afro-haired hellion,” he stormed on to the ice while suspended wearing his street clothes and starting beating up several of his team’s opponents. A movie was made about his incredible life.
Goldie wound up in jail many times for his off-ice antics in bars and nightclubs, alcohol fueling many of the fights that landed him in jail. In San Diego in 1980 he was shot trying to save an ex-girlfriend from a drug dealer. So it’s amazing to learn these days Ogie is still alive and now lives in quiet retirement in Surrey, near Vancouver. He does occasional appearances at Slap Shot reunions and various hockey games. Since Ogie, Tiger Williams and George Jerome all retired to live in Vancouver, I thought it would have been interesting to get them all together for a story. I know a seedy bar where we could have brought a video camera to record the conversation.
“Here, put these on,” said George, handing me a set of gloves. I was horrified. There was no way I was going to get into the ring with a professional heavyweight boxer, journeyman or world champion. But they were not boxing gloves; instead they were training mitts used by the boxers as targets. The trainer danced around as if he was a boxer, holding up the gloves for the boxer to hit. Since I was wearing sneakers, jeans and a t-shirt, all I had to do was climb over the ropes (which proved harder to do that it looks on TV) and start to backpedal, which I did as fast as I could. Boxing is an art form like dancing. It requires skill, speed, balance, strength and courage. I found myself coming up short in several of those categories, but not speed because I backed up faster than George could chase me.
“You hit me in the ribs just once,” I said through gritted teeth, “and I will call the cops. I will have you arrested and hire a lawyer and sue you for what’s left of your beer money.”
George just grinned. The force of his punches hurt my hands more than catching a hockey puck. All I had to do was move my hands around quickly and erratically while he nailed my mitts each and every time. There was no doubt about it, George was nothing more than a journeyman, a simple pug, but he could have knocked me out in three seconds if he wanted to, even if he was 20 pounds overweight and over 40 years old and way out of shape.
According to Boxerlist.com, George Jerome fought 32 professional bouts, somehow winning 13 of them. His first fight was January 1st, 1968, against Russel Baer in some whistle stop called Headingly, which may be in Saskatchewan. He won. On December 11, 1978, he faced off against George Chuvalo in the St. Lawrence Market Hall in Toronto where he was edged in a close decision. His last fight was May 21, 1980 at the Kelowna Memorial Area against some other pug named Ron Roussel. He fought mostly in the Pacific Northwest in small towns for small payoffs but ventured as far as Alaska, the Netherlands and Auckland, New Zealand or wherever he could earn a purse.
Climbing out of the ring, George wanted me to watch him skip rope. This is an activity normally associated with pre-teen girls prancing around the schoolyard, so it was something to see to watch a 240-pound fireplug skipping on his toes as sweat poured off what was left of his pugnacious nose. He was dripping like a fire hose but not breathing hard, talking casually as he bounced. It was like watching a hippo do ballet.
“You ready to work up a sweat?” announcing that next we would go a few rounds in the ring but promising he would pull his punches. Thankfully another boxer skipping rope in the ring next to us caught George’s attention and the two began to talk, bouncing like twin kangaroos. I took this as an opportunity to slide away into the shadows, my brief boxing career coming to a hasty conclusion but with my nose and ribs still in the same place as they were when I entered the gym, which was the main challenge as I saw it.
I never got a story published in any newspaper because I was too embarrassed to write anything about my experience as a boxing doofuss. If you ever asked me about fighting, I would side with Globensky’s opinion. Which is, getting punched in the head is definitely bad for your health and also you need your nose to breathe through. I looked far and wide before writing this story, but there are no photos of George Jerome online to be found anywhere, may George rest in peace. If he was still around, George would be my age and probably still looking for a scrap. Me, I’m looking where I put my beer a minute ago. I can remember meeting George 40 years ago but I can’t remember what I had for lunch today. You get old, some things you forget. On the other hand, some things you always remember, like flinging a few with a pug in a pub.
