Willie Pep, 84; featherweight reached boxing world's pinnacle

Willie Pep, considered pound for pound one of the top boxers to lace on a pair of gloves, died Thursday at West Hill Convalescent Home in Rocky Hill, Conn. The "Will o' the Wisp" was 84.

Mr. Pep had been in failing health and had advanced Alzheimer's disease, family members told the Hartford Courant this fall.

He had learned to fight while protecting his turf as a shoeshine boy on the street corners of Hartford's North End. From there, the elusive Mr. Pep -- a featherweight -- flitted and floated, danced and dodged to the pinnacle of the boxing world.

He won a staggering number of matches. After winning 62 fights in New England as an amateur, Mr. Pep won his first 63 professional fights, setting a record for the best start to a career. After finally losing a match -- against future Hall of Famer Sammy Angott, in a heavier weight class -- he reeled off 73 consecutive fights without losing. That, too, was a record.

By 20, he had become the youngest champion in any weight class in 40 years. Because of New York boxing restrictions, he had to lie about his age in order to get the 15-round title fight against Chalky Wright in Madison Square Garden. By the time he hung up his gloves, Mr. Pep had won 230 professional fights, lost 11, and had one draw.

Yet, it was not just numbers that prompted busloads of New Englanders to follow the kid from Connecticut as he fought in matches along the Eastern Seaboard or that propelled purses for featherweight fights into the realm of heavyweights. It was his style, colleagues and writers said.

"He carried boxing beyond the coarse, vulgar displays of human carnage," boxing writer Don Riley once wrote. "His were classic victories, rarely bloody; more the incredibly skilled surgeon, operating on his foe with the cool dispassionate dispatch of the antiseptic clinic."

At 5-foot-5 1/2-inches and about 126 pounds, Mr. Pep had a lightning left jab and a slipperiness that left opponents swatting at shadows.

"His style refined his brutality," the sportswriter Jimmy Cannon said in 1958. "Sometimes there seemed to be music playing for him alone and he danced to his private orchestra and the ring became a ballroom."

Globe writer Clif Keane started one fight story in 1948 this way: "Little Willie Pep of Hartford, Conn., brought along his gloved paint brushes and daubed Joey Angelo of Providence, R.I., for 10 rounds at the Garden last night."

Mr. Pep was born Guglielmo Papaleo in Middletown, Conn., and his family moved to Hartford when he was a child.

The early lessons of the street were hard, but like his childhood friends, Mr. Pep would carry them with him throughout his career.

"I weighed about 89 pounds soaking wet," Mr. Pep said in 1999, telling the Hartford Courant about preteen days spent trying to keep other shoeshine boys from muscling in on his prime spot. "The big guys would pick on me and so I had to fight them. I didn't know anything about boxing then. I was just a kid, but I knew enough not to get hit."

He spent his career perfecting that notion.

Along the way, the man who was named Willie Pep by his managers acquired several nicknames, including the Connecticut Kid. The one that stuck was Will o' the Wisp, the phrase for an apparition of lights ghosting over damp ground in still air at twilight. The will o' the wisp is said to disappear if approached.

As he reeled off victory after victory, Mr. Pep transformed the featherweight class. Before him, little attention was given to the lighter weight classes; the headlines and the big purses went to the middleweights and heavyweights. In early 1942 in his first main event fight, Mr. Pep earned $44 (at Fall River against Joey Rivers). By the late 1940s, he was fighting in front of packed houses at Madison Square Garden and the Boston Garden for some of the top purses in the sport.

Little seemed to stand in Mr. Pep's way. At the height of his career, he served a year in the Navy in 1943 and six months in the Army until World War II ended in the summer of 1945. When he returned both times, he continued where he left off: winning.

In January 1947, on a flight from Miami to Hartford, the passenger plane he was on crashed in a snowstorm in New Jersey. Several passengers were killed and Mr. Pep broke his leg and his back in two places. For three months, he lay on a hospital cot, one cast extending from his shoulders to his waist, another from his waist to his feet.

Many, including several of his doctors, thought his career was over.

"I'm through," Mr. Pep told a sportswriter visiting him in the hospital. "I'm through flying at night."

As for boxing, he said, "I'll fight again. You wait and see."

By mid-June, he was back in the ring. He won again, as he did in 25 more consecutive bouts.

Eventually a chaotic private life, and a lean slugger from Harlem named Sandy Saddler, caught up with Mr. Pep.

Saddler would take the featherweight crown from Mr. Pep in a jarring fourth-round knockout in October 1948 at Madison Square Garden. It was the first time Mr. Pep, then at 135-1-1, ever lost professionally in his weight class.

The two met in a rematch three months later at the same venue. "The second fight was the fight of our lives," Mr. Pep told writer Neil Allen in 2001.

"The greatest cheer he had ever received greeted Willie when he entered the ring," wrote Keane in the Globe's coverage of the fight. "Although cut three times around the eyes, Willie overcame these obstacles with a left hand that crackled Saddler's jaw like a skeleton clogging on a tin roof. The roaring continued in crescendo throughout the breathless struggle."

Despite the vicious cuts and swelling that nearly closed his eyes, Mr. Pep prevailed in 15 rounds.

After Mr. Pep was declared the winner, the referee, the esteemed Eddie Josephs, made a remarkable and controversial gesture: He shook Mr. Pep's hand.

"It was such a great exhibition of boxing, I just had to do it," he told the Globe. "I never did it before."

In 1981, Ring magazine named the fight one of the 10 best of all time.

The two would meet two more times. Both were brutal, frenetic bouts that were characterized as brawls, not boxing. Both ended with Saddler the victor. In the 1950 fight in Yankee Stadium, Ring Magazine reported: "Referee Ruby Goldstein was needed in triplicate." Mr. Pep lost his crown when he was not able to answer the bell for the eighth round, his shoulder injured after what Mr. Pep called an illegal armlock.

The last tilt, in 1951, was such a melee that the referee was sent sprawling to the canvas several times and the New York boxing commission banned both fighters from boxing in the state for several months.

Mr. Pep's other downfall was his no-holds-barred private life, which included an inability to keep the vast amounts of money he won. Mr. Pep -- whose quips could be as quick and sharp as his jabs -- put it succinctly: "I spent it on slow horses and fast women."

By the time he married his present wife, Barbara, in 1987, he had been through five marriages. "All my wives were great housekeepers," he used to say. "After every divorce, they kept the house."

Gambling debts and rumors that he was involved with the mob dogged Mr. Pep in the latter part of his career. In 1946, he was arrested in a dice game raided by police in Connecticut.

At times during his career, he fought a match every week to bankroll his gambling.

"I never was a good horse man," he said in 1957. "I had to be in the gym when the tracks were running. You know, in Hartford, I'm close to both the New England and New York tracks.

"I was licked."

In 1980, he won a lawsuit against Sports Illustrated over an Inside Sport article that claimed he had thrown one of his fights in the early 1950s.

Mr. Pep retired from the ring in 1958 and again in 1966 after a brief comeback.

"Let me tell you something about boxing," Mr. Pep once said. "I was champion of the world and there's three things that go and that's how a fighter knows that he's all done. First, your legs go, but if you got reflexes, you can see the punches coming, and you can bob and weave.

"The second thing is that your reflexes go, and the third thing is that your friends go, and you know you're all done when there's nobody hangin' 'round no more."

Those were his fly-by-night friends. Another group, he had said, stayed with him to the end -- the boys he grew up with on the streets of Hartford during the Depression.

At the turn of the century, the Associated Press named Mr. Pep the greatest featherweight ever. At around that time, he was diagnosed with dementia.

Much of the rest of his life was spent in a nursing and rehabilitation center. Several doctors and his wife thought boxing had a role in the degenerative disorder.

Mr. Pep was bewildered when his wife told him he was "sick from boxing."

"But Honey," he told her, "I was a good boxer -- I never got hit."