Born in Warsaw, Israel “Charley” Goldman (1888–1968) arrived in America with his Polish parents at a very young age. The short kid from the Red Hook section of Brooklyn, New York, grew up with clenched fists. His fighting days were primarily during a time when it was illegal to box in the Empire State.
Before 1896, boxing was illegal, but the short-lived Horton Law legalized it until complaints of fixed fights and ring fatalities forced the state legislature to repeal it. From 1900 to 1911, boxing was relegated to chartered athletic clubs and could be patronized only by members of said club.
Club owners, trainers, and boxers, however, worked to circumvent the law by establishing their own “clubs” to host fights. Instead of buying tickets, patrons simply paid “membership dues,” which enabled them to attend the fights and bet on them. For Goldman, who relied on boxing as a career, especially since he dropped out of school in the fourth grade, the circumvention was a necessity. Many of his fights took place in the back of bars, but at the age of 15 he made the decision to turn professional.
Boxing Trainer
Goldman later became a trainer and found great success in his methodology of never changing the basics of a fighter but merely improving on what the fighter could already do. He would train several champion boxers, none more famous than boxing’s only undefeated heavyweight champion, Rocky Marciano. The future champion luckily landed with Goldman; otherwise, he would have been ignored or had his basics altered completely.Speaking with his assistant Angelo Dundee, who would go on to train Muhammad Ali, Goldman said of Marciano: “I gotta guy who’s short, stoop-shouldered, balding, got two left feet and, God, how he can punch.”
Goldman forced Marciano to work his left jab and hook by tying his right hand behind his back. To establish better footwork, he tied a rope to each ankle so that when he would overextend himself on a punch, he would fall. Goldman never focused on Marciano’s grace in the ring (of which he hardly had any), but rather on his brute force and inextinguishable stamina.
Goldman would continue training into the 1960s. He was inducted into the Boxing Hall of Fame in 1992.
