Four Fires (62 page)

Now this one, to wish you luck in Rome. I'm very proud of you, Bozo, and can't take credit because you're a natural, always and was willin' to work hard even as a little bloke But you made me time in prison a pleasure and I'd do the stretch all over again if you was there. I'm sending you twenty quid. I-talians are cowards and I captured 20 meself in Toohruk and I didn't even have a live round up me barrel when I come across them behind a sand dune. They dropped their rifles and put their hands up and one already had a white rag tied on his rifle barrel I reckon'd, for sure, I'd get a gong or something, but lots of blokes did the same thing and some brought in 200 prisoners of war single handed. But it's the I-tie sheilas the money's for. There's no better, take my word, son. Spend it wise on one of them but take a rubber. Never can tell, eh!

Yours faithfully,

Bobby Devlin

P. S. Ask your mother has she still got the gold bracelet, she'll know what mean.

Bozo couldn't even write to thank him because there was no address, but the postmark said Tweed Heads. Bozo wrote anyway, care of the Tweed Heads post office but we never heard if
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he got it.

Bozo isn't like Sarah or Mike who can tell you sort of blow by blow what happened. He's always been a modest sort of a bloke who doesn't like talking about himself too much so when he got back from Rome I had to interrogate him for weeks to get the story and some of it has taken years, bits coming out here and there.

Bozo said the preliminaries were all pretty tough fights as there were thirty-three welterweights in the first section. According to Ray Mitchell, the great Australian boxing expert, there were some pretty weird decisions at the Rome Olympics. It seems that sometimes you weren't only fighting your opponent because some of the referees and judges were pretty one-eyed, and there was a fair bit of aggro about it among the boxers and the team managers. Not just the ten Australian boxers, some of whom felt they were the victims of a bad decision, but a lot of the other teams as well.

The Eastern Bloc officials were pretty keen to see their boxers come home but so were some of the judges and referees from the free world. The Italians, whose games it was, wanted to see the local boxers come good even if they didn't always have the talent and if they needed a nudge or two on a scorecard, well, so be it.

Bozo said that after the first section of fights when it became pretty apparent that it wasn't always a case of the best man wins, there was a pretty bad spirit among some of the teams and you couldn't help feeling it. You knew you had to beat more than your opponent in many cases and a lot of blokes, to make sure they'd beat their opponent convincingly, were encouraged by their trainers to start off a lot more aggressively than was maybe their natural way of fighting.

When I asked him if he'd done the same, he laughed, 'Mate, I just kept thinking of Big Jack and Kevin and Mrs Rika Ray and even Bobby Devlin and what they'd taught me and I reckoned that if it wasn't enough I wouldn't win. No good trying to change your style going into the most important fight of your life.'

There definitely were some very weird decisions given and one of them was when our Australian light heavyweight, Tony Madigan, fought Cassius Clay and the crowd booed after the verdict was given to Clay.

From outside the ring it appeared that there was very little between the two boxers in the first two rounds. Clay used the ring very well and scored on the back move, keeping the fight at long range. You see, Madigan had knocked out his Romanian opponent, Negrea, when the Eastern Bloc fighter made a careless mistake in the second round and led with a right and, boom, Madigan let go a left hook followed by a right to the head and dropped Negrea cold.

So Clay's corner are anxious not to get too close to Madigan. But Madigan keeps coming in and in the first two rounds it would have been hard to separate them.

In the third and final, Madigan steps up a notch and goes for Clay, who tries to dance out of the way and keep the ferocious Australian at bay but Madigan's got a gold medal in mind, which means he has to get into the finals and he's showing tremendous aggression. His constant attack takes the fight to close quarters where Clay can't escape. Madigan has Clay holding on desperately as he whips punch after punch to the American's body. Ray Mitchell says that unbiased and good judges of boxing rated the decision for Clay. The crowd was very vocal and hooted the verdict, but Bozo disagrees, he saw the fight and he reckons Cassius Clay always had the fight under control. It was just that Madigan was a fighter who looked very good in the ring, a bit like the contrast in styles between Thomas and himself.

Yet you can't help thinking about what happened afterwards with Cassius Clay, who became Muhammad All, world heavyweight champion and one of the greatest boxers the world has ever seen. What if our own Tony Madigan had won? Christ. I don't suppose Madigan, who was a Catholic, would have said anything like that in a hurry.

The Italians won an amazing thirty-three bouts counting all the preliminaries, that was more than anyone else. A great many boxing experts came away from Rome saying that the sport of boxing
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had not been well served at the 1960 Olympic Games.

When all was said and done, Australia did okay in the boxing though, considering they were a very inexperienced team and most of the fighters from Europe and America had over a hundred amateur fights under their belts. Except for Tony Madigan, the rest of our boys didn't even get near that figure. The flyweight, Rocky Gattellari, who later ranked number five in the world when he turned professional, went to Rome with only twenty-seven amateur bouts behind him.

So bronze medals also coming from Madigan and Ollie Taylor in the bantamweight division wasn't a bad show and the best we'd ever done

in Olympic boxing.

While we didn't win as many medals in Rome as we'd done in Melbourne, Herb Elliott's win in the 1500 metres by twenty metres, which is about twelve yards, was one of the greatest 1500

metre races

ever! Some people say he may even give up running because he is bored with winning and he's won everything there is to win anyway. You'd think that sooner or later he'd have an off day, a cold or something, but he hasn't.

We also did much better in swimming than in Melbourne. Murray Rose and Dawn Fraser, whom Bozo marched next to in the opening ceremony, both won gold medals, so did John Devitt and John Konrads and David Thiele. I think Rome was where Australian swimming really started to come into its own and look at it now!

As far as I can gather, Bozo's fight with the boxer from the Soviet Union was almost a duplicate of his fight in the 1959 Nationals with John Thomas, only this time the other fighter got the decision.

The Soviet boxer was another headhunter like Thomas, though he knew a fair bit about going for the body as well. He was tough as teak and was prepared to take a few good punches so that he could get in close where he preferred to fight. In the first round Bozo did a lot of backpedalling, keeping his opponent at bay with his left hand and, every once in a while, throwing a beautiful straight right that kept him in contention. Like the Thomas fight, the more aggressive Soviet fighter seemed to take the first round. He'd landed two good right hands of his own, a straight right to Bozo's head and another right hook when on a rare occasion he had Bozo on the ropes. Both punches hurt Bozo, and his opponent seemed pretty pleased with himself when the bell went, smacking his gloves above his head on his way to his corner. The judges might have given him the first round, they probably did.

Thinking that Bozo lacked the punch to hurt him, the boxer came in very aggressively, chasing Bozo all over the ring. But it was Bozo who'd worked his opponent out and in the second round Bozo boxed beautifully and scored well, counter punching when the boxer went on the attack.

Bozo took most of his punches on the gloves and, regular as clockwork, planted his signature with a rip to the body, most of his punches going into the same spot under the heart. Bozo was working to his plan, not allowing the Russian to dictate the fight, though to someone who wasn't an expert, the Soviet fighter's aggression may have fooled them into thinking he was gaining the ascendancy when just the opposite was true.

In fact, Mitchell says he thought at the time the fighter from the Soviet Union had lapsed in the second round and that Bozo's hard and accurate punching had sapped some of his opponent's strength and he was now fighting in flurries and breathing heavily from the mouth, his punches mostly missing. It became clear from the number of times the Russian threw the same punch that he was hoping he might get a good right cross to Bozo's jaw and put him down. But towards the end of the round, uncannily like the Thomas fight, Bozo moved laterally after his opponent had thrown a right cross and missed, putting a perfect straight left into the point of the Soviet fighters jaw, which dropped him to the canvas as the bell went.

The Soviet fighter was tough and proud and he took the compulsory count on his pins before
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going to his corner. There was no doubt that Bozo had hurt him and comfortably taken the round. One round each with one to go.

In the third round, the superbly conditioned Soviet boxer was ready to fight. He was throwing punches from every direction of the compass and Bozo was tying him up so that the ref warned him on one occasion. Then the Russian was warned for a headbutt, which may or may not have been accidental. But he kept coming and Bozo had to withstand a desperate onslaught. I keep repeating it, I know, but Bozo kept those rips going in, landing them close up, short jabs that went under the heart. They may not have looked much but Bozo was a very strong boxer and the short punches had the full weight of his shoulders and body behind them and each time he landed one, you could hear the Soviet boxer grunt, they were hurting bad. With thirty seconds to go in the final round, Bozo had done enough to win but he wanted to make sure so he hit the boxer with a beautiful left and right that should have put him down. The boy from the Urals was tough as they come, though, and hung onto the ropes for dear life. Bozo went for his heart again and the Soviet fighter grabbed desperately at Bozo, locking his arms and holding on for grim life. The referee didn't tell them to break and the crowd started yelling, but the other boxer kept hanging onto Bozo's arms. The few seconds Bozo needed to make the break and then put in the decider, the knock-out punch, was gone. The final bell went.

The decision in favour of the Soviet Union boxer was jeered at by the crowd. Afterwards, the trainer of the Soviet Union team came up to Bozo in the Australian dressing room and, in front of all the other Australian boxers, raised his hand above his head, before walking out again without saying a single word. Bozo laughs when people say he could have won a gold if he'd been given a fair go. 'Nah, the Italian, Nino Benvenuti who won gold was in a class of his own, I couldn't have taken him,' he'd say. Bozo's always been a straightshooter and he was right, Benvenuti went on to become the world professional middleweight champion.

So Bozo Maloney became an Olympic bronze medallist and he said later it was the happiest day of his life. All the hard work was rewarded and Big Jack Donovan's faith in him justified.

Toby Forbes at the Gazette goes wild. He has a special rotogravure colour front page printed in Melbourne on high-quality paper. It shows a picture of Bozo stripped down to his boxing gear with the red singlet and white shorts that are the Yankalillee colours and, of course, his red Tommy Christmas-gift boxing gloves and, as well, his bronze medal big as a side plate with the ribbon trailing across the page with the five Olympic rings across the top of the page. In two-inch letters, in the alliteration Toby Forbes is so fond of using, the headline says: souvenir edition

bloody

beauty!

Bozo's

brilliant

boxing

bronze!

In the editorial, after he's said how fantastic Bozo's win was and how proud the town of Yankalillee is of him, Forbes gets well and truly stuck into the shire council.

Every dog has his day and Bozo 'Dog Boy' Maloney's is well overdue. Refused a civic reception when he was chosen to represent Australia, he has now returned from Rome with a bronze medal. A brilliant result for a local

lad fighting the world's best. But, it seems, he can win in the international arena but not in his own backyard unless he brings back the spoils. Now Yankalillee's shire council and the men who run it must keep their promise and give this upstanding young boxer the civic reception and the honour that goes with it that he so richly deserves!

He goes on a lot more and quotes the article from Australian Ring Magazine that says Bozo
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should have got at least a silver and that who knows where he'll go in the 'world of fights and fists' but everyone knows that he is a credit and always has been a credit to Yankalillee and so on.

So now, of course, the shire council and its president, Philip, with one T, Templeton, are forced to give Bozo a civic reception. Bozo's not that keen, but Nancy wants it more than the crown jewels. The town clerk comes to see her and says they'll have a parade down King Street with all the trimmings. They've decided to borrow the Rolls-Royce from the mayor of Albury and Nancy and Bozo will sit in the back seat and the town band will lead them to a reception at the town hall.

Nancy won't have a bar of this. 'We all go in the parade or nobody, this family does things together,' she tells him.

'We could get a ute from Mr Templeton's dealership and you could all stand in the back.' The silly coot must be away with the fairies or something.

I'd rather be pushed down King Street in the nightcart than go in a Holden ute belonging to Philip bloody Templeton!' Nancy protests. Then she has her sudden inspiration. 'The Diamond T!' she screams out. 'We'll do it in the Diamond T!'

She goes on to explain that the whole family will be in the back of the Diamond T. Bozo in his Olympic blazer, tie and hat with the special khaki flannels. Sarah in one of Mike's outfits, me and little Colleen, Morrie and Sophie as well, because as far as us Maloneys are concerned, they're family as well. Tommy will be the front passenger with Templeton, Sarah's daughter, on his lap waving to the crowd and reminding everyone who sees her who she is, and Nancy will be there, behind the wheel.