Heaven knows, the sport of boxing has given us some truly amazing people, some surreal characters over the years. From fascinating personalities to shady figures, to all-out unbelievable individuals, the Fight Game has thrown out some real gems. Speaking of unbelievable, 1970’s heavyweight warrior Bob Bozic has lived a truly astonishing life, his 74 years having been crammed full of enough material to fill some chapters of a ‘Ripley’s Believe It or Not’ book.
Bozic’s name may not be a familiar to most people, even hardened boxing fans, but Bob fought Larry Holmes at Madison Square Garden in 1973, this his most famous fight, and Bozic worked for many years at a New York bar, where he regularly left patrons with their mouths hanging open in disbelief. Over the years, the writers tracked Bozic down, his story coming to light. This year, Bob released his memoir, entitled ‘So, What Happens Is….’
This week, Bob was kind enough to speak with ESB, and there was a lot of stuff to cover!
Q: Where do I start with your amazing life story?
Bob Bozic: “Where are you from first of all?”
Q: York, about an hour from Manchester.
B.B: “Did you know Brian London, wasn’t he from around there?”
Q: Yes, Blackpool I met him once, before he passed away…..
B.B: “How old was he when he died?”
Q: I think he was 87, a good age.
B.B: “Yeah, that’s a good age. Go ahead, ask me questions.”
Q: I’ll start off with this one, it’s true you were basically on your own in Canada at the age of 14, and then a gangster got you into boxing?
B.B: “I was on my own at 14, yeah, and just before I was 16, a gangster found me on the street in Toronto. He was just a goodhearted person, I was just a hungry kid. He was a bookie, and what you call a gangster here [in New York], whatever that means. He fed me for a couple of months and then he told me I had to go back to school and he found me a place to live and he paid for it. To keep me out of trouble, he owned a boxing gym, and I started boxing after school. And it turned out I could fight. I had the will to fight. If you hit me, I came back hard. It’s the will to win, not so much the toughness. Larry Holmes once said of me, he’s got a blurb in my book, and he said how tough I was, that I ‘had the dog in me.’. He was a great fighter. The first jab he hit me with, he broke my nose. In round three he knocked my teeth out. I’d heard about Larry Holmes’ jab, and his very first jab broke my nose, this in eight seconds. In round three, it was like a car crash as he hit me as I was going right at him, he timed it. He knocked three of my teeth out, I had to spit them into the bucket between rounds.”
Q: But you went the distance with Holmes. You fought at The Garden how many times?
B.B: “I fought at The Garden five times. The first fight I had there, I had just turned 20, and George Chuvalo, you know him, right? We sparred hundreds of rounds. I sparred George more than anyone else in my life. George broke my nose four or five times. My nose has been broke nine times, but he broke it four or five times. He was fighting George Foreman that night, and Foreman really clobbered him. But I was sparring George [Chuvalo] and my manager got together with his manager and he said, get these two a fight each at The Garden instead of them fighting each other in sparring. That night, I won the fight and I also lost my virginity, to two girls. I was more terrified of them than of the guy I had fought! But anyway, I don’t want to get into my sex life…….leave that for another call (laughs).”
Q: George Chuvalo is not in good shape today, is he?
B.B: “No, he’s got Alzheimer’s unfortunately. Great friends we were, oh yeah. Some of the writers compared me to him, too, we had a very similar style. He’s from Croatia and I’m from Serbia, which was then Yugoslavia.”
Q: Briefly, who else did you spar during your career?
B.B: “Ken Norton and I did not get along. He was a very good fighter and I was a very rough fighter, and when I sparred him in Los Angeles, I wouldn’t let him out of the corner, I kept blocking him. He was hitting me so hard, I could hear his knuckles cracking against my skull, even with the sparring gloves on. But I wouldn’t let him out of the corner. And it was embarrassing for him that I had him trapped, but he was boxing the s**t out of me. But a reporter was there, and he [Norton] said to the reporter afterwards, ‘f**k, I hate to owe this kid my rent!’ In other words, I was a pain in the ass and he couldn’t get rid of me. And you know what my nickname became in Los Angeles? ‘The Landlord.’ The landlord never leaves you alone, he keeps on coming back.”
Q: All the sparring sessions you had with Chuvalo and Norton and others were in the late 1960s and early ’70s?
B.B: “Right. But why did I get out of boxing? Well, I’m fighting Larry Holmes and my nose is broke after eight seconds, then my teeth were knocked out. The teeth were hanging by the roots. But it didn’t bleed that much and I hid it from the referee. But I knew then that I would never be that good, never as good as Holmes. I said to myself I had to move on. I basically retired from boxing four or five rounds into that fight. Then I went to live in Europe, in Spain and then in Greece. Wonderful times. Then I went to Istanbul and I met some guys and I started smuggling (Bob really did smuggle auto parts into Afghanistan, from Istanbul).”
Q: Just like that!
B.B: (laughs), Yeah, and I robbed a bank. I got caught robbing a bank here in New York. But I never went to jail, not even for a day. I had no gun, I told them I had no weapon. But I did take hostages, I scared a teller, a guy that worked there. I told the manager I needed to take a loan and we went into the vault. Later, I gave the hostages tickets to some Broadway shows. It was a hassle for them, having to answer questions all day at the police station. They arrested me, the detectives did, and they had me around to their house for a barbecue, before the trial.”
Q: You were just desperate for cash, is that why you did it?
B.B: “Well, it wasn’t a hobby. Yeah, I wanted to make money. I had worked for a living, I was a bookie myself, and I was a smuggler. But one day, my room-mate didn’t come up with the rent like he was supposed to, he said he’d loaned the money to someone, and I said, ‘s**t, what do we do now?’ So I said, ‘I’ll go and rob a bank.’”
Q: And you really did! Working at the bar in New York, Fanelli’s, as you did for 25 years, is that when people really got to know about you and your life, with boxing writers interviewing you and so forth?
B.B: “Yeah, I became quite well-known, the guy from The New Yorker who was sent to interview me, he didn’t want to do it, but after we talked and we had lunch, he said he was definitely gonna do the story. He told me my life covered the 20th century! So later, I wrote my own book. Some good people came to the bar to see me over those years…Liam Neeson, he liked my book it. He came to the bar, he wasn’t a big star at the time, I’d say it was around 1996, or 1997. He’s a big guy, he boxed amateur in Belfast. Anyway, I looked at him and I asked him if he ever did any boxing, and it was a slow night, and we swapped boxing stories. I asked him what he did, and he said he was an actor, and I said to him, ‘no, what do you do for a living?’ And he said he’d done some movies, and about five months later out comes ‘Schindler’s List.’ I said, ‘wait a minute, this guy’s a movie star…..’ And we’ve stayed friends. He loves to talk about boxing.
“I think you’ll like my book, I cover all of it in there. The stories about Serbia, I think you’ll like. I was more or less tortured in Serbia. I nearly died. I’ve had two minor heart attacks, from the pain where my legs were burned. But you’ll read all that [in my book]. But I’m moving back to Canada, next year. I don’t want to be in this country any more. I’ve had enough, and not because of [Donald] Trump, but because of the people who vote for him. How can you possibly vote for a man who mimics a cripple and thinks it’s funny? Because years ago, a reporter, who was disabled, Trump made fun of him, and the crowd laughed and cheered. Who would laugh at that? I knew gangsters, and they would never do that. These people are idiots and I’ve had it with regular people. I’m gonna live on a farm and read books. You know I’m a big reader?”
Q: Yes, you’ve read hundreds of books?
B.B: “Oh, easily. You know about the woman I married, who her boyfriend was before she met me, don’t you?
Q: Barack Obama?
B.B: “Right.”
Q: No wonder people think a lot of stuff about you is made up! But it’s all true and verified….
B.B: “Oh, of course. Anyway, she’s an expert on T.S Elliot, and we talk nearly every day. We’re still very close.”
Q: Nobody’s got a story quite like you…..
B.B: “Everybody’s got a story, a different story. Tell the readers, they might like to buy my book. It’s a good read. You’ll get a kick out of it.”
Q: And one more thing I read about you, you met Jack Dempsey?
B.B: “Yeah, I met Jack Dempsey two times. My managers were here in New York and I had dinner with Jack Dempsey. I like to talk, but I didn’t talk much at the table (laughs). What, I’m gonna tell stories to Jack Dempsey? He had a restaurant, and he would stand at the front door. But my managers knew him. You know, it’s such a small world with gangsters and boxing, at least it was in those days. He was a very interesting person. I knew a lot of movie stars too. You know Veronica Lake? She sat besides me once and I was beside myself, she was such a beautiful woman. It was a great time back then. You remember Bugsy Siegel? I knew the guy who was involved a little bit when Bugsy got assassinated, when he got shot. He got shot in his home, while sitting on the sofa. We talk about these things all the time. It’s a small word, really.”
Q: It’s been amazing speaking with you! I know I didn’t even get to asking you about the smuggling thing!”
B.B: “It’s in the book, and people like the chapter about the smuggling. I gotta go cook for someone now.”
Bob’s book ‘So, What Happens Is….’ is available now via Amazon. Some more of Bob’s amazing stories can be found at bobbozic.substack.com
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