By Peter Lyons Hall
On Saturday, May 11, 2024, Greenwood Lake’s reputation as a destination training ground for many of the top professional boxers like Joe Louis, Sugar Ray Robinson, Rocky Marciano, Rocky Graziano, and Floyd Patterson in the early 1940’s, will be celebrated at the Greenwood Lake Middle School, where the Floyd Patterson Boxing Club, together with USA Boxing, will present a match of 10 bouts, from 4-6:30PM.
Each of the 10 bouts will be three rounds each, from pee-wee categories (8 years old) to masters (over 40). The pee-wee rounds last 1.5 min each; masters are 2 min each, featuring both men and women boxers, at all age groups.
During the PBS program, The American Experience, the series portrayed what won Joe Louis’s “white America’s” acceptance was not his mild personality and good behavior, but his dramatic matchups with German champion Max Schmeling who, to many, represented the Nazi Party. Louis would become the symbol of American freedom over Nazi totalitarianism. Many whites still wished to see Louis defeated by a white boxer, but in 1938, when Louis knocked out the German, the celebration wasn’t confined to black America alone. For the first time, Blacks and whites, even in the deep South, had rooted with all their hearts for the same guy.” Many thought that Louis’s victory would teach Hitler a lesson.
Louis was one of many top American boxers who would train in Greenwood Lake. Starting in 1939 Joe Murchio operated a boxing camp at Greenwood Lake that attracted lots of interest from the locals, who would seek out autographs, signatures, and photos of the famous boxers, and they added to the community life of the Village. An early article in the local newspaper reported that Louis had moved to quarters at the Tom Draak property and begun training with Jack Blackburn at the nearby Murchio camp.
In September of 1941 Louis hauled Mr. and Mrs. Leonard Bronner of New York from deep water off Sunken Island. Louis and friends, according to the article, “were guests of Police Justice Harry Sudman and were taking a spin about the lake in Justice Sudman’s speedboat. The group stopped near a rowboat from which Chubby Blackburn and John Roxbaugh, executives of the Joe Louis camp, were fishing.” The bow of the boat in which Sudman and Louis were riding, however, had obscured a nearby canoe that contained the Bronner couple and when they swerved to avoid a collision, the wake swamped the canoe, throwing both Mr. and Mrs. Bronner into the water. Sudman brought his boat quickly to the side of Mr. Bronner and his wife, and Joe Louis quickly lifted each body into the Sudman boat, “unharmed, but very wet.” After their recovery, the Bronners returned to New York where, in relating the details of her experience, Mrs. Bronner remarked that Louis had plucked her out of the water as though she were a featherweight.
Eventually, the Murchio camp was sold to Eddie McDonald and renamed “The Long Pond.” The Warwick Valley Dispatch in the 1940s carried stories of Sugar Ray Robinson’s exhibition matches in Greenwood Lake. Robinson, the welterweight, had never been KO’d, but many of his opponents had tasted the floor of the ring including Fritzie Zivic, Maxie Shapiro, Ruben Shank, Joe Curcio, and several others. On December 9, 1956 the Steve Allen show televised Sugar Ray Robinson from Greenwood Lake, now a middleweight champion, going through a sparring session at Long Pond Training Camp, in preparation for his upcoming title bout against Gene Fulmer. “Long Pond has been the training quarters of such famous names of the boxing world as Joe Louis, Rocky Graziano, Rocky Marciano, Paddy Demarco,” stated the Dispatch, as well as the then new world heavyweight champion, Floyd Patterson, who maintained permanent quarters at Long Pond.
The building, The Long Pond Inn, however, burned down in 1971. But Greenwood Lake’s reputation as a famous boxing training ground continued. Tickets for the upcoming match on May 11 will be available soon at GWLCentennial.org. The Saturday afternoon event will offer VIP ringside seating, food and beverages, bleacher seating for fans young and old, and sponsorship packages for businesses wishing to participate in the historic occasion.
