AMERICA AT LARGE:THE INVITATIONS describe next week's festivities as a "Grand Reopening" and proclaim the new incarnation of the 5th Street Gym will be "in its original location." In truth, the original location fell to the wrecker's ball some 16 years ago, but the new gym is a couple of doors down the street, but near enough the junction of Fifth and Washington that nobody's going to quibble.
When we visited Angelo Dundee in Florida to help the Hall of Fame trainer celebrate his 89th birthday a couple of weeks ago he was already bubbling with excitement over the impending event. His partners in the new enterprise are a couple of businessmen from Chicago, neither of whom was born when the original 5th Street opened its doors in 1950 or when, a bit more than a decade later, a nascent pro who then still called himself Cassius Clay first walked through its doors.
Muhammad Ali will join Dundee for next week’s ceremony inaugurating the new facility.
A press release touts the rebirth of “Angelo Dundee’s 5th Street Gym,” but in truth, though Angelo maintained an office there and trained more than a dozen world champions in the grimy old sweatbox, his older brother Chris, the boxing promoter, was technically the proprietor.
The brothers had actually been christened Cristoforo and Angelo Mirena, but an older brother had adopted “Dundee” as his Nom de Guerre, so when Chris began promoting club fight shows in Virginia and Pennsylvania, and later in New Jersey and New York, he had latched onto the new handle as well. When Angelo Mirena was discharged from the army after the second World War he also adopted the name, and by the time their children were born it had become official; Dundee is the surname on their birth certificates.
Angelo apprenticed under Whitey Bimstein and Ray Arcel at Stillman’s Gym in New York, and when Chris decided to stake out a promotional claim to what represented virgin boxing territory in south Florida, Angelo had learned the tricks of the trade and was ready to hang out his own shingle.
In the 1950s Chris ran two dozen boxing shows a year in Miami, periodically staging cards in Havana and the Bahamas as well. Two of Angelo’s first world champions, Luis Rodriguez and Sugar Ramos, were products of pre-Castro Cuba; he also trained the Mexican-born Jose Napoles to the welterweight title, and his New Orleans pipeline yielded two more champions, Ralph Dupas and Willie Pastrano. He had first worked as Carmen Basilio’s cut-man back in New York, and continued to train the Onion Farmer through his successful assaults on the welterweight and middleweight titles.
Two Sugar Rays (Leonard, who was Angelo’s fighter, and Robinson, who was not) worked out at the gym on the beach. Non-Dundee clients from Joe Louis and Ezzard Charles to Archie Moore, Willie Pep, and Kid Gavilan all passed through the makeshift turnstile with the hand-lettered command: “Stop and Pay Fifty Cents. No Dead Beats.” A visitor to the 5th Street Gym back then was as liable as not to encounter any two or three of the aforementioned roster working out on any given afternoon.
The renown of the gym brought the fancy flocking. The fight-buff celebrities who made the precarious climb to the grungy paddock upstairs might include Frank Sinatra or Jackie Gleason or Humphrey Bogart, and once the future Muhammad Ali came there to receive his instruction, the Beatles. The notables mingled with an assortment of local characters with names like Evil Eye Finkel and Sam (The Mumbler) Sobel.
Angelo’s son, Dr Jimmy Dundee, recalls that as an eight-year-old boy he was treated to lunch down the street at the Puerto Saqua restaurant by a gym visitor named Malcolm X.
In another connection we once noted before that classic American boxing gyms share certain traits, among them a distinctive aroma reflecting, in approximately equal proportions, a combination of “40-year-old cigar ash, human body odour, rodent excreta, and backed-up plumbing.” In the case of the 5th Street Gym, there was yet an additional hazard: several generations of a particularly virulent strain of termites native to south Florida had been masticating on the woodwork even before Chris Dundee turned it into a gym, and by the time we made our first pilgrimage there in the 1970s, Angelo was making it a point to warn visitors that: “We might go through the floor at any minute.”
By the mid-1980s Chris was in semi-retirement, and Angelo had set up shop further up the beach in Hollywood. The original 5th Street Gym soldiered on under new management for another decade, but it had been abandoned with a distinct absence of sentimentality, there was a near-revolt in 1994 when developers announced plans to knock the building down.
“The old place should have been preserved as a historic landmark,” says Angelo. “We tried like hell to have the city take it over, but these guys had the title to the property and they wanted $5 million for it. Chris and me, neither one of us had $5 million and neither one of us had a gun, so what are you gonna do?” (Actually, one suspects, Chris probably had both; it was more likely a matter of priorities on his part.)
For most of the 1980s, before he and his wife moved across the state to Oldsmar to be nearer their son’s home, Angelo trained his boxers out of a health club that was, in comparison to the old joint, anyway, almost pristine. The first time Dr Ferdie Pacheco visited him there, his fellow Ali cornerman sniffed the air and pronounced it “too antiseptic.”
One suspects that the Fight Doctor, who recently authored a book entitled Tales from the 5th Street Gym, may not be entirely enamoured of the new version he and Ali will help Angelo open this week, which will offer instruction in white-collar activities such as Pilates and cardio-boxing. But anything that gets Angelo Dundee back in action in Miami Beach is all right with us.
