The good fight

"Joe was mad about that," Curtis recalls. "That was one of the happiest moments of my life, because that was big-time for me, knocking out one of Joe Louis' fighters. I used to watch Joe fight on Wednesday-night fights. I saw him fight Marciano. But that night, Joe walked out of the arena and got on a plane for Puerto Rico without paying me. I stayed in California two days to get my money from his wife."

Cokes got his shot at the title when Emile Griffith, the welterweight champ throughout most of the early 1960s, was forced to vacate his title after winning the middleweight title in 1966. The WBA held an elimination tournament in New Orleans in the summer of 1966 to determine the new welterweight champ. All the contenders and active past titleholders were invited, among them the Angelo Dundee-trained Luis Rodriguez (who had lost his title to Griffith in 1963) and Cokes' old foe Manny Gonzalez.

Cokes fought Rodriguez first, on July 6, and it was an easy fight, a 15-round knockout. "I was beating him every round," Cokes recalls. "I was just enjoying it." One boxing magazine referred to Cokes' win over Rodriguez as the "year's biggest upset." Six weeks later, he took Gonzalez in a 15-round decision, and he was crowned world champ. He retained his world welterweight title over the next two years, beating the likes of Frenchmen Jean Josselin and Francois Pavilla, and Argentinean hopeful Ramon LaCruz.

Both Doug Lord and Dick Cole agree that Cokes should have ended his career there, as world champ. His body had taken a pounding, his legs had begun losing their spring, and he had trouble keeping his weight below 147 pounds. Even worse, he wasn't mentally prepared to fight any longer: Cokes, who would never get rich off boxing, had lost a considerable amount of money by 1968. He invested $150,000 in a South Dallas club called The Arena, only to watch it burn to the ground. The insurance company covered only half the claim--nobody wanted to pay full coverage for losses in the ghetto.

With all this on his mind, Cokes entered the ring on April 18, 1969, in Los Angeles against Jose Napoles and was pummeled in 13 rounds. He was in the fight during the first few rounds, but toward the end, he was all but dead on his feet, a punching bag for the Cuban right-hander. Cokes' eyes were swollen shut, his nose bloodied, his face severely cut. After the fight, he spent eight hours in the hospital. He shouldn't have taken that fight.

But he needed the money, and Lord guaranteed he would make more than Sugar Ray Robinson's then-record purse of $75,000, which was at the time the highest amount ever paid any welterweight. Coke was guaranteed $80,000 for the fight, and he couldn't resist.

"He was ready to quit anyway," Lord says. "Against LaCruz, you could tell his legs were gone. It wasn't the same Curtis. But he came to me and said, 'Let's get the most money you can.' He didn't need to fight Napoles. But he had to." Two months later, Cokes tried to regain the title from Napoles in Mexico City, with the same result: he was knocked out in 10 rounds.

Cokes stayed in the ring until October 5, 1972, when he beat Ezra Mzinyane in South Africa. But it was a meaningless victory, padding on a record that stood well enough on its own. Cokes had taken too many beatings, and it was time to call it a career.

He began managing and training after that, and he even did a little acting, appearing in John Huston's fine 1972 boxing drama Fat City opposite Jeff Bridges and Stacy Keach. Playing Earl, Cokes' performance is deadpan and hilarious; for a boxer, he wasn't a bad actor.

He trained pros and amateur fighters throughout the 1970s and early '80s; he even tried managing a few fighters, but found the job distasteful, at best--he far preferred being in the corner to getting matches for fighters. At first, he trained boxers that no one else wanted, and eventually he took a job with the city of Dallas' parks and recreations department, prepping amateurs for the Golden Gloves. But he left the job in 1994, when he was working at the Anita Martinez Recreation Center. The center's director, Ruben Mendoza, became infuriated when Cokes took one of his fighters, Quincy Taylor, to the North American Boxing Federation title fight in Boston. Cokes also accompanied another of his pros to Los Angeles, taking sick time for that trip.

"There was not a policy against pros working out [at Anita Martinez], but he was training pros on city time," Mendoza said in 1995. "That's double-dipping."

But Cokes sees it differently: "It was out of jealousy," he says. "It was all about jealousy. So I left. It was no big deal. It was time to move on anyway."

Last August, Mayor Ron Kirk attended one of the regular Curtis Cokes fight nights at the Bronco Bowl and honored the champ for all his work with the city and his years spent as Dallas' only world-champion boxer.