Sometimes I get asked that if I could have interviewed any fighter in history who would it be.
I’ve been lucky and done a good few hundred, but for the longest time my answer was a tie between Philadelphia duo Bennie Briscoe and Willie Monroe.
I had, of course, a lot of respect for both. But it was also because I’d either met or spent time with so many Philly greats that they were the two I felt I was really missing. I’d seen Cyclone Hart in the gym, I’d sat down with Joe Frazier, and I’d interviewed… Jimmy Young, Harold Johnson, Kitten Hayward, Matthew Saad Muhammad, Jeff Chandler, Joey Giardello, Marvis Frazier, Boogaloo Watts, Robert Hines, Tyrell Biggs, Bert Cooper, Buster Drayton and Ivan Robinson. Now you could argue over the geography of a few of them, with Cooper being in Sharon Hill and Joey being in Cherry Hill, but this isn’t about that.
And I’m not an obsessive completist, or didn’t think I was, but Briscoe and Monroe repeatedly eluded me.
I’ll start here by talking about Bennie Briscoe, the middleweight hardnut. If Joe Frazier was the president of Philly boxing, Briscoe was the mayor.
The thing with Bennie is he didn’t talk to many people any longer. I’d always been told that, while never to give up, it would always be more of a long shot than certainty.
I remember calling his home once and speaking to someone who told me it was the wrong number, but it sounded suspicious and I wasn’t convinced.
There were a couple of attempts between about 2001 and 2004 and, years later, came my closest effort.
It was early 2010, and my friend Tom Jess knew where Bennie lived and we pulled up at his house.
Tom knew that Bennie was my unicorn and that I was desperate to meet him, and that filtered into my apprehension when I knocked on the door.
We heard a noise inside, and a person who I believe to be Briscoe’s son answered. We explained who we were, and he said his dad wasn’t free but that we should come back in about an hour.
Bingo. We were in.
Only, we weren’t.
With time to kill, Tom and I headed to a local bakery and picked the Briscoes up a freshly-made cake.
Tom said we could give it to Briscoe’s wife, who he reckoned was protective of Bennie and the real reason the former middleweight contender rarely ventured out.
I’m I said to Tom more than once, “I can’t believe we’re going to see Bennie Briscoe.”
I was in dreamland. It was actually happening.
It’s fair to say, I’m far more cynical about life about 20 years on.
What happened when Tom and I returned will likely stay with me forever.
We knocked on the door, and Mrs Briscoe answered, but only had the door lightly ajar. I guess their son had briefed her about our earlier visit and she was ready for us.
She promptly told Tom and I that we would not be seeing Bennie, so then Tom produced the cake.
“We brought you this,” he said, hopefully, and perhaps half expecting we would all go in and be sat around a dining table eating cake, joking and telling boxing tales.
With that, she opened the door a touch wider. Just wide enough to take hold of the heavy white box and carry it inside before thanking us and shutting the door.
That was that.
It’s kind of funny, but Willie Monroe was elusive not just in the ring but out of it. Willie lived in Sicklerville, New Jersey, just south of Philly, so I’d never doorstepped him before, but I’d made a couple of calls and had been given short shrift by his wife.
“Willie doesn’t do interviews,” she said.
Of course, always being polite, I’d plead and speak of my respect for the fighters, but she was Mrs Briscoe-esque in her defiance.
Well, one day Tom and I were driving between Philadelphia and Atlantic City and happened to be passing through Sicklerville.
I reminded Tom that it was where Monroe lived and reached for my old address book, which contained a treasure trove of addresses of old fighters.
The cold call was on.
We found the home, walked up to the front door and knocked.
