October 9, 1988|BY MATT SCHUDEL, Sunshine Staff Writer
One of his pupils is Bonnie Levin, a third-year law student at St. Thomas University. She goes through a two-hour workout every day, just like the men. She jumps rope, hits the heavy bag, then the smaller speed bag, practices moves in the ring, spars occasionally and does exercises to strengthen her abdomen and neck. Every other day she runs eight miles.
``I wanted to go for the challenge,`` she says. ``I heard about Beau Jack being very tough and rough. He`s lived up to his reputation.``
Mark Sanford, a professional boxer training with Beau, had more than 30 amateur fights and is an ex-Marine. Nowhere before had he met a man like Beau Jack.
``He`s tougher than anything you`ll find in the ring,`` he says. ``If you can take what Beau Jack gives you, you can handle anything.``
Beau wears flat leather gloves to block punches in the ring, shouting to his boxers that they`re not tough enough, that they`re lazy, that his grandfather could beat them. He pushes them toward that one extra minute of strength that can bring victory.
``The only thing that made me win,`` Beau says, ``was my conditioning. You have to be in shape with your mind, with your strength and with all your energy.``
BEAU JACK`S REAL NAME IS SIDNEY WALker, and he was born on April 1, 1921. The family split apart when he was young, and Sidney was raised by his grandmother, Evie Mixom, who smoked a pipe and lived 112 years. It was she who first called him Beau Jack. He grew up during the Depression on a ragged patch of a farm near Augusta, Ga.
This is how he remembers his early years:
``A hard life, sir. I would farm in the day until 4 o`clock and then pick me up my shoeshine box and go into town.``
On other days, he would leave home at 5 a.m., walking 3 1/2 miles to town in his bare feet. He was up early so he could claim the best shoeshine corner in Augusta, at Ninth and Broad. When other boys wanted to work on his corner, Beau Jack beat them away with his fists.
``My grandmother said, `Beau Jack, you`re going to be a preacher.` I said, `No, Momma. I`m going to be a fighter.```
When his grandmother was working in the kitchen, little Beau would swing at the apron strings hanging down behind her. ``Sometimes,`` he recalls, ``I`d throw a punch so hard, I`d fall down. She`d say, `Get up and throw it again.```
He was small for his age, but in his teens Beau began to fight in battle royals. It was a bloody form of entertainment in the South, in which six to 10 young men, usually black, were blindfolded and thrown in a ring together. The last one standing got to keep the prize money collected from the white spectators.
Beau Jack won every battle royal he fought. One time, he and his big brother, John Henry, were the last two left in the ring. There was nothing else he could do, so Beau Jack knocked out his own brother.
After his final battle royal, held in the main dining room of an Augusta hotel, Beau was taken to the Augusta National Golf Club -- site of the Master`s tournament -- to meet Bobby Jones, the famous golfer.
``He ain`t nothing but bones,`` said Jones.
``I can fight, sir,`` Beau Jack told him, ``if you give me a chance.``
Fifty golfers put in $50 apiece to buy Beau some clothes and send him north to learn the trade he was born to.
He ran 10 miles every morning in the dim light of dawn. At the gym, he hit the punching bags and sparred in the ring by the hour. No one worked harder or had a bigger heart for the game. In the spring of 1940, at the age of 19, Beau Jack became a professional boxer.
``All I got in my first fight,`` he recalls, ``was $4. Oh, $4.50. Some man gave me a 50-cent piece.``
In those days, it was a slow, hard road to the top. Every week or two, Beau fought in another Saturday night smoker in another forgettable town. He picked up a few dollars and went back to work. Beau`s trainer, Sid Bell, saw something special in the brawling style of the Georgia bootblack.
``He told me, `You are a natural-born murderer,``` Beau recalls. ``You are a natural fighter. Any boxer who can outfight you, he is a champion.```
A SMALL MAN, ABOUT 5 FEET, 5 INCHES tall, Beau Jack fought as a lightweight, with a limit of 135 pounds. In the 1940s it was one of the toughest divisions in boxing, and almost no one could beat Beau Jack.
People loved to watch him fight. As soon as the bell rang, he was on his feet throwing punches while his opponent was still on the other side of ring. Even when he was battered, his eyes swollen almost shut, Beau fought on, always throwing punches.
``People have to want to see you fight,`` Beau says today. ``When they learnt about this little boy from Georgia named Beau Jack, they loved me, because they found out that I would fight every second of every round and never give up.``
