It's been 25 years since former world middleweight champion Gene Fullmer hung up his gloves professionally, but that doesn't mean no one is trying to pick a fight with the former champ.
In the living room of his West Jordan home, a would-be challenger provokes Fullmer, 58, with a verbal jab and a punch to the knee. "You cuckoo bird," blurts his 3-year-old granddaughter, April. Fullmer is quick to engage the youngster, gently rustling her curly blond hair with hands that look like they've been used to shred car tires.Though it's possible someone may have come to know Fullmer only as a restaurant operator, horse trainer or mink rancher, it's not very likely. Most who know him think first of his career in the ring. Of the seven bulging folders in Fullmer's file in the Deseret News library, most contain biographies that tell and re-tell how Gene is the son of a West Jordan street fighter nicknamed "Tuff," how Gene was named for then-heavyweight champion Gene Tunney and how he got his first set of boxing gloves at age 6 and was competing in tournaments for boxers age 16 and up when he was 12.
But the crowning event in Fullmer's boxing career will remain his conquest of world middleweight champion "Sugar" Ray Robinson in Madison Square Garden on Jan. 2, 1957. Robinson won the title back four months later in Chicago, then Fullmer regained it in August 1959 from Carmen Basilio in a 14th round knockout in Las Vegas.
Fullmer said he and Basilio have become good friends over the years, but he still doesn't like Chicago. The city didn't thrill him when he represented Utah in the Chicago Golden Gloves competition in 1948 and 1949, but it was his loss there to Robinson that iced his opinion of the windy city.
Though winning the initial world middleweight title is the crown jewel of Fullmer's career, the anniversary of that first fight with Robinson is bittersweet because it is also the same day his first wife, Delores, died of a heart attack in 1983.
Now remarried, Fullmer and his wife, Karen, try to keep up with eight grandchildren who live close by along with most of Gene's family: His mother, Mary, still lives in the house where Gene was born just two blocks away. Gene's two brothers and one sister live along the same street, and Gene's two sons and a daughter are also close by. Gene's grandfather first purchased the land decades ago where the family houses now sit.
The rural lifestyle that is still alive in southern parts of West Jordan is reflected by some of the interests Fullmer has pursued outside of his boxing career. The family raised mink commercially until a few years ago. Gene still keeps up to a dozen quarter horses and races them both at the chariot track in South Jordan and in surrounding states. He's also a longtime member of the Salt Lake County Fair Board.
Boxing is still an integral part of Fullmer's lifestyle. As president of the Rocky Mountain Golden Gloves organization in Utah, Idaho, Montana and Wyoming, Fullmer boasts of national championship titles the last three years in a row. "Nobody's done that before," he says proudly, disappointed only that boxing doesn't have the same visibility it had when he was being promoted in fights by trainer and longtime friend Marv Jenson.
Fullmer also gets in the ring once in a while. Veteran boxers get together in Las Vegas frequently for exhibition fights consisting of three one-minute rounds - usually to benefit charity or to help out a boxing buddy that's fallen on hard times.
"We aren't out there to hurt nobody," Fullmer said of the reunion boxing matches. That's one reason the promoters never let Fullmer in the ring with Joey Giardello, who unsuccessfully challenged Fullmer's title but held him to a draw in a Bozeman, Mont., fight in 1960. "He butted heads with me. They didn't stop the fight, but they let it go on," Gene said.
Most of the aging champions enjoy the fraternity and friendly sparring matches. But there are boxers who aren't matched up with certain others because of the fear that someone might try to settle an old score. Fullmer and Giardello is one such matchup.
Thanks in part to the celebrity fights, Fullmer said he and Basilio are still good friends. Fullmer associated with Robinson regularly until Robinson died.