About a week ago, Gene Fullmer, former middleweight champion of the world, paid a visit to Marv Jenson, his former manager. And no, it wasn't to slug him or to sue him.
Fullmer, who will be 76 on his next birthday, was in a local hospital trying his best to cheer Jenson, about to turn 90, back to good health.
"I thought he was doing better, I sure hoped so," said Fullmer.
But within the week, Jenson died; of natural causes, hospital personnel said. The indefatigable man finally wore out. His funeral will be tomorrow in West Jordan, where it all began. Gene Fullmer will be one of the speakers, "If I can get through it."
Marv Jenson's life was hardly one-dimensional. Boxing was only part of it, and in the big picture far from the whole show. He was also a politician (including mayor of West Jordan and a Salt Lake County commissioner), a school board chairman, a state parks and recreation director, the Father of the Salt Palace, an active churchgoer, a family man, an inventor and a mink rancher.
But it is boxing that attracted the world's attention, and it is boxing that provides the microcosm of this good man's life.
When a case of Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever ended his own promising boxing career when he was in his early 20s, he started a boxing gym for local kids in the basement of his house. Among the earliest to show up, from a nearby farm, was young Gene Fullmer, sent to Marv by Gene's dad, Tuff Fullmer, a welder at Kennecott.
First thing Marv did was give Gene a sweater, the type fashionable in the 1930s, with "WJ" on it.
"He made me promise I wouldn't smoke or use alcoholic beverages, that I would obey my mother and dad and that I would go to church. It didn't matter which one," remembered Fullmer. "He said 'if you don't do these things, I want this sweater back. I won't even ask you why.'"
By 1957 Gene Fullmer had become champion of the world, standing over a fallen Sugar Ray Robinson in Madison Square Garden while Marv Jenson sat in his corner.
Others from Marv Jenson's West Jordan stable — the basement gym evolved into a separate building he built next to the house — would go on to make names for themselves. They included Gene's younger brothers Jay and Don (Don fought for the middleweight title in 1968), heavyweight contenders Rex Layne and LaMar Clark, 1948 Olympian Jay Lambert, who went on to become a doctor, and dozens more.
The constant was Marv, self-made trainer, manager, promoter and defender rolled into one, a Mormon guy from Utah who waded head-on into the international fight game but never budged from his West Jordan roots.
Marv's son Ray tells the story about the day his dad was back East with Gene Fullmer getting ready for a fight and a car rolled up and the people inside told Marv to get in, somebody wanted to talk to him.
That somebody was mafia don Frankie Carbo.
"They said, 'look, it's OK, just come with us,'" said Ray. "So Dad gets in the car and they take him to this bar and have him wait and after about 10 or 15 minutes
Frankie Carbo shows up. The mafia was involved in boxing in a lot of ways and my dad was aware of that, but he was always a fast talker and he said, 'Frankie, I've really been wanting to meet you because I know they're doing investigations at the (U.S.) Senate and now if they ever talk to me I can tell them you've never asked me to do anything illegal.'"
And that, as legend has it, was the end of the meeting.
Eventually, Marv's boxers, and Marv, moved on. The gym next to the house was finally torn down about six years ago to make way for a school for disabled kids. The Jordan School District let Marv drive the backhoe that pushed down the first bricks. That night, when the building was gone, Marv went out alone to walk around the rubble and slipped and broke his arm.
From there it was a succession of things of the type that happen when the body gets old. A torn rotator cuff, kidney stones, a tumor in his neck. Finally it was stomach flu that drove him to the hospital a couple of weeks ago. Then he broke his hip trying to get out of bed.
It was about then that Gene Fullmer, the West Jordan Mauler, Marv Jenson's great claim to fame, paid his last visit to the man who "was like another dad to me."
"I can't remember what we talked about," said Fullmer. "I just told him I wanted him to get better."
"You know," added Fullmer in what could easily pass as the sum total of Marv Jenson's eulogy. "I still have that sweater."
Lee Benson's column runs Sunday, Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Please send e-mail to benson@desnews.com and faxes to 801-237-2527.