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Abraham Lincoln Marovitz was a lawyer, a judge, a U.S. Marine, a friend of the famous and a friend of mine.
He was also a boxer.
As a young man, one of five children reared in the Maxwell Street area, he competed in the first Golden Gloves amateur boxing tournament in Chicago in 1923. Though he never won a championship, he boxed many times as an amateur. More than once, he told me that “boxing helped to make me the man I am.”
This is true of many people who benefited mightily from the Golden Gloves competitive experience, the rigors of training and the sense of self-worth imparted by the fires of competition.
As part of this year’s celebration of the Chicago Golden Gloves’ 100th anniversary and the current series of boxing matches taking place at Cicero Stadium, on April 13 there is an event honoring and inducting the first class of “Titans,” seven men who boxed “before going on to extraordinary success outside of the ring in business, law or the art.”
Marovitz, who died in 2001 at 95, represents the law. He officiated at my parents’ 1950 wedding and became like a member of our family. Here is but one of the many stories he told me:
“I fought under the ring name of ‘Herbie Miller’ because my father didn’t want me to ‘ever hurt the family name.’ I don’t want to be immodest but I was a good boxer. I had a following. It was because of boxing that I came to the attention of my boss when I was working as an office boy in a law office. He noticed that I had a swollen eye and cut lip the day after one of my fights and he told me to enroll in Kent Law School. He gave me a check to cover tuition and a raise from $8 to $10 a week. I paid him back by the time I passed the bar. I was a lawyer at 21 and soon the youngest assistant state’s attorney in Cook County.”
The other “Titans” being honored are:
Jack Sandner (1941-2021) was best known as a business executive, community leader and chairman of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. But he came from humble circumstances on the hardscrabble South Side. There, after dropping out of high school, he turned to boxing. Under the tutelage of former middleweight boxing champ Tony Zale, he compiled a ring record of 58-2 and became a Golden Gloves winner. He returned to high school and graduated at the top of his class, obtained a degree from Southern Illinois University and graduated from law school at Notre Dame. Sandner and his wife would raise eight adopted children, and he was active in all manner of charitable activities.
[ 100 years old, the Chicago-born Golden Gloves are continuing to mold boxers and inspire lives ]
Jim Ryan (1946-2022) was a two-term attorney general of Illinois and a teenage champion of the middleweight division of the Chicago Golden Gloves.
He was born in Chicago but raised in DuPage County. As a teenager, he boxed in West Side gyms and in Golden Gloves competitions. In office, he went after toxic dumpers, polluters, online fraud and gangs. He helped the Illinois Violence Prevention Initiative. It was said that the lessons learned in the ring helped him through some familial tragedies — the loss of a 12-year-old daughter to a brain tumor and a son to suicide — as well as three cancers bout of his own. One of his sons said, “To see the strength my father exhibited through all of that really showed us an example of how to act and behave moving forward.”
Appellate Judge Joe Birkett is from humble beginnings, the seventh born of 10 children raised on the city’s West Side. His father died when he was 13 in a boating accident. There was no life insurance policy, and the family got by on veterans’ benefits, Social Security checks and the money the kids could earn.
Birkett worked at a gas station and boxed at the gym in LaFollette Park. He was able to thrive in high school, where he became the football team captain and its most valuable player. As a boxer, he became a Chicago Golden Gloves light-heavyweight (novice) champ in 1974 and then the Chicago Park District light-heavyweight open champ in 1975 and 1976. His law degree is from John Marshall Law School and his sister Bernadette is married to actor George Wendt.
Jorge Pacheco grew up in Aurora in a family in which boxing was part of life. As he recently told WTTW-Ch. 11, “It was part of our culture, boxing.” He was a teenager when he asked my father if he could join him at a gym. “He said, ‘Sure, come in,’” says Pecheco. “He wasn’t really expecting me to stick with it.” But stick with it, he did, becoming a Golden Gloves champion, winning titles in 1997, 1998 and 1999. The belts from those championships are now in his office at Apache Service and Supply, a custodial and commercial cleaning services operation he founded. He has said of the sport, “I owe my life to boxing. Boxing has taught me perseverance, resilience, hard work, dedication to something.”
Joseph Sikora was raised in the Norwood and Jefferson Park neighborhoods on the city’s Northwest Side, one of three children. He was determined from early on to become an actor, but he became distracted and instead entered the world of graffiti writers, saying, “That was almost a full-time job. We were a crew, with a gang-like structure.” Boxing drew him away from that life, in the form of English teacher and boxing coach, Tom O’Shea. When O’Shea died in 2020, Sikora said, “He often referred to boxing as a metaphor for life. There is nowhere to hide in the ring. Being an actor and a writer is an unbelievably brutal business to try to go into. I didn’t have any connections when I started, but I applied those same rules that Coach O’Shea taught me: Listen to people who you trust, work hard and just fight like hell.”
Sikora has fashioned a terrific career, with dozens of stage, TV and movie roles. He’s currently starring in the Starz network series “Power Book IV: Force.”
Michael Flatley was a child of the South Side. Coached by the late Martin McGarry, he competed in the Golden Gloves as a 126-pound novice and was good, fighting for three years in high school tournaments and the Chicago Golden Gloves in 1975, earning five knockout wins.
He was noted for his quickness and footwork, and for a time flirted with the notion of becoming a professional boxer. But that footwork was also employed in other ways, notably as an Irish dancer. He created and performed in the shows “Riverdance,” “Lord of the Dance” and other popular productions that have played to an estimated 60 million people in more than 60 countries.
In 2005, he donated $10,000 to the Chicago Golden Gloves program, saying that boxing taught him “so much about discipline, preparation and courage … I love boxing and I want to help draw attention to the young people who keep the sport going.”
