Golden Gloves in Chicago: 100-year anniversary of the largest non-national amateur boxing event in America

Right now, Chicago is in the midst of the latest edition of the Chicago Golden Gloves tournament. It will continue through preliminary bouts until the championships take place in mid-April.

It will include 470-some male and female boxers in three-round bouts taking place at the Cicero Stadium.

Our city is one of 30 Golden Gloves national outposts, most of them holding similar tournaments. The winners from these will be featured in the national championship that will take place over three days in May at Harrah’s Casino in Chester, Pennsylvania.

This is the 100th year of this venerable event in Chicago. Here are some stories not only to note that anniversary but to celebrate the longest-running and largest non-national amateur boxing event in America.

Have you ever watched two men or two women battle one another in a boxing ring?

The real thing has long been a fixture in this city. Boxing remains a significant part of the landscape, even if its reputation has been sullied over the last few decades, and its popularity challenged more recently by the flashier offerings of mixed martial arts and professional wrestling. Read more here.

Just hours before the start of the preliminary rounds of the Golden Gloves centennial tournament, the back room of Cicero Stadium is a crowded jumble of ambition and nerves.

The soon-to-be 88-year-old Dr. Glenn Bynum quietly assesses each fighter as men of varying ages, ethnicities and weight classes line up single file in their underwear for the stressful final weigh-in.

Dressed in a Navy blue windbreaker, Bynum appears decades younger than a man born in the middle of the Great Depression. He stands straight as he uses his aged stethoscope to check each fighter’s heart rate or eye pupillary response, asking whether they have noticed changes to their health since their last fight.

The longest-running and largest non-national amateur boxing event in America, the tournament is celebrating 100 years in Chicago, one of 30 cities holding similar tournaments. For 55 of those years, Bynum has served as a familiar face ringside. Read more here.

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. Read more here.

Have you heard of “The Golden Gloves Story” from 1950?

There’s a tale behind that obscure title, one that illustrates how the Chicago Tribune used to operate and what they promoted, relentlessly. Longtime Tribune sports editor Arch Ward was a key figure behind the creation of both the Golden Gloves and the Major League Baseball All-Star game. And in the late ‘40s, a plan was hatched to shoot a feature film, fictional but soberly respectful of the real-life Golden Gloves tournament and its belief in good, clean combat. Read more here.