"This is the class street of the world," Eli says from deep in the recesses of his black executive's chair. "If you want to find it, come to this street. You got the greatest people that walk God's earth and you got some of the biggest stinkers." He notices a friend crossing the street. "Hey," Eli bellows. "Hey, hey!" The friend looks up at last to see Eli in the window, clasping his hands and shaking them over each shoulder, back and forth, back and forth.
It is the wave of the champion that 52-year-old Eli Hanover, son of a Rumanian immigrant peddler, child of the tough East Baltimore streets, never was. He won 14 of 15 professional fights as a lightweight, but in the process he had the truth about his ability stitched onto his eyebrows. "I wasn't no great fighter," he says. "I was just a preliminary boy." A steadier future waited for him at sea, where he spent 13 years sailing the world in the Merchant Marine. When he came ashore for good, waiting for him were his wife and the earliest of their nine children, an organizer's job with the seaman's union and the chance to get back in boxing.
He paid his dues training and managing a series of nondescript fighters before he began promoting in the mid-'60s. There are pessimists in town who say it was more curse than chance. Before, Hanover could take whomever he was handling to Philadelphia or Washington or Richmond. Now he was stuck in Baltimore. Baltimore, where the only places he could put on a show were tiny Steelworkers Hall or the 12,000-seat Civic Center, which, a series of bad crowds has convinced Eli, is "a fat, greedy, white elephant." Rising land costs in the suburbs have kept him from building an arena with 3,000 seats that he insists he could fill any time he stepped off The Block.
Such confidence has deserted Hanover just once in his decade of promoting. When an attractive Civic Center card flopped in 1970, he went incommunicado for 18 months. He came back for another try, of course, declaring, "I felt like I just got outta jail."
Boxing was about to become a full-time job for him by then; he had retired from the seaman's union and he was getting ready to unload the Jewel Box. It wasn't money that brought him back; although Eli says, "I ain't going broke," friends indicate that he isn't getting rich, either. The lure, most likely, was that he was needed. Needed, that is, as much as any city whose populace remembers TV's Friday night fights needs a boxing promoter. Replacements had come from Philadelphia as well as Baltimore, and they had failed. That does much for Eli's already substantial ego, particularly now that his business is picking up. "Let's face it," he says. "I'm Mr. Boxing in Baltimore. This self-praise stinks, but we're talking about actuality."
Baltimore's last successful promoters, Lou Fisher and Georgie Goldberg, struck it rich in the '40s. They put on two or three fight shows a week, and they always had one on Monday. "Except when it was Yom Kippur," says Hanover. But time caught up with them. The ice rinks and ball parks that housed their fights fell to ruin, and when the promoters grew old, there was no one to take their place.
There still isn't, as far as gimmickry is concerned. Fisher and Goldberg once had a heavyweight named Curtis Sheppard who was putting opponents' lights out upon request. That wasn't enough for them. They bought a hatchet, painted it gold and gave it and the nickname Hatchetman to Sheppard. He carried the hatchet into the ring with him every fight after that. When he fought Jersey Joe Walcott, someone had to carry it out for him.
"The people that come to Steelworkers don't want no gimmicks," says Hanover. "They don't want no free T shirts. They don't want no free boxing gloves. They want to see blood, that's what they want to see—blood. As long as it isn't theirs." The boxers who turn up regularly on Eli's cards seem eager to draw it or give it. "They are," he says, "ath-a-letes. You can't give the people what I call tomato cans. You know, no fluff-fluffs, no boo-boos, no ha-has. You do, you're out of business. You got to give the people ath-a-letes."
One of the fights Eli dreamed of would have matched Wes Unseld, the redwoodthighed center of the then Baltimore Bullets, with 6'5", 280-pound Bobo Renfrew. This is the same Bobo Renfrow who, when asked to sing his school song during a tryout with the old Boston Patriots, warbled the Schaefer beer commercial. Bobo turned to boxing when football rejected him, and when boxing became too hard, he went underground. "He's working on the subway in Washington," Eli says. "I think he's holding up the street."
So Hanover must settle for fighters of lesser physical stature but equally strange reputation. Light heavyweight Josh Hall's performances at Steelworkers have led to rumors of a jaw made by Libbey-Owens-Ford. But he is 4 and 0 in the parking lot of The Frigate lounge in suburban Glen Burnie. It is surprising that welterweight Buddy Boggs has time for boxing at all. He claims to have wrestled alligators, driven a motorcycle off a bridge for the Annette Funicello classic, How to Stuff a Wild Bikini, and come up swinging after falling 20 floors in an elevator on a construction job. "Ronnie McGarvey, he's my Jesus freak," Hanover says. Once Eli paid McGarvey $650 for a main event at Steelworkers that the undefeated featherweight thought was worth more. "But I didn't argue the case with him," says McGarvey. "I just want to praise God."
