Angelo Dundee Was Boxing's Quintessential "Confidence Man" Angelo Dundee liked to call himself "a confidence man," an expert at bolstering the self-assurance of boxers who needed more poise in their punch. But there was always a wink in his words; he was the actor who wants you to know just how crafty he is playing his role. Dundee, who died Wednesday at 90, was a confidence man, all right. He was best known for steering Muhammad Ali, then known as Cassius Clay, to the heavyweight championship and then training Ali through the difficult times when political and religious issues seemed to overwhelm the demands of the ring. But Dundee, as wily as a political handler, as aware of nuance as a shrink, came to Ali having practiced on tomato cans. "I had this used-up heavyweight, a banger named Johnny Holman," he said once. They booked him as an opponent for Ezzard Charles. Eight-to-one odds, no chance. First thing I did was give him a moniker, Big Jawn. Every time he came into the gym, "Hey Big Jawn, you're looking good." Got everybody to say it, until he started believing it. Little by little, Dundee said, he worked his way into Big Jawn's mind. He found out that the fighter's dream was to make enough money to buy a house with shuttered windows. When Charles was battering him in the later rounds of their fight and Big Jawn staggered back to the corner ready to quit, Dundee hissed, "That man is stealing your house, taking the shutters off." Of course (Dundee would not have told the story otherwise), Big Jawn scored a technical knockout in the ninth round. "We booked him with Boardwalk Billy Smith, a destroyer," said Dundee, his voice rising as it always did when he was excited by his own words, his protuberant eyes seeming to pop over his longish nose. I used a gimmick. Johnny was working on a light bag with a bad strap; it kept breaking unless he boxed rhythmically. I see Boardwalk Billy coming up the gym steps and just as he walks in, I yell, "Let's see the hook, Big Jawn." Sure enough, the strap snapped, and the bag flew across the gym. Boardwalk Billy never recovered. Dundee had his defeats. Willie Pastrano, the light-heavyweight champion he was training when Ali first called on him, had a heavyweight appetite for sex, especially before a fight, which was conventionally considered a sapper of leg strength. When Dundee realized he could not turn off Pastrano's sex drive, he tried to reroute it. During training camp, I tagged along to an appointment with a nightclub hypnotist who was supposed to mesmerize Pastrano into thinking sex would make his legs stronger. Unfortunately, Pastrano came out of his trance before the fight was over. His legs buckled. Dundee's most galling defeat, he said, was his inability to talk Ali out of his planned humiliation of Floyd Patterson in Las Vegas in 1965. The fight had become a symbolic match between Patterson's Catholicism and Ali's version of Islam. Ali taunted his opponent as he prolonged the fight so he could cruelly pick apart Patterson. It was a brilliant tour de force for Ali, but Dundee, a traditionalist who believed in "the good of the game," was disgusted. He seemed an unlikely boxing conservative, a product of tough South Philly who changed his name from Mirena after his older brothers, Joe, a boxer, and Chris, a promoter, did so in homage to a former champion. Angelo's early success as a trainer and manager was often attributed to Chris's connections to underworld boxing dons like Blinky Palermo and Frankie Carbo. This may have been true, but it was also Angelo's skills as a premier psychologist, cut man, ring tactician, diplomat and public relations manager that helped establish the 5th Street Gym in Miami Beach as a leading Southern training center. Once Ali arrived in the early 1960s, those skills were showcased on a world stage. Dundee became famous for widening a small slit in Ali's glove to delay the fight so he could recover from a Henry Cooper knockdown; for tightening the ring ropes before the Rumble in the Jungle so Ali could bounce off them as he beat George Foreman to regain the title; and especially for shoving Ali out to fight Sonny Liston in the fifth round of their first championship fight despite a blinding substance in the young fighter's eyes. Clay went on to win the championship at 22. As important were many less obvious pieces of business. Unlike most trainers, Dundee was careful to avoid giving Ali obvious orders or to become involved in his personal life. He appeared to let Ali choose his training regimen - especially early in his career, the fighter was a devoted gym rat - preferring to herd him gently by suggestion. And Dundee could make himself blandly genial or even invisible when Black Muslims appeared at a fight or training site to declaim dogma or merely stake their claim on Ali. Dundee never talked religion or sex with Ali, and while he courted the news media relentlessly, he routinely evaded questions on those topics. As did many boxing reporters, I would often get wish-you-were-here postcards from overseas fights. They were signed Muhammad Ali in Dundee's handwriting. He always gave Ali more credit for their success than Ali gave him. He said that Ali would have been a great champion without him and that Ali had brought him fun, and taught him patience and decency. I think it was a mutual gift. Howard Cosell got it right when he said, "If I had a son who wanted to be a fighter and I couldn't stop him, the only man I'd let train him is Angelo."