Dean Martin
Dino sowed some of his wild oats during his blue collar youth trying to be a boxer. Naturally, it wasn’t really for him.
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As a boxer? “Well, I wouldn’t give him too much credit, now. He fooled around a little bit. He didn’t have too many fights. Most of ‘em was him gettin’ the hell out of the way from gettin’ hit. After he got hit in the face a few times, why, he quit.”
Dino would ever after bear the scars of the brow cuts and the split lip that Kid Crochet incurred. “And my hands,” he would say, “aren’t exactly pretty. They weren’t taped correctly - my manager knew even less about fighting than I did. [...]
As George Mavromantis put it: “He fought amateur for a while. Wasn’t bad. But he was too good-lookin’ to be a fighter.”
[...]
To others, he would mention his twelve fights in 1936 with a wave of the hand. “Yeah,” he would say, “I won all but eleven.”
-- Nick Tosches, “Dino: Living High in the Dirty Business of Dreams”
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As a boxer? “Well, I wouldn’t give him too much credit, now. He fooled around a little bit. He didn’t have too many fights. Most of ‘em was him gettin’ the hell out of the way from gettin’ hit. After he got hit in the face a few times, why, he quit.”
Dino would ever after bear the scars of the brow cuts and the split lip that Kid Crochet incurred. “And my hands,” he would say, “aren’t exactly pretty. They weren’t taped correctly - my manager knew even less about fighting than I did. [...]
As George Mavromantis put it: “He fought amateur for a while. Wasn’t bad. But he was too good-lookin’ to be a fighter.”
[...]
To others, he would mention his twelve fights in 1936 with a wave of the hand. “Yeah,” he would say, “I won all but eleven.”
-- Nick Tosches, “Dino: Living High in the Dirty Business of Dreams”
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