pound4pound.com Photo
Doyle Baird (left) guides one of the fighters he helped through the years
When Doyle Baird was young, Akron was a tough rubber town, a fight town. Tire builders still stretched the rubber that became the carcasses onto their machines with their strong, rough hands. It was not a push-button job. It required muscle and grit.
Is it any wonder that some of their progeny could put a carcass of a different sort on the canvas of a boxing ring and climb up off it and get back into the fight if someone put them there?
Doyle Baird started fighting young and went down for it. He was no angel in those days. He once told the story to Jerry Bak who shared it on the website pound4pound.com. Out with some buddies, Baird got into a fight and knocked the guy out. “My friends and I jumped in our car to get out of the place before the police came and my friend, being afraid and in a hurry, drove right over the body of the guy I dropped. He died. So we all got charged with manslaughter.”
Baird served 39 months in the Ohio State Reformatory in Mansfield for manslaughter and burglary from August 1959 to 1963. He was 22 when he was incarcerated.
“The place really did me some good,” Baird told Lou Whitmire of the Mansfield News Journal when he visited the prison in 2018. “I almost got famous being a boxer.”
Forget “almost.”
Doyle Baird, who died September 2, 2021 at age 83, was famous—especially in Akron where he returned after his release from prison and his young wife had divorced him. He came back fighting, after learning behind bars to box. What he almost became—should have become—was middleweight champion of the world, and what he did become one of the inaugural choices for the Summit County Boxing Hall of Fame.
In one of the most memorable events at the Rubber Bowl, the old Akron stadium that has been demolished, Baird fought middleweight champion Nino Benvenuti. Promoter Don Elbaum convinced Benvenuti to come to Akron and take on Baird but either Benvenuti or someone in his camp knew enough not to put his title on the line. Baird was a straight-ahead fighter who could seem like a swarm of fists to an opponent.
Though he decked Benvenuti before 5,000 spectators, Baird had to settle for a disappointing draw. “I always thought I won that fight,” Baird told Jerry Bak. “That was a tough one. It took me several weeks to get over it.”
Baird was not the only person who thought he had won. “In my lifetime the night Doyle Baird fought Benvenuti was the most unforgettable moment for Akron boxing,” manager/promoter Sean Matheny told Ralph Paulk, who wrote about boxing for the Akron Beacon Journal. “They called it a draw, but Doyle won eight rounds.”
What is so unforgettable, as far as I’m concerned, is what Doyle Baird did afterward. He fought and beat Don Fullmer, champion Gene Fullmer’s brother; lost to Emile Griffith—champion at three different weights; suffered a 10th round technical knockout in a rematch with Benvenuti in Italy; and even went up to light heavyweight to try to take champion Vincente Rondon’s title but again suffered a TKO. When Baird quit in 1972, he did not do what Michael Dokes had done. The Akron heavyweight who won the WBA championship allowed his life to spiral out of control as Baird had when younger.
Besides drug and other serious legal problems, Dokes, whom Baird had worked with when he was younger and found him to be serious about his boxing, chose the spotlight of New York City and the bright lights of Las Vegas. He became more interested in claiming to be “the best dressed heavyweight in the world” than the best champion.
Baird, by comparison, remained in his Coventry home, became a teamster, driving a newspaper delivery truck for the Beacon Journal, teaching his sons to box and wrestle, and guiding young fighters along a different path than the one he first followed. As his obituary reminded, he “taught them how to be honorable young men and to fight when life gets tough, how to overcome obstacles by believing in themselves.”
It wasn’t as easy as it might seem. Not everyone listened and learned as Baird finally had. Boxing, once an Akron powerhouse, faded after it lost its showcase venue, the Akron Armory, demolished in 1982 to make way for the Ocasek Building downtown. As I wrote in the last years of once-strong Akron Golden Gloves competition, the young fighters could read the boxing roadmap that was Doyle Baird’s face, but few understood how it came to look the way as it did after enduring to build a 34-7-1 or 36-7-1 record.
“They see the old posters down at the gym,” Baird, with whom I used to work, told me. “They’ll ask me, ‘Were you a fighter?’ “They have no comprehension of who I fought or when. If you become a world champion, you expect the fame to last. If you don’t . . . well, sometimes people say they’ve heard your name. There are only a few immortals, and I’m not one of them.”
But Doyle Baird was. He taught himself how to teach his craft and he worked the corners of his fighters to help through the rough rounds. “If you can get an amateur fighter to do just one thing he needs to do to win,” Baird said, “you’ve accomplished something.”
By the time the final bell rang for Baird, he had accomplished much, though it might not have seemed like it when athletes were turning to other more popular sports—the basketball of Akron’s all-time hero LeBron James—and to easier roads to success.
If when a bell rings an angel gets its wings, as famously suggested by Zuzu Bailey’s teacher in the classic It’s a Wonderful Life, in Akron the bell, as often as not, meant it was fight night. I don’t know if Doyle Baird got his wings. He was not always an angel, but in the end, he deserved metaphorical wings. He probably has on a pair of Everlast boxing gloves with those wings and is ready to go a heavenly round or two.
