Mar. 12, 1965 - Dick Tiger scored a technical knockout over Juan (Rocky) Rivero in the sixth round of their scheduled 10-rounder at Madison Square Garden tonight, beating upon the fat and sloppy Argentine until his heaving belly dragged him to the canvas.
The fight was stopped at 1:39 of the round, many hours too late for the crowd of 7,162 that had been promised a rousing battle between two slugging middleweights.
The 35-year-old Tiger, once the middleweight champion, needs some victories for a shot at Joey Giardello’s title. He got this one easily, absorbing no more than two or three punches. Wild and awkward, Rivero threw many punches, some landing on Tiger’s elbows, some flailing at air.
Tiger took his time. He has no jab to speak of, but his left hook flashed out again and again, off Rivero’s head, his nose, his chin. Rivero never backed away.
In the sixth, two long lefts and a right drove Rivero across the ring, and Tiger followed him, slugging. Rivero fell sideways into the ropes, onto a knee. The fight was stopped.
“I had too much,” Rocky’s manager, Gil Clancy, said afterward. “If the kid would train, he’d be the greatest. But how can you make him train? One time, the night before a fight, he sweated out to 164 pounds. I left word that nothing should pass through his lips. I figured by the next day he’d lose another four or five pounds. So what happened? The next day he weighed in at 174. I checked room service. The son-of-a-gun had ordered two quarts of ice cream as soon as I left him.”
Giardello was at the fight. “I want to give Tiger a shot at my title,” Joey said, “because he gave me a break when I needed it. And I’ll give him a break, too — if I get my license in New York and if the dough is good enough.”
Joey doesn’t have a New York license. Once he tried to get one, and the commission turned him down. Joey thinks that’s because he then had a manager named Tony Ferrante, who was supposedly associated with Blinky Palermo.
“But that’s in the past,” Joe said. “Now, I’m my own manager, but I got a lawyer, see? And you want to know something? Lawyers is worst than managers.”
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