Trainer Angelo Dundee was in Louisville in 1957 with light-heavyweight champion Willie Pastrano when they got a phone call from a local young man named Cassius Clay. They invited him up to their room, where he peppered them with insistent questions about training, sparring, and fighting. “By then I’d worked with six champions,” Dundee said, “and none of them ever talked the way the kid did.” That meeting launched one of the most successful pairings of trainer and athlete in modern sports.
Dundee was born in Philadelphia as one of the nine children of Angelo Mirena, an Italian-born railroad worker, and his wife, Philomena. His older brother, a boxer, changed his name to Dundee “to escape discrimination against Italian immigrants,” said ESPN.com, and Angelo followed suit. He worked as a cornerman in military boxing matches while stationed in England during World War II, and hung out after the war in New York’s Stillman’s Gym, where he “learned the game by listening to old men talk.”
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