Willie Pep is my favorite all-time, old-school fighter. Two-hundred and twenty-nine wins against 11 losses and one draw, won and regained the featherweight title, competed in three decades and, this is my favorite, defended his title six months after being in a plane crash and having doctors tell him he’d never box again.
His defense and movement were legendary. He carried the nickname “The Will o’ the Wisp” because he glided in and out of harm’s way in the ring while stopping to counter and do damage. He was beautiful to watch and worth a deep dive on YouTube to gets some appreciation of his mastery.
Like with many larger-than-life figures, legend surrounds Pep. Maybe the most enduring legend is that Pep promised writers that he’d win a round without throwing a punch. Before fighting Jackie Graves, a very solid opponent, he supposedly announced in the third round that he’d win while mounting zero offense. It is often reported as truth in documentaries about Pep and that he even carried two of the three scorecards in the third that night.
Did it happen?
The answer is a decidedly, probably not.
We know Pep won the fight but no film of it exists. It was before reporters and filmmakers reported on the official scorecards so we can’t rely on that either. In fact, reporting was so inconsistent in that era that the AP and the UPI disagreed on how many times Graves went down in the fight – one news service said twice and the other reported four knockdowns.
Pep liked to talk about the round and it was said that he even carried around an article on the fight that supposedly verified that he won the round without throwing a punch. Some even claimed that Willie wrote the article himself. Late in life, Graves said he didn’t remember if he lost the round without Pep throwing a punch but said it was possible because he was that hard to hit.
“I believe he did it. The man was a legend and a star beyond boxing. He hung out with guys like Jackie Gleason and Frank Sinatra—why would he need to make up anything to make himself seem bigger?” James Madio says. Madio starred in The Featherweight, the 2024 Pep bio-pic. The New Yorker said in its Academy Awards issue that Madio should’ve been nominated for best actor.
Regardless of whether the myth is true, the fact remains that Willie Pep was one of the most elusive boxers to ever step into the ring. His defensive skills were truly something to behold and you could see his influence on fighters like Ali, Camacho, and Whitaker. His footwork and lateral movement, his feints and misdirection and his head movement left opponents bewildered and often frozen. He slipped, bobbed and weaved and parried with ridiculous balance.
Still, can all of that, without throwing a punch, win you a round?
“Unless the other boxer didn’t throw any punches either you can’t win a round without throwing a punch,” Joe Cusano says. Cusano is a long-time pro ref and judge who made a cameo appearance in the movie – playing, of course, a referee. “He would have had to have thrown something.” (Cusano’s book, Uppercuts, will be released later this year.)
Could Pep’s charisma have helped him to win a punch-less round? One part of the legend is that he told the judges what he was about to do.
“Hey, if Willie leaned over the ropes and talked to the judges that might’ve got in their heads and maybe that influenced them,” Madio says. It wouldn’t be the first or last time that a fighter influenced judges.
To justify scoring a round for a fighter who didn’t throw a single punch would involve some pretty abstract thinking. When you apply the four scoring criteria it would mean there would be no clean punching and zero aggression, let alone effective aggression. I guess you could earn points for defense and ring generalship but usually those two supportive criteria count when they lead to clean punching. If a fighter just evades without countering that’s not really worthy of points.
The opponent, as Joe Cusano points out, would have to be complicit in his passivity by missing all of his punches and perhaps not even throwing any. I think if one fighter didn’t throw any punches at all and the other boxer threw punches that didn’t land that would probably be enough to give that fighter the round.
“I spent a whole day with Willie at the Hall of Fame and we talked a lot about this,” Mark Baker, Pep’s biographer, says. “It always sounded shaky and the more I prodded the more the story kind of fell apart. Eventually, Willie said he probably jabbed or he threw punches but didn’t land.”
Jabbing and throwing punches that might not have landed is a whole lot different than not throwing any punches. You could certainly win a round doing those things.
“Willie was quite a character and he was given a bit to telling tall tales,” Baker says.
Baker also has some insight into how the article got written and how the legend developed.
“In those days reporters and writers sent their accounts over the wire,” he explains. “Their accounts of the fights were often quite inaccurate. On the night of the Pep-Graves fight there was quite a bit of sun spot activity that would have interrupted the transmission. That would have left a lot of holes in the account of the fight. The guy who wrote the article that Willie carried with him was a pretty obscure reporter and may have taken the opportunity to write something sensational.”
The Featherweight will have a wide release in May on various streaming outlets. Mark Baker’s book Willie Pep: A Biography of the 20th Century’s Greatest Featherweight is available on Amazon, and the same goes for Joe Cusano’s forthcoming boxing book Uppercuts.