Come Out Smokin' by Phil Pepe

get a job. I treat my fighters this way . . . any deal I make, the fighter can be right there, listening. The only thing I ask in return is hard work. Conditioning is what I stressed.”
    These are ideas and theories that did not come to Yank Durham the day Joe Frazier walked into the PAL gym. They are part of the wisdom picked up over a lifetime spent in hundreds of gyms like the one on Twenty-second and Columbia.
    Yancey Durham was born in Camden, New Jersey. “On Berkeley Street,” he emphasizes. “In 1921.” That means he has pushed past the half-century mark and for most of those years, he was just another former fighter trying to scratch out a living training fighters in what was a slowly disappearing business.
    â€œI had nine fights as an amateur,” he says. “Not counting eleven bootleg fights.”
    â€œA ‘bootleg fight,’ ” Yank explained, “is where you go someplace and get ten dollars. Places like Glassboro, Scranton, Pittman. They’d give you some flukey name and you’d fight. I fought on cards with Tony Galento, John Henry Lewis, Freddie Steele, Fred Apostoli. I thought I’d be a fighter.”
    Then came World II and Yank’s career as a boxer came to an end during an air raid in Liverpool when a jeep ran him down and he suffered compound fractures of both legs, a fractured skull and a few broken ribs. He spent two years in hospitals. “I still thought I could fight when I came back home,” he says. “I was twenty-five, but I went to the gym and worked with Harold Johnson. I wanted to see what I could do. I was still a middleweight. But I couldn’t get in shape. I didn’t give myself a chance. I was supposed to be training, but I’d have a girl in the gym with me and I was thinking more about going off with the girl afterward than I was about training.”
    The crusher came one day when he was working in a Philadelphia gym, sparring a few rounds with a fellow named Ellis Stewart. “The ring broke,” Yank says. “I fell and cracked a rib. The doctor told me to forget about fighting.”
    He could forget about it as a fighter, but he couldn’t abandon the game entirely. He began working with fighters, amateurs at first. Then he managed little-known, unsuccessful professionals whose names would be nothing more than that even to the most avid boxing fans. That was in 1952 and he had to wait more than ten years before a Joe Frazier came into his life, quite accidentally.
    Durham has settled down considerably since his early carefree and wild days. Now somebody else does the training and he goes home to his wife and four young children, Nancy, Yancey, Mark, and Chandler Marcellus.
    The name Marcellus has no significance, Yank says. “I didn’t know that was Cassius Clay’s middle name at the time my boy was born.”
    Marriage was the first good thing that happened to Yank Durham. The second came in 1962, only Yank didn’t know at the time how good it was. He was working with some of his fighters in the Twenty-third PAL gym the day Duke Dugent brought him over to look at the roly-poly kid who came in off the streets because he wanted to lose weight.
    â€œHe came into the gym weighing between two hundred and thirty-five and two hundred and forty pounds. And all I saw was that he was a strong boy who needed to get that weight off,” Yank recalls. “I didn’t pay too much attention to him at first because these kids come into the gym all the time, then they quit when they find out how much work it is.
    â€œHis punching power was tremendous, so I told him to come back and we might make something out of him. You tell a lot of kids that. Most of them get discouraged. Joe kept coming. This fellow liked to work. He’d get up at three or four in the morning to run, then he’d come to the gym. He was powerful, he was determined, and he didn’t mind working. If they’re