Tillie?s previous involvement with law enforcement included arrests for beating up his pregnant and enchantingly-named spouse, Laverna Taverna?
That dude?s name was ?Tillie? Taverna. Imagine me, the great big, strong man, being sent up against a ?Tillie?! A guy oughtn?t to hit a ?Tillie?!?Max Baer
But hit him Baer did. Knocked him out twice, in fact, in 1929, five years before ?The Livermore Larruper? became heavyweight champion of the world. Big, strong Max wasn?t the only one, either. All but two of the 16 losses on the known record of Tillie Taverna were by knockout or TKO. But few of them came easy for the winner because as Baer himself acknowledged, ?Tillie wasn?t as soft as his name.?
Not in the ring (where according to one probably apocryphal witness he once ?hit a fellow in the belly so hard the poor gink threw up all his teeth?), and God knows not out of it. In the 1930s and ?40s that charming, alliterative handle adorned as many police blotters as sports pages. Tillie?s last recorded knockout happened in a gambling den where he worked as a bouncer in 1944. The customer Taverna took out with three punches to settle a beef about a $2 bet never beefed about anything again?not in this world, anyway.
Another heavyweight with a euphonious name, Clarence Killingsworth, set the tone for Tillie?s boxing career by knocking him out in their April 11, 1929 mutual pro debut. Two months later, Taverna?s wild haymakers had Ford ?Varsity? Brooks floundering for three rounds, but in the fourth Tillie walked into one himself and went to sleep.
The offer of a $115 purse overrode Max Baer?s misgivings about socking a ?Tillie? in Stockton, California on July 4, 1929. Max?s later recollection of his third professional fight was typically Baer-oque:
?He kept out of the way in the first, although I nearly got him a case of pneumonia from the wind I stirred up throwing the right hand. As usual, I kept the left in my pocket. In the second, ?Tillie? made an error. He thought I was so wild that I never would be able to park a punch. Come in close, he did. I tossed a roundhouse curve, his left eye got in the way?and there was no more entertainment for the customers that evening.?
Two weeks later, 0-3 Tillie went in as a last-minute substitute against Jack Lewis in San Francisco, where the latter was undefeated in eight fights, seven of which went only one round. So did this one, but it was 10-to-1 no-hoper Tillie?s right hand raised by the referee after it knocked Lewis down three times. ?There never was a more sensational denouement to a boxing contest than this one,? wrote Pat Frayne of the San Francisco Call.
It was the start of a white-hot five-fight rivalry between Tillie and Lewis. Six, if you count what happened in the dressing room at Dreamland arena following their second bout one week after the first one, which Lewis was winning handily when the referee stopped the fight and declared Tillie winner by disqualification. ?After the boys had gone to the basement to change their clothes,? reported the Oakland Tribune, ?Lewis hung a 10-second wallop on Taverna?s button.?
Both fighters were suspended by the state boxing commission, Lewis for fouling in the fight in the ring and Tillie for ?rowdyism? in the dressing room, notwithstanding his staunch insistence that Lewis had clocked him while he was ?looking the other way.?
Looking the right way in his third official encounter with Lewis a few months later didn?t keep Tillie from getting stopped in the second round. But then he ran together a string of KOs, and on November 11, 1929 at the Arcadia Pavilion in Oakland the betting odds were 10-8 that in their rematch Max Baer would end up the way Tillie had their first time around.
The Oakland Tribune reported the future champion ?took some punishment? in the opening moments of the fight, but Baer smacked Tillie down at the end of the round and finished him off in the second; and with that Tillie permanently reverted to palooka status. His available record shows just two wins in his 12 post-Baer fights. One was another KO of Jack Lewis, but Lewis stopped him again too, and Tillie was also fodder for Hans Birkie, Steve Hamas (it went just 30 seconds) and, in Tillie?s last fight, Ed ?Unknown? Winston.
During a layoff from the ring in the mid-1930s he reportedly worked as a ?special policeman? at a Sacramento dance hall. Tillie?s previous involvement with law enforcement included arrests for beating up his pregnant and enchantingly-named spouse, Laverna Taverna, and minding an Oakland house of prostitution, and he probably got a kick out of working the other side of the street for a change.
His lengthy rap sheet put him on the ineligible list in Sacramento when Tillie applied for a general laborer?s job with the city in ?41, but the decision was reversed after he personally pleaded his case before the local Civil Service Board. If he was in fact ever hired it didn?t last, and three years later 38-year-old Tillie was taking down $105 a week as a bouncer at the backroom gambling den operated by Alfred Fong in Broderick (now part of West Sacramento), where on May 23, 1944 patron Warren Gundel died after Tillie overruled his protest of a losing $2 bet with his fists.
He was arrested for murder, and a showy crackdown on illegal gambling in Yolo County, in which Broderick was located, ensued. But doubts about its integrity and the state of justice there in general were inflamed first when all the slot machines and other gambling paraphernalia at the Fong joint disappeared under the nose of the police guard posted at its front door, and then on July 8 in Woodland, the county seat, when after a mere one-hour deliberation a jury found the mauler named Tillie not guilty.
