I was barely 15 years old when I went to the first funeral of a professional boxer that I knew.
The year was 1965 and there wasn’t a person in Boston who knew and did not like happy go lucky journeyman welterweight Willie “Pineapple” Stevenson.
I was there on Sept. 11, 1965, part of a small crowd of maybe 300 at the Boston Arena, when a hot prospect from Brooklyn named Roscoe “Go Go” Gregory pummeled Stevenson.
Stevenson left the dumpy arena complaining of a persistent headache but refused to go to nearby Boston City Hospital. At home, he lapsed into a coma and died seven days later, only age 29.
(See the tragic condition of Wilfred Benitez, age 52 now and mentally and physically wrecked.)
Stevenson was an anamoly in the highly segregated city, having grown up in the old West End (near the Boston Garden, the rarest of all neighborhoods in a city where the Irish Catholic majority identified themselves by the name of their parish. If you meet a guy from Southie, he’d say he was from “Gate of Heaven.” If a woman lived in my area of Allston-Brighton, she might refer to herself as being from “St. Anthony’s” or “St. Gabriel’s.”
But Stevenson mixed it up and was rasied not in predominantly black South End or Roxbury but in the polyglot West End. City planners ruined the easy mixing there with what we called “urban renewal” but was in actuality “urban removal.”
I’ll get to the ill-fated Pineapple in a second but his story is timely in view of th
