George Chuvalo, the Toronto heavyweight who fought Muhammad Ali twice and was never once knocked off his feet in a professional ring, has died. He was 89.
The World Boxing Council announced his death on Saturday, calling him “Canada’s greatest warrior” and pointing to a legacy built on “unrelenting courage and legendary iron chin.” The council’s statement did not give a date; Chuvalo was born in Toronto on September 12, 1937, and news reports say he died on Saturday, his birthday.
Ninety-three fights, never down
The number that defines him is not a title. Over a 23-year professional career Chuvalo fought 93 times, winning 73 — 64 of them by knockout — losing 18 and drawing two. He was never knocked down. Not by Ali, not by George Foreman, not by Joe Frazier.
He was Canadian amateur heavyweight champion at 18, having gone 16-0 with every win by knockout, and he held the Canadian heavyweight title five times.
The two Ali fights, in 1966 and 1972, are what the wider world remembers, and the first is the one Torontonians still talk about. Ali took the decision over fifteen rounds at Maple Leaf Gardens, and Chuvalo was still standing at the end of it.
A Toronto life
Chuvalo was a west-end Toronto product, the son of Croatian immigrants, and he stayed a Toronto figure long after he stopped fighting. In later decades he spent much of his time speaking to young people about drugs, drawing on losses in his own family — the kind of second act that made him familiar to Canadians who had never watched a round of boxing.
